Review of Heavy Lifting by David Alpaugh. Alehouse Press (www.alehousepress.com) (2007). 108 pp., paper, $15. Reviewed by David Chorlton.
Beginning at the back of David Alpaugh’s book, I cannot resist an essay with the candor of “The Professionalization of Poetry” with its clear intent to provoke thought about the way we conduct certain poetry activities in the USA. Of course how each of us will react to this depends on whose thought is being provoked. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets be forewarned that the author holds a low opinion of their work. He also questions “—the publication of flat, pedestrian prose with the assurance, explicit or implied, that it is the real thing.” Such essays ought to appear more often in literary magazines, something contentious enough to spur healthy debate. When the essay accompanies a collection of an individual’s poetry though, it cannot help but ask the question of what “the real thing” is of the author’s poetry. I think, even though “Out of the Cornfields, Endlessly Flapping” elicits a smile, it is more fun than real poetry:
I'm a Graduate of the Iowa Workshop.
Who are you? Are you a Graduate too?
Then there’re hundreds of us, all doing swell,
thanks to Jorie Graham and Marvin Bell.
“Poet's Progress
(from workshop to quarterly review)” is a four-line satire that may lead the reader to wonder, Is this me?
Showing your poems to the world
like a starlet shows her tits—
first in the back of the car,
then in magazines.
Okay, enough of this. It is a far cry from any literary review to the magazines overflowing with bosoms at the supermarket checkout. I acknowledge the author’s distrust in the poetry establishment and his desire to expose a perceived fraud, but prefer to turn to the poems of his own he has chosen to float on our literary seas.
In the opening section we find a sequence of reminiscences and observations, atmospheric and convincing. “What My Father Loved About Melmac,” “Singing Along with Miss Worrell,” and “Losing Control of the Toad” all testify that experience and insight are more important than academic schooling in writing poetry. The language is straightforward and the imagery is natural as in this stanza from “Deconstruction”:
And I was white as the housewife’s
wash you see every weekday at three;
yes, I was whiter than Moby Dick,
bobbing on an Ahab-angry sea.
Later in the book, in “Scene from
The Book of the Dead,” a fine poem inspired by a painting on papyrus ca. 1450 B.C., the language is even more lyrical:
And so it behooves even the leanest of heart
to notice the feather hovering in the balance
before the trial by metaphor begins
how light it is, how lonely
how fallen from the sky
Turning to contemporary references such as a BASF commercial (“Not in Our Name”) or the evening news (“War and White Wine”) brings out a sharp response:
Six PM: Baghdad’s on the line.
Time for war and white wine.
The satire in
Heavy Lifting is more appealing when directed at a political or social adversary. This is a book whose content covers a wide range and therefore it is likely to please or displease its readers in patches depending on their disposition or appetite for irreverence toward poetic icons. We don’t need the notes at the end of the book to underline the author’s opinions and one comedic version of a
Reader’
s Digest version of Milton as condensed by Robert Creeley would have sufficed rather than two, but let me end by quoting the David Alpaugh who can pick up a thread of memory and enhance its value by the alchemy of turning it to poetry:
That never again would Mom shout, “Butterfingers!”
nor grieve over china lying in ruins at our feet;
nor swear as she cut her toe on an unswept shard.
Pharaoh of our New Jersey duplex, Dad dreamed
of burial, near the Nile, with his favourite cup and saucer.
“Melmac,” he said, “would last ten thousand years.”