By Matthew Dickman (American Poetry Review, 2008)

I first encountered Matthew Dickman’s “Trouble” in a recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s a litany of the many ways famous people killed themselves. Marilyn Monroe took sleeping pills. Marlon Brando’s daughter hanged herself. Bing Crosby’s sons “shot themselves out of the music industry forever.” The list’s utilitarian feeling only makes the horror more horrible, especially when it includes the suicide of Dickman’s brother: He “opened thirteen Fentanyl patches,” Dickman tells us, “and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore.”

But there’s a sense of humor too, even whiffs of whimsy, which make the tenor of All-American Poem, in which “Trouble” appears, feel genuine without being sappy. The poems are lucid and coy, rambling and drunk, playful and gregarious, a tapestry of emotion with a notable thread missing: There’s little in the way of satire or irony, by which I mean meanness of spirit. Written amid the anxieties and neuroses of the Bush era, Dickman’s poems are conspicuous for their lack of bitterness. After learning about his brother’s fate, we learn: “I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears.” How random. How charming.

And how frightening, too. For “Trouble” also recalls Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which suffering consumes those experiencing it while the rest of us appear cruel without meaning to. For the tortured, nothing else matters but the torturer, even as his “horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Life goes on despite that tiny shudder that comes from knowing that as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is in pain.

But where Auden seems intent on forcing on us the aloofness of the cosmos, Dickman’s “Trouble” levels a cool eye while making a little room by the fire. His might be called gallows humor, but somehow it’s never macabre. It’s intimate and warm, friendly and firm. A tragic view of the world, but maybe also optimism in disguise.

In the introduction to All-American Poem, Tony Hoagland rightly calls the book the “epitome of the pleasure principle,” and there are lusty, earthy poems contained within, stuffed with images, metaphors, and jokes that delight more than instruct. But they also affirm an old-fashioned sentiment that right now seems to be much in need in America right now. I’m talking about the human spirit.

There’s a line in Richard Greenberg’s 2003 play, The Violet Hour, in which a flamboyant clerk riffs on the word “gay.” It’s 1919, way before the word took on its present meaning, so “to be gay is not to be frivolous,” he says proudly. “To be gay is to be light-hearted in the face of every kind of darkness.”

Toughness with a smile. But Dickman isn’t afraid of darkness. In “V,” the world’s “been talking sleazy to all of us and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb that makes me want to wear a cock ring in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.” The speaker wants to flirt with a girl, but reconsiders. Maybe she wants to be treated as a human being, not an animal at the meat market: “And maybe this is not a giant leap into the science of compassion, but it’s something.”

Happiness can be an act of will as much as an accident of fate. It’d be natural to let the light die behind your eyes in the wake of losing a brother, or your house. But to be “gay”—and in Dickman’s case, to be funny and charming and witty—is almost an act of rebellion. To be “gay” in the world of All-American Poem is be totally punk rock.

Though there’s no sign Dickman sees it that way: He breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O’Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times. Especially Koch, who saw no reason why poetry couldn’t be fun. The first line of Dickman’s “Chick Corea Is Alive and Well!” is “Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.” And the last line isn’t afraid to flirt with sentimentality, because it’s a sensibility rooted in the here and now, and it feels right: The jazz pianist is like “a man whose been raised from the dead, looking down at a woman’s knees after years in the dirt, singing yeaahh! yeaahh! This is what I’m talking about, yeaahh! This good, sweet life!”

John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.

Or, Donald Westlake, R.I.P.

Death is the common currency of popular mystery fiction. So we shouldn’t be so shocked when the major practitioners of the form happen to die. At least they weren’t murdered.

Still, the death of Donald Westlake feels like a mortal blow to the entire mystery genre. He was an exemplary chronicler of witty, breezy, American bank heists or other escapist capers for half a century.

Westlake wasn’t a household name like Gregory MacDonald (the former Boston Globe columnist who created the Fletch and Flynn series) or Hartford’s Hillary Waugh (credited with pioneering the modern police procedural), both of whom died last year. He certainly wasn’t on the level of longtime Weston, Conn., resident Ed McBain, who was still churning out a book or three a year right up to his death in 2005 at age 78. (Actually, the real household name among mystery writers would have to be Geoffrey Household, the British thriller author, but I digress.)

But to those who wallow constantly in the genre, Westlake was as inescapable as a locked-room conundrum. He operated at both ends of the spectrum, cheap and classy. His bibliography exceeds a hundred titles. He further labored under several pseudonyms, Richard Stark being the most notable. But despite his steady success as a novelist, he continued to publish short stories in seemingly any fiction magazine that would have him. The quality level of the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines were assured by the regularity of Westlake’s contributions to them.

One of the last mystery authors old enough to have experienced the post-war transformation of the mystery novel into a pop culture phenomenon, thanks to innovations in paperback printing, Westlake filled the public trough. But his work was fine enough to catch the attention of filmic interpreters of the level of Costa Gavras (The Couperet, from Westlake’s The Ax), Jean-Luc Godard (Made in the USA, from Westlake’s The Jugger) and such A-list stars as Lee Marvin (Point Blank), Mel Gibson (Payback) and Robert Redford (Cops and Robbers). Westlake’s own screenplay for The Grifters, which he adapted from the Jim Thompson novel, was nominated for an Academy Award and lifted the careers of John Cusack and Annette Bening.

Westlake’s weakest books are as enlightening for involved readers as are his best. At his worst, he was simply guilty of getting too stuck to a format and filling in gaps with too much idle chatter and silly jokes. There is, nonetheless, artistry in that. At his best, he bent the rules for linear mystery storytelling, creating characters which were more interesting than the contrived situations they were thrust into. His talent was more for humor than humanity, but his desire to flesh out stereotypical cop and robber characters with amusing quirks and idiosyncracies set him apart. Part of an eager breed of prolific paperback writers who ruled late-20th-century pop fiction and who at times seemed interchangeable, Westlake was also a unique voice, furthering the mystery craft by never taking it too seriously.

By Frank Kuppner (Carcanet, 2004)

Beware the writers who give you what you want. Like the gregarious person at a party who immediately compliments your shirt, the over-accommodating writer, so pleasing at first, may in fact have nothing much to say. So in reading the poems of Frank Kuppner, whose charm is a very easy one, you may be on your guard. When he has a good line, he isn’t shy about it: “If I weren’t myself, I would like to be Bias of Cyrene,” he writes, “assuming that Bias of Cyrene himself wouldn’t mind, of course.” His wit is effortless to smile at, so you might resist smiling. But what can you do if the author possesses, as Kuppner does, a wit that is tireless, diverse in means, deep in learning, and abundantly delightful?

A God’s Breakfast consists of three fully developed book-length poems containing so many varieties and shades of humorous ingenuity that wariness of his charm must quickly be replaced by amazement at his gift. He also writes with a marathoner’s endurance. The first section of A God’s Breakfast, “The Uninvited Guest,” consists of over a hundred pages of epigrams (one is quoted above) by an unnamed thinker of the classical world, peppered over by annotations from an equally anonymous modern scholar. The set-up allows Kuppner to trace characters and launch subplots that lead to some brilliant and bizarre turns of phrase. These may be lewd: “A little boy walked past me in the street / With scratches all over him. Hmmm. Zeus, I suppose.” Actually, quite a few are lewd, but just as many make for fair philosophy: “What sort of lunatic would worship a stone? / No-one. It must be something else they are worshipping.” By this hodge-podge technique, the epigrams and their commentary gradually form a composite picture of the learned mind, be it classical or contemporary, and how it ceaselessly flickers with doubt, insight, and silliness.

It’s a democratic point of view: One senses in Kuppner a distrust of things deemed special or impressive. He has Juvenal’s instinct, but he applies it at a deeper and almost empathic level. In the second work of the book, “West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil,” his target is another learned writer, T.S. Eliot. The poem is narrated through Eliot’s droning disembodied voice, as he grapples with his prim Anglicanism, jots down notes on possible rhymes (“we stood together down a deep hole / anguishedly discussing the soul / either that or the sole / near Knole”), and unconsciously channels his own collected works (“so here I sit, an old man with bad teeth”). The tone is unquestionably satirical, but if that were all, it would again be merely what we think we want—to knock Eliot down, to humiliate the mirthless, mincing old poet—and not nearly so satisfying as the actual achievement of Kuppner’s ventriloquism. For every dig Kuppner takes at the master, he allows himself to feel a sad sort of camaraderie. One imagines that if Eliot had just been less lionized, Kuppner would respect him more. So “West Åland” is a corrective; it’s also an assemblage of some lovely and very natural verse. If Eliot had written certain of these lines, there’s no saying if he would have quite been able to throw them away.

In “What Else Is There? 120 Poems,” Kuppner disencumbers himself of the conceits of the previous pages, allowing himself to speak as himself. It’s a freeing switch for the reader as well. The unvarnished Kuppner specializes in humor and metaphysical alienation; his vernacular and down-to-earth attitude is perhaps over-pronounced, but his sureness with the line is moving. The poem “Busy Tram, Löwenbrücke” begins:

All these thousands of people
whom one talks to only once.
Yes. If even quite that.

A dry hurricane of uniqueness
through year after year.
Excuse me. And then gone.

Down the roads which only they know.

Kuppner allows the 120 sonnets, dithyrambic meditations, and other varieties of verse to play off each other symphonically, a technique he seems to allude to in the sweet and open final poem, “The Tenth Symphony.” Here, he identifies silence, too, as a vital instrument in all great compositions, and the human urge to locate hope where there is simply the future tense. But Kuppner’s silence in the United States—he is Scottish, and apparently none of his books have been published outside the United Kingdom—has clearly lasted too long. American readers of poetry do not usually shy away from what is plainly wonderful. When will he arrive here?

James Copeland’s poems appear in the upcoming issue of 6x6.