In the book review I wrote for Basie Allen’s Palm-Lined with Potience, I tried to convey an enthusiasm for the book. Its poetic energy. Its voice so present on the page. Like that way my fellow grad school classmates would read Frank O’Hara, and me with them, and it would feel like a baptism. This is what voices in the New York School sound like. And what I’m registering here is the challenge to write about almost any New York School poet. How do you say, “I love how near the poet’s voice sounds,” then quote the voice, without essentially suffocating the voice beneath your subsequent analysis? All I ever want to say is that every time I hear one of those New York School voices say something, what I hear is a straightforward declaration: “I’m a poet!” And it’s infectious. We all feel like poets, because the poems put us inside the poets’ minds. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley. I can never read Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” without hearing Baraka’s voice telling me poems are bullshit. But I love bullshit poems and serious political poems! Mr. Baraka, what am I supposed to do about that?
I spent all this time in the Basie Allen book review trying to prove the poems are fully aware of their own self-consciousness. And I’m afraid this review merely accomplished throwing a wool blanket on the poems. Or two or three wool blankets. I can barely hear the poem under all these layers. But at least I pinned it down.
I’m so self-conscious “proving” what happens in poems I like. I try to be good at it. Because I think my interest in the poems comes from more than just excitement. Or taste. My close reading of both “parts” for “Both Sides of the Cover” fit the book review’s purpose. Spontaneity in New York School poetry, and in Basie Allen’s poetry (whether it’s officially New York School or not) is an exercise, or a process. It’s a very shiny machination. I have been reading this Ben Hickman article about Frank O’Hara, “Having a Real Day of It,” and I’m interested in how Hickman registers the tensions in O’Hara’s voice. And how no one wants that voice to be saddled with tensions. “Frank O’Hara was carefree!” my grad school classmates and I tell each other while we’re stressed out about grad school. And maybe he was. But when Hickman highlights O’Hara’s working life, what I think is: “I don’t want Frank O’Hara saddled with that life!” But that was his life, even if I don’t want the life for these poems. What a delightful paradox Frank O’Hara sets up for everyone!
It’s a dual position. And many of the poems in Palm-Lined with Potience occupy dual positions. Like “Controversial and Erotic Dream Where the New World Trade Center is the Largest Klansman in the United States and As it Turns Out We’re Engaged.” The poet opens by telling us how cute they are. They’re so becoming! It’s their wedding day! Then they come down the aisle, up to their their spouse, and pull back the “hood.” Yes, “hood” IS the word! And it signals something is definitely not right. Meaning, the poem has led us into a cultural wrong, and the wedding day fun we’ve had on this path only makes the moment even more wrong than you’d think.
Many of the book’s poems occupying dual positions are explicitly addressing issues of race. In another poem, “The No Scent Story,” Allen is out in nature, enjoying it in a literal solo-sexual way, when his reverie is interrupted by a white man dressed in fatigues and carrying a shotgun. Like “Controversial and Erotic Dream,” the threat represented by this face-masked man is exaggerated (a) because everything leading up to his appearance was idyllic, and (b) by the fact the poet was in such a vulnerable position (”[his] pants still handcuffed around [his] ass” while the white man addresses him). And while I definitely feel the poem’s duality relates to the many aspects of racism—the poem assuredly accounts for the poet’s peace in nature getting interrupted by this white man’s appearance. Close to this is a corollary statement about how impossible it is to escape the reach of white culture’s watchful, surveilling eye. But I feel that the central duality relates to what the white man thinks he’s “saying” when he’s dressed in this aggressive outfit and he comes across another man out in nature. Is the poet supposed to read the white man as a threat of violence? Or should the poet see the hunter as one man encountering another, and a “manly response” would be appropriate, because it’s just a conversation between two men?
Reading the poem’s duality in this light, it concentrates the power dynamic squarely with the white man. Everything depends on his choices. And, meanwhile, every signal from the white man plays a double speak that’s common with men like him. I mean, why would someone be scared? Camouflage, a face-mask, and a low hanging visor is what you wear when you’re hunting. It’s his way of being in nature. And the shotgun? When I was in the Navy, three of the guys in my work center carried shotguns through the lobby of a Hampton Inn one weekend, and the manager had reported them. And according to them, he was stupid. Because it was “their right.” I won’t pretend to understand the motivating logic of situations like this, except how they evidence the power felt when you are a menace to others. When you can assert your dominance in a situation, and any possibility of peace comes from your good will alone. But even as men like this might refrain from doing anything violent, they’ll play the ambiguity to the very end. And if you’re at the receiving end of this ambiguity, everything feels precarious.
Allen’s poem plays that ambiguity out. He and the reader occupy this space between “playing it cool” and terror for his life. The story, then, portray the poet as the fool. He’s going to try acting like a bro. Yeah. Everything’s cool. He’s just waiting for his friends, the “really big frat dudes.” They are “literally on the way.” And it’s hard not to find the poet endearing in his clumsiness, and his bravery. Because even though the white man thinks we don’t know him, and our ignorance should be more forgiving, where we don’t worry about him, he’s still playing into the ambiguity by pumping the shotgun while talking to the poet. And everyone knows what men like him are like. We’re in suspense to see whether the poet makes it. And at its most innocuous, the threat is merely to the poet’s masculinity. How to be the man who can comfortably talk to another man who’s holding a loaded gun. But then the poem’s clear understanding that being the black man in a situation like this speaks to a whole history of racism and lynching. And it’s unclear the white man would willingly own up to seeing himself in this role, but it’s impossible to think he’s oblivious.
Thankfully, the poem ends with relief. Nothing happens. The white man essentially gives his blessing to the poet as he walks away from the scene. But even in the palpable relief expressed by the poem, racism exists as the inescapable fact. This poet, This Charming Man who listened to The Smiths while writing many of the book’s poems, filled with wonder at nature and ready for every possible pleasure, will always have the radius of his charm measured by this cultural menace. That, I would argue, is how the white man’s duality is imposed onto the poet. Palm-Lined with Potience presents a very active perspective on the menaces and delights of American culture.