Ignoring Poetic Schools: Premeditations by Klipschutz

Unlike Auden, Klipschutz once schmoozed with the hard boozing Darrell Gray, who also gets his own full page titled “Lost and Found”, a three part prose poem that recounts that when “several years later (Gray) died too young … his adoptive parents in Indiana had his literary remains, strewn about his disaster-zone Berkeley apartment, destroyed.”  In the second and third stanzas, Gray, like his Country Churchyard namesake, seems to wander ingloriously among gloried ghosts like Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky and Borges.  Klipschutz ends; “Gray founded a movement, Actualism, on April 17, 1972. Many books, many lovers. He won my heart with his “Ode to Jibberish”. Charmed and chased off everyone he knew. Made a will, never found. In an alternate-reality time-space continuum, which gem might his executor have salvaged from the cat-piss-soiled piles on his floor.”

En-face from Darrell Gray is a memoriam to Joyce Kilmer, titled “Delirium’. It opens

Joyce Kilmer was a man
who wrote a thousand rhymes
and died defending France
at the Second Battle of the Marne.
Survived by eight iambs.
Three wars later, Spiro Agnew
took the trouble to reply,
if you’ve seen one tree,
you’ve seen them all.

The aptly titled poem then wanders in free association with lines like “So then why so many Nixons / each unlovelier than the next?” And ends on an un-memorial, self-referential note.

…besides the stray snatch
of a poem from ancient Sumer,
and the odd shard behind glass,
not much really lasts,
not even Nixon. George Sand,
on the other hand, was a woman.
And I, on my honor, am a tree.
If you’ve unseen one of my poems,
you’ve unseen them all.
    in memoriam, 1886 -1918

That ending would border on the snarky if it weren’t directly preceded and redeemed by this passage:

… O Memory!
I think a German sniper
that I shall never see
cut Joyce Kilmer down
a poem as lovely as
almost a hundred year ago.
Don’t you agree?…

Reading this legerdemain, the image of the idealistic young versifier/volunteer, now remembered only for a mostly unmemorable poem, touches the heart simply, without sentimentality. I do agree.

By rough count, there are some seventy-five such pieces in Premeditations. With subjects as wide-ranging as  Cavafy, Emily Dickenson, Roberto Bolano, and Kay Ryan. Meandering some American icons, Klipschutz gives us wry, but not askance looks at Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost and the domestic banter between William Carlos Williams and his wife Floss. Who reminisces how “her Bill circumcised Hemingway’s son/(the hunter nearly fainted)/ in a tub”. 

All these pieces seem to find just the right distance from their subjects to engage them as humans as opposed to poetry-revered objects. Their satire is gently un-barbed, and eschews meanness. A good example is a long mourning poem written in the voice of Anne Sexton’s husband titled ‘Alfred Fowler (Kayo) Saxton’. In the poem Anne becomes “Carolyn Saxton ” Their daughters, Linda and Joyce are also given new names. We filter our view of the protagonists through this cosplay as Kayo relates their marital troubles and broods on his poet wife’s Confessional circle. Then ponders “the pins stuck in “that poor Ted Hughes.” The stage names deftly allow us to hear Kayo’s last sentence as coming from an actor on a tragic stage, distanced from personal rancor.

She belonged to you, the readers,
the self damned, and I to her,
and Wendy and Hope. I’m glad
she happened. I’m glad it’s over.

And I’m glad to have read Klipschutz’ sui generis forays.