In graduate school, I roomed with two other men. Both were graduate students in English - Dan is an essayist and Phil a poet. The writings of both men introduce them to me - these are men that I know well - in ways that I previously hadn't known them. On the surface, we are three guys. We played a lot of basketball and hosted a weekly game of football that took place at the park at the end of the street we lived on. We hosted a big party together - a "mixer" - and invited the English and Psychology departments. In fact, they mixed not at all - the Psychologists inside, the English folks in the backyard. We hosted many smaller parties - and got to know each other well. Dan was married to a woman I'm not sure I ever met - though Phil liked her a great deal. She lived in another city and she and Dan, despite his continued attachment to her, drifted apart from each other during this time. I started dating the woman who would become my first wife. Phil dated and married - a brief marriage. And we talked about all of this. About our families, about our dreams, hopes and ambitions. And we bickered. Famously about how to open a cereal box. And we worked, each on our own passions.
Dan, the essayist, wrote about his life. Big swaths of his life - his marriage - and little bits and pieces - the hats that his grandfather wore. Phil, the poet, wrote some poetry that was romantic - and some that read more like an essay - poetry about his life and the people and events in it. The latter poetry became his dominant voice, much to my relief, though his newer poetry contains romantic strains - but the mature romantic strains of a father, of a lover - of his wife and the life and place that they have built together and a lover of a life that is all too brief; "a hummingbird's worth of air,// the portion you were allotted,/ the dust-mote of your existence."
Now, thirty years later, Phil has published a book that contains new work and a retrospective of his old work, Our Portion. It contains poems like his epic poem, The Used Car Lot, that I interfered in its composing with the cereal box complaint, poems about his family, and recent poems, poems about the raising of children, something that each of us is doing relatively late in life and that keeps us from spending as much time together as we otherwise might. And these poems are both familiar and strange. The product both of someone that I know in places that are well known to me and of a stranger, a person who is thoughtful and careful and generous and observant in ways that I have not had access to. And sometimes that person is in places that are familiar to me - like New York City, but not in ways that I can see and know, except through his eyes. At other times he is in places that I flesh out through what I have seen with my own eyes - his family's home in Pennsylvania - a landscape that I know intimately, and with him in it.
I don't know how you will read this book. For me, it evokes some very particular images. The one room school house in which Phil and his family lives is etched in my mind - the quality of light at different times of day is evoked by the poetry that he writes. The images that I see are very particular. In one of his poems, Phil goes to Walt Whitman's house and thinks he sees the ghost of Walt hanging out under his shoes. When we were in graduate school together, Phil wrote his dissertation about James Wright - and in this volume he writes a poem about being James Wright's age when Wright died. Wright's poetry, like Phil's, evokes a particular place - one that I have never been, but that is alive inside of me because Wright wrote about it. Whitman lives in Phil through his poetry and Phil yearns to touch that poet, to know him in the flesh.
This book evokes in me more than the Phil that I have known - the living breathing Phil - it evokes a particular Phil - an intimate Phil - a Phil that I have never known, and think I could never know except through his poetry. I have heard him read many of these poems. I know the rhythm of his voice as he reads these poems and hear it as I read them silently. I have talked with him about some of them. And my experience of them allows me, I think, to have an authentic experience of him, but one that is novel - different than how I know the guy with whom I have hung out, the guy I have played basketball and football with, the guy with whom I have eaten many meals and talked of many things. This Phil is a Phil that Phil knows and constructs in particular ways - the ways that poetry allows.
I get to know the variety of experiences that Phil's Judaism, never far from his poetry, and present but somehow in a less poignant way in our day to day interactions, has for him. I get to know how Phil views his parents, his wife and his kids - from the perspective of Phil the poet. I get to know a Phil and a vision of the world that is very personal and very moving. Reading his poetry feels not unlike being present to the constructions of the world that analytic and other psychotherapeutic patients often create when they are freely associating - and by that I mean not saying whatever comes to mind as means to avoid dealing with the things they are trying to avoid, as happens at the beginning of treatment, but articulating important, moving, real and frequently quite deep connections, some of which are difficult to articulate because they don't shed the best possible light on their selves, and, by their nature, are, in fact, multilayered and full of seemingly contradictory elements that somehow, together, create a beautiful harmony.
Neither a poem nor an essay is a free association. Both are worked and reworked, edited and left to lie fallow, only to be returned to and reworked. Dan's essay about his grandfather's hats was one that he worked on off and on for many years. Phil's great epic poem, the one that starts the second section, The Used Car Lot, a poem about his father, contains themes that are revisited in the most recent poems. The material is worked and reworked. It is published when it is complete - or as complete as such things get at any particular moment. And a patient comes to have a more complete narrative - one that helps them articulate who they are within the therapeutic relationship, but also outside of it - though that version is, inevitably, different. One of the fun things about knowing the writers is that both versions, the private and the public, the rough and the final draft are available, in some form, to me. With the writers, this includes seeing the poems and the essays evolve across time, but also talking with them, knowing them across the dinner table, and seeing them live their way into their lives - lives that they are in the process of writing about.
My reluctant wife points out that my students don't really know me. They know the constructions of me that they have made based on my being the type of authority that I am in my roles as teacher and administrator; who I am (as the reluctant wife experiences me, which I like to think is as close to the authentic self as anyone can experience) from her perspective - one where she knows my strengths, but also my considerable weaknesses, is one that is at odds with my students' experience of me and one that I particularly value because she loves me despite the reluctances that such a view inevitably introduces, but also because those reluctances are based on my shortcomings as a person, not on my lack of abilities to fill a role defined by others (OK, she is also reluctant because of my shortcomings as a husband as she defines that role, but we can argue about that because neither of us is afraid to articulate our different and converging views of what that role entails).
The relationship between the reader and the poet, most of the time, I imagine, is a relationship with someone who, if he or she is known, is known in a particular way. The poetry allows us access to parts of him or herself that he or she has come to know and to present to us in a particular way. In this book we are treated to not just a layer of that poet, but to a developmental arc. The arc from being his father's son, wrestling with what he has inherited as a man and as a Jew, a man who has a long and known and unknown line of ancestors with academic interests in things mystical, the things that sages think about - also from being his mother's son, a mother whom he loses but connects with in her Alzheimer's, and the arc of being a younger brother, one who idealizes and then poignantly loses one of his older brothers, and his parents - to the point of becoming a parent himself, and anticipating his own loss to his developing daughters. And this arc - particular though it may be - particular to Phil and his one-room schoolhouse on Scrubgrass in Barkeyville (yes, that really is the name of the street and town where his family lives) - and as particular as the memories that are evoked for me are, this poetry taps into something universal - some part of which we all share as we move forward through this complicated thing called life, in part because it is tied together by the close appreciation of the passing of the seasons, of the world of nature, a world that we, in our suburban bubbles, sometimes seem to cruise right past, but one that is, in fact, churning beneath us, calling us out to a garden, perhaps one that is not as lush as Phil and Ganya's, perhaps the world is not as carefully apprehended as Phil's is, but his gift is to lend us that perception - to let us see, as he does, the natural world that continues to breathe, to move underneath us, holding sway, despite our wish to deny it and our movement forward, as he points out again and again, in a variety of ways, to becoming dust again.
So Phil's gift, the gift of the poet, is to introduce us to the particulars of his life - to tell us what a Schvitz is and how it fits into his life - in this case by describing it in detail, but sometimes he lets us figure things out from context - so that we come to know the world that he has lived in by repetition, the way that a child comes to learn language. We discover the pieces of it that he casts before us, and he lets us stitch them together, these things that I would call associations, both within and between poems, to create a tapestry of a life lived fully - and all too fleetingly. And we feel, with him, the infinite possibilities that we have not pursued. And we get to experience with him some of the moments that he has experienced, because he has worked to bring them to life for us. So that we, even if we have never been to Barkeyville, know what it is to help his wife, a master gardener, plan and plant a magical garden - one that feeds the body and soul - and names her - Ganya. And we can piece this together, or we can simply place this book by the bedside and pick it up now and then and read a poem, and be transported, for a moment, to a very different time and place - one that is both strange, and very familiar.
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