Jazz, Politics, & Love

How rare to open a book of poems and turn down the page corners for every other poem, as if to say, “I like this one, too.” This was my experience upon reading Paul Austin’s latest collection of poems — Notes on Hard Times.

Writing about jazz, politics, love, and the solitary figure or “isolato” (as D. H. Lawrence calls him), Austin is always clear, forceful, and insightful.

His first poem,” Nightfall,” is an invocation and a blessing. It goes like this,

“Nightfall”

leave the lamp unlit,unclose the window curtain,look beyond the glass.

can you not agreethe uninhabited nightpulses with desire?

can you not allowthe blue anticipationmurmur in your ear?

let go your heart’s fear,give of your eyes to vastness,that it may be seen

The sparseness of the poem and its almost complete suspension of punctuation is striking, as is the simplicity of its complex meanings. We don’t know exactly where we are, or with whom, or who is speaking and to whom. There is a lamp, a window, two lovers, and an invitation to see the night pulsing with desire. In our imaginations, we can expect the lovers to consummate their love or to go outside to explore the night with its “blue anticipation.” We who are reading are also being invited to enter the book as if it were uninhabited and pulsing with desire.

The second poem in this book plunges us into history — “Warsaw Ghetto, 1942.” It is a straight narrative poem about the encounter between a Jewish boy and a storm trooper who terrifies him into losing control of his bladder and wetting his pants. The point is humiliation, not murder, though by the end the crowd of witnesses is impatient for the man to commit the murder he has promised them.

Both “The Jazz Lover” and “As It Should Be” are poems about jazz that are inflected with the rhythms of jazz. The first narrates the life of a woman who hangs out in jazz clubs and bars, while the second contrasts the sounds of a bass in the night with the song of a wood thrush in the morning which does not include “the flatted fifth” of the jazz bass.

The long poem called “Wittgenstein” seems to parallel a biography of the philosopher, and emphasizes his wish to purify, clarify and “decontaminate” language itself. It starts with his habit of slapping his forehead by which he hoped “to knock loose the right word.” He searched for a “virtuous language”: “He played the game of language, / in the music hall of his mind, / slip-sliding on false starts, / prat-falling over bad choices, / Spinning verbal cartwheels/hoping to reveal hidden truths / in what, for him, was the natural / state of the nonsensical.”

One of the longest poems in Notes on Hard Times is “Dreaming Angel,” a prose poem full of freely associating thoughts of an absent woman. The poet imagines he has become this woman: “the inner me is actually you.” He eventually begs her to write him, calling him “Harvey White.” Meanwhile, he worries about a female suicide bomber who is on the radio news. He imagines being on the same bus that blew up: “Everything is bright, bright and white like gold, bright white gold. And hot. The whole bus is steaming and shimmering and vibrating…”

“Tell Me Who I Am,” described as an “installation”, seems like a scenario or script for a movie. A color-coded woman (“Black pants, black shirt with Chinese collar. Black slippers, white socks. Scarlet red scarf…” picks up and briefly skims a green book, then a blue book, then a red book. She keeps being interrupted by distracting external street noises — a jet flying over, a train whistle blowing, an ice cream truck playing music. She “closes the red book in anger.”

This well-imagined set of actions, in a white writer’s studio where the books form color squares like those in Josef Albers’ paintings, seems painterly, a sort of...