The shame I felt then
is the shame I have now, though tempered
by my healthy adult knowledge
that I was just a kid. I hated
being a child. My shame
is having been one at all.
Since then, I’ve been cultivating
an ability to look back on myself
as someone other than myself. Better yet,
no one at all. Instead, a mere body
moving through space under some other
volition, like lights from far off cars—sudden
shapes in shapeless nights—going down a road
at the edge of a field outside a bedroom window
each night, their headlights pointing to where
no one cares as long as they are gone soon.
( from “Childhood”)
*
Justin Marks’ first collection is called Million in Prizes, but could have as easily been given the title, “Life is Elsewhere,” the title poem of the opening section. For Marks, time, most notably the past—for whatever can we know of time but the past—is a continuous subject. But there is also (to use one of Marks’ words) a “healthy” sense that life on earth is small, insignificant, and one’s personal experiences are the best place to spot this insignificance. It is mature, Marks might say, to realize things are so. His voice features a bravura that is consistently and willfully undercut. A high-wire act, no doubt, that through cocksureness is capable of expressing, oddly enough, some democratic ideal, as in the book’s opening poem, “Matter of Fact”:
I wanted to create the ocean, the sky,
the intricate structure of a leaf
and thought by now
I’d have come close.
What joy I have in knowing
creation of that sort
doesn’t exist.
The world has little
use for me.
Its glare blinds.
How glad I am
for the orbit I inhabit.
A planet to the sun.
In this poem (and in the book), Marks seems to insist that one not forget the clock of monumental time, and that personal time always moves (if at all) within it.
Many of the poems risk a certain irksomeness, but they seem to trust that in the same moment they can nullify this irksomeness, as in the poem “Little Happier” that opens: “All that whiteness was still before me” and a moment later the poet describes the snow as “whiteness without end.” A poem, ostensibly about the purity of snow, eventually and profitably, changes seasons:
One year I forgot
to spray the budding
little apple tree in the backyard.
From then on worms
each year more freely preyed
on it so tenderly grown,
which reminded me that that tree really exists,
as do others.
The poem then moves back to the snow: “[H]ow naïve I was to say, / whiteness without end.” The poet kids the opening gesture. Rather than go back, then, and change the line, he leaves it, and concludes the poem recognizing its sentimentality. This is a different brand of courage from Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” wherein the poet tells herself to “write it!” Marks’ inner voice might say, “leave it!”
Because of this tone (or in spite of it), the opening section is warm, welcoming. The best two poems of this section are coincidentally narrated from the air. One, “Sea to Sea,” closes:
A little turbulence. Engines nearly inaudible.
A clear plastic cup on my tray table.
Cold water almost perfectly still.
Here, the enormity of the land, from sea to sea, is collapsed and the water that surrounds this land is placed in the “clear plastic cup.” The poem, “Life is Elsewhere,” also examines the sensation of the big corresponding to the small, or even to the forgotten:
Looking out the window of a plane
at night, I’m filled with that
romantic feeling. The lights below
are indecipherable
letters of some unuttered language.
Nothing new. I’m sick
of the selves I’ve been.
Their gestures are all
I can conjure, a kind of
dishonesty, but one
that keeps me busy.
I was free
from disappointment
until I looked to the past
and thought: now what?
Trying to visualize
ten dimensions at once,
understanding reality as different
than it’s already unknown to be—
a form of magic. Do you see
the difficulty? I’m delusional
when I sleep. It’s better
to keep your eyes open.
The best time on earth
is one you don’t remember.
The comment on language becomes a comment upon the self. The present buckles when faced with the past. The qualitative “best time” occurs in forgetfulness. The separation, the undercutting, the distance—makes yet another poem about riding in an airplane “with that romantic feeling” possible.
*
An untitled sequence that gets the default bracketed title, “[Summer insular]” makes up the middle section of the book. The sequence takes place in flashed episodes over the beginning, middle, and end of a summer that features a bit of work, a bit of play, the lines between which are malleable. But Marks does mean real work: “Word from the bosses today: three weeks to improve.” The sequence in its best moments are those that seem unforced but that feature a lineated shuttering that provides a torque in the line, as in the opening lines:
Summer insular
season in which
the mind functions
as in no other
yet I’ve never
given myself over
to I’m giving over
to now in a way
but I can’t
be sure
(I haven’t done this before)
of much more
than what I’ve done
so far
which is a bit
more than I’d done before
I noticed the days getting longer
and warm then hot
nature’s the city’s
abundance in full bloom.
This is quite an opening, and stylistically, the section comes as a change, and is welcome in this sense that one is happy things do change. But in the poem happiness is questioned. It is almost as if the childhood spirit from section one becomes enlightened and realizes—from the very beginning almost—that “Summer / is nearly over.” But the poem isn’t a downer; rather, there is a mood, something under the surface, what one might term a persistent, effective melancholy:
I feel good
like I’m right
to see things in rudiments
basic facts: outside
it is hot and sunny
a nice breeze blowing.
Other times, the poet takes the issue above the boards:
A poem about summer
should be happy right?
Summer is life
in full swing
and concludes:
But to see to try to see
some significance
into I mean onto things
I return to certain habits of mind
which are part of what I want
but not all Happiness
for example is lacking
taking a different
dinghy for a row
enjoying
a good smoke
Stylistically, the corrections (“I mean onto”) makes one thinks of Creeley, as does Marks’ emotional/sexual directness:
A kiss from Meri
another more
then sex
a nap
And yet girded into the poem is a clause that says there is “[n]o need / to name names”:
I am aware
from whom I borrow
(steal outright)
and don’t
No need
to name names
But many come to mind, and for the same reasons one thinks of Creeley, add the foodie, and you have Robert Hass:
For dessert:
pear gelato flecked
with flakes of chocolate.
*
For a poet that earlier in the book can be compared to Creeley or Oppen or O’Hara or Hass—Marks moves on to the land of Tate, or Edson. And the third section, “The Voice Inside the Cheerleader’s Megaphone,” seems a part of this deliberate progression. From self-contained poems to a sequence, in the third group, Marks shows yet another side. These poems tend towards the prose stanza, if not the prose poem altogether, and they move beyond the constructed “I” persona of the earlier sections. No panoply of voices, there is though a wider cast of characters:
When I was a child, my father was a goddess. Gender switching
was common. Now my boobs keep falling out of my shirt, which
really sucks, but if I were into dudes, I’d totally be into you.
[“Another Year of My Life with Me”]
But the business of time and its ineffable face consistently haunts the book. This can be seen in “The Detonator Always Has a Red Button,” wherein Marks at once ruralizes and updates Prufrock:
I am merely one to whom things happen. Being a child of the
country, mosquitoes harassed me all the long summer nights.
What’s most important to me now is water, my complexion, and
urinating. In bed last night, I kept my genitals to myself.
I was going to say something about the clouds, these brand new
clouds. Now I’m tempted to see where a round drinks before
every decision will take me.
When people discover my rural roots, they inevitably resort to
calling me Huckleberry. The day crawls by like a living document,
the prettier for having forgotten me.
And for Marks, life is elsewhere, or passing dumbly under “new clouds.” Nonplussed, the speaker in “Cédez Le Passage,” says “O, would you look at the time. That’s a lot gone by.”
But back to that title: Million in Prizes. There’s even a poem called, “Million in Prizes.” It is a wonderful poem, and this is an stunning first book, well worth the price of entry. Iggy Pop sang “I’m worth a million in prizes, ” to wit, Marks might answer, in his self-mocking Eliotic melancholia: “Well, I’m not.”
