And so to counteract these poems’ effects, I will take a more strictly logical approach to writing this review. I’ll comment on my thirteen favorite poems in the book in some depth, in the order in which they appear in his excellent and consummate new collection, True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at David Blair
“Sonnet for Robert Reich”: Here in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, where David Blair and I have both lived for nearly three decades now, people know this dude, Robert Reich, a politician and thinker who remains lucid and outspoken on political issues, in spite of his not winning his run for governor of Massachusetts a number of years ago. Anybody should be so lucky to have an artist like David Blair take such an omniscient portrait of you: “Mr. Peanut on his cane, tilting his urbane body skull / at all the ungovernableness.” And because Mr. Reich is small in stature, despite his admirably capacious and judicious mind, Blair encourages all of us to “lift him up in a light / that melts stubborn icicles,” perhaps the best metaphor around for Reich’s opponents, the Republicans. I think Reich would be happy to read this sonnet, and hopefully he will someday, if he hasn’t already.
“Sound Solution (‘Die Spinnerin’)”: Because “a young person around me with a jetpack” is probably a great analogy for parenting (I don’t know for certain since I don’t have any kids of my own). Then we get a trio of things that only Blair would know how to hinge together, with slight nods to James Tate and John Ashbery before him: “I missed my ping-pong paddle, all of my hair, / and the entire cut of the record. Rueful.” This is what I meant before by “presence of attention.” Blair’s strategy is not pure surrealism. Look at how tangibly rudimentary that little sequence of objects is, and yet as pure surrealism aims to do, Blair’s goal I think is perhaps to evoke specific maybe unknown feelings through his unique combinations of language and imagery. His poems decidedly do not go where others’ poems go.
“Election of the Saints”: By choice as a pacifist anarchist, I have never registered to vote and never will, a truth that I recently revealed to David Blair in an email, and it’s possible that he may never forgive me for it or see me the same way again. Yet “Election of the Saints” I’d say captures why I refuse to vote quite well, and gives an imagistic sort of exit from the problem by its deft close. The poem begins, “Traveling through the landscape / of election signs, / did you ask, Who is he? / and Who is he? / and Who is he? of names / held aloft at intersections / on fresh pine stakes / in yards?” We never really know who politicians are. History will also treat them as merely names (ask any student in any kind of history class about that), unless they happened to get shot (I think we know that by now). And then the poem pivots so intelligently into our predicament: “When you tell / me how your mother ran / out of gas on purpose, / so the two of you would / walk along the lavender / medians and across/ the margins of pine / along the road.” Politics ran out of gas on purpose long ago. This country has run out of gas. So Blair concludes, “I imagine / loving a person in his faults / or hers: allowing the car / to run out of gas, gladly, / to stop driving and walk.” What other choice do we have? That’s where we are now.
“Vinyl Raingear”: This one you just kind of have to read. It’s an awesome description of Cambridge near where we live at entirely its own pace. It’s a weird and special place. I hate it and love it equally every day. And I hate it and love it intensely. David’s poem captures the people there (in motion through rainswept wind verging on winter), who are both gross and gorgeous. (Usually more gross, but hey, that’s me.) “In the middle there is light-splashed tang / of the street with the bus not there yet.” Yeah, after thirty fucking years, I get really tired of waiting for it, too. But at least we have the light, while it lasts.
“At Park Street Station”: I was actually there just yesterday, on my way to the cinema as usual. Park Street Station is the hub of our transportation system in Boston. In fact, it’s why Boston is often referred to as “the Hub,” and you might already know that that station has the oldest stretch of streetcar tracks in the United States: “the subway on one level, / slim streetcars up here, // walls, ceilings, tunnels / sprayed with fire repellant, // against fire, but not mud, / catacombs, a Venetian future.” Is that global warming, since the ocean is just a few blocks away across the financial district? Will our subway tracks soon be submerged in canals? Probably. Blair’s ironic closing stance is both cheerful and not. “Isn’t it romantic, / and won’t it be? // Yes, and yes.”
“Primitive”: Here’s another one that you’d just have to read rather than watch me quoting every word. Our mutual friend, the poet Tanya Larkin, makes an appearance here, in her grandfather’s yard in (I think) New Jersey, and a little shrine he built there “around his Virgin Mary statue, / lawnchairs pointed at it, a stone in each chair.” Walt Whitman swims in from Camden like a great gray ghost, too, “like a long-horned sheep in a meadow / wedged as a paper stopper for elderberry wine,” that very vinegary elderberry wine that Oscar Wilde himself once drank.
“The Adorable Couple”: Now give me a dialogue-based scene, with half of it in ALL CAPS. As a gay man, I kind of hate heterosexual romance, but guess what, you have to deal regardless, and so I learned to love it anyway from John Hughes’ movies in the 1980s. I still love those films and the characters. These are not those characters. A music therapist who works in palliative care and a hospice physician. Clearly, they were meant for each other, as they shout across the din in some local dive bar. Good luck to them.
“Doris Duke in Newport”: Have you ever been to Newport, Rhode Island? I’ve been there once, maybe twice. Once for the famous folk festival there, and maybe once because I was dating some guy. I didn’t do the walk along the ocean by the mansions (“the big Bellevue eyesores,” which only David Blair would think to call them) because I can’t stand ocean-walk shit like that. It’s all over New England and you just can’t avoid it, so you start to hate it after a while. Yet David finds an estate that’s a true winner: “at Rough Point, mansion / museum of Doris Duke, / keeper of pet camels, / friend of Martha Graham, / Malcolm Forbes, / jazz musicians, / Imelda Marcos.” And of course David goes from that particular shoehorned historical figure to “the footbridge… / down at the front of her mansion’s / seaside backyard / for the Cliff Walk, / you see a cave full of ocean.”
“Vagrant Song—Boston Players”: Now we’re downtown, on Boylston Street in Boston, beside the entrance to the Lord & Taylor department store where “the modern wing of the library had driven aground / its white hull into pedestrian space,” along the roadways and sidewalks spread out far below “the Morse code of the antennae / on top of the buildings,” “basic and beautiful buildings.” Boston is provincial in the best sense of the word, and therefore, it’s both basic and beautiful. A vagrant’s song, of course, disturbs the proceedings, or augments them, outside of the 7-11 by Symphony Hall. The orchestra’s players go out with a splash: “Backstage, oboists were cranking / salsa and hip-hop, playing grab-ass, snapping jocks and ties.”
“Beach Blanket”: All the random things we do while sea level continues to rise by gradual increments: “shell beans,” “drink gimlets,” “slice tomatoes,” “pull weeds,” venture to outer space. “That way, we not only prepare for global catastrophe but can get over shocking boredom.” Ha. Isn’t it always so.
“Sonnet, Viking Funeral for a Workweek”: Shove it the fuck off, for real: “After work, I put my foot on the edge of the weekdays / and give them a shove back out into the harbor.” I mean, you have to remember where we worked. We basically taught ourselves to death, so each weekend was like a funeral, a funeral for us. “I salute you as you disappear, lazy porpoises, dear students, / with all of your pigtails, your tattooed faces, your sloppy hearts.” It’s a poem about not death but love. And survival.
“The Armies of Being Here”: Finally, a poem in which the legendary gay matinee idol and movie star Montgomery Clift teaches with us, the “half-employed” (oh, were we ever). We deserve that kind of dignity. So did Monty. Thank you, David.