Viral Spring #11: Poetry in a Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips

One of my stay-at-home pleasures this Viral Spring has been perusing my friend Bill Christophersen's new book of poems, his fourth and I think his best. Like the ancient seafarer whose song closes this collection, he deliberately steers into the worst kind of storm -- the so-called post-truth moment that poisons the world's discourse today. And like the seafarer he comes out banged up, weatherbeaten, exhausted, but alive and articulate. I wrote something like a review, but since Bill and I are long-time friends and collaborators --  thick as thieves -- let's just call it an "appreciation."  

Rarely does a collection of poetry begin with a headline – but Bill Christophersen is a journalist as well as a poet, and he knows from a header and a lead.  The headline is the title – Where Truth Lies – in three syllables, the crisis of the world today.  The Pandemic is just the latest case in point: we can find where truth lies, only by finding where it doesn't.   

The difficulties of this quest, seen and unforeseen, are the plot of this Odyssey of epistemology, testing experience and language for the presence of truth.  Not much pans out.   

Objects gather dust, lose their emotional charge -- the ferris wheel he jumped at 18 creaks on in middle age ("The Wheel").  Memory bobs and weaves ("Tip of the Tongue"). Fiction sucks with “dark vapors” ("The Rise of the Novel").  Poetry itself prevaricates – “a license to deceive" ("Lies").  Speech loses its nerve and curdles in the throat ("The Right Thing").  

And yet there is a metal that can be truth-tested. He finds it in a newspaper story of murder with a blunt instrument – an aluminum baseball bat ("Being Here Now"). And in the title poem, truth bides its time, conceals itself and finds him -- in dreams and dust-balls, in misread blurbs that morph into indictments ("Where Truth Lies").  He sums up the quest with a spring-cleaning haiku: "Beneath the shag rug /the vanished salamander’s /sooty skeleton."

The collection is divided into three parts, plus an epilogue --- Bill’s translation of “The Seafarer,” an Anglo-Saxon poet’s credo of stoic righteousness.  Its Homeric hero ploughs the ocean plains, steering into awful storms, life’s most harrowing tests.  Can he stay afloat amidst these “louring waves. / Sea-stricken. Sleep broken. Ballast awry.”?  

The answer is the centerpiece and longest part of the book -- “Still Life with Soaking Dentures” -- a masterful series of formal exercises, in which poetry stops prevaricating and comes to the rescue of truth and life.    

For Bill, truth is born in the Bronx and salted with ground glass.  This is a bird-watcher of starlings and grackles, a student of squirrels, a chronicler of death and dental work. And yet for all his urban grit he is a Romantic, who lives and writes to prove Keats’ crazy dictum – that Truth is beauty, beauty truth.  

“Still Life with Soaking Dentures” is like a Japanese flower arrangement – a calendar with 12 sonnets, one for each month, strewn at seemingly casual intervals.  “April” rebukes T.S. Eliot and claims every month is cruel in its own way – and yet we should be “grateful for its latest visit.”  "October" is a balm before the blast of winter – a celebration of “everything that’s contrived to beat the odds:/ the peach tree bent with sunset-colored fruit; / the grackles diligently scarfing crumbs; /the acorn-freighted squirrel on the fly.”

Somewhere in this book, an indigo bunting flits through the starlings. And everywhere, beauty contrives to beat the odds, with mixed success.  The odds are always long, and beauty can be buried by anxiety or despair.  But when the long-shot comes in, the payoff is rich.   

Among the winners are several painstaking sketches from memory of that rare bird, a good father (e.g. "Old Book"); and two poems about poetry, which together stand as the raison’d-etre of this collection. "Ars Poetica” refutes Archibald MacLeish, and argues that while anything can “be,” a poem, like Shakespeare's "rat without a tail," should "do." 

“A Defense of Poetry” tells us why:    

“We do without these words the way a child/ does without milk: our health is hurt, our growth/ stunted, our potential unfulfilled. / We want our lives to matter. We are loath/ to see them thrown under the bus, untold.”

Now there’s your lead, bro.    

 -- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips