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heart candy.
In preparation for the endless holiday season, New York’s Overlook Press has sent over a copy of Jerry Williams, Ph.D’s newly-released must-buy contemporary break-up poetry playlist: It’s Not You, It’s Me. Culled from poems that have consoled him through various states of distraught over the sharper edges of monogamous love, Williams and Overlook have created an anthology certain to provide comfort to purchasers of niche-collections everywhere. Friend dumped? Dumped yourself? Dumping someone and don’t know how to say it in your own words?—
The fact is I have a rule. It began with movies, and has carried out to other media from there. Many may consider it unfair—an infraction of the book-and-cover agreement—but if the word “hilarious” appears anywhere on the jacket or casing or sleeve, said media will generally be returned immediately to the shelf. This response is not blind reflex, but muscle-memory carefully toned by years of pseudo-scientific testing, periods of exposure and examination of my psychological response to various forms of product marked “hilarious,” followed by extensive comparison and recovery. And no, this does not mean I did not laugh as Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin farted in the cloud generator in Bio-Dome, or when Jim Carey made another ridiculous face in that movie where he can’t control again his response to social stimuli, but more often than not I’ve found that such items provide little more than light distraction, a superficial temporary mind-melt, no more fulfilling or restorative than a mouthful of ketamine. Thus, you can imagine my expectations when I opened the package from Overlook Press, flipped to the front-inside of the dust-jacket, and found that dreaded word within the book’s first five. It was out of a certain sense of duty, of some relationship established simply by the sending and receiving of the book—which suggested a sort of mutual respect—that I read on.
In his introduction, “legendary sufferer” Jerry Williams describes the four devastating break-ups that provide the experiential and inspirational backbone for the compilation of It’s Not You, It’s Me. “By now,” he writes, “I’ve spent so much time in the throes of dissolution that I must certainly have achieved a keener understanding of the process, if not an advanced degree of expertise.” Thankfully, Williams has put down the cross long enough to organize these poems. The book is split into three sections, each meant to convey a stage of the break-up process: One Foot Out the Door, In the Middle of the Storm, and The Aftermath. Featuring over 90 poems by 38 authors, the book’s collaboration follows a few simple rules: “(1) the poets still had to be alive; (2) they had to be female and/or male, gay and/or straight, minority and/or majority; and (3) the work needed to be non-therapeutic yet transformative, hard-hitting, enlightening, emotionally varied, wide-ranging technically, and either clear-cut or discursive […] poems that ‘[make] the stomach believe,’ to quote Tim O’Brien…”
This being said, despite its questionable value as a niche-market anthology, its worth as a survey of contemporary poetics should be considered. Represented are works by writers including Mark Strand, Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, Linda Gregg, Jack Gilbert, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ravi Shankar, Alan Shapiro, Tony Hoagland, Ai, Denis Johnson, Kim Addonizio, Patricia Smith, Amy Gerstler, Mark Halliday, and Bob Hicok (with many of these authors displayed more than once). The poems themselves exude their strength, their authenticity of experience, in which “you will not find false hope, but the real hope of colliding with genuineness,” as well as bearing with them some understanding of being alive, in love, in anguish, in the world as it is today. Most of the pieces are certainly of the sort that, were one caught in the throes of love gone awry, solace could be found within them–some recognition of oneself nestled inside these poets’ lines. Moments of collision arrive in various forms; sometimes bluntly, as in Bob Hicok’s “The Sporting Life”:
He and his wife have split.
As an atom does when violently asked, when struck by a hammer
of some kind.
Wherein break becomes nothing more or less profound than a universal fact of things, when struck, when strained. Or else with bitterness, as Denis Johnson doles it out in “After Mayakovsky”:
This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you’ll never see my face again.
There is the dark and eschatological humor of Ai’s “Penis Envy,” in which the speaker suggests:
But the other subtler thing is how a man
must stand up to humiliation,
must retaliate, or lose himself,
who when he finds some pubic hair
in his can of Coke
must ask, regardless of the consequences,
who put it there?
And the cheekiness and nostalgia of Kim Addonizio’s “Ex-Boyfriends”:
They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,
they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.
Ultimately, whether or not Jerry Williams, Ph.D, is being truthful when he says, “Subconsciously, I must have been preparing this anthology ever since I was sixteen years old and swiped my first book from the library,” or It’s Not You, It’s Me is an opportunistic stab at seasonal and commercial irony, while also conveniently adding a publication to Williams’ list for the tenure review board, we may never know. However, for inquisitive minds, you may ask him yourself if you’d like, and enjoy readings by some of the compiled authors at upcoming events, including an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party tomorrow, February 11th. Of course.
From gestation to realization, Jerry Williams spent more than four years compiling the poems that make up this text: gaining rights, organizing them, writing his own introduction, dealing with the death of a writer who was originally meant to be in the anthology, etc. He was able to get Bob Hicok to write three original poems expressly for this anthology; does that sound like something one would do if they weren’t completely committed to producing the best work possible? In the midst of this mammoth undertaking, he was also able to write and publish his second book of poetry, teach a rigorous courseload at MMC (8 classes per academic year), get married, apply for and receive tenure and promotion, mentor countless young writers, and produce wide scholarship. Your hypothesis that this book may just be a way of padding a tenure application proves not only how little you know, but the general tenor of the review you are trying to write here. As one who knows Jerry personally, the simplest thing I can say is that you are dead wrong; this was a labor of love if ever there was one. And as someone who has long been a critic writing for many Internet publications, your snarky, solipsistic review embarrasses me.
Dearest Someone who knows more than me,
I am always happy to be reminded you exist. And no, this certainly does not sound like the activity of an individual who has simply created a document as padding for his tenure application. However, as you must realize, as people asked to review and examine pieces of work, it is incumbent upon us (yes, you and I, and others, too) to accept and explore the work qua work. Allow me, if you will, to explicate.
In order to illustrate my discussion, I would like to turn briefly to the realm of visual art, so let us go walking, hand in hand (if you’ll still have mine) in a museum of your choice. Let us stop before whichever painting might catch our fancy–say Picasso, or Cezanne—to admire the mastery of the strokes, of the proportions and tones. And yet, there is more to be considered. There exists in the realm of painting, of photography and drawing as well, the illustrious and—dare I say it–extremely important decision of whether or not to frame the piece when it is exhibited. Many artists, such as Rothko and Pollock, decide often to exclude a frame from their paintings, allowing the consistent tone of the wall itself to act as border, setting the work before the flat blankness, while allowing that surrounding surface to uninterruptedly communicate (except by spatial difference) with that which it supports, that which breaks it. If the decision is to include a frame, we cannot ignore the fact that the frame itself becomes a part of that which it frames, informing and communicating with it, simply by confining or extending its borders. This is why many artists choose to construct their own.
Writers, lamentably (unless they would like to disperse their work as loose pages without cover or introduction) lack the luxury of the first of these decisions, and this fact may have led to a certain amount of ignorance (and I use this word intentionally) concerning the fact of the frame when it comes to a book. Thus: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” This is, however, an utter fallacy. The cover is that frame. When the book is closed, the cover of the book is what separates or sets apart the text from the surface of the coffee table, from the others in the bookcase, from your hands. It is that which you crack to reveal what lies within, a natural and very physical disjunction: book/not book. As with the frame of a painting, which says “Outside of this is wall, which is different than that which lies within this, which is painting.”
But the concept of frame extends even beyond that, to the conversation that surrounds a work–all that swirling discourse we catch here and there in art-books or criticism or reviews or publisher’s write-ups or dust-jacket inserts. Even now, we–you and I again–are in the process of further framing, as well as revealing, that which is “It’s Not You, It’s Me.” If we are meant to believe Derrida, all of this prattle, all blogging and bickering, all critical examination, exist already within the text or work discussed, and so are inherently OF the work.
Now, I apologize for the long-windedness of this remark, but I am attempting to get at the issues of this piece, a task I may have eschewed earlier out of laziness, and which resulted, I believe, in the snarky tone of my review.
(You will notice, by the way, that as far as the actual stuff, the bulk and body of the work, I have little disparaging to say. It is, I believe, a strong—though limited in its scope because of its concept—survey of contemporary poetics. The sections are aptly formulated. Many of the poems are quite powerful. The paper stock feels pleasant against my fingers. No cuts.)
This all being said, you have, in your comment, shrewdly added another dimension to our understanding of this document. That being: the personhood and character of its editor, Jerry Williams. As it is, I generally prefer to disregard the identity of the author in first examination of the work, as it seems to me the pieces themselves should do the speaking. I do not want to discuss whether the artist is a good person, whether they are sweet and they are kind, whether they are married. However, Jerry Williams is not the artist here, but the instrument by which the pieces were compiled, and thus he too must come into question when examining this work. As with any “Selected Poems,” “It’s Not You, It’s Me” is a subjective assemblage of writings by an individual or individuals, and it seems to me that in the case of a compilation, such as this poetry playlist for the broken-hearted, the intent of those compiling should be in the realm of questionable aspects. As should the cover, with its candy heart reading “GOOD BYE”
Allow me to provide the first lines of the dust-jacket write-up, which—apart from his introduction describing various of his painful breakups—are all we as readers receive of Mr. Williams: “Award-winning poet and legendary sufferer Jerry Williams is a self-proclaimed expert in breaking up.” Nowhere in the introduction are we made to understand the nuances of compiling this book. It goes unmentioned that he was able to get Bob Hicok to contribute three new poems. He fails to note the death of an intended contributing author or the sadness associated with that-which, considering his bit about the project’s rules, seems pertinent. The introduction tries to do much, taking us briefly through four breakups and an ill-fated road-trip, to arrive eventually at some pale sense of anecdotal significance and the volume’s ground-rules.
In the response to the initial review, you write: “As one who knows Jerry personally, the simplest thing I can say is that you are dead wrong; this was a labor of love if ever there was one.” This I believe, as no one would work on something for four years if there were not love involved. However, being that I don’t know Mr. Williams, or how much control he had over the final realization of this project, it is left in my charge simply to document my impressions. Between gestation and realization, between idea and product, the concept, the work within it, and the character of Jerry Williams (who I am sure in actuality is a wonderful man) were cheapened by kitsch and gimmick. Ultimately, the book winds up being cute.