| I have come to regard these pieces as a kind of poetry under fire. They constitute a continuation of my quarrels with the world; they are about family, love, loss, and the American War in Viet Nam—subjects that clearly overlap. Love and death appear in the family poems as much as in the pieces on Viet Nam. I mean all the poems are about loss and death and the speaker's response to a predatory world in which ripeness and sweetness is dangerous, in which death comes for no good reason, but “you are singing” anyway, still. I bring up “but you and I are singing” from “Snake and Wolf”: because I think it may be one of the most hopeful moments in my work. Another is the applause after the speaker in “October Song 1 (October 1996. My Father's Eightieth Birthday)” speaks of his father and fatherhood at the scene of his dad's eightieth birthday party. These moments are conscious efforts (“I swear to God…I think for an instant”) to defeat despair. Love is not an automatic consolation for a retreat from the world, but an effort to live in it whole, as neither prey nor predator. The love/family poems hold great sorrow—death, fear of death, danger to loved ones—but they do afford a sense of meaning, a counter to a view of random meaningless dog-eat-dog predation, violence, and loss. If we are like coyotes and rabbits (predator and prey), we are also more—lovers of people, art, justice, and shopping.; These poems are serious, grave, consequential. But ultimately is that darker or more pessimistic than poems full of black comedic irony? On the contrary. And sincerity, the opposite of irony, is a hallmark of these poems. No shenanigans, no smoke and mirrors, nothing up their sleeves. The magic these poems perform I hope is genuine. |
