Review of Dear So and So by Rusty Barnes
Review by Karen Klein
If you are a visual person, when you open Dear So and So and leaf through it you will be struck by the stanzaic forms of most of the poems. Most of them are sonnets-- 3 quatrains and a couplet--,but poet Rusty Barnes enjoys playing with the form, sometimes adding a line,taking a couple of lines away. The reader will see this playfulness runs throughout this book of love poems; he even includes a poem expressly titled, Not a Love Poem.
The poet has chosen the appropriate form in which to express love; after all that’s where the sonnet form began with the medieval Italian, Provencal poets in their expressions of longing for the beloved, appeals for just a look, just a touch. Whether these poets were truly in love with the beloved object--often a woman socially superior, therefore inaccessible--we don’t know. But as W.H. Auden wrote, “…a person’s statement of belief is no proof of belief, any more than a love poem is proof that that one is in love.” Shakespeare used the sonnet form in English to extend and describe more complex feelings of love--magic, mystery, misery. Barnes writes in this spirit, bringing a unique voice to a literary tradition.
The poems in Dear So and So are in the form of letters, but to whom are they addressed? The dedication is ‘to Heather’, but who is Heather--wife, lover, a single person, a composite of many? The first poem, Marriage for All Ages, punning perhaps on Ages as forever or the age of the couple, opens with a prose-like, five line stanza, describing a maybe fortunate or not sexual encounter. Describing his sexual technique, which guarantees her orgasm as “the Force-5 Forklift Flip,” he is hopeful his partner will marry him, “but two days later you sacked me as your boyfriend/because I didn’t like ‘sex’.” Barnes’ tone here is typical of his throughout--self-deprecating, but leavened with honesty and humor. Not shying away from sexual imagery, he ends his poem which includes a car accident with a deer and an allusion to jail with a declaration of his loving need: “Let your breasts hang from your shirt when you bail/me; smother me with the great guns of love.” How many poets can make a love poem like that?
There is the power of desire in “Dear So and So: the door remains too open” with its plea “teach me again what it means to be loved” from a man “bent on his own destruction.” There also is the sad despair in The Deep Dark Ditch of Love, Or What a Woman Says that She Doesn’t Mean, but on the facing page Vegetable Love: “ Dear So and So: at wholesale prices my love/might be worth five bucks and a fat cracker. Stop teasing. Break down the ways I refuse/to become a reasonably rational adult.” It is the speaker who is teasing, because it is a ‘reasonably rational adult’ who ends this poem: “We loved body to body like leaves,/ the wind always waving us goodbye,/or hello.Yes, hello. Yes love. Yes.” This resounding affirmations rings throughout literature, echoing Molly Bloom’s “Yes I said again, yes” ending Joyce’s Ulysses.
Rusty Barnes’ poems run the gamut from that affirmation to the Bondage Poem which imagines a phantasy of a woman tied down; this image serving as stimulation: “…I’ll take myself in hand anyway. For love.” What, as Tina Turner sung, “does love have to do with it?” For Barnes, it must be part if the mystery and complexity of our sexual, emotional, heartfelt, and instinctual needs. And their domestication as in The Man Addresses the Fight, its Aftermath and the Makeup Sex which ends “Bless the children who coitus interruptus us. Kiss their steamy wet/heads and tuck them in between us; we can continue at dawn.
