A Review From AGNI, Web Issue 5
GEORGE WELDTwo Seconds
Evenings & Avenues. By Stuart Dischell. New York: Penguin, 1996.
David Rivard provides something that readers may not have known they were
missing until they take in the intense, beautiful poems in Wise Poison,
Rivard's second book. Rivard writes about life as though he's actually
lived it; reading his poems, one realizes how rare a bird that makes him.
He doesn't treat contemporary culture merely as a playground for irony or
wit, and he doesn't strike the pose of the worldly, hip poet that is so
boring a convention of its own. Rather, he takes the material of his life
seriously, and he treats the characters in his poems with a refreshingly
humane respect, neither romanticizing nor condemning them. The book takes
amazement as one of its themes, and it is amazement that comes through most
clearly as Rivard's response to the world.
seemed then to have made my body glow, like a particle shot scraping through dense air, one of the brief phosphor-red sparks thrown off by an emery wheel while someone sharpens a blade. and, finally-
out into the pond, where the current takes it down the cut & quickly, dutifully, abandons it to the waves. It isn't just that the poems end with images of things being sent off or out; the poems themselves are surprising trajectories. The process of reading some of them is the process of trying to understand how you came to find yourself someplace unexpected. It seems to be the point of the poems and the book that we don't understand how we move through life and that life doesn't come to any resolutions. Surprise, imagination, and, again, amazement at what Rivard calls the "curious forces" in life are what redeem. Allowing himself to dwell in mystery, Rivard has had to marshal the poetic energy to prevent himself from succumbing to it. He is a master of phrasing and of original imagery. These lines from "What Kind of Times," describing the objects of a peculiarly American and contemporary desire, turn beautifully around verbal repetition and rhythmic variation:
snakeskin, the necessary drug, say six breeds
of dog that insinuate power, or the tan of her In another poem, a meditation on a friend's violent suicide entitled "Earth to Tell of the Beasts," the rhythms underscore shifts in tone to emphasize meaning:
It's easy. A sure thing. That the warmth & abiding plenitude of this morning would permit me to call your pain a fugue, an intricately feathered spiral, because it sounds lovely. And lovely implies consolation and accuracy. But all the while, buried inside, hurt is still hurt, shame still shame. Rivard's facility with vocabulary and cadence carries him well through the longer narratives in the book, as it does in "Against Gra-vity," the story of one of the poet's misadventures as a teen-aged hitchhiker. Whether he's describing the way hippies who pick him up are dressed ("a synaptic Apache / snake cinching the woman's frayed macrame belt") or his own half-asleep, deeply stoned thoughts ("And haven't I // always loved being broken up & abrogated by sleep"), Rivard writes not by imposing lyricism on the world but by extracting the world's lyrical potential. Elaborate or musical as they may be, none of his descriptions feels trumped-up or overdone. It helps strengthen this sense of accuracy that Rivard is able to make music out of even the most banal of subjects, as he does in "Document Processing," a poem about proofreading legal documents overnight at some San Francisco law office. The poem opens, "Not the Chilean debt restructuring, not / even the pro bono for San Quentin prisoners, & certainly / none of the venture sheets, the start ups in gene splicing. / None of it loved us." This legalese gives way easily to the erotic stories one of Rivard's co-workers tells to help pass the night-her fantasies of neighbors' sex lives, in which "She brought together whoever she felt / most needful & polished, or inept & thrilled." The interplay between the strange stories of private perversions and the drudgery of the work darkens toward the end of the poem, involving the reader in the same voyeurism the characters in the poem indulge in. The games the clerks play seem less and less innocent, and the poem ends pointing a finger at the reader: "You think I'm telling you / something naive, or wrong, but I don't exist / except as an absolute distrust of words." If the conclusion of the poem is confusing, it's no less powerful for being so. It continues:
while you decide what you most want, the care, or the taunts, whichever you think you're getting, the strappado or the luxuries, whatever is unexpected, the windows raised & wanton & wanting. You know the ones. The distanced amusement we felt at the beginning of the poem, like the enjoyment the poem's characters derive from their colleague's stories, feels more and more guilty. The ambiguity of the final condemnation is appropriate; there's no easy way out. Rivard's lyrical, amazed view of the world, naturally, isn't always ordered, and it doesn't always ride the strength of narrative or focused energy as it does in the best poems. In "Little Wing," a reflection on loneliness, it's hard to understand the logic that suggests that an appropriate metaphor is:
scented brushes flourished hastily over the back of your neck after a haircut, some feelings, some of mine, are too obvious to notice. . . . The poem flits from there to a dilapidated resort and spa to a Connecticut tobacco barn, and while there is something appealing in the images themselves, they don't cohere, don't deepen each other, and don't advance the poem in any understandable way. It is in spots like this one that the value of Rivard's narrative gift is most apparent: here, where there is no narrative stringing its materials together, the poem doesn't have the momentum that carries a skeptical reader through murky spots in Rivard's other poems. It would be ungrateful, though, to pick at the weak points of this volume. In any case Rivard may be a step ahead of these criticisms. In one of the last poems of the book, "C'è un'Altra Possibilità," he supposes that the soul, at death, will not go shooting off into space, "consumed / in wind & light," but will instead reexamine the life it had. "And whatever / once seemed puzzling, / a mystery, without reason, / will be clear." All the bewildering, disorienting, mysterious moments in life will be straightened out and understood. He continues, though, pushing beyond the expected resolution:
Then the soul will see, finally, how useless wisdom is, & save itself by being reborn. The best and worst of life is mysterious, amazing, bewildering, and beautiful, and Rivard gets all of it in this book.
Stuart Dischell sketches with so light a hand it's easy to miss the fact that Evenings and Avenues, his second book of poems, is a book of ideas, not impressions. The gem-like poems of the book return to a handful of considerations: the price of happiness, of fantasy, of relationships; the place of the self in the world; the definition of home; and the meaning of boundaries. These knotty subjects aren't pushed to the fore, however, and at the beginning of the book, they're the last things one expects to confront. The opening poem is the somewhat mysteriously titled "Ellipsis, Third or Fourth Dot, Depending." The poem's opening is as funny, if more direct: "'All my life I wanted to join the carnival. / I would be happy there upon the midway, / Tearing the heads off chickens.'" The poem is one of Dischell's justly famous monologues, and it takes off in a sort of loopy ecstasy as the speaker imagines himself as carnival freak, opera singer, sundial, sky, flower child, wall: all things, he says, he has wanted to be all his life. The poem ends on a Whitmanesque note, but without Whitman's grandiosity. Dischell's speaker is sincere, but campy, someone we like most at a distance-someone we're happy to indulge when he concludes:
My block, my building. I have wanted To be this city where I live, to walk down The avenues of myself, whistling a tune Through all the people that look like me.' The character wants to be both central, the object of attention (as opera singer, sundial) and universal and immanent (as sky or neighborhood). It's easy to write off his desires as dreamy and peculiar at first, but they are desires that recur more and more emphatically throughout the book. Themes and images hold this volume together on an abstract level; concretely, the book is unified by a series of poems entitled "Evening." The first of these opens with a more serious-sounding evocation of the expansiveness of the first poem. "For an hour or two the evening has no limits," Dischell writes, describing a feeling of twilit well-being and nostalgia. It's as convincing a poem about a moment of complete contentment as Stevens' "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," continuing:
What could be forever, linking cities and outposts; Suburbs that were villages separated by farms Have merged the way they once were forested. What it means to be alive has never troubled you. Strange as you are you have always felt this welcome. And like the Stevens poem, "Evening" hints at a darkness barely held off. One sort of darkness is made explicit in the next poem, "Morning by the Sea," which opens, "The atrocities of the last world war / Mean little at the moment she smooths / Her blanket on the shore." Dischell is interested in our abdication of general responsibility for the sake of personal contentment, and ironic scenes like this one recur fairly frequently in these poems. More interesting, though, are Dischell's explorations of individuals' responsibility to one another, as in the poem "Explorations": "It's the staying that has brought him trouble, / The building of others' expectations, neighbors / And bosses, lovers who thought he'd keep till / Morning." Over and over, Dischell writes about characters who have let people down, characters who are rootless or loveless, trying to eke out a little happiness in the evenings of their lives; or people whose fantasies steer them away from real human contact. There is the divorcé who dreams of his adolescence, of spending his summers surfing; the writer who has grown old in his garret ("All those years believing you were the spider, / But you were merely the web, / Attracting what life you could"); the ubiquitous idealist ("She was still her parents' girl, living home, / Helping out. She was always the one. She believed / In her soul, in birthday parties, in feathers and drums."). These sad characters are so common in the poems that they don't seem to be the objects of judgment; they're the scenery of a world view. Dischell's weaker poems can feel a little precious or rarefied. Though it's often interesting to see someone working in so denigrated a mode as allegory or fantasy, sometimes the poems end as riddles, closing out the reader. Also, Dischell has an unnerving tendency to be somewhat prodigal with meter. He seems, at times, to treat rhythms almost arbitrarily-to make a waltz out of a line here, drop an utterly flat one there. For the bulk of "Morning by the Sea," for instance, the rhythms are casually unobtrusive and varied, with no pattern or cadence asserting itself over the natural unfolding of the lines. The poem is jolted out of this naturalness midway through, however, by the pronounced lilt of these lines: "Behind fences and porches, in the pastel houses, / The pale food of morning is served at the table." And these lines, in the poem "People Who Talk to Themselves," conclude a paragraph of otherwise varied and interesting verse:
Offering their opinions, grievances, enthusiasms, Their limitless orations on topics of race and gender, Not unlike Shelley's 'unacknowledged legislators.' This feels almost aggressively flat, and one fishes around in vain to find some theoretical justification for it-or at least a good joke in it. Aside from these few notes, Evenings and Avenues is an interesting book of well-made poems. Dischell's imagination is broad, and he reinvigorates forms of fantasy like the allegory and the fairy tale with rare confidence. Moreover, the book sparks with intelligence and wit, sadness and beauty. One of the last poems is one of the best; it shows off Dischell's gift gracefully. Short enough to quote entire and beautiful enough to end on, it is called "Psalm":
the sea We were uncreated, oh yeah, we were speechless before the sky. There were no words to be sung on the water without edges. Lord had shown his preference for his serpents and his mosses.
Into the depths we drowned, the familial and the animal,
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