On a poem called "Facts"

Another Bulls fan writing about Levine

Philip Levine was the second poet I loved. He’s widely respected, but sometimes gets dismissed as the sort of poet fiction writers like, and because I’m susceptible to the power of confident dismissal from people I don’t otherwise care about, this Poet filed his college copy of “What Work Is” away in a box for years, till it got left behind in some divorce or another.

Up till I shifted from fiction to poetry in 1996, I imagined myself as some mixture of Richard Yates and Donald Barthelme, balancing absurdist commentary with trenchant suburban intensity, but whenever I wrote fiction, I ended up with unlinked paragraphs sans transitions, asking the reader to make connections I was too lazy to draw. I told workshops I was a Robert Coover acolyte when all I’d ever read was “The Babysitter”. At least I realized I couldn’t write like Lorrie Moore or Raymond Carver.

So now I’ll admit it: Everything I write today is my attempt to recreate Philip Levine’s “Facts”, a poem that is certainly well-regarded, but I didn’t find online to share in full, so here it is from my replacement book, shaded by my dying plants.

It’s structurally interesting, with the four-line stanzas each self-contained with a parallel rhythm. That shit’s hard to pull off. But what I love most is the guiding hand behind the non-transition transitions, the itsy bitsy spider feel of going from A to B to 4 to § to (viii) to a Wingding and back again. It’s not unlike newspaper structure, the way Mike Royko showed you can always find a bow to tie after 600 words in the Chicago Tribune columns I grew up with. Hell, Dave Barry used to do that.

(Boy, this is a lot of white guy talk.)

I went through a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry phase 15 years ago, which, to this autodidact, felt like a response to the more narrative, confessional poetry that came before it. I was so into it, I wrote a poem that required you to remember matrix notation from Calc 2. Fortunately for you, that poem is long gone from my hard drive, though I still sometimes write poems that look like this:

Getting crazy with the tab key

Which, OK, but why? Let’s say you figure out how to read it, there’s no way it’s more satisfying or emotionally engaging than a moderately difficult sudoku puzzle. “Ah, the last number was, indeed, 4.”

What was actually happening was slam, online outlets and democratization, which meant the experiential and confessional poems were being written by people other than academics, so it was necessary to academic poetry all up. I do still like a lot of that work – Lisa Robertson and Rusty Morrison were my later poetry loves. Then I fell for book length multi-genre weirdness of, say, Michelle Taransky, Tyehimba Jess or Donna Stonecipher, and the pastoral mist of Dan Beachy-Quick. And I still kind of like the poem I shared above, which is part of (sigh) “a book length meditation on decay of the body, stone and society”.

But then Niina Pollari’s harrowing “Path of Totality” wrecked me. Her directness and reserve only make the subject matter (the sudden loss of a newborn during childbirth) hit harder. She used the form to maximize the connection she forged with me, the reader.

AA took me down a similar path. In meetings I had so little patience for the white guys who got all academic, peppering in Georg Lichtenberg quotes to be smart and Homer Simpson lines to be relatable, or explaining why they’re already mad about the impending 5^th edition of the Big Book. Even less for the real-talk performative profanity of the NA squatters. I’ve since come around on all of them - they’re all my friends and loves and they all connect with others in important ways.

But it took all that to finally, truly understand that nobody’s going to read anything I write when my motive is to show you how smart I am, any more than they’re going to watch me play KenKen (which I mention because it’s so much more complex than sudoku and I am smrt).

In art and sobriety there are risks and consequences to being vulnerable. Turns out I had to learn all the alcoholic parts first, to understand connecting with others isn’t selling out.

Putting a bow on it: My first and forever poetry love is James Tate. Turns out I was right all along about connecting with his mix of sincerity and surrealism. Turns out I should listen to my gut.

Perhaps Tate’s most famous poem: “Goodtime Jesus”