Gary Lilley, Blues Poet

I had the good fortune to meet Gary Lilley in Chicago in the early "aughts" at Nina Corwin's and Al DeGenova's venue at Molly Malone's. After we both read during the open mic, we spoke kind words to one another about our work. Further discussion revealed that we shared a poet in our past who had influenced the way we both approached the line--Keith Wilson. That's a long story I'll leave for another time.

This is about Gary--an introduction to a terrific poet whose poems sound like part Stradivarius, part blues saxophone, and part southern gospel singer--successfully blending virtuosic craftmanship, blues soul, and moral import--something quite unique in the world of non-sequiter, non-consequencial assemblages of lines that sometimes pass for poetry today--until you hear the real thing. And Gary Lilley is the real thing! Listen (read aloud) the following opening poem to his second collection, The Subsequent Blues, and you'll hear what I mean:

Prelude To The Predicament

Ain't you the image, a part of the creator,
when you got love growing in the garden
ain't everything raised in its warmth,
asked the snake.

Thickets grew in the path,
air beneath the trees fouled
and birds shied to the sky.
Wolves howled behind
the red of their teeth,
vultures reversed their spiral
and discovered a taste for death.

Seeping fell like stones.

A saxophone wind, the first low notes,
wailed the story of troubles forever.
They ran, mouths wide open,
eyes pinpointed and seeing nothing
but ground moving backwards
under their flying feet.

Or, better yet, hear Gary read his own work, like "It's About the Ponies" on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ple6JHraEn8

Even better yet, buy copies of his two books, Alpha Zulu and The Subsequent Blues, get a bottle of good bourbon (or not) and and spend an evening rearranging your head and rediscovering your heart. And, if you ever make it up to Port Townsend, Washington, find out where's he's reading and hear him in person.

In the mean time, I'm going to devote a few posts to his work. Stay tuned...these are just "the first low notes." More "wailing" and "stories of troubles" are a comin'.

Trio House Press Opens Submissions for Two Contests Today!

I rarely write anything in this blog other than reviews of poetry. But I must take this space today to inform you of a new press that opens its submission period today for two full-length poetry book awards: Trio House Press. Formed by Tayve Neese with assistance from Dorinda Wegener and Lisa Sisler, this is a press that has done all the right things, and it hasn't even published its first book. From its final judges (Michael Waters and Ross Gay), its advisory board members (including, among others, Peter Campion and Ilya Kaminski), to its adherence to CLMP guidelines, Trio House is a class act.

I wholeheartedly recommend it for consideration for submitting your first or second book-manuscript. Here is their website, or you can click on the link below and to the right of this posting under "links" for all the details: http://www.triohousepress.org

Nina Corwin's The Uncertainty of Maps

If there were no other reason to read Nina Corwin’s second full-length collection of poems, The Uncertainty of Maps, it would be to engage with genuinely original ideas and images. Like problem children sent to the principal’s office for not fitting-in, disrupting classes, labeled early on as having a learning disability, these poems never fail to act out. And, like what were once called “juvenile delinquents,” many can been seen as mimicking some leader of the pack. But each walks with its own unique swagger, so as to create its own nonce form each time it opens its mouth. Hear this refreshingly rebellious, at once identifiable, voice in “Conduct Unbecoming:”

Because her images are a problem
and her poems won’t sit still, are unruly
as a hoodlum in need of a lesson
in etiquette, overgrown lawn before mowing
because they roll out of control like a car
with a brake job long overdue or rumble
like a muffler with a hole because her words howl
like Janis Joplin with a jones and her metaphors
won’t stay in one place: sit in each other’s laps,
legs splayed and scramble
over fences through backyards, leaping here
to there on several streets at the same time…


As in the poem, this theme of inescapable irregularity begins at the beginning and permeates the entire work. Poems like “Identity Issues,” “Against Straight Lines,” and “Leftovers” give us conceits born from the poet’s experiences as a psychotherapist, a woman, a citizen of the world AND an outsider to the common assumptions of the neighborhood—all laced with the pain and pleasure that each moment of life brings. The book opens with the appropriate and clever “Irregulars.” Hear its first two stanzas:

It starts with Inspector 29, her nervous tics
and squinting eyes gone bad in the strip-search
for the wayward thread or almost invisible discoloration.
Or, should I say, it starts with the apparel
on its hopeful parade from production line
to seller’s rack. But there’s always somebody judging:
saying yay or nay, fast track or going nowhere fast,
fine department store or strip mall cheap boutique.
As for me, you’ll know me by the labels
on the clothes I wear.

Gathering up the also-rans, the factory seconds
that stumbled under scrutiny, I who was always the last
to be chosen for blacktop kickball teams, I celebrate
irregulars! Those mail-order pantyhose marked down
for their slightly wavering seams, the snags that only
Inspector 29 can see, the skirt unevenly pieced together
By the anonymous sweat shop sewing machine operator
who must’ve had a really rough night. I welcome
their cut-rate selves into my home sisters in imperfection,
standard-bearers and tainted saints of human error.


The emotions of these poems erupt from the core of the paradoxical human condition honestly and surprisingly, and yet they reflect life experience with a language many times as eloquent and wise as any “schooled” poet of our time. Observe the gorgeous blend of music and meaning in the following lines from “Not Knit”:

Beyond the social weave of tit for tat,
what’s left but undressed need?

The plundered yield
of cultures severed at the roots,

a suckling calf that cries out for an udder,

while a raft devoid of oar
or rudder, dithers on a vagrant tide.

The occasional lyrical/meditative poem, like this one, breaking the narrative arc of the book, serves to bind it together, rather than tear it apart, creating one long narrative, lyrical poem that subverts our expectations in the same way that the territory often deviates from the map. This unreliability of the brain to accurately map reality is, in itself, a reality that must be accounted for. Corwin’s omnivorous appetite for paradox annexes this landscape, as well, in lines like these from “Inhabitants of the Cusp”:

I am forever awaiting the moment
when gravity switches off and all those things we like
to count on being anchored: frying pans, mailboxes,
the coffee out of cups and then the cups
themselves, float silently into the air.

A fly ball arcs into the summer sky.
Loses itself in a post-industrial sun.
Neither here nor there.

Corwin’s description of reality is a description of her work as well, bringing to mind the following quote from Valery:

Poets enter the enchanted forest of Language with the express purpose
of getting lost, getting high on being lost, looking for crossroads of significance, unforeseen echoes, stranger encounters; they fear neither detours, nor surprises, nor the dark. But the [one] who comes here excitedly running after ‘truth,’ following one single and continuous road…not wanting to lose either [her] way or the road already covered, risks capturing only [her] shadow. Gigantic sometimes, but still just a shadow.

The Uncertainty of Maps takes us into poetry’s deep, rich forest of language and gets us high on losing our way. In the process, we just might find our own voices, our own selves.

Suzanne Buffam's The Irrationalist

Suzanne Buffam's second collection of poetry, The Irrationalist, achieves an unusually elegant balance between the quotidian and the ineffable antinomies of human existence. This is not accomplished by carefully placing precisely measured material on either side of a stable fulcrum, but rather it is the result of moving the reader to an improbable position where the familiar predictable world appears precariously unstable, and structures caught in the act of toppling somehow become capstones for a new architecture.

But what Buffam builds is neither a city of God, nor a new Babel; it is a world that somehow embodies both the history of rational human thought AND “the dreaming sea”—a world that looks a lot like the old one, until one walks its streets and sees how (like Buffam’s work), what makes it epic is its ordinariness, because it is viewed, like some out of phase parallel universe, from a slightly (but truly) different vantage point—a vantage point totally engaged in a present that contains all of the past and future as ore, waiting to be mined for its art, an art that creates beauty from materials that might be rejected by lesser artists.

Like the Genesis account, Buffam's opening poem, "Ruined Interior," brings her world immediately to us with no ontological discussion of what preceded it:

In the beginning was the world.
Then the new world.
Then the new world order

Which resembles the old one,
Doesn't it? Its crumbling
Aqueducts. Its trinkets and shingles.

Its pathways lacquered in fog.


Then the poet invites her readers to examine evidence that the vision to come is no sleight-of-hand, but truly magical:

If all we've done is blink a bit
And touch things,

Notice how dust describes
A tin can by not falling
Where it sits, or how a red sleeve

Glimpsed through curtains
Mimics the tip of a flickering
Wing...

In the face of such beauty, she asks:

...was the whole day a waste
Or can worth be conferred
On a less than epic urge...

The answer is that it is the fresh examination of the ordinary that ushers in the epic:

...Bow Wow
says the doggie on page two.

Ahoy says the sailor.
Arise says the tired queen
And face the highway,

The donut shops, and the boardwalk.
It rained today. You can see
Perfect inversions of streetlights

Suspended in drops on the window.
You can see the skyline
Trying to hold up the sky.

Don't tell me there's another,
Better place. Don't tell me
There's a sea

Above our dreaming sea
And through the windows of heaven
The rains come down.

The elegant simplicity and exactitude of this poem reminds me of "If There Is Another World," by Malena Morling, which speaks to the nearness of the imaginary to the objective world in its opening line "If there is another world I think you can take a cab there." But in Buffam's world, one doesn't even have to hail a cab, all other worlds are in this one, all other streets on this street, all other images reflected from this drop of water. To discover them simply requires diligence and as much love for the beauty of the not yet, as for the beauty of the already.

Buffam is on record for saying that “It’s not art unless it breaks your heart.” But it is her mind strumming at the strings of existence that brings forth the music to which the heart responds. The result is the largely unspoken theme of The Irrationalist: beauty. It is borne from the marriage of the intellect and dream, as evidenced in one of her “little commentaries” which inhabit section II:

On The Enlightenment

Take the thing you love most and cut it up.
Arrange the parts carefully
According to the picture in your head.
Now shine your mind at them.
If their laws come striding boldly forth at you
You will soon become a great man of your time.
If instead they lie there on the table bleeding beauty
You are probably a poet or a child.


Buffam is not a Romantic in the classical sense, even though she makes liberal use of its devices, including Keats’ negative capability, even celebrating it in a six-line poem on the page following “On The Enlightenment.” But even her eavesdropping on the silence/not silence of “On Negative Capability” simultaneously subverts our expectations and satisfies our longings in a unique way that afterwards could not have been any different:


A man and a woman
Side by side

Not speaking
Not not speaking

Cross a moonlit plaza
Without plans.


The seventy-four modern-day proverbs that comprise the middle section inform, and are informed by, the imagistic, somewhat philosophical poems that precede them, and the more conversational, sometimes confessional poems that follow them. If I were to list my favorites, I would simply be copying the table of contents, but read aloud these titles to get a flavor of their musical and ideational arc.

“On Possibility”
“On Necessity”
“On Shortcuts”
“On Attachment”
“On The Fire Sermon”
“On Valleys”
“On Clouds”
“On The Enlightenment”
“On Moonlight”
“On Ghosts V. Zombies”
“On Abstract Expressionism”
“On Negative Capability”

Then the final thirteen…

“On Beauty”
“On The Seine”
“On Suicide”
“On The Logic Of Dreams”
“On Church Bells”
“On Hummingbirds”
“On White Flowers”
“On Clear Nights”
“On Antigone”
“On Where You Live”
“On Irrational Numbers”
“On Paradise”
“On Everyone”

All of history and literature, philosophy and physics is important to Buffam’s vision, and everything on the page is significant. Thus, her titles, as well as her epigraphs and her blank spaces, are as well-thought out and as integral to her work as her diction, imagery, and ideas. They all lend their weight and/or buoyancy to her vessel as it makes its journey.

The final section of the book begins with a rumination of wisdom, a natural outgrowth of the proverb-like epithets of section two, in a prose poem entitled “The Wise Man.” The opening sentence “I am not a wise man,” is wise and humorous on many levels. The poet is a woman who has just demonstrated more wisdom than ten award-winning poets of our time (probably all men). The self-effacement of this poem, along with the next one, “The True Believer,” which pits faith against doubt, beautifully sets up both the long collage-prose-poem, “Trying,” which narrates the anxiety-filled process of attempting to become impregnated, as well as the entire third section’s more personal, autobiographical pieces.

These poems personify both the ontological and axiological investigations of sections one and two much as the writers of the New Testament attempt to unite the Pentateuch and the Proverbs into a new revelation. While the latter fed a new religious movement, without totally reaching its goal of providing the comfort of assurance through belief, The Irrationalist is able to offer grace to those who do not believe, but who want to—more accurately those who “keep flipping back and forth between trying and wanting to try” (p. 66, section 3, line 3-4). Two poems that fuel this discussion are “Ideal Tree” and “A Perfect Emergency.”

In the former “God is in the forest counting trees./You are in the city writing poems.” The “you” of the poem writes a poem with a tree in it—“a tree without roots or branches/Or squirrels or sap/Without even a shadow/In its crown, for it grows/Without even a crown.” “You” call the poem “The Tree of Everlasting Love,” and leave it on the page of an unwritten book. It is finally published as part of a book of poems, but no one notices it, “No one sees it burning coldly/Through all the foggy mornings/Of your misinterpretable world.”

In “A Perfect Emergency” the poet spots a blaze in a parking lot, where kids are standing around throwing sticks at it, and kicking at it. When the poet approaches, “it shook out its golden locks and sang in a language [she] could not see”:

I am the Unburnt Bush! it cried. I am Burning but Flourishing!
I am swallowed but I am not Consumed!

The poem continues…

In my head was a page from a musty old book with its useless
list of Latin verbs. Before me I could see all the lives I
might have lived, lined up and leaping through the same
burning gate.

The final stanza of the poem is interpretative commentary—a telling, rather than a showing that Buffam seldom does—but it is an earned gorgeous description of the dross of salvation we we are left with in the 21st century:

It was a perfect emergency. The only thing worth saving was the blaze.

The ease/difficulty in reviewing a book as significant and as well-orchestrated as Buffam’s is that one can easily glean dominant themes from many single poems and each section, but one cannot accurately portray its depth and beauty without examining every poem—completely beyond the purview of this review. I will therefore leave my readers with a poem that at this moment best summarizes for me this happy dilemma. Tomorrow, if I pick up my already worn-out, heavily notated copy, I will, no doubt, find a different poem that I feel is emblematic of this terrific collection. But for now, as in the 1960’s lyrics of The Association’s “Along Comes Mary,” drinking this poem to the last drop leaves “my empty cup [tasting] as sweet as the punch.”


If You See It What Is It You See

I didn’t look at the fire.
I looked into it.

I saw a wall of books
Crash down and bury me

Centuries deep in red leather.
I saw a statue in a park

Shake dust from its fist
And a ship called Everything

Sink down on rusted wings.
Ten thousand triangles collapsed

Into a point
And the point was this.

I cannot tell you what I saw.
My catastrophe was sweet

And nothing like yours
Although we may sip

From the same
Broken cup all afternoon.