New Mexico
Review by H. L. Hix
Frank O’Hara himself is not a recurring presence in Susan Aizenberg’s new volume, but the themes introduced in the title poem, which opens the book, weave themselves through the rest of this wise and elegant collection.
One such theme, a source of dramatic tension throughout the book, is the interplay between what is and what isn’t. That interplay structures, for example, the poem “In My Other Life My Mother Fails,” in which “my other life” and “our real life” turn out to be at once sharply contrasted to one another and hard to pull apart. In both lives, the life the speaker is living and the one she is not, the speaker’s mother tries “to track down my gambler father in Reno.” In one life the mother fails and in one she succeeds, but in both “she tries every club / and casino, the hospital, the jailhouse, the SROs, and, too broke for train fare // back to Brooklyn, rents us a shabby room.” We all live lives shaped as much by woulda shoulda coulda as by what actually happened; Aizenberg is just especially alert in her attention to that fact. Her speaker sees how intimately her actual self is connected to her alternative selves.
The tension between what is and isn’t has a sister, the tension between what was but no longer is. That tension, too, structures every human life (“It is not now as it hath been of yore; … The things which I have seen I now can see no more”), but Aizenberg’s poems articulate it with particularly acute awareness, as in this moment from the poem “Childhood,” in which the speaker’s remembrance of things past is doubled by her memory of her father in her past, focusing on his memory of his own past. “On our best / nights,” she reports, her father would
take me walking along
the boardwalk at Coney Island, where
in the soft voice he used for stories
at bedtime he’d spin his litany of better
days, before I was born, when he flew
the Atlantic, navigating, he said, by the stars.
He is secured in the present by maintaining connection with the past, and so is she.
One of the wisdoms that informs Aizenberg’s poems is that the tension between what was but no longer is can never be eliminated, and that memory itself must stay tensed to avoid mere nostalgia. Reflecting on that wisdom, one poem, “Charm against Recollection,” advises its reader to
Forget the moon that night. Forget the sidewalk
grates breathing steam, the stink and screech of iron
as the D train brakes. Forget the fraying curve
of the straps, those droopy Os held by our young
fathers as they swayed, half-asleep, tunneling
home from “the office.” Forget Jerusalem’s
old city, the men in fur hats davening,
and so on. This forgetting, the forgetting urged in the poem, is not an erasure of the past but a way of being toward it without being confined to it.
Yet another dramatic tension in Aizenberg’s book is that between good desire and bad desire, as in one poem’s sorting out attraction to and repulsion from “The Beautiful American Word Baby.” Now the speaker knows how problematic a term it is: “Baby? As in child? As in mine? / Not your Baby, reads the T-shirt / on the young woman I passed on the street / today, and of course she’s right.”
The poem’s speaker, though, is not completely rid of the feeling she had for Baby when she was sixteen and “wanted it growled low in the throat / by a Steve McQueen look-alike,” when the word suggested for her “Sleepy gray eyes / behind Ray Bans. A cocked cowboy hat.” In relation to desire as to their other concerns, these poems resist reductiveness and oversimplification.
A Walk with Frank O’Hara is full of pop culture, world events, and art: Sturgis, Altamira, Vietnam, Janis Joplin, Mary Cassatt, and on and on. It is a collecting pool, as each of us is. But the gesture I take as formative for the book is a reversal of the familiar patriarchal male gaze: Aizenberg’s book is full of women looking at men. Many of those cultural and historical figures, objects of fascination, are men: Walter Cronkite, James Dean, Marlon Brando, the Doors, the Beatles, and so on. And specifically they are men being looked at, men women are looking at. It is not only icons and celebrities and sex symbols, though, that women look at in these poems. Wives look at husbands, daughters look at fathers, lovers look at lovers. And mothers look at sons, with a range of emotion that includes grief along with love. Addressing her son, the mother in “Jane County Corrections” says,
I watched you marched in by deputies,
guns on their hips, lined up
with the other petty thieves and addicts,
saw you look for me, then look away?
Memory fails, but I remember this
the way the near-drowned in winter
never forget the darkness and the ice…
The integrity of Susan Aizenberg’s A Walk with Frank O’Hara is a fullness of observation and a wholeness of feeling: grief and joy and envy and loneliness and wistfulness and hope. And love.
