CJ Evans, LIVES

 

CJ Evans’s beautiful book, Lives, explores and circles around, into, and out of what it means to be free and alive in a world where humans insist on war and environmental destruction. Evans’s speaker is constantly trying to remain present in the world through deep perception and seeing, unable to free himself from his past (having served time in literal prison and the metaphorical prison of addiction). In the process, he gifts the reader with his keen perception and awakens the reader. Evans writes in “Now That the Time for Lives Getting Better is Done”: “And what else could my heart be for it not to try?” The collection renders through language a gorgeous natural and domestic landscape within a landscape that is dying—one war, one shooting, one plastic bottle at a time. Lives maps the apocalypse while simultaneously trying to resist it through language and life. (Victoria Chang, “INTRODUCTION”)

It is hard to know what to say about California poet and Two Lines Press’ Editorial Director [see my interview with him on such here] CJ Evans’ second full-length collection, LIVES (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2022), given the lengthy introduction by Victoria Chang, judge of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry that provided this book’s publication. Following his full-length debut, A Penance (Kalamazoo MI: New Issues Press, 2012), LIVES crafts lyric narratives of connection and disconnection; of being alone, as every other part of America might be: singular, and untethered. He writes a cadence of descriptive meditation and thoughtfulness akin to that of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell [see my review of Brockwell’s latest here], although one that manages a particular flow closer to that of water, flowing and connecting well beyond the boundaries of each standalone poem. Evans writes of seeking connection, even redemption, writing extensively of standing alone in the dark, only to discover that someone, there, has possibly been there the whole time, reaching out. “This shamed, this used,” he writes, as part of “IN THIS POEM WITHOUT YOU / I’M ALONE AS URANIUM ORE,” “this american body of mine / is near-done. Or I’m done with all it has become, / being american.”

Writing from underneath a shadow of environmental disaster and wildfires, school shootings and suicides, American political and cultural failures large and small, Evans writes of swirling storms and trying to find and even reach the calm centre. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we, and this book as a whole feels less a collection than a kind of metaphysical lyric suite, held together through a common tone, and a variety of intricately-woven threads across a great distance. “Panoramic,” the cover copy uses to describe the work, and his poems maintain a wide scope and deep attention, often returning back to particular tethers, to hold himself in place. He writes unapologetically of life, and a faith in living, almost as though believing in such because he has to; he needs to. “Just for today,” as the poem “INQUIRY INTO STORM” begins, “let’s erupt / the reverie with a plosive, // play in the halation, / the emblazoned, the significant // spiral of our specific / tornado.”

AN ORCHARD IS A FOREST WE BROKE

Walk with me the rows and whir: poor trees poor trees
poor wilderness clipped, fruit plucked, ugly branches robbed
of the weight of little animals. Pears rot around the roots,
blind black eyes in yellow skin infolding, eaten from inside

by neglect and wet. Along down the row and earth bends
away from them toward naked dirt between, and here,
in the cold cradle of winter, we wear high vulcanized boots,
and I work hard each day to remain in the world with you.

The poems in LIVES are grouped into four sections, three of which are built out of assemblages of shorter poems, but the second section holds but a single, extended poem that seems to anchor the collection as a whole, the poem “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE.” Subtitled “after Donnelly & Schuyler,” the poem, as Evans offers in his acknowledgments, “is after poems called ‘Hymn to Life’ by Timothy Donnelly and James Schuyler, and also nods to poems of the same title by Lou Andreas-Salomé and Nazim Hikmet.” It is almost as though the entire collection swirls around this poem as a central core, akin to how Manitoba poet Di Brandt’s collection Now You Care (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003) was structured around the central core of a longer sequence as well (my review of such seems to have fallen offline, formerly up via The Antigonish Review).

The narrative Evans writes across the seventy stanzas, each five lines in length, of “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE” loop and swirl around a variety of images of wetlands and Lake Merritt, resting in the centre of Oakland, California, the Simon and Garfunkle song “America,” the memory of Sandy Hook, his daughter’s imaginary sabertooth, “Toothy,” and other family moments, connections, memories, dislocations and trauma, all wrapped up and around not only a belief in life itself, but the very act of that particular brand of faith. “I can’t see the lake from here,” he writes, early on in the poem, “but I believe / it still is. Just as I believe in the shellmounds / I’ll never see, the sabertooth, that the flat moon / is actually a sphere. I believe as I do / in this tabletop you can’t touch: wood pulp crushed // in a hydraulic press with glue.” Or later on in the same poem, offering: “I believe in this as much as god / or biology, which is to say, a bit less // than to make a bet with it against a bullet, / but enough. I call it belief, but it’s purposefully, / wondrously unexamined.” There is such a stunning beauty to this collection, one that shows itself as open-hearted while playing rather close to what might suggest a deeply-wounded chest. This is what one might call a darkly optimistic book; one filled with as much beauty as one can muster, and everything one can see after having been in the dark.

 

Douglas Crase, On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays

 

As another appraisal of the commonwealth, “Lake Superior” extends a tradition that seems particular American: it’s a tradition we honor only partway. For the truth is, when our poets start telling us about gneiss, or land and air, when they locate their story in stone or, as Niedecker does, in rock, I think we are likely to allow them the trope but not likely to believe they are saying what in fact they just said. They and their poems are made of land and air and rock. People who read poetry have always been alert enough to entertain the trope while avoiding the notion itself as sentimental, romantic, or worse, perniciously near to nationalism.
            Get them away from poetry, however, and today’s readers are also alert enough ecologically to know that their own identification with the environment isn’t ipso facto proof of direct-mail mysticism or gang nationalism. (“Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime”)

Moving my way through the stunning new collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase, I had foolishly presumed I hadn’t actually heard his name prior to this, only to discover I’d read his essay “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” included as part of the late Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As the press release for On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays offers: “On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.” Some of the essays collected here, truly, are revelatory, and he writes repeatedly, thoroughly and thoughtfully on poets such as Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), John Ashbery (1927-2017) and James Schuyler (1923-1991), among multiple other pieces on an array of literary activity, centred around his attentions across some four decades. I’ve read numerous works by Niedecker over the years, but admittedly paid little attention to the works of Schuyler and Ashbery (preferring, myself, the work of their New York School compatriot, Frank O’Hara), although Crase’s essays almost make one feel a sense of loss for not having paid enough attention. One doesn’t need an intimate knowledge of his subjects to fall deeply into these essays, and one is even reminded of just how poorly and rarely Niedecker’s work had been read for so long, only rescued from relative obscurity in later years, thanks to critics and editors such as Jenny Penberthy and Douglas Crase (fully aware that there are plenty of examples of women poets not given their proper due until later: Mina Loy, Anne Wilkinson, Judith Copithorne, etcetera).

Crase’s essays are deeply knowledgeable and intimate, managing to write critically about poets, as in the case of Ashbery and Schuyler, that he was personally close to for decades, allowing his friendships to open up, and not hinder, the possibility for clear critical examination. There is also something quite charming, and even unique, about Crase’s approach, as he offers in his preface to the collection: “You can emerge from your education by heroes and friends lacking a certain conventional balance, partial for the rest of your life to a set of values acquired when you were the fool in love. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I find that kind of self-assessment quite wonderful, “a fool in love,” as Douglas Crase the critic/reader allows his thinking heart to fuel his examinations into the thinking and structure of any particular author beyond what might otherwise be possible. He continues, further on:

            Say you’ve decided to read all of a single author, as I did Emerson, or as Susan Howe must have done with Dickinson; read them as if no one had read them before, and only afterward consult the established critical writings on that author. You soon note that the writings generalize where they might be particular. They elaborate on their learnings, impressions, and at times their prejudice, until it appears eventually they have substituted the elaborations for what the author actually wrote. Jarrell cautioned his readers to remember that the criticism of any age, even the best of it, becomes inherently absurd. Sometimes it’s risible. And the conclusion is: if they got Emerson wrong, or Dickinson, how can I believe what they are telling me about Ashbery, or Niedecker, or the origins of the New York School?

There is such a delight in his examinations, offering a joyous and rapt attention and passionate engagement on very specific poets, poems and moments, while simultaneously able to see how the threads of his particular subject’s work fits into the larger fabric of literary production, culture and politics. As he writes as part of the essay “THE LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE,” “Much of art is the struggle to make emotion less embarrassing.” There is something quite staggering in that simple, short sentence that Crase manages to get, and get to. Honestly, go to page 135 and read the whole paragraph that sits at the bottom of the page. It’s breathtaking. And read the whole essay. And then read the whole collection. This is easily the finest collection of prose I’ve read in years.