Love's the Word

Review of Spring Sonnets by Don Yorty

In his sonnets, the poet Don Yorty gives us a piece of his mind and a chunk of his spirit.

Not so much small as compact, that literary miniature known as the sonnet has held pride of place—not just in English—for 500 years. From the oft-quoted creations of Shakespeare and John Donne to Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, 1964—considered his greatest work—the 14-line stanza, of varying rhyme schemes and assorted structures, has proven a satisfying form. Is it the brevity? Is it the fact that, whether as writer or reader, we know approximately what we’re getting? Is it because this deft instrument seems particularly amenable to certain feeling-states, or to any?

To one writer it’s a nature poem, to another the perfect vehicle for elegy or celebration. For the late Wanda Coleman in her American Sonnets, it’s a vehicle for ex-lover vengeance, bitter wit, and funky reminiscence. This malleability provides a good deal of the sonnet’s allure. You can cover the waterfront of feeling and experience. The poems may look similar but produce all manner of effects.

In the paragraph-length afterword to his Spring Sonnets, New York poet and novelist Don Yorty says he began writing sonnets after not having written a poem for twenty years. The immediate occasion, he explains, was America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. “I think because I opposed the invasion so much,” he writes, “I needed something I could control.” The sonnet was something he’d never attempted. He wrote 180, initially, then culled them to the 90 included here.

Bush’s criminal war may have been the catalyst, but the war and its destruction and the more general predations of imperial policy are rarely mentioned in Spring Sonnets. Rather, war as a constant presence constitutes the psychological and spiritual backdrop to Yorty’s poems, creating a sense of helplessness and existential angst that is our “new normal,” out of which a new awareness, a clearer vision, comes into being and is duly recorded (think Auden in the Thirties). Poem #20 is one of the few that mentions the war(s). Here it is in full:

Just as I write two hawks above the trees
fly fast away. Shadow of a buzzard
passes over my shoulder hopefully.
I was expecting rain, impeded start
but the sun’s come out, made the day open
as a pursued lover turning might smile
and kiss me on the mouth. Surprised I am
chosen I am happy as can be while
everything gets worse. Soldiers still fight
in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars
I hadn’t wanted, but then who am I?
The wind blows my pages while I write for
those killed in battle. Wind, give me the breath
the word eternal not alive or dead.

The tone, typical throughout this volume, is both personal and direct. The method lets the poet trace out the movement of thought across the mind, notating the places where it happens to land. Anything is game, and any set of circumstances, seemingly, can make this happen. For instance, thought itself becomes subject to examination, as in #28 where Yorty pauses to reflect on language and its relation to consciousness and cognition:

[…] What’s thinking
but flying, following thoughts. Why are they
always words?

They’re not, of course. Thoughts are often simply feelings to which specific sounds have yet to attach. Or, if they are attached, are not words. (Music, for instance, where tonality leads us directly into specific, but undefined, emotional states.) This is an idea that quickly gathers complexity. The poet’s question is rhetorical, necessarily, since to answer it would take us into linguistics and theories of language. Yorty’s sonnet, whether considering the relation of thought to words or of a private citizen to war, is allusive rather than exploratory. Its insights awaken curiosity rather than supply answers.

The poems are intimate, not so much in the “confessional” way wherein contemporary American poetry makes the Catholic church look like a piker, but in the sense of their tone being wholly unguarded. If making decisions, or forming clearer observations, arrives as a result of the various voices in our heads engaging in debate, then on these pages we’re allowed (encouraged?) to eavesdrop. This tone of confident disclosure makes for an engaging and ongoing I-and-thou effect. Reading these puts us in the presence of a mind often astonished at the ordinary because the ordinary rarely is merely that to a mind willing to look further or deeper, or to step back and gain perspective about what it observes. This curiosity and commitment enable the poet to take on just about any subject matter and say something startling or new. 

Yorty does not abuse that freedom by running hither and yon, making us chase after his meaning. He sticks to his ken, and that adds to the power of the performance. Spring Sonnets maps out a world the reader can readily comprehend and stays there. That world consists of two places: the New York City neighborhood where Yorty has lived and worked as a second-language instructor for thirty years, and a rural retreat somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains. The poems move between these locales. A single season is the time frame, what happened then is the subject matter.

More importantly, the poetic voice leans on experience without making that the point, giving the poems not just a significant tonal difference but determining choices all around: what to notice, what to write about, what to say, finally. The first sentence of Sonnet #31, for instance (“Today for the first time in my life…”) launches a disquisition on technology. The loss of a cell phone becomes a reverie about the telephone. No one ever lost one when it came with a cord plugged into a wall. Moreover, there was a time when if you noticed someone walking down the street alone and talking volubly, the implication was that mental illness was somehow involved. Now we see such behavior all the time and assume a cell phone conversation is taking place. But our reliance on this torqued up communication device means “no one’s alone anymore.” The fact that technology shears away, one by one, the dimensions of privacy, is alarming but inescapable.

[…] Times change. There’s nothing about
it you can do, if you don’t change, you
don’t move and you’re run down by the future.

Whether it’s Cachito the cat, squirrels on a park bench, a butterfly making its way across a pond, whatever the subject these poems are invariably meditations on the immediate, as for instance #41 (“At any moment it’s going to rain…”), wherein a rainstorm effectively stops composition in mid-measure. Add to that the notion that anything is a fit subject for poetry and (thank you, Dr. Williams) what results is a simplicity of expression and gratifying absence of self-conscious literary affect. In poems mentioning war, politics, death, classroom repartee, or describing the woods or milkweed pods, the effectiveness of the level of engagement owes much to the plain-speaking that avoids that recognizably elevated vernacular—poetry!—alerting readers that someone’s trying to say something important. The voice of Spring Sonnets is the same one we use to share our thoughts and observations in everyday conversation. Sonnet #19 (“My hands are numb and yet the sun is bright.”), for instance, observes and records the changes evident in nature as spring manifests. Its subject is the strange, unfolding chaos that ensues when the temperature rises a few degrees and the grip of frost is broken. It’s the suddenness and multifariousness of this process that always surprises, and that effect is replicated in certain details (bird sounds, vanished ice, sudden appearance of white flowers) before shifting to thoughts of how we change as we get older, looking behind to that time of life—youth—when we tended to think only of ourselves.

Though sonnets can be about anything, they gained their preeminent place in English as expressions of love. Love is not just ardor, romance or sexual attraction. The Greeks, for instance, recognized multiple forms of love, including affection, friendship, familial love, universal love (for strangers, nature, or God, known as Agape), practical love and self-love. All emerge in these poems one way or another. The transforming power of love is Yorty’s theme here, I suspect, because, as an older poet “with time to spare but not one hour to waste,” he sees love as an animating force, always present, often concealed:

[…] As I grow
old it seems possible to really love
even the startled snake scared in the leaves […]

That’s not to say the view is all Woodstock. When the poems shift back from the Poconos to the Lower East Side, a certain tension surfaces. Poem #11, for example, fumes at the manner in which a crew of anarchists trashed the local public space, “gerrymandered the park bench to drink, drug / take a long piss when the beer filled them up.” The poet’s willingness to go where emotion takes him—whether pleasant, deep or seriously annoyed—deepens the tone of Spring Sonnets. Mostly, though, Yorty takes the long view, one in which light stands in for our fleeting present and night is the death that’s waiting around the corner.

This being a book of sonnets, it’d be impossible not to weigh in on technical matters. Various rules hold that, for instance, the lines of a sonnet must be ten syllables each, that sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, that they deploy end rhymes in an ABAB CDCD pattern, etc. All that would’ve made for a different kind of book than Spring Sonnets. Here the rhymes, internal and at line ends, are playful rather than constricting or self-conscious. Some, like the poem that got rained out, employ ABBA end rhymes, some AABB. Slant rhymes often suffice and are gestural, even whimsical. Several times, for example, the poet rhymes “a” with “the.” This works both to keep the lines rolling and to acknowledge the five-century provenance of the form. The sonnet, here, turns out to be the mode most appropriate for Don Yorty’s re-entry as a poet. He’s clearly comfortable working it and it works because he knows how to make it work. As Sonnet #158 notes:  “…the music’s always true while it plays.”

Spring Sonnets
By Don Yorty
Indolent Books, 2019
Paperback, 114 pages

The book may be ordered here.

Don Yorty is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat (both from Philadelphia Eye & Ear), and he is included in Out of This World, An Anthology of the Poetry of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991. His novel What Night Forgets was published by Herodias Press in 2000. He blogs at donyorty.com: an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets.

Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998), Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and, most recently, Have You Seen This Man, the Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019).

The Posthumous Publication of Karl Tierney's Castro Poems, 1983-95

Review of Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney

“I’ve a knack for attracting the supercritical like flies,” Karl Tierney writes in his poem “Vanity.” Perhaps so, but there’s no reason to be supercritical of these poems—called “The Castro Poems”—compiled by editor Jim Cory as Have You Seen This Man? and published, at long last, by Sibling Rivalry Press as #2 in their Arkansas Queer Poet Series.

The press is based in Arkansas, where Tierney, who originated in Westfield, CT, earned his MFA at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville; the poet found his voice, his métier, perhaps even his raison d’être, in the Castro section of San Francisco, where he moved in 1983. As Cory writes in his useful introduction: “Starting in the mid-‘70s, thousands of gay men . . . moved to that corner of San Francisco at the far west end of Market Street” and created a “vibrant ‘out’ enclave, with its own politics, institutions, media and vibe.” The milieu became vulnerable to the scourge of Aids throughout the period Tierney lived there. Tierney became the area’s fascinated, fascinating scribe.

 The streets clog with the usual Leftist litter,
sidewalks with shorts, sunglasses, the smell of pomade,
sewers with the beady-eyed scurry of plague.
Still what’s left is most attractive to me,
which means I’m horny, which is most dangerous
these days, in this era of No One’s Choosing.
“June 21, 1989”

In poem after poem, Tierney shows off his knack for pithy, aphoristic asides, but he also gets at the brittle feelings below the surface—“The character’s revealed, smoking after each kill” (“Bed Making”). His is a world where seductive appearance is almost everything but where morning-after regret inevitably kicks in—“It’s all a chore and less than uplifting” (“Act of God”). We hear the suppressed despair under the irony in his view of his peers—“Still, isn’t leaving your sexual fantasies on answering machines / these days more desperate than the traditional lavatory walls?” (“Café Hairdo”)—and see the poet wink at his coping mechanisms: “But when I feel like writing fiction, / I just take a nap” (“Suicide of a Video Head”). Tierney’s trenchant commentary is the stuff of poetry because only poems can be so elliptical, able to veer from wry to melancholic—"I slip into something more comfortable. / Then the real discomfort begins” (“Dating in a Thinning Field”)—and from acrid to sweet in the same verse: “You cost twenty bucks and lie and cheat / and have the most darling feet” (“White Trash”).

Tierney ended his life in October 1995 after living for a time as what Cory calls “actively AIDS symptomatic” and being denied entry into a trial program for protease inhibitors. (As Cory reminds us, the diagnosis “positive” was a death sentence at the time, with a life expectancy of, at best, a year and a half with horrible symptoms.) The book takes its title from fliers bearing Tierney’s image posted in the San Francisco area after his disappearance. When Tierney’s family members listened to his phone’s voice messages they found—in one of life’s appalling ironies—one from his doctor saying that a mistake had occurred and that he would be able to begin the treatment after all. Sadly, Tierney had, it seems, already jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Fortunately, shortly before that he had had the good sense to enlist Cory to be his literary executor. Honoring that request has led to the publication of this always engaging volume. And one can’t really better Cory’s pronouncement on Tierney’s verse: ‘It’s frank rather than confessional, since confession is a sentimental manipulation of frankness.” Tierney, even with us knowing his tragic end, is not a poet of sentimentality enlisting us to feel sorry. The frankness is the frankness of the need for pleasure, for thrills—which may come from risk, from sexual excitement, or from being an eye and an ear on a scene—and for truth, no matter how grim.

The book is not unlike a time capsule: we see and hear and feel the times as Tierney lives through them. The sense of a diary or journal, recording what Tierney found worth noting, is aided by the fact that the volume follows his poems in chronological order, and each is dated by month, day, year, from his first Castro poem, “Dressing,” October 29, 1983 to his last, “Poem for Neil,” May 13, 1995: “The poem’s for you. / I’m not.” Those familiar with the Castro area at the time may encounter people they will recognize. But even someone like myself—a few years Tierney’s junior who never set foot in his beloved city—can find in the book’s movement through time a way of reliving the spectacle as the lumbering self-satisfaction of U.S. culture frays and flakes, relishing potshots at “Jackie O.,” Madonna (“Female Impersonator”), Elizabeth Dole (“My Alma Mater Honors a Whore of the Republic”), and “talentless pretty- / boy actors who become Presidents after losing their looks” (“Boundary”).

As Cory discusses, Tierney’s manner at times puts the reader in mind—easily—of Frank O’Hara (to whom Tierney dedicates the poem “Arkansas Landscape: Wish You Were Here”) and, a bit more uneasily, of Catullus (whom Tierney invokes in the poem “Whore”). Tierney often aims at and mostly hits the kind of immediacy O’Hara achieved so memorably, a feeling that the poet is simply confiding poetic thoughts, bon mots, aperçus, and, yes, catty jibes in a verse that seems almost artless in its ability to move from thought to thought, regarding the world with just the right detachment and engagement. As we read, we come to know the poet as a personality and, while we might not wish to be the object of his acerbic attention, we appreciate a wit that is always equal to the occasion, such as recalling Nixon’s departure: “three guards roll up the red carpet / as if we’d never invited him into the palace / in the first place” (“Caligula or Nixon Leaving”).

The nod to Rome brings us to Catullus, and Tierney has always an eye for excesses and lapses in taste that bequeath to those high-rolling “end of history” times a certain imperial sheen: “The prosperous proletariat anxious to pump itself / into the bourgeois logjam of more upon more” (“Salò at the Castro”). In Cory’s words, “As with the Roman poet, ardor and spite, sometimes combined (‘Litany on a Perfect Ass’), animate the text.” The spite is never simply grand-standing, and the ardor keeps the poet in the game, both in the sense of seeking for something less ephemeral and of exercising his instinctive sensibility. A poem like “Import, Export”—from 1993—shows Tierney in mature form: thoughtful and insightful, irked by the trends and tendencies as “gays” become a cultural identity—“As sophisticates in matters of theater, a perfect find / in its adopted habitat! Voting, tax-paying, well-adjusted.” His keen eye veers around the available diversions, smirks at Germans and Romans, dials up Tennessee Williams’ Cat, and ends with—perhaps nodding to a flashback of Allen Ginsberg—a supermarket in San Francisco: “You squeeze soggy New Zealand melons and, / for some sort of fruit, settle for California prunes.”

Occasionally, Tierney can be called mannered in his assumption of a viewpoint that is both in and out of the scene, a perspective that amplifies, exaggerates or diminishes the flattened affect of the tawdry media with a certain baroque charm. It might be hard for those who didn’t have the buzz of the long march from Ronnie to Newt piped into their ears directly to hear Tierney aright. The chat surrounding these poems is drenched in the media-awareness of local publications, and radio and television, letting the cultural bonhomie of the gay community flirt with the anomie of the disenfranchised: “I have to have these ‘I have’ issues no one gives a damn about” (“The Trees Are Wrong: A Nature Poem”)—think how easily that statement could be multiplied into a movement today! (Brandishing exclamation marks with arch abandon is a Tierney tic—and it’s mostly earned.)

The overall impression won from this volume is of true-to-life sketches, sprung from apt occasions, and delivered with devilish aplomb. It’s a fine addition to whatever you think you know about gay poetry, San Francisco, the gay lifestyle during Aids, or life in general during Reagan/Bush. “O generation drunken and blind!” (“Whore, after Catullus”)—this one’s for you.

Have You Seen This Man?
The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney
Jim Cory, editor
Sibling Rivalry Press
Arkansas Queer Poet Series #2
Paperback, 129 pages

available for order here

Karl Tierney was born in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies in his lifetime, including American Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review and Exquisite Corpse. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995. He was 39 years old.

Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998) and Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Poems have appeared recently in Apiary, unarmed journal, Bedfellows, Cape Cod Poetry Journal, Capsule, Fell Swoop, Painted Bride Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Trinity Review, Have Your Chill (Australia), and Whirlwind. Recent essays have appeared in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, New Haven Review, and Chelsea Station. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. He lives in Philadelphia. Cory will read from Have You Seen This Man? on Saturday, October 12, at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Philadelphia at 7 p.m.

Why Am I Naked?

Review of Wake Me When It’s Over: Selected Poems by Bill Kushner

If you happen to have a kooky old Jewish uncle who’s also a kind of poetic savant sitting around on park benches in NYC taking things in, you’ll have an idea of what to expect from the poems of the late Bill Kushner. Kushner’s a genial nonconformist by temperament and Wake Me When It’s Over, Peter Bushyeager’s excellent selection drawn from the poet’s eight books, offers the seductive charm of childish candor without any of the obvious calculation so often implicit in ‘confessional’ poetry.

Kushner’s free and easy lines blithely mix questions and statements, generalities and specifics, to get at a thought the reader never sees coming:

                                                 …The trouble is
          One can understand passion, any form of it, more
          Readily than affection.

In a poem called “Goodbye,” the speaker watches “two friends who’re men who’re lovers kiss.” The casual act fascinates, prompting a meditation on the poet’s own status as a single person. What they have, he doesn’t, and he compares his status as a single person to being the first guest to arrive at a party: “...am I that/ Most awful of beings: The First One?”

From the book’s opening poem, “Night Fishing,” (“Why are you crying, he asks, as the sun/like a hungry shark follows us home.”) you know you’re reading a highly original writer averse to falsehood or convention. The point of his personal and streetwise poetry is not to spill secrets but to give us life as it’s lived, without filter, as in for instance the poem “Bread,” when he recalls his father suddenly entering the room where he’s in bed with another guy (“He looked and his face just went dead.”). These narratives are variously ecstatic, funny, bewildering, fearful and above all replete with disappointments that must somehow be negotiated without losing heart.

Kushner the writer never pulls rank on his reader by telling us what to think about what he describes, which is often what he remembers about his relationship with his parents. The level of insight is sometimes chilling, and it’s the poet’s deft handling of words that enables him to pull it off, again and again. On reading the poems you may wonder how anyone ever manages to grow up.

In “My Father’s Death,” three lines say everything:

          I am in this world only because
          the first son died. He wanted a son.
          So they tried again.

But the perspective Kushner brings to this subject is never demeaning. On the contrary, these parental poems exude an affection and remorse the reader can feel. Compare these lines to the most famous lines in Philip Larkin’s most notorious poem, about how  “they fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do.” Kushner recalls his Russian immigrant parents in a way that thoroughly humanizes them, rather than simplifying them into authority figures. Four of his books were dedicated to his parents, either as a couple or individually.

In falling back on memories of childhood, Kushner gives us its grim moments of emotional denial and enervating guilt along with something other poets of family dysfunction often forget: the image of the boy inexplicably bursting with so much love he can scarcely contain it. “My restless bed awake/with it, love,” he remembers, in the extraordinary poem, “When I Was Five.” Many poets mine the fears and fantasies of childhood but how many also conjure its almost embarrassing exuberance? No wonder adulthood turns out to be bewildering for this poet, and his life’s point unknowable or non-existent. Kushner often sounds like a 12-year old kid in an old man’s body yacking to his friends—us, his readers.

My guess is these poems would irritate many creative writing teachers and bring grad school writing workshops to blows. Kushner takes chances most poets wouldn’t. For instance, the first stanza of a poem with a date for a title (“5/9/87”) recollects the so, so serious sexual scolding delivered to the poet by a now-deceased friend (“Bill, I don’t understand you…”), while the second stanza describes the movies on TV that night. On first reading it’s funny. Read a second time it comes through as a reflection on fate as chance and the beguiling craziness of popular culture.

The spontaneity of Kushner’s poems completely convinces. They mix memory, dream, desire, anecdote and reflection, sometimes in the same stanza, and are propelled by the generous wisdom that comes through in the how they read, sound, are structured, and in the effects of the poet’s voice which is often hilarious (example, “UFOs,” which begins: “They come from outer space/dressed as cornfields.”). At moments Kushner seems to be talking to himself (“Narrowly avoiding gulp just about everything…”) with that bruised and lyric honesty one part of the mind uses to address another. Many poems describe, in memorable ways, the seeking, finding and losing of love, as for instance in the poem “Lee Wiley,” where the speaker goes home with someone who worships the jazz singer popular in the 30s, 40s and 50s and instead of having sex they stay up all night listening to platter after platter.

Reading Kushner sometimes feels like watching a Warhol movie. The aesthetic arises out of social awkwardness, rendered here as comedic. The poet says exactly what he feels, as for instance about a pain-in-the-ass little dog: “Sometimes I just want to kill my naughty chiwawa/but I love my little Chi Chi too much.” His dream poems prove that the rampant absurdity that takes place while we sleep is indistinguishable from what goes on in “this spinning wheel world” when we’re awake.

Never having met him, my guess would be that reading this wholly unfiltered book is pretty much like hanging out with Kushner, not only because the poems are “Written by someone who knows all about True Life” (“Pigeon”) but because of the directness and authenticity of the speaking voice. The poems change line length and form over the years, but the tone remains a constant. Kushner can be downright erotic when writing on sex (in sonnets such as “Rock” or “Hot,”), or fiercely tender on the topic of friends, parents, and other relationships.

Dull poetry can bore like no other form of literature. Great poetry, on the other hand, can electrify, which is why, like music, we return to it often. Kushner’s poems will not only light you up on a first read but also justify a permanent presence on the bookshelf. These sad, spirited, crazy and tender constructions show us a different way to look at life, and remind us not to take it too seriously. “It’s just one/old lazy day after another,” the poet writes in “We Make Plans. “…here at the/far far end of the world.”

Bill Kushner just telling it like it is makes for a poetry of strange, lyric beauty.

Wake Me When It’s Over: Selected Poems
By Bill Kushner
Edited by Peter Bushyeager
Talisman House, 2018
162 pgs.

Available here.

Bill Kushner (1931-2015) authored eight collections of poetry and co-authored a volume of collaborative poems with Tom Savage. His work has been anthologized in Up Late (4 Walls & Windows, 1987), In Our Time: The Gay and Lesbian Anthology (St. Martin's, 1989), Out of This World (Crown, 1991), Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner’s, 2002), and Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Melville House Publishing, 2003). He was a 1999 and 2005 Fellow of the New York Foundation of the Arts.