Poet's Choice

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, July 13, 2008

Sometimes I think critics resent poets who are understandable; otherwise, they'd write more about Louis Simpson's marvelous work, whose lines could put the academic interpreters out of business. Here's "In the Suburbs": "There's no way out./You were born to waste your life./You were born to this middleclass life.//As others before you/Were born to walk in procession/To the temple, singing."

With miraculous authority and pacing, this captures for me the despair of suburban comfort, contrasted -- as Simpson often does -- with the sweet, tribal unity of his Jewish ancestry. "In my grandmother's house there was always chicken soup/And talk of the old country -- mud and boards,/Poverty,/The snow falling down the necks of lovers." This idyllic tableau is exploded by historical fact: "But the Germans killed them./I know it's in bad taste to say it,/But it's true. The Germans killed them all." These lines break two rules that workshops hammer into young poets: avoid abstraction and jazz up your diction. Yet the unadorned speech creates for me an intimacy, the character being revealed through actions only, not by language that draws attention to a self conscious poet/artisan.

Without Simpson, the class to which many of us belong (middle) would go grossly underrepresented in American poetry. Simpson's suburban characters lack the urbane sheen of the upper crust, the melancholy grit of the factory hand, the squalor of the welfare mother. When he meets a car salesman on a commuter train, he drifts away from a diatribe on Japanese imports into imagining how his father jumped a ship and swam to this country. In "Quiet Desperation," a man whose social life has become "the only life there is" flits from chore to chore in his home's spiritual vacuum. "The dog!/He will take the dog for a walk.//They make a futile procession . . ./he commanding her to 'Heel!' --/she dragging back or straining ahead."

Watching candidates scramble for the presidency in these past months, I couldn't help returning to Simpson's poem about the cost of democracy. The process exalted by Jefferson and Lincoln is made up of endless, basement-level arguments.

IN OTTO'S BASEMENT

At the meeting of the village board

last night in Otto's basement

when they were discussing a building violation --

Why hasn't the building inspector reported?

The village lawyer is waiting to hear from him.

The inspector has to be told to "get off the pot" --

a picture drifted into my mind

from some Latin American country,

of men tied to posts, about to be shot.

Or perhaps it was Africa, or Afghanistan.

So we endure it. This is what Jefferson

and Lincoln had to endure,

sitting and listening to people

argue . . . the cost of conversion from oil to coal

and the statement by the tree-trimming committee.

If you want to know what freedom cost

look for us here, under the linoleum.

Dig between the end of the table

and the wall of some brown material

grained like wood, with imitation knotholes.

For me, the wood paneling cinches the final image. It's the perfect, Chekhovian detail -- embodying Simpson's understated precision.

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