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A Poet Laureate for the Down-and-Out REVIEWED BY Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, October 1, 2000
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TELL MEBy Kim Addonizio BOA Editions; 96 pages; $20, $12.50 paperback
The woman making your cappuccino in the cafe, the one with red lipstick, is the ex-lover of your lover -- does she know? A man slips a quarter into the slot in the darkened, anonymous booth to see a naked woman writhe in pretended ecstasy before him. In a late night movie, the undead slowly stagger back to the farmhouse ``like drunks headed home from the bar . . . wham wham wham.'' This is Kim Addonizio's world. ``Tell Me'' is the third poetry collection from this very San Franciscan, and too little known, poet. Addonizio is an unlikely candidate for people's poet. With her dark hair and delicate features, she looks kind of like Joyce Carol Oates, if Oates should ever go into a leather- and-metal phase. And because much of her poetry is about men, drinking and down-and-outers, we are unlikely to be facing the city's future poet laureate. And yet it's hard to find a poet whose work is passed around prisons and homeless shelters as, for example, her last book of verse, ``Jimmy and Rita'' (1997), has been. ``Jimmy and Rita,'' a book that can be (and is likely to be) read in a single hour, is a star-crossed love story set against a backdrop of drugs, drinking, crime and homelessness. Addonizio weaves an unsteady course between extremes: Hers is ``serious'' poetry, yes -- but popular and inclusive in a way rarely attempted so straightforwardly and courageously. It's not dumbed- down advertising slogans or easy-listening haiku. Nor is her work trendy or gimmicky, though it's astonishingly readable and compelling. The dominant mode of ``Tell Me'' features long, Whitmanesque lines of free verse, with a smattering of sonnets, blank verse, pantoums and that much-abused genre, the prose poem. Which way is she jumping? Hard to tell. Except, always, into deeper water. Passing emotions lead quickly, relentlessly, to timeless ones. For example, in ``Physics'' the man dropping quarters into a slot to see a naked woman is suddenly troubled by a vision of the atom. The atom, the size of the Earth, has electrons inside it as big as cherries, one ``sitting on an ice floe in the Antarctic, a pinprick/ of blood, and another in a village in north Africa/being rolled on the tongue of a dusty child.'' In the speed of an Addonizio synapse, a couple brawling on the streets of San Francisco quickly becomes a nightmare of emotional association and involvement in ``Collapsing Poem''; the memory of lost love dissolves into a barroom scene in ``Beginning With His Body and Ending in a Small Town''; in the delightful ``Aliens,'' sex with a new lover brings the thought that her body has been taken over by aliens, come to Earth to explore pleasure. Addonizio doesn't piggyback on the usual truckload of cultural, historical and literary associations, the instant pudding of academic poetry. Similarly, her earlier mixed-bag career (as waitress, bookkeeper for an auto parts shop, attendant for the disabled and portrait photographer, among other employment) may have taught her to use simple, primary words to make her profound points and reach her everyman audience. Her poems are more likely to be inspired by late-night reruns and bars like the Embers than by a recent rereading of Ovid or Milton. An occasional exception is the sly reference to Freud in the poem ``What Do Women Want?'' Addonizio replies in her brassy first line: I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight . . . She proceeds to her triumphant finish: and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in. A brassy C Major is one of Addonizio's favorite keys, and it serves her as well as her more melancholy notes. In ``Good Girl,'' the narrator urges the abstemious friend to cut loose, comparing her to a dog ``always groveling for love and begging to be petted. . . . You've rolled over long enough.'' She concludes: . . . At the end of all this there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt. So get going. Listen, they're howling for you now: up and down the block your neighbors' dogs burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up. This stuff, although powerful, can veer toward shtick. Addonizio has developed a marketable persona that she will inevitably soft-pedal as she goes forward. This is especially tricky, because she does this shtick so well, with her striking looks and get-ups and the dramatically appealing persona she presents at readings. It will be interesting, then, to look forward to future Addonizio volumes, as this mid-40s poet mellows. Already, we see more somber notes in ``Getting Older,'' a with-it update echoing Millay's famous sonnet, ``What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why.'' Or in her pantoum, ``The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision,'' in which the narrator moves from the pain of revision to the agony of creation, and finally to her own passing life: ``listen, I was a beautiful woman,/you think I want to be standing here, lecturing? Look again./ Listen. I'm trying to tell you.'' Addonizio's recognition is growing, and she has already been the recipient of two NEA Fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, among other honors. The last few pages of ``Tell Me'' show that most of the poems have been published elsewhere, in publications ranging erratically from the prestigious Threepenny Review and American Poetry Review to the Bastard Review, and they've been included in a surprising number of anthologies. Whatever the future brings for Addonizio, it's a good bet that she will continue to defy easy categorization. Others have tried: The Washington Post called her ``an inspired mix of Camille Paglia and Edna St. Vincent Millay.'' Yes, kind of. Well . . . that's not quite it, either. Cynthia Haven has written most recently for Philadelphia magazine and Stanford magazine. |
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