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Friday, October 04, 2024

Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness Timothy Gager Poems



 Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness

Timothy Gager Poems

Big Table Publishing, 2024

73 pages

by Lo Galluccio

Is the title ironic? Is it meant to mimic a toothpaste or detergent commercial? X-tra Whiteness suggests not race in this book, but some kind of gleam. Or maybe Gager is playing on the theme of whiteness, and even including race. After several readings, I’m still not sure but the title, it’s pop and its ambiguity, drew me to this collection, without a doubt.

The book’s divided into four sections, the first “Blue” contains poems most of which are elegiac poems to loss: the loss of a pure, true love, the death of his beloved father, its blue meaning bereft, blue as in the blues, to be blue, sad, as Nick Cave mentions in his lecture on love songs like the Portuguese word saudade. Here is tangible sorrow, even desolation, a sense that the world has broken apart into a void. In “Dependents” Gager posits that rescue when it comes, comes too late to save anybody. “Listen/smother me with a pillow/Don’t worry, no one will come/…/and when they finally come…it’ll be too late.” p. 11. In “After You Go” he writes: “we send to the sky our grief/when writing letters/to the deceased.” p 13. This affirms both the sense of futility and awe that accompanies a close relative or friend’s passing. Certainly, a testament to mortality and our inability to stop death. And later, “No one makes/our longings/into a song.” There seems no compensation, no silver lining to this black cloud. There is a nostalgic poem to three past New Year’s Eves with the lost partner, now gone: 2020, 2021 and 2022, where in a Cape Cod Airbnb it begins to drizzle, “right before the sky fell down.” p 17. Gager deftly deals in worldly concrete specifics, often juxtaposed with more abstract forces, nature, the sky. In 1/1 he insists that his love is “one of one” and that since they no longer converse, “…I no longer recite.” p 19. A sense of mute longing that is however, undercut by the playful, imaginative language with which Gager crafts these “blue” poems. They are, as he writes in “It Sunk” “…my best pieces, /wreckage after implosion.” p 23.

Part 2, is a shorter section entitled “X-tra-White.” It begins with a poem called, “Reflections: A 17 Year old Drug Addict 40 Years Later,” a meditation on getting clean and losing bad habits of addiction, a little shoplifting, badmouthing others which amount to an “empty echo of lunacy –” and the harsh violence or violated foundation “struck, strike, striking,/of permanence.” The addict recovers through an act of faith as God is summoned and gives one more chance, so the addict “started to clean.” p 29. This is an ode to recovery without going into the painful steps sobriety requires. In contrast, in a combative mood, there is indulgent excess that is a “reply to someone who said, there’s a lot of selfish going around here.” In response to this reprimand, the narrator licks sweet syrup and heaps on bacon, “sticking my tongue directly on/the sizzle of a steak.” When something is stolen from us sometimes our impulse is to steal more from the world, in a desperate and seemingly justifiable greed, “I’m waiting to eat more/of what the world owes me.” He wants, “More/Bring it/Some more.” p. 31. Dunno, is Gager suggesting that X-tra whiteness in\our society means, addiction/recovery/country music/abuse/death…some of the themes in this section. He ends this part with a “found” poem that takes excerpts from Twitter, In Their Own Words on NYE, 2022, drawing upon the tweets of female public personas that

range from Michelle Obama (On Knitting) to Marjorie Taylor Greene (Saying Stupid as Fuck Things) to Margaret Atwood (On New Year’s Day)-- the kind of piece that gives us verifiable documentation of the way social media voices can scream at us for good or ill.

In Part 3, “Re(a)d” Gager moves into a more redemptive sequence of poems on matters of the heart. The first, title poem plays with the homophones, “red” and “read” and suggests that we read or interpret that bold valentine of love in a hypnotic, playful way. There is rhythmic music to it: “heart/red red/heart/red red/heart/red/heart/red.” p 44. Here is something almost primal about how fragile and trancelike a beating heart is. In “Picturing One Great Love” the poet pines to paint a portrait of the beloved and ends with the plea, “Can I finish one drawing/Please…just one?” p. 45 Longing can trick us with its endless myriad tugs, no matter how clearly we see and want the vanished love object to materialize. And there is also a coming to terms with the reality of not possessing-- the sanity of it-- by acknowledging our lack of control. In “Acceptance Poem” he pens an ode to serenity, a concept familiar to many recovered addicts (or members of 12 step programs of all kinds.) As he puts it: “A goal is to have no expectations/Please accept this distance/a gift, where serenity lives/as prospects crucified us.” p 51 Same as prey he suggests we survive with grace like birds, “hummingbirds, bluejays, sparrows and finches.” There is poignant beauty in the poem “Into the Silent Sea” where “the moon was not full today;/it was shaped like a heart,/seen from the bottom, light diffracted,/in a way that made you nauseous…/ that sickness that a state of isolation brings as he still feels “like an incredible ship/sunken and abandoned.” p 47. This section ends with a poem for which Gager was nominated for a Pushcart prize, a narrative poem about a visit to Star Island in 2024 that juxtaposes the calm beauty of a “white gull, blue water/the calmness of the completed” with the brutal excavation for a grave back home. The piece ends with a moment of seemingly perfect harmony though, a bird joining the choir by the sea, and the poet’s astonishment that “a piece of congruence, /swiftly the flash of/” could be real. “Damn, it can be,” he asserts.

The final section, “Blu-ing, as distinct from the first section, “Blue,” is where the poet takes on other themes, objects, even humor. It’s as if “Blu-ing” were the poet’s ability to compensate for or distract from the underlying grief by looking at the world with some jauntiness and resilience. It begins with “Abecedarius,” in compressed form, a poem whose lines copy the sequence of the alphabet. Only this one is just seven lines, that run from letters A to X, a lovely mysterious piece that lives “under voracious waters,/xeric, your zone.” Someone, and I forget who, said that a few poems should contain exotic or unfamiliar words, so I looked up “xeric,” and it means arid. With the big currents turned back, the poet is dwelling in a paradoxically safe, dry space, under a deluge. The poems “Almost Famous” and “Literary Action Figures” give us some comical relief; the first about how Boston’s so called famous eating joints are actually not known outside of the locale and the second is a look back to childhood toys and a sibling spat about a Barbie whose hair is pulled out, and a “Bukowski doll” and the favorite, a Kurt Vonnegut figure, who defies his sick sister’s destructive tendencies. Real or fictional it gives some insight into the writer’s psychic literary pantheon. In “Recipe Dumb-Ass Men Use to Cook Women” Gager catalogues the obnoxious ways men can turn off women in their ego-centric stupidity, including lying and “proclaiming distaste toward/ the dirty bourgeoise./ p. 69. A simple fave of mine is the closing poem, a list poem called, “Things You Find in Miami Beach,” that includes “a hairless cat” and “Hot as fuck/white/sand.” In the end, he leaves us with a slice of the world, an ode to escape on a popular Florida beach.

This is a marvelously composed collection that includes both the sacred and the profane. It’s about love, loss, mortality, addiction, recovery and survival and it’s both a good time read and enlightening literature about the state of our humanity. From the particle of deep loss to a wider field of understanding and acceptance, Gager takes us on a carefully executed poetic journey that leaves us wiser and well sated. I’ve frankly missed out on a lot of Tim’s fiction work, but I’m very happy to have found this, his latest offering. I feel both alive and awakened by it.

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

 


Leopoldstadt

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

At the Huntington Theatre through October 13, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Tom Stoppard has said that Leopoldstadt might be his final play. The production of it at the Huntington Theater, running through October 13, 2024, gives us reason to celebrate and reflect on the playwright’s accomplishments. From his first hit, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, through his most recent work – with important side journeys into film, such as Brazil and Shakespeare in Love (for which he won an Oscar) – Stoppard has challenged directors and audiences with his intellectual slapstick, jumps from reality to fantasy, splices of chronology, and productions seemingly too large for the stage. In Leopoldstadt, Stoppard explores his family history, but with all the elements that have made his plays essential viewing.

Stoppard has transferred his family from Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Vienna, Austria, which gives him the broad canvas he loves. Beginning in the 1860s, Vienna became an artistic and intellectual magnet, providing a launching pad for excellence in diverse fields. Home to Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Gustav Mahler, Vienna drew people and perspectives from across the Habsburg empire. Approximately ten percent of Vienna was Jewish, and Jews wielded disproportionate influence in universities, in the arts, and in society. Although still excluded from full and equal participation in public life, Viennese Jews led and inspired Austrian culture. Stoppard, who only learned at age 57 of his own Jewish roots, reimagines his family in the political and artistic milieu of Vienna, where secular Jews often adopted Christianity, married out of their tribe, and endeavored to mix completely into Austrian society. Leopoldstadt is a multi-generational family drama, in which the largely Jewish family is buffeted about through history. Despite their accomplishments, their friends, and their individual efforts to pass beyond social barriers, in the end Nazis determine who is Jewish and who is not, who is worthy of full citizenship in Austria, and who will find themselves in the ashpit of Auschwitz. Stoppard’s parents had the good fortune to escape, though his father died on the circuitous route to England, and he was himself raised as an Englishman, full stop. Most of his family, like most of the family we meet in Leopoldstadt, fall victim to the Holocaust.

Directed by Carey Perloff, who helmed the superb Lehman Trilogy last season, this production of Leopoldstadt handles Stoppard’s dramatic pyrotechnics adroitly. In the first scene, for example, the entire family appears on stage for a Christmas gathering, almost twenty characters crowding the stage with music, dancing, and family quarrels as we focus in on small groups chatting about art, politics, and religion. The scene could devolve into a confusing mess, but the Huntington’s actors, following Perloff masterful direction, keep the action moving throughout. The drama focuses on Hermann’s attempt to navigate Vienna’s turbulence with money and connections. He converts, marries a Christian, and truly believes he will ride out the tide of history. He learns, after attempting to satisfy his honor through a duel, that members of the class he aspires to won’t even deign to kill the descendent of a Jew in pursuit of honor. Only then does he, and the audience, begin to fully realize how impossible fighting the tide will become. Stoppard uses the well-known story of the rise of Nazism to point out the dangerous times we live in now. Toward the end of the play, when we meet the few survivors in the fourth generation of the family we meet in the first scene, one of the characters representing the English Stoppard observes that the Holocaust could never happen again. The audience knows better and gasps audibly. We have seen almost the entire family obliterated, generation after generation, before we can clearly distinguish individual members, more expendable Jews than remarkable people.

Brave and ambitious as it is, Leopoldstadt does not quite reach the stratospheric heights of Travesties or Arcadia, but it reminds us that we have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sharing the earth with Tom Stoppard. As Ludwig, the family mathematician, uses a cat’s cradle to explain the hidden relationships between events discernable only through study and intellect, we recognize and thank Stoppard for helping us in our struggle to understand the extent to which people choose cruelty. Extraordinary performances by Nael Nacer as Hermann and Firdous Bamji as his cousin Ludwig anchor the picture of the family, even as they disappear under the waves of the twentieth century. The costumes, set design, lighting and sound also help pull together this complex family portrait. I encourage you to see Leopoldstadt and embrace the sweep of language and history Tom Stoppard brings to life.