Poetry Review: "Lime Light Blues," Kevin Young

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

“Lime Light Blues,” by Kevin Young, was originally published in Tin House 37 (Fall 2008). It was reprinted in Young’s collection Dear Darkness, and is featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman.

Kevin Young’s short poem “Lime Light Blues” evokes feelings of extreme self-consciousness, specifically the African-American narrator's awareness of others' prejudice against him. Drivers in parked cars treat him as a potential carjacker, women in elevators see him as a possible mugger, and police and teenagers assume he is a drug dealer. (The police consider him a potential shoplifter as well.) Nothing is actually done to him, so there is no way to respond. But the poem isn’t really about the prejudices so much as the narrator’s private anger, and Young's artfulness comes from the tropes he uses to illustrate it.

Young’s most effective figurations are ironies. One laughs at lines like “I’m in an anger/encouragement class,” or “I know all/a movie needs/is me/shouting at the screen/from the balcony.” They have a subtle absurdity. Others cut deeper. There’s a poignance to a passage like “Crowds gather/& wonder how/the spotlight sounds.” One knows those in the crowds couldn’t care less about the impact of their prejudices on the people the prejudices are projected onto. If they cared, they would disabuse themselves of the prejudices. An earlier set of lines is even more disturbing. Young writes, “When I dance,/which is often,/the moon above me/wheels its disco lights--/until there’s a fight.” The point is that there never is a fight; giving into one’s enjoyment--the “dance”--is undermined by the awareness that others’ prejudices lead them to consider violence a constant possibility. Knowledge of outside bigotry creates a hothouse of resentment that undermines life's enjoyments.

The poem’s use of metaphor isn’t as accomplished. A figuration such as “What pressure/my blood is under” is a pretty hackneyed trope for anger, and the title “Lime Light Blues” is at least as obvious when it comes to evoking the anxiety one feels in response to outside attention. The poem’s opening sentence, “I have been known/to wear white shoes/beyond Labor Day,” is better. It conveys, in the context of the entire poem, the tension between awareness of idiosyncrasy and knowledge that the idiosyncrasy is too slight to warrant the attention one feels from others. However, one wonders if the idiosyncrasy is too slight to express that tension. It doesn’t make the reader respond on an emotional level; one is left to figure out Young’s intention.

However, my reservations about some of the tropes aside, Young does a fine job of portraying the state of mind that accompanies consciousness of others’ bigotry. The examples he gives of everyday prejudicial assumptions strike immediate chords, and the ironies that render the narrator’s aggravation and unease are quite effective. “Lime Light Blues” is a solid poem.

Poetry Review: "Carrying on Like a Crow," Charles Simic

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

This gathering of powerfully desolate imagery overtly challenges the reader to recognize the limits of words and interpretation.

“Carrying on Like a Crow,” by Charles Simic, is featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler & David Lehman. It originally appeared in the 20 November 2008 issue of the London Review of Books and is included in Simic’s own collection, Master of Disguises.

Charles Simic once described poetry as an “orphan of silence.” In a way, that’s a good description of the tropes that make up his 2008 poem “Carrying on Like a Crow.” The images are ones of desolation, abandonment, and ill portent. They include dead leaves floating on a pond, a swing set with no children to play on it, and dark clouds hanging overhead. Most of the imagery is very still, and even when there is movement, such as in the reference to laundry flapping in the wind, it speaks of something that has ostensibly been forsaken or otherwise left to itself. The exception might seem to be the dark clouds, and even those are a trope for a place where no one would want to be. The imagery’s only eloquence is of a despairing solitude.

But this characterization is only adequate at best. It is a description that speaks of its inadequacy. That acknowledgement illustrates Simic’s more suggestive definition of his “orphan of silence” trope, which is that the “words never quite equal the experience behind them.” Truth be told, the juxtaposition of the various images creates a meaning that can only be approximated by efforts to summarize it. And Simic explicitly defies the reader to recognize that his tropes are too replete with meaning to be properly and fully unpacked. Every one is introduced with challenges such as “Are you authorized to speak,” “Are you able to explain…,” and “What do you know about…” The poem’s final sentence begins with “Ask yourself, if words are enough…”

Simic closes by likening the act of interpretation to “Flapping your wings from tree to tree/And carrying on like a crow…” (He actually implies that emulating this obnoxious bird would be preferable.) I suppose the analogy is apt. A critic does noisily scavenge a work of art for both sustenance and to create his or her own meanings. But I’m not offended. Simic effectively admits he does the same with the world around him and the writers who preceded him. The writer is always trying to describe an unsullied ideal. He or she will invariably travesty it, but perhaps they will create a new ideal in the eyes of others. A crow becomes an eagle when it steps away from the mirror.

Poetry Review: "A House Is Not a Home," Terrence Hayes

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

This elegantly constructed poem uses a drunken tiff as a springboard for a reverie about sounds--and satirizes bourgeois African-American pretensions about their heritage along the way.

So much of reading contemporary poetry involves working through tropes. No matter how much one enjoys analyzing things, it can get a bit wearying at times. But a poem like Terrance Hayes’ “A House Is Not a Home,” an exercise in building structure out of free association, is an enjoyable respite. Hayes catches a reader up in his imaginative flights. By the end, he also has one marveling at how he pulls his verbal caprices together into a coherent whole. Reading the poem is like listening to an experienced jazz musician play out one apparently unrelated riff after another, only to recognize that they’re adding up to a proper song. The hook isn’t there at the beginning; you pick up on the refrains as you go.

The starting point for “A House Is Not a Home” is an incident in which the narrator gets his ears boxed by a friend and the friend’s wife after an inappropriate display of drunken affection. At first, all he can think of is the happier moments when the three of them were singing along with soul crooner Luther Vandross. From then on, every thought that occurs to him relates to sound, which eventually circles back to the scene with his friends. The structure isn’t immediately obvious, but it is ultimately very simple. The passages about the friends alternate with passages featuring the musings about sounds. The latter function like bridges between the choruses of the former.

The reader may be taken aback by the nature of the sound imagery. Examples include the sounds of church fires and “a skull that only a sharecropper’s daughter can make sing.” Obviously, Hayes is evoking images from the battles over Jim Crow and civil rights. But one doesn’t get the sense that he’s laying it on in the service of any kind of self-aggrandizement. If anything, he’s doing the opposite. Bringing it up in the context of a drunken reverie makes it come across as a poke at the narrator's pretentiousness in bringing it up at all. The feeling of absurdity is only enhanced by the narrator's plans to do his aural explorations as a hypothetical employee of the--brace oneself--"African American Acoustic and Audiological Insurance Institute." There’s an irksome pomposity to bourgeois African-Americans polishing the talismans of bygone oppressions, particularly those they only know vicariously. Hayes seems to recognize how ridiculous that behavior can be. Anyway, everything comes back to the narrator’s relationship with his friends, and that is ultimately what’s important. Sounds may evoke the symbols of history, but they also stand in for everyday personal experiences. It’s the latter that always stays with one the most.