- - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
- - - - - - - -
Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
|
|
| PAST REVIEWS | MORE REVIEWS |
The Daily Mirror : A Journal in Poetry
Reviewed by Rachel Barenblat
|
"Every errand's a fool's errand/ if we run it because/ I'm a fool to want you/ and you're a fool to agree/ that's an example of a sonnet/ in four lines," writes David Lehman in "April 1." God, he's good. I had a jump on this book: I heard several of its poems at a reading a year before its publication date, and I read others at Poetry Daily (http://www.poems.com) during the month of April 1998. As a result, reading The Daily Mirror was like running into old friends at a foreign airport. The poems I hadn't seen before kept me busy, interested, engaged, and then I'd run into one that I knew and I'd have to pause to savor. |
 The Daily Mirror Poetry by David Lehman Paperback - $12.80 Published January 2000 Scribner |
The book's conceit is one that probably turns many poets green with envy: in the fine tradition of Emily Dickinson, William Stafford and Robert Bly (among others), Lehman writes a poem a day. It's a crazy undertaking. Publishing such daily verse seems like an even crazier idea. What chutzpah!
Lehman knows he's taking a gamble. "The dailiness of the poems may act as a corrective to artificial poetic diction," Lehman writes in his introduction. "It may keep the poem honest by rubbing its nose in the details of daily life. But however casual each poem may seem, however nonchalant, it has to work as verse - it must transcend the occasion of its making as only real poems do." What pleases me is that the gamble pays off: the poems work.
Lehman's most recent non-poetry book, The Last Avant-Garde, chronicled the whirlwind of relationship, aesthetics, humor and art that comprised the New York School of poets. The Daily Mirror places Lehman squarely within the school he's described: these poems are filled with exactly the kind of joie de vivre Lehman ascribes to his New York School predecessors.
It's not just his joie de vivre that makes me consider Lehman a New York School poet. Nor is it exclusively his wit, his willingness to take risks, his use of the present tense or his love for Gotham. It's that so many of the things Lehman says about the New York School poets could as easily be said of his own work. About O'Hara, for instance, Lehman writes: "The surface of O'Hara's poems is so dazzling, with taste so fine and sensibility so rare and appealing, that it comes as a surprise to investigate and realize there are depths of meaning in his offhanded poems that seem as disarmingly immediate and perishable as telephone calls." My thoughts - about the poems in The Daily Mirror - exactly.
"Some people confuse inspiration with lightning/ not me I know it comes from the lungs and air" begins "January 1," the book's first poem. It is not rocket science to decipher the defense implicit in these lines. Inspiration, the gift of verse, isn't handed down from above; for Lehman, inspiration is as natural as breathing. Which means that writing a poem a day is not an act of hubris, it's an act of faith. Put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard; open the mouth and breathe; and the poem will come.
I like these poems for their humor, though sometimes it is a melancholy humor: take "April 26," one of my favorites.
APRIL 26
When my father
Said mein Fehler
I thought it meant
"I'm a failure"
which was my error
which is what
mein Fehler means
in German which
is what my parents
spoke at home
