Essay by Steven Croft
The poet, a “poet,” is a crafter of words, and if very successful, maybe a magician of words. A philosopher, if wise, gives great thought to fundamental ideas and questions, even if wisdom knows final answers will remain elusive. Stephen Corey’s volume, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New & Selected Poems, 1981-2020, (White Pine Press, 2022) in its span, brings to mind a later iteration/edition of Leaves of Grass, in that what the poet felt, speaks, in the “now” of a single poem, is followed by, coexists here, with the “now and now and now” of a whole year, ten years, four decades. We hold in this volume a record of a young lover of words who becomes a reverent husbander of words to get the idea and meaning of a poem just right, like the careful work of the artisans in the set of poems from the first section, “Crafts,” of Corey’s first volume, The Last Magician (1981): smith, quiltmaker, potter, carpenter. Corey finds great surprise in the lives of these “makers” who are deliberate, intentional, focused. Already in these earliest poems he has the depth of thought of a philosopher, albeit a philosopher sometimes wryly sensitive to the humor of involuntary shifts of fate and incongruous absurdities (e.g., one of the poems in “Crafts,” “The World’s Largest Poet Visits Rural Idaho”). In the second half, titled “Loves,” of this earliest volume, Corey makes an Erich Fromm-like study of love’s aspects, though his poems live more in love’s mystery than in any certain conclusions — as one of the poems, “Condition: Pachyderm,” concludes, after reversing the lesson of John Godfrey Saxe’s “The Blind Man and the Elephant” into a gonzo parable of sight: “consider all possibilities / presume no conclusions.” One aspect of Corey’s exploration and study in “Loves,” urged by a young man’s libido, is of the form and contours of the female body, the speaker’s appreciations eliciting an awe like Erwin Blumenfeld’s study of Renoir’s Statue of Venus. Another aspect of love considered in this earliest book is familial love — a central movement in all of his poetry — parents, the give and take of marriage, his relationship with his children. A reviewer can at best give a brief overview of such a copious and varied “life” of poems as those found in As My Age Then Was; however, of particular interest is in what direction his philosophy has “cured” as he has accumulated and ‘studied’ his empirical life experiences (from a young age the first-person speaker in these poems has had an affinity for scholarship), and for this, a focus on the “New” poems is relevant.
As My Age Then Was starts out with the New poems, which are titled “History of my Present,” and divided into three sections, “Order,” “Learning from Shakespeare,” and “Overlay.” The first poem of the first section is called, like its section title, “Order,” and is instructions for “When I am gone…” to a female family member — “Rebecca” — probably a daughter. The poem’s theme is the human desire for life to have meaning and lasting purpose, in spite of the fact that it is ultimately transient. She is to look among his books for the Selected Poems of Pope, find in its pages, “one / hand-sized leaf, three-boled,” laid across Pope’s poem, “The Unfortunate Lady.” He tells her, “I / am there still, my right hand moving / on the ground beneath the maple….” (Pope’s poem in fact is a long elegy to a lady who has died, Pope saying in one of his famously epigrammatic couplets: “A heap of dust alone remains of thee, / ‘Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!”) Corey’s speaker entreats Rebecca, in the last three lines of “Order”: “Here is a life, and a life, and / a life. Not the same, but each the one. / Now…please: Save them. Save it. Please. Now.”
Later in this first section of New poems, two poems are coupled together by an endeavor/subject the poet visits more than a few times in the volume: how to join the semiotic production of art/poetry as closely as possible to physical reality. In “The Art of Sex,” the poet sits in a coffee shop under an explicit photograph of a nude woman. He muses, “I assume I could be arrested for moving my tongue / up and down and back and forth on the glass,” and asks in the last two lines: “Where is the line between art and life? / What is the distance?” The following poem, “Here,” begins, “Here is Sappho, whose face we have never seen…” and then considers the fate of a random soldier who died in the Napoleonic wars, both of these things he has only read of. He considers a view of nature, “Here is the bursting berry….” He decides at the end of this first stanza, “No to all these heres, which one after one / after one are there.” The second stanza begins: “Here are my fingers, one after one / and together as well, on all of your skins….” He continues to explore an unnamed female’s body with a slow, loving care that would get an ‘A’ in an Erica Jong workshop. He illustrates, offers this tactile physical connection as something truly here.
What we have in the second section of the New poems, “Learning from Shakespeare,” is a serious revealing of Stephen Corey’s mature worldview. Similar to Anthony Burgess, who was famous for this well before Corey, Stephen Corey’s speaker peers through the great works of Shakespeare to find connections to, and expressions of, his own life. The use of Shakespeare’s genius as such a foil gives “Learning from Shakespeare” a particular importance among the sections of the New poems. Emily Dickinson is a leitmotif for genius in various poems of As My Age Then Was, but these are occasional lyrics not placed together. Other great writers in English — among them Keats, Whitman, Ginsberg — make “singular” appearances in As My Age Then Was, but it is Shakespeare who seems to count most to Corey. In “The Last Magician,” the the title poem of that earliest volume, the ‘last magician’ is Houdini, who bested all the others, who was something beyond a gifted practitioner, whose “magic” transcended the possible of what a man should be humanly able to do. For someone who loved words and learning as early as the fifth grade, as the poem “What We Did That Year, and the Next” from the New poems tells us, I think to Corey, Shakespeare is the “last magician” of poets — a writer who not only used words to tell epic stories and make poetry with startling ease and nuance, but who was also a prolific creator of words in English beyond any other individual poet. Also, I think it is Shakespeare’s ability to express the gloom of tragedy, also unmatched in English, that draws Corey. It is tragedy that sets the tone for Corey’s converse with Shakespeare’s art. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama Walter Benjamin sets Pedro Calderón beside Shakespeare as the greatest of post-classical tragedians. Benjamin says of Calderón’s “sublunary” characters who are wrecked by fate in his dramas because “the rule of fate was to be confirmed”: “his heroes are always able to turn the order of fate around like a ball in their hands, and contemplate it now from one side, now from the other.” This is a main goal of Corey in channeling the works and words of Shakespeare into the meaning of his own life: to turn the too often terrible order of fate around, contemplate it now from one side, now from the other.
In the first poem in “Learning from Shakespeare,” “Romeo and Juliet,” the first stanza sees actors, “R and J — / aren’t they that familiar to us all?”, dancing with “dips and swirls” on a college green in Burlington, Vermont, as a twilight “R and J” troupe prologue to the play’s imminent opening that will begin when the last light leaves the earth and the night’s full darkness begins: “darkness / making ready inside — as if alive — to fall on every step a world could take.” The speaker finds the idyllic dance movements on the grass a magnetic draw, but he, his friend, and friend’s wife, walk on, “they not quite thirty, I just past, / through the simpler night the city produced.” Then, in an Edvard Munch-like, “German Expressionist” sort of sudden twist, the second stanza details the friend’s wife’s suicide, a future the poet “neither saw nor dreamed” as they walked that night:
I then heard no one entering the dark
garage to gather in the steeped, wrong flower.
I could not sense the world would offer up
its startling, constant promise quite so soon.
This meditative recollection with its shocking turn ends with this ironic, knife-to-the-nerves inversion of the word “promise.”
Other poems in this section, even those that borrow the title of comedies, carry this tragic mood, to lesser or greater degree: “The Taming of the Shrew,” where as a boy the speaker visits the mean, impoverished home of a friend, the poignantly haunting “Much Ado About Nothing,” about,
Just self-analysis, mirror sucking,
As when I studied my eyes through the days
Following my daughter’s death, following
The world’s attempts to fit back into my brain
…she /
The source of places and reasons, she
The all that was not, ever, nothing.
Shakespeare’s contemporary, Montaigne, has an essay titled, “That to Study Philosophy is Learn to Die,” in which he warns the carefree people who will not consider death that they will, as a result, be too confounded by it when it comes, to their wives, children, or themselves; instead, Montaigne councils: “Let us learn to bravely stand our ground, and fight him….Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.” If Stephen Corey hears Montaigne over centuries today, he also heard him as a younger man. In the poem, “Fighting Death,” from his collection Synchronized Swimming (1984), the speaker, woken by the unexpected sound of the cat walking the piano keys, he believes after investigating, suddenly imagines the future loss of his loving partner who still “sleeps down the long hall.” In this poem of soft nuance, he frets: “Each reach for your love is one / last pull on the slot machine.”
So far, I’ve focused on the darker poems in As My Age Then Was, but, certainly, not all the poems in the book are pitch-dark. Many are gray. In the first stanza of “Julius Caesar” in “Learning from Shakespeare” is a Chomsky-like critique of American culture, a conscientious quarrel with our society the poet has had since earlier poems like “Town and Country” — from the collection All these Land You Call One Country (1992) — where the photo of a teenage boy two years the speaker’s senior, whom he hasn’t seen around town in a while, appears in the local newspaper: “Local Serviceman Killed on Vietnam’s Hamburger Hill.” Other poems are in some ways creatively carefree. Corey’s “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” from “Learning from Shakespeare” has the madcap back and forth tension of the best Shakespearean comedies, despite its serious discussion of ‘love and its discontents’ (to paraphrase Freud). This effect is produced by the creative form of the poem which splits its lines down the middle, moving their beginnings and ends to opposite sides of the page so that the lines play their meanings across a wide, blank-space caesura in a kind of give and take, back and forth Vienna Waltz. Other poems in As My Age Then Was display this virtuosity for experiment in person and form, but on balance the focalization of the poems in the book are of first-person narrative, making Corey on balance a narrative poet. A standout poem in the third section “Overlay,” is the New poems’ eponymous poem, “History of my Present.” This winsome look back at the speaker’s adoration of and crush on a fifth-grade teacher, Miss Garfield, belies one of H.L. Mencken’s biting pronouncements: “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.” “History of My Present” is the New poems’ “Hallmark moment,” and it is one of Stephen Corey’s best poems. It begins “One could do worse than march toward posterity / sandwiched by gardens and garfish —….” As it happened, Miss Garfield was the “triple-great-grandchild” of President Garfield (who of course made it into one of the speaker of these poems’ most revered books: the Dictionary – one might assume Corey places Samuel Johnson in his pantheon, not far below Shakespeare and Dickinson). Even if his crush is one-sided, the poem has the zany feel of a romantic comedy, as staid stanzas of political events in the Garfield Presidency trade off with next stanzas like:
Marlene she was, blond and twenty-three,
picking up Louie and me — total years, twenty —
in her bright-yellow Ford for a Popsicle run
after school, her hair blowing wild in my face.
What was she thinking, in 1958? What were we?
“History of My Present,” a continuation of the longer narrative poems found in the earlier books, e.g., “Art Elective” from Synchronized Swimming, pulls its loose-seeming, diverse strands together and masterfully sticks its landing.
Stephen Corey
As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2020 shows Stephen Corey to be one of the best American poets of the latter twentieth, early twenty-first centuries.
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