Final Bookslut Columns

This month's poetry column at Bookslut will be my last. This month I look at Tom Clark's selected, Light & Shade. Also see my March column for an article on the late great Lorenzo Thomas. Here's some of what I say:

Of the cities one might live in, Houston, with its bayous and highway congestion, in part offers an experience of modernity rivaled only by the more recent transformations of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Like those mirage cities of the Middle East, Houston, grounded in the extraction and management of energy systems, remains close to the fossil sources of North American ease. And like those Emirates, Houston has made the banal from the improbable. Glass skyscrapers rise above suburbs that now occupy the subdivided remains of sugar plantations. Nearby, Bay City refineries prepare crude for domestic consumption. Companies in the Bayport Industrial District contribute essential chemicals that go into the making of plastic bags, cleaning agents, and antifreeze. It is difficult to think of this, however, when walking along the magnolia-lined street of Sul Ross. In this neighborhood -- the Montrose -- the Menil hosts a significant collection of surrealist art, and near it, the Rothko Chapel broods obdurately beneath the oaks.

In Houston you live either “inside” or “outside” the “loop,” a reference to Interstate 610, an artery that separates downtown “island cities” from the outer portions of Bellaire, the Memorial Villages, and the suburbs beyond. The Third and Fifth Wards, located within, have given Houston much of its vitality through the blues scenes long established there. The city’s cultural or spiritual orientation, too, is turned toward the Gulf; it is more trans-Atlantic than southern, mid-western, or Latin American. Something about the dazzling contradictions and puzzling spatial dimensions must have appealed to Lorenzo. Perhaps something about the sky and air there recalled for him his family background in the West Indies and Panama. The Atlantic meets there the black prairie of North America. This geographic confluence meant something.

Lorenzo, when I asked him once whether he lived “inside” or “outside” the “loop,” only said, “Outer Space,” and we laughed. We talked about jazz, his small car hurling through space somewhere, that day, “inside.” At Brazos Bookstore, he pointed out new work on Texas jazz, along with Travois, a 1976 anthology of Texas poetry. Line drawings by Houston artist John Biggers accompany Lorenzo’s poem. One drawing shows a West African couple. A woman approaches a man, her body doubled, as if an aura moved a slight step ahead of the actual body. In the other image they embrace, kissing. Their forms darken and their features flatten. An aura of light penetrates the space where their faces meet. Lorenzo’s poem speaks into these images. “I want you to dance / GET IT,” he writes. “[D]o you get it? / I want you to dance / light as air / like the water.” The question brings a kind of brooding self-consciousness to the poem. “[D]o you get it?” There is an urge here, and in much of his other work, to expose, and then reject, what he feels in order to arrive at the truth of the poem. He thinks through it to discover what it means to live in a kind of powerless situation, and in the poem he makes the heart account for what it so deeply desires. [More...]