How Long by Ron Padgett (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2011). Paper, 91 pp.: $16.00. ISBN: 978-1-56689-256-8.
Fall Higher by Dean Young (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Hardback, 96 pp.: $22.00. ISBN: 978-1-55659-311-6.
Reviewed by Tom C. Hunley
What is it like when established writers of witty, playful, New York School-style poetry turn their attentions to thoughts of their own mortality? Do they imagine themselves going gentle into that good night? Do they rage, rage as they age, age? Frank O’Hara never saw the dune buggy coming, and late in life Kenneth Koch vowed, in a private notebook, not to think about death. However, Koch’s protégé, second-generation New York School poet Ron Padgett, does contemplate death in his latest collection, How Long. So does Dean Young, identified by David Lehman, in The Last Avant-Garde: the Making of the New York School of Poets, as a poet “whose work has been enriched by the New York School influence,” in his new book, Fall Higher.
Padgett writes in a conversational style that is easy to follow, even when the logic gets loopy as he leaps, hops, and free-associates. Like Koch, with whom Padgett studied for four years at Columbia University, Padgett is a poet of laugh-out-loud humor and verbal high jinx: “At the age of three Marx did not say / I wish I were a tree / and of course the tree is always saying / No comment” (“Material World”). The pacing in these poems is unhurried, drifting, which perfectly suits the poems’ content. Notice how the leisurely pace of these lines, from “Snowman,” make you feel like you’re right there with Padgett, enjoying retirement.
Nothing can hurt me today I’m warm
and I don’t have to go to a job or anywhere else
I can fix a pot of jasmine tea
and half a prune Danish,
take the other half on a tray to my wife
in the bedroom where she’s taking it easy
with telly and a cup of tea for her too
But then Koch steals a page from O’Hara’s playbook, making a move that’s very similar to the one O’Hara employs at the end of his anti-elegy, “The Day Lady Died.” Duende, Federico Garcia Lorca’s awareness of the presence of death, leaps onstage just when readers have been lulled not to expect it, and it’s all the more powerful because of the peaceful setup.
and suddenly I cry for you I wish you
were looking out your window on St. Mark’s Place
so I could call you and say Sono io
and hear you laugh at our inside joke
and say Ronnie!
I just heard you say it through your ashes
In addition to poems that address friends who have passed away, Padgett memorializes family members in the title poem and in “The Best Thing I Did,” and he considers Christopher Marlowe’s death by stabbing (“Kit”), Lorca’s execution (“I Remember Lost Things”), and even Christ’s crucifixion (“The Joke”). His poem “Death” begins with the clever opening line, “Let’s change the subject,” but Death can be an insistent subject, and it keeps asserting itself in these poems. In “Urn Burial,” Padgett remarks “I can imagine what it is like to be dead / because I have woken up after a deep sleep / with no memory of it.” In “The Death Deal,” Padgett, age 68, lists various ways that he may die, expressing an understandable preference for dying in his sleep over other possibilities such as “head banged hard / in fall from ladder” and “vaporized in plane crash.” He comes across as unafraid of death, merely curious about it.
Now that I’m officially old,
though deep inside not
old officially or otherwise
I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.
Ten years ago, Dean Young was diagnosed with a heart condition called idiopathic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He received a heart transplant, from a twenty-two year old donor, in April 2011, the same month in which Copper Canyon Press published Fall Higher, his ninth full-length collection. While he was working on this book, his heart was working at 8% capacity; most of the pumping was being done by a fifty pound assist device similar to the one that former Vice President Dick Cheney uses. “Poetry is about time running out, to some extent,” Young told an NPR interviewer on May 23, 2011. “You can think of that purely formally – the line ends, the stanza ends and the poem itself ends.”
There’s a lot of what we’ve come to expect from Dean Young in this collection. There are experiments with different levels of diction, e.g. “There are hard things inside / each of us like gravel in a chicken’s crop / or magnets that leadeth us to screaming / at shadows,” (“Rock Garden”); there are imaginative uses of personification, disjunctive turns, and sudden tonal shifts, e.g. “I had no choice, complains the rain. / Did you even want one? answers the river. / Oh dead friend still on my answering machine!” (“Flamenco”). There are moments of oddball philosophy, e.g. “The left hand is thousands of years older / than the right, that’s why most people / still don’t know how to use it” (“Dragonfly”), and quirky theological and entomological statements, e.g. “We have absolutely no proof / god isn’t an insect / rubbing her hind legs together to sing” (“Selected Recent and New Errors”). There is a wry reference to his divorce from novelist Cornelia Nixon, “suddenly I know I’ll be an awful, / dim and recognizable character / in my ex-wife’s next novel” (“Full-Time at the Cyclotron”) and there are earnest, sweet references to his year-old marriage to Laurie Saurborn (“Late Valentine”). There’s also the heart. Not the metaphorical heart that is the hallmark of bad Valentine’s Day poetry (do you see what I did there with the word “Hallmark?”) but the real human heart that does or doesn’t pump blood, that needs to be replaced with a transplant, if you’re Dean Young, that will one day stop ticking if you’re anyone on Earth. The word heart appears in fourteen of these poems, by my count.
When Young, with his considerable arsenal of verbal pyrotechnics, turns his thoughts to his own mortality, the effect is at once exhilarating and unsettling. “Across the bay, fireworks punched / luminous bruises in the fog. / If only my body wasn’t borrowed from dust!” he writes at the end of “Red Glove Thrown in Rosebush,” perhaps intentionally evoking Stanley Kunitz’s line “I only borrowed this dust,” which appears at the end of “Passing Through.” In the very next poem, “This Evening from Far Away,” Young asks the reader to imagine a situation in which “that first pet the vet injected // while you held a paw and wept / bounds forth as if from your own chest / to greet you.”
In The Art of Recklessness: Poetry As Assertive Force and Contradiction (Graywolf 2010), the best book about writing poetry that I’ve come across in years, Young cautions that “poetry atrophies when it strays too far from the human pang.” Young’s poems, especially the poems in Fall Higher, show that poetry can be adventurous, surreal, and yes, reckless, without sacrificing emotional intensity, depth of feeling, and I guess I’ll just say it, heart.