A View from the Curb

Too well we know of the suburbs—many a television sitcom attempts to make them home-ish, many a fiction writer pulls back their myriad veils (for example, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, etc.), and of course, trailing after, poetry too takes its stab: James Tate springs to mind, as does Richard Greenfield’s recent, rather well done Tracer (2009). Rather poorly done are many, many more— too many to name. Greenfield chooses to highlight the angst generated by the realization that, despite all the gates, walls, amenities, and regulations defending these stifled, zoned, non-towns, there’s much beyond our control that promises to threaten this protective bubble—perhaps a reeling Al Qaeda will bomb the boarded-up local mall…? The possible threats and outcomes, it seems, are endless.

Rich Levy’s suburbia, though, is less directly threatening (or threatened?) than Greenfield’s. Instead of the wars of faith and ideology raging beyond our borders and their potential political ramifications coming home to roost, in the pages of Why Me? the battle Levy wages is for the soul—this fight being for his own soul, yes, but also for that of his children, his wife, even his neighbors. Throughout, Levy’s sub-concern, one not often directly voiced in Why Me? but one which is always implicit, is whether or not we’ll ever get past the barriers that materialism, careerism, white elitism, and over-packed-scheduleism have erected for us. Levy’s is an old concern—as old as American outsourcing, which is as old as the country is, at least.

To mention outsourcing, it is important to note that Why Me? is really about putting off what to, and what not to. What not to suspend, defer, or forbear, Levy argues, is that basic belief in the beautiful, that the beautiful is situational, not scriptable, and also cannot be mocked by irony. Given the suburban as our setting, we find such moments of beauty in those rare instances of connection, those glancing moments that afford us, who have forgotten, that it is still vital to encounter one another as sensual beings. As example his “At Night, “the first flatly rapturous poem of the collection, in full reads:

a squat brown-skinned woman walks past us with a bag of groceries on her head, and the darkness robs her of form, dusts her shape with absence. She is as the live oaks above, except they don’t move from their posts in the blueness and she presses on like a knife through dust, sending absence back to where it came from, wrapping herself in hunks of light and shadow under the streetlamps. To me, she is a story of life more than a life: four children and thin cotton dresses, a husband slumped in a chair, the TV rinsing him in blue light, his eyelids trembling, the kids mumbling, asleep. Then she’s gone.

In lines like “To me, she is” lives William Carlos Williams’s “To a Poor Old Woman”; we can hear Wallace Stevens in the woman’s form: she fades into the dark, yet retains a larger, more totemic presence. There are other evocations here as well. Without unpacking the entire poem, it is safe to say that what works here is the ease with which the reader may insert himself into the position of the speaker, and the sublime way in which the reader may forget he is reading a poem. The lines don’t fail by announcing their presence, and yet most all of them do the extraordinary work of providing second-sight—of providing subtext and a sub-narrative beyond the situational details of the poem’s genesis. There are several poems in Why Me? like this, all demonstrating Levy to be a writer of great emotional insight.

The best of Levy’s Why Me? reads very much like the line “and shadow under the streetlamps”—it acknowledges the world of opposites created by suburbs: places that mimic what someone else once thought a...