Club Q by James Davis, and: What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar (review)

Here’s how Edward Hirsch introduces James Davis’s debut, winner of the 2020 Anthony Hecht Prize: “Club Q is a startling book. It is cleverly conceived, formally deft, musically resourceful.” Certainly; it’s funny, too, as in “Em”:

Ohio boundary? My woe!You adore—booty—no?The shape of nature, sir!Dovetail! Truly tented—donkey show!

But Hirsch continues: “It is also flamboyantly gay, the queerest of queer poetry books—it keeps finding closets to shred,” merely glancing at the point in an otherwise generous introduction. The closets aren’t just here to be torn down, they’re furrows (more later) for linguistic renovation; stanza, after all, means room. Every stanza here’s a closet, too. Davis takes enormous risks therein. Take the end of “Murray”:

      In time his branding iron left a deep meridian      in my limberwood gallery.      He felt carefree. I felt a saddle horn.

It must have been at the aeroplazawhen I slipped off his jetwing.Or was Constitution?Or was it Seton Hill?

      I got lost in his contrails.      I think his name      was Murray.

Each stanza alternating quatrain and tercet, the uneven 7/4 construction presents like a musical phrase, though not purely musical because poetry deals with—or attempts—semantic meaning more directly than music, and therefore between the shape and sound of a poem is always eventually an awkward fit—and much remains to say on the virtue of awkwardness, remembering for a moment how John Clare spelled that word, “awkard” which contains everything the word implies: awkwardness gives itself to ambiguity (as though the awkward thing were missing a letter), works against logic, prefers improvisation (and every “awkward” structure is contingent, like improvisation). Davis makes here, and with Club Q more generally, an argument for—and from—invention, at whatever cost.

More than that, the poem risks specificity, naming things in and out of being. Take “I think his name was Murray” (emphasis added): “think” proves decisive because it sets doubt into motion—the speaker doesn’t know his subject’s name. The poem is a mechanism for the kind of doubt that attends experience, the painful knowledge, or unknowledge, of oneself in the face of sex. There’s a Renaissance pleasure in the candor of it all, the unlikeliness of hookup. Again, this is “awkward,” as rock lyrics are on the page; Bob Dylan, for instance, is at best a disruptive force on paper, though these poems read more like Skelton, an old songwriter for whom the page was made:

        The panges of hatefull deathWellnye had stopped my breath.Heu, heu, me,That I am wo for the!Ad Dominum, cum tribularer, clamavi:Of God nothynge els crave I

Not unlike:

My arrowgrass shotstraight into his burning flameHis burning pineset my bitterbush aflame.

Pine/flame is downright Skeltonian as a reach-rhyme, also aping Dickinson:

      A narrow Fellow in the GrassOccasionally rides –You may have met Him – did you notHis notice sudden is –

“Grass / rides / is” detonates with the same dull persistence as “flame / pine / aflame.” Fitting, since this poem more than anything approaches the afterlife of sex, the dim memory of moments and words (sex was always epilogue to Dickinson since it’s so close to death). And how good are those compounds? “jetwing,” “saddle horn”; sex, too, makes a compound being, bodies striving unevenly with and within one another, provoking ample counterpoint, as in music or a poem.

Critics writing on books invested in form tend to catalog the forms therein. Sure there are sonnets and sestinas here—but Davis anticipates, with no small irony, the catalogical reading too often afforded formal poets: “Gainesville Sestina,” for instance, uses the following for its alternating end-words, “cowboy,” “soldier,” “Indian,” “bike,” and “police,” with some deft variation: “indie” for Indian, GPD (from the Mandarin People’s Liberation Army General Political Department, as I gloss it) for “police...