Surrender When Leaving Coach
By Joel Lewis
Hanging Loose Press
Brooklyn, New York
ISBN: 978-1-934909-26-3
124 Pages
$18.00
Review by Dennis Daly
Some poets sing. Some paint
images. Some invoke spiritual or philosophical vibrations to carry the mood.
Joel Lewis does none of these arty things. Yet Lewis somehow makes poetry
happen. His poems emerge from a background of dissonance and human density,
like quartz or obsidian out of craggy rock. Lewis creates his context of noise
from mass transit vehicles: bus, train, shuttle, and ferry. The noise of these
vehicles includes conversation snippets of passengers, storefront sights,
quotes from books, jokes, famous and anonymous people, and much more. What rises to the level of poetry will often
depend on the reader and his or her sensitivities. In his poem, Walking Main
Street, Hackensack Lewis recalls 1988,
… buses idling against the
Transfer Station platform.
A thick goodbye to old Hackensack
Saturdays
with farmers swarming off
up-country’s
Susquehanna trains—those
Wortendyke Dutch
and moody Paramus celery ranchers
have left their progeny
a vast Mall to inhabit…
Twenty years later the poet
returns by bus and finds most stores of his youth are gone, but his favorite
hamburger joint still there, offering some stability in his fast moving
universe,
“Is Prozy’s Army and navy open?”
“Nope.”
What about Womrath’s Books?”
“Gone for years.”
“How about White Manna?”
“Some people say Hackensack
should shut down if
‘ the Manna’ closes.”
Well ‘the Manna’ is not closed
and Lewis enjoys his comforting potato flour hamburger rolls and the oniony
meat before getting back on the bus. Lewis’ vehicles not only transport his
reader across town, but also across time.
The poem, Mass Transit Journal:
January, is one of four monthly journal poems in which the poet delivers more
context and the poetry of everyday belching black soot grittiness. He records,
1/18, 8:00am, on the S46 (towards
West New Brighton)
bus slogs up to the Victory
Boulevard stop
meat pies of all nations in a
still-gated store window
columns of industrial rain on a
Van Duzer Street awning
my butchered hesitations, my
inhibited fantasies of power
as the bus climbs uphill
I look back
see oil tankers parked in the
Narrows…
The poet counts his blessings
while watching his wife as she eats crème brulee at a French brasserie, which
is, of course, located inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He comments on
the scene,
—a scenario I’d have found
hard to imagine in the late ‘70s,
either marriage or a bistro
in that scary homeless dormitory
where I’d catch the bus back
to my basement warren
in North Bergen
after another evening
of poetry readings…
Like most poets and other people
Lewis has had bad times that have made an impression on him, and in his case,
he cannot believe his present good luck. (After writing this I would recommend
knocking on wood).
In his title poem, Surrender When
Leaving Coach, Lewis quotes Barrett Watten:” A bus ride is better than most
art.” He then goes on to test this principle in the poem itself,
self-consciously dropping names as he writes,
Once again my obsession with
the motion of buses, trains and
canal boats
and Paterson has it all
including
a heavy-duty waterfall
elegantly framed in the
five-volume Paterson
of William Carlos William
and it’s where I once took Bill
Berkson,
Robert Creeley (I have the
photo)…
Not to be missed in this poem is
the “Zen bus driver,” who I believe I’ve met in a different context. The poem
ends with a lovely stanza, a jewel which seems to me to burst through the
density of static. The poet describes the scene thusly,
Grey crescent moon above Port
Newark’s cranes:
that distant space that stretches
out
beyond the grasp, at-history haze
of retreating winter light
along the Jersey horizon.
The poet identifies himself as a
true nerd in the poem, The Origins of My Social Marginalization. He corrects
“Fun Fact #226” on the underbelly of a flavored tea bottle cap and is rewarded
with a case of Snapple from the Schweppes-Cadbury Corporation. That’s funny.
But funnier still is the poet’s recitation of the history of Spaghetti-o’s in
his poem entitled Spaghetti-o’s. Here is a bit of literature to remember:
Because salesmen had trouble
pronouncing the family name
it changed to the now familiar
phonetics
of Chef Boyardee line
of prepared dinners.
Everyone is proud
of his own family name,”
said Chef Hector,
“but sacrifices were necessary
for progress.”
August Yale Professor Harold
Bloom makes a cameo appearance noting his adoration of the New York Yankees in
the poem, How Harold Bloom Chills Out. But Lewis tops this comedic scene in the
poem, Daydream Nation,
Phil Rizzuto, upon hearing of the
death of Pope Paul VI:
“Well, that kind of puts a damper
on even a Yankee win!”
Lewis’ delivers quite a few
one-liners and uses famous names for effect. A dying Babe Ruth says to Connie Mack:
“The termites got me!” And in the poem,
The Academy of an American Poet, there is a very unflattering but human picture
of Robert Frost in which Lewis makes a point on hero worship and writers’
communities.
I was slow to warm to these
poems, but when I did, especially with Lewis’ sense of humor, they grabbed me.
No comments:
Post a Comment