Tangled Persistence: On Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere

Kim Addonizio’s eighth collection of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is alive with tension between the habits that dominated her earlier books and the emerging new truths of her later years (she was born in 1954). One famous inclination throughout her books has been to suggest that sexual romance is (though fraught with miseries) the only powerful escape from dreariness and dismay. At the same time, she has habitually presented her speaker as a jaded survivor of eros, someone who sees through romantic illusions. Addonizio can make both of those views convincing, but they become even more interesting when they intersect with other truths involving stoicism, humor, generosity, and hope; these attitudes have appeared in her earlier books but seem even more crucial for her in Now.

Fatalism about sexual desire and sexual role-playing and sexual disappointment has always been a central current in Addonizio’s books, so prominently and explicitly as to seem the necessary inspiring subject of her poetry. In my essay “Stuck in Desire: The Poetry of Kim Addonizio” (The Hopkins Review 13.3, Summer 2020), I praised the clarity and variety of her representations of sexual longing and seeking and struggling and regretting and renewed seeking. All of this seemed courageously self-revealing, encouraging the reader to accept and display one’s own midlife sexual energy with Addonizio’s nervy candor. A friend of Addonizio, however, soon told me I had mistakenly assumed that Addonizio is the speaker in all her poems that refer to sex. Maybe so. It is an assumption Addonizio has rendered tempting through many autobiographical details in her poems, as well as in her 2016 memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. So often, she has written in the voice of a woman who has sought happiness in many sexual relationships and suffered many disappointments—a woman who is explicitly a poet in California, like Addonizio. The cumulative effect is to give readers the illusion of personal kinship with a writer whose persistence is like ours. To be a tangled mess is, she lets us feel, not only interesting but sometimes admirable.

Sexual longing and sexual fatalism persist in Now We’re Getting Somewhere, but in a way less pervasively emphatic than in Mortal Trash (2016) and the books before that. Looking at Now on its own, we can see sexuality not so much as the maddening central force and rather as an inevitable part of a human lifetime. Addonizio’s compelling subject is herself—or the self, with whatever ripples in her relation to her speakers. She is driven to keep asking about the shape, pattern, meaning, value of her life. Sometimes she gives in to fierce cynicism about it all. The shortest poem in Now is “Résumé”—eight lines, based on Dorothy Parker’s poem with the same title:

Families shame you;Rehab’s a scam;Lovers drain youAnd don’t give a damn.Friends are distracted;Aging stinks;You’ll soon be subtracted;You might as well drink.

That poem is too easy to quote and does not give us insights except that we realize she could not resist including it in the book. She must have enjoyed its hyper-simplification. You could suggest that the poem satirizes the attitude it expresses, but I’m afraid it is instead a brief giving-in to the force in Addonizio that is repulsed by conventional lyrical affirmations and that wants to squelch them by saying Oh come on let’s face it. “Résumé” offers the pleasure of neat summation; the wish to depict her life as a whole won the day too easily. Fortunately, “Résumé” is not at all typical in a book full of long lines that seldom rhyme. Still, we note the temptation of bon mot boiling-down that our poet must dodge to give us the sensation of having met a woman living in the minutes and hours of real watching and longing.

In “Signs,” she looks from...