In Which This Is All We're Going to Say About It

Poems Newly Appeared: You Were the Chicken

“Evening Man” is a poem in the current issue of the Paris Review, but it does not appear in the table of contents. Properly speaking, it was not even selected by the editors. The poem is instead given to us by the poet himself, Frederick Seidel, in a bout of aloofness toward his interviewer, who cannot help bothering with questions like “what does that mean?” and “where did that come from?”. Seidel stops the interview to deliver the 24 rhyming lines of “Evening Man” and then states: “That’s the poem, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

Good, but what has he said? The second stanza begins:

     This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,

     Who does the things most people only dream about.

     He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.

The lines are frankly consistent with the Seidel elsewhere depicted in the interview. This is a poet who is well known for collecting Italian motorcycles. He is independently wealthy and shops on Savile Row. A smooth 73 years old, he is photographed here while surrounded by attractive young women (“friends” in the caption). He jaws on about meeting Pound (“We got on very well”) and Lowell (“We hit it off”), and though he is demure on Eliot’s obvious influence, he did meet the man (“We had a rollicking, wonderful time, roaring with laughter”). Aloof even in regard to consistency, he explains how he discovered his poetic vocation upon reading part of the Pisan Cantos in Time magazine; then, some ten pages later, tells how he refused to publish his own work in Time, “a vulgar place to bring a poem out.”

This makes the beginning of “Evening Man” somewhat unpromising. To use verse as a medium for self-regard would not seem worthy of the man—and, besides that, would seem a belabored point, not at all an admirable range of expression.

But the poem changes tack. The speaker of “Evening Man” suddenly comes forward with “An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair / That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey,” and before it is over, he is waking up “on a slab, beheaded,” with his hands chopped off into the bargain. Occasionally, lines of poetry are printed that make one sorry ever to have heard the name of Sigmund Freud, but here the imagery is essential, and indeed makes this an astonishing poem, for it transforms the speaker into someone vulnerable, challenged by life, and perilously aware. “It ends like this” is how the poem ends, and it could not sound more depleted.

* * *

In the field of genre fiction, there are plenty of authors who publish heavily, reach a wide popular audience, and enjoy nice financial returns. In the field of genre poetry, not so. With the possible exception of the “cowboy poetry” of American West, whatever that might actually be, who out there is keeping alive the practice of niche verse?

For a small but brave effort, turn to the noir-themed current issue of Black Clock, a literary review published out of the California Institute of the Arts. Only two poems are included, but they are both distinctly moody with crime and debauch. One is “Oracle Bones” by Alison Turner. This short piece of free-form noir starts off intriguingly enough, but soon careens into a fateful metaphor:

     Meaning if you were the chicken

                                   boiled down for this

     Would you ever mean the truth again?

If that leaves you craving a rye and soda with a Chesterfield, flip over to the other poem, “Witness to a Murder”:

     She saw a murder.

     She bought all the papers.

     She pocketed the murdered woman’s earrings.

     She called the police.

     She smoked a cigarette.

     She told her story and was not believed.

Gripping, and we have not even met the “suave Englishman” yet, or the mysterious Mr. Peabody who is sequestered in the drawing room. “Witness to a Murder” is by David Lehman, whose staccato lines recreate the suspense of a not too innocent young lady caught in a web of something or other. Regrettably, Lehman breaks form in the second half of the poem, dispensing with the usual resolution of a gun shot and replacing it with something vague, suggestive, and poetic. By the last line, one would give up half the works of Shakespeare to find out who Mr. Peabody is, but no luck.

Issue No. 10 of Black Clock is purchasable online, as are selected back issues, including No. 7 (sex), No. 8 (travel), No. 9 (politics).  No. 6 (poetry), however, is sold out. Issue No. 11, which takes on “forsaken cities and blasted landscapes,” hits newsstands soon. Submissions for Issue No. 12 are being accepted through October 31, though no theme has been announced. Instead, authors are encouraged to read past issues.

—T.K.         

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

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