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| Poet Lloyd Schwartz |
Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz.
The University of Chicago Press. 73 pages. $18.00. ISBN-13:
978-0-226-45827-4.
By Ed Meek
Lloyd Schwartz has become a cultural
icon in the Boston area. Like Robert Pinsky, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and Helen Vendler, his is a name you probably recognize. Part of the
reason for this is that Lloyd Schwartz has a wide range. I first ran
into his work in the 80s when he wrote about opera for the Boston
Phoenix. He is a well-known Elizabeth Bishop scholar and he won a
Pulitzer Prize writing criticism about her. He does a little acting.
He teaches in the MFA Program at University of Massachusetts Harbor
Campus, and he writes poetry.
In his new book of poems, Schwartz is
often funny in a bittersweet way. His humor has a sadness and a
sentimental undercurrent whether he is writing about a conversation
with his mother who has Alzheimer’s, or a close friend who
disappeared, or a ring he can’t find, or being mistaken for Gerry
Garcia of The Grateful Dead in a parking lot in Somerville.
Some of these poems do not exactly read
like poetry but rather like the hybrid form of prose and poetry that
is showing up more and more these days (see Claudia Rankine for
example). Other poems are tighter with rhyme and assonance and
cadence. He uses some of his expertise in music here and there, and
sometimes engages in a kind of playfulness as in “Howl.” “How’ll
I learn my lines if there isn’t any script? /How’ll I find my
shoes if I can’t find my glasses?”
In a poem entitled “Crossword,” he
is both funny and clever.
You’re doing a crossword.
I’m working on a puzzle.
Do you love me
enough?
What’s the
missing word?
Yet, he can also be serious. In a poem
about a missing friend, he concludes with these lines: “Our
birthdays are looming. The older I get, the less and less/ I
understand this world, /and the people in it.” The ending is
unexpected, yet as with all good endings, it rings true and hits the
mark in this puzzling period we are living through.
Here he is describing an orchestra
conductor:
Breezing easily between exotic
Chinoiserie
and hometown hoedown, whisking lightly
between
woodwind delicacy
and jazzy trombone…
He’s all dippy
knees, flappy elbows, and floppy wrists…
He threw himself
into the music—and very nearly into
the first violin
section…
Late one night in a parking lot in
Somerville he sees two young men smoking marijuana. He is worried as
he walks to his car. Then one of the two men tells him a silly joke
and offers him a drag because he looks like Jerry Garcia: “long
gray hair and a bushy gray (almost white) beard…” He laughs about
the encounter all the way home.
My favorite, “Goldring,” is about
losing a ring he’d worn for thirty years. He goes from obsessing
about losing the ring to trying to find it to connecting it to other
types of loss. Then he does what all writers do, he writes about it.
Why should he lose
it now?
He’d been having
a run of bad luck.
A downward spiral…
His finger feels
empty.
He feels empty and sad…
Another little hole in his life…
Endings, separations, partings—always leave him melancholy.
At a party he is always last to leave…
Maybe he should write
his own poem—the way other poets turn their losses/into poems.
When Schwartz comments on other writers
turning loss into poetry, he is making fun of them but he is also
being self-deprecating and poking fun at himself since he is doing
that too.
In these poems what comes across in his
poetry is a sense that Schwartz is both warm and likable and using
poetry as a means of dealing with the world. Warmth and likability
are not attributes one automatically assumes about poets and artists.
In these difficult times, reading “Little Kisses” is reassuring.
There may be Alzheimer’s, people may disappear from our lives,
sometimes we lose objects we care about, but there is great music to
be listened to, people can be nice, and there’s a lot of good
poetry to read.
