By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Sometimes a poem delights by mismatching some familiar style of language with a surprising topic: T.S. Eliot taking material from the music hall as a way to brood on culture, Alexander Pope writing an epic about the trivialities of upper-class flirtation, Elizabeth Bishop describing her desk and its objects in the jargon of a miniature newscaster.
Kevin Young has written a book, Black Maria (an old term for a police wagon or a hearse), that lovingly uses the hyper-metaphorical tough-guy style of classic American detective fiction and movies. Part of his subject is male loneliness and selfishness, and connected to that subject are all sorts of poses and stereotypes. The book's protagonist is part Raymond Chandler, part Muddy Waters, and the poems unearth the emotional realities behind the old detective-story vocabulary of alibi and alias, suspect and saloon, gunsel and hideout, as well as the movie vocabulary of "Voiceover" (the rubric of each section or "reel" in the volume) and "Credits" (title of the last poem). Here is "The Hunch":
THE HUNCH
She wore red like a razor --
cut quite a figure
standing there, her
slender danger
dividing day
from night, there
from here. Where
I hoped to be is near
her & her
fragrant, flammable hair --
words like always
entering my mouth
that once only gargled doubt.
You see, I been used
before like a car . . .
Between us
this sweating, a grandfather
clock's steady tick, soundtrack
of saxophones sighing.
It's been too long --
a whole week
since love burned
me like rye. I had begun
to see the glass
as never empty
& that scared me.
She fills me
like the lake
fills a canoe --
no rescue -- & to swim
I never learned how.
Young helps us think about the language, stereotypes and psychology of actual feelings by alluding to their stylized presence in books and "B" movies. The mingling of parody, tribute and insight befits the word "allusion" -- originally meaning not learned reference but any playing with language -- which comes from the same root as "ludic" and "ludicrous." Young, in this book's serious cultural play, braids the ludicrous and the profound.
(Kevin Young's poem "The Hunch" can be found in his book "Black Maria: Being the Adventures of Delilah Redbone and A.K.A. Jones." Knopf. Copyright 2005 by Kevin Young.)
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