All Have a Voice: On David Yezzi's "More Things in Heaven"

David Yezzi | More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems | Measure Press | 2022 | 154 Pages

Contemporary poetry is haunted by what Keats called, in reference to Wordsworth, the “egotistical sublime.” Some poems, rather than focusing outward on the world, end up being about the poet instead. Perhaps lyric poetry—with its quasi-spiritual solitary “I,” its inwardness—is the worst culprit. The lyric often includes a declaration of the poet’s personality and identity, which can easily slip into self-seriousness (“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”) and hyperbole. A poem that feels like one person’s ego-centered, solipsistic response to the world can certainly drain it of energy and scare off potential readers.

The solution? Focus outward with an energy charge! Art in any form requires a full scale orchestra, cymbals thundering, horns blasting, to approximate the subtlest human feeling. David Yezzi, in his essay “The Dramatic Element,” argues that poetry needs theater: “never is poetic anemia so apparent as when the element of drama has been removed.” Poems, he says, need to let disparate voices and community in. “Why,” Yezzi asks, “shouldn’t lyric poetry ... learn a trick or two from playwriting?” He cites Robert Frost, who says, “I want drama in the narrative—a lot of talk. I suppose mine just runs over with these things. There’s always somebody—nearly always somebody—talking.” Frost calls it “gossip”: a community speaking back and forth. Yezzi’s dramatic lyric involves various characters undergoing conflict, “which might be as slight as an idle chat or as charged as an assassination plot.”

I recently heard Yezzi read from his forthcoming book, More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems, at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia. You can tell he’s an accomplished actor (currently preparing to play the title role in King Lear at the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory). He took to the stage and blasted us with “Tyger, Tyger” (one of the new ones), about stoned teenagers who find a real tiger in an abandoned house. The first lines—“Strong bud. Mind-splitting, hydroponic, pure indica body-high, one-hit weed, / grown from Hawaiian seeds in a closet in a doublewide in Maine, up near Canada”—hit us like an invocation: a beckoning into the as-though-of-hemlock-I-had-drunk immersive theater of Yezzi. He reads clearly, in no hurry, enjoying the humor (“But wasn’t it their tiger? They had found it. My tiger is your tiger, she had told him”) and music (“indica body-high, one-hit weed”), as if off script, off the cuff, pausing confidently, then hitting certain words like a snare drum. The tiger—“emerald-eyed carnivore with a voice like a fault line”—shimmers in our minds, impossible and real. The poem is fierce, straddling the line between the surrealism of Borges and the reported particulars of CNN. An energy charge.

More Things in Heaven—which spans four earlier books, 2003 to present—is replete with melancholy, grief, envy, weakness, self-doubt, and joy. These are tender poems, narrative at times, with a willingness to be vulnerable (on the speaker’s son: “Will he, in his turn, find / a different way to be? So far, / he is, in his finer moments, kind. / Other times he’ll turn / raw, like me, and like me / will not learn”). Regarding form, Yezzi can be thought of as a disciple of Frost’s famous  “sound of sense” approach. Frost, in his poems, frequently utilized the colloquial voice of his native New England to develop meaning. “The surest way to reach the heart,” Frost said, “is through the ear.” In Yezzi’s colloquial blank verse, you can hear the poet and actor working together, playing with the unique voice against meter. Some of his poems are quite formal, almost ornate (“It’s when we’re most engaged with other things / that the angel enters, a twist in temperature, / a lightness in the chest that we call wings”), seemingly inspired more by Robert Herrick than Philip Larkin. But then he shifts to a (fresher, to my ear) Frank O’Hara- or George Green-inspired informal register (“Now you’re dead, I wonder more and more / whom I should tell them to, stories like this, / running through them in my head mostly. / Julie and Mitch? Pfft. I can’t really say / what happened to them. Did they ever marry? / I doubt it.”) 

The energy charge is nowhere more dynamic than in Yezzi’s long poems, where he has the space to change registers, allow in multiple characters, personas, voices cascading, interrupting each other. “Hand to Mouth,” from The Hidden Model (2003), begins with a voice, thrusting us into a scene in medias res: “‘How much is enough?’ she snorted, gamely / twisting a sprig of watercress in the air ...” This exclamation in a restaurant sends the speaker down a discursive wormhole of associations. He remembers a poor couple in Manhattan whose German Shepherd died, who then moved to Greece, where the man became a goatherd. He recalls other friends, “newlyweds” who “moved out West”: “He’s lost his mind again (believes he’s Christ) ...” The speaker considers all his relationships: “How different are the friendships that endure: / inviolate, well-founded, decorous, / though never seared by that eruptive heat / that harms the people closest to our hearts.” The poem takes us deep into a reverie about human attachment, but it’s not inward or quiet. It’s unleashed, wild, performative. Disrupting narrative, with mise en abyme stories within the story, voices within voices, gossip within gossip. Yezzi allows the entire village into the poem: the chorus, the hero, the author, the groundlings, the queen. All have a voice. Imagine a stage full of people in different outfits, an elaborate opera, with one person after the next breaking into song. In the end—returning to the restaurant, the couple fighting about “God knows what”—Yezzi leaves the various threads deliciously unresolved. The poem holds together by virtue of taking place on a single “stage.”

“Tomorrow & Tomorrow,” from Birds of the Air (2013), is—at fifteen pages, in five sections—the longest in the book. It opens with a destabilizing barrage of lines from Macbeth riffing on the word “done.” The speaker, a young actor in Manhattan, lands a role as Malcolm in a production of The Scottish Play (“The show was a disaster”) touring West Germany during the Cold War: “we crashed the van: Lady Macbeth / was driving. She spun out on the Autobahn / and had to do the tour in a cast— / ‘Out damned spot ...’ She’d start rubbing the plaster, / night after night, sleepwalking, in a trance.” Various threads intertwine, gushing, disrupting each other: Shakespeare, Polanski’s Macbeth film, New York City (“syringes in the walkups, random gun-pops, / vials strewn in doorways like bright glass / from a car wreck”), Germany. 

So far “Tomorrow & Tomorrow” is fast, leaping, daring, but the feeling is elusive. The young speaker rebounds from thing to thing without direction. Only in the second half, which shifts to Sasha, the speaker’s lover in Manhattan, does the poem find its focus: “I remember looking over at my girlfriend / just then—Sasha, a dancer. That made her laugh. / Her teeth were too big and a bit off-center / in a way that made me always want to kiss her.” We’re surprised by his affection for her. Then in section four the poem shifts POV into what is, I think, the center of the maze: Sasha’s perspective. She, thinking to herself, remembers “a perfect antlered buck” she once found dead on the side of the road: “Its eyes were filled with snow, / I felt sick, kind of queasy, and I thought / that I should do something for this deer / like drag him to the shoulder, but I just / left him in that paradise of snow. / Was it the blood that made it seem so holy?” At this instant I fall in love with her, and with the poem. A private, sacred moment between her and us and the deer, “in that paradise of snow.” After, the speaker sees Sasha one last time: “six or seven months before she died. / It was a suicide. I should have told you that.” That last line slips under my ribs like a knife. The poem ends with a confession, lonesome and guilty, by the speaker: “I learned / that I was capable of anything.” 

The new poems in More Things in Heaven,placed at the beginning, show Yezzi’s renewed commitment to the energy charge. Some of the poems from his earlier books are like porcelain plates that I admire but am hesitant to pick up. Balanced and beautiful, but behind glass. His later work is more colloquial, looser, less rigidly formal. The masterpiece of these new poems, I think, is “French Suites.” It’s made up of two dramatic monologues: Erik Satie speaking to a young prostitute in Arcueil; and Marina Tsvetaeva speaking to her dead daughter Irina in Paris. Yezzi evokes a profound longing for the unattainable, for the lost, not so much through a cacophony of voices, as in earlier poems, but—the two sections balancing male and female, breath and spirit, flesh and loss—with the subtlety and confidence of a master. The whole village—with their anger, pain, jealousy, weakness, darkness—is on stage, singing. Softly, hauntingly.