Lamentations

Roger A. Lewin

Thank you, Oscar Wilde, for having the stones to say something that allows the rest of us to quote you and thus not come off sounding like such hard-hearted bastards: “all bad poetry is sincere.” The problem with reviewing (much less critiquing) bad poetry is that it makes the reviewer, oft-times, feel like an ogre. You pick up a book full of thoroughly awful verse about a topic that it would be heresy to bash. There are an awful lot of bad poems about rape, child molestation, and other such light and airy topics; one need not look far to find a thousand examples. In this case, your obstreperous, bullheaded reviewer is going to take on one hundred twenty-eight pages written by Dr. Roger A. Lewin about the death of his wife and the effect it had on him and his two-year-old daughter. And, so I don't sound like too much of an ogre, let me, dear reader, gently remind you of Wilde's quote, and say that denigration of the work is not denigration of the inspiration of the work.

Roger Lewin is a psychiatrist. Roger Lewin is also an exceptionally bad poet. I have no idea if these two things are combined, but I suspect that, at least in Lewin's case, it is. Lewin manages to flaunt all the rules of what makes good poetry, sometimes all of them in a single poem. We have expressionless laundry lists of verbs, we have telling and not showing, bad puns, little psychological tricks, the whole painful mess of teen angst. Which might be forgivable if Lewin were still a teen; one does not want to make assumptions regarding his age, but his late wife would have been forty-nine when the book was published; thus, one guesses his teen days are relatively far behind him. Growing up and gaining life experience has not made the man a better poet.

In the great tradition of “I don't know art, but I know what I like,” a few examples of what I'm talking about above:

“The range
of verbs
is too narrow
to name
my horrified
acquiescence
in your demise.”
(“Autumn Voice”)

Let me point out the piquancy of word choice here, and say that I have never before seen the phrase “horrified acquiescence” in a poem. And I hope to never see it in a poem again. (As you may be able to guess from the first few lines of the strophe, this was preceded by, yes, an expressionless laundry list of verbs.)

“Language
is
spoken;
otherwise
it's
broken.”
(“My Lips, Your Face”)

Do I need to say anything about that? It's the kind of thing college freshmen should be getting in poetry 101 classes as examples of how not to write poetry.

Perhaps the most painful thing about reading a Lewin collection is that on very, very rare occasions, he gets it right. Not in the way an Ira Sadoff or a Debra Allbery gets it right, not with a whole, sustained poem that sings its perfection to the heavens. But he'll come up with a line, or even a whole strophe, that Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound look down and smile upon. The image is concrete, there are no extraneous words; there may still be bad line breaks, but it's as good as Lewin gets:

“First hard frost
like hair spray
arrests
the willow's branches
leaning south and east
in memory
of last night's breeze.”
(“Soon After My Wife's Death”)

A tad long for haiku, but with the same economy of tone and verbiage. In a hundred-twenty-eight page book, you get more of these minor gems than you do in a smaller book like New Wrinkles, but an increase in pearls guarantees you a greater increase in swine. Ultimately, it's not worth the frustration.

The vanity press business has flourished for decades, if not centuries, and one suspect that it's been feeding off the blood of aspiring (and very bad) poets since its very inception. For all I know, poets were the reason for the genesis of the vanity press business. Evanston Publishing (and its more recent and equally loathsome subsidiary, Chicago Spectrum Press) claims it is not a vanity publisher, but someone who takes your money and lets you self-publish using their equipment. (The difference: you, not the press, keep the rights to your work.) It's not exactly a difference of semantics, but the end result is the same. This is the third offering from Evanston/Chicago Spectrum I have had the misfortune to read, and if I remember to check from now on, it will be the last.