Steve Potter reviews Steven Creson's BIG DAY, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Big Day, New and Selected Poems
A review by Steve Potter
Steve Creson's collection of thoughtful, introspective poems, Big Day, is arranged into five sections presented in reverse chronological order from 2020 back to 1988. The book ends with an afterword by Creson's long-time friend, the poet and multimedia artist, Jim Jones. Jones writes that:
Creson's lifelong project is to imagine how his past determines the quality of the unfolding present. As Kierkegaard remarked in his journal, 'Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.' The attentive reader, then, will not be surprised to find so many references to dates, days, and even specific hours and minutes. The poet tries to pinpoint experiences that have some bearing on what he is living as he writes each poem. The result is a kind of bilocation, a feeling conveyed to the reader of being in two places at the same time.
This put me in mind of Wordsworth's oft-quoted description of poetry from his Preface to Lyrical Ballads:
I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
The sense of bilocation Jones writes of is evident at the beginning of the poem, “Karen in Brighton”:
Her red
painted nails
short fingers manicured
nails clean and
Some betrayal of
otherwise enduring
youth.
It's been 12 years
yesterday, the familiar
smile came
sunglasses veiled eyes
that didn't want
to give
away
too much too soon
or all at once
maybe her brown (?)
eyes would betray her last
12 years
like a lightning flash
employing soul &
heart laid out
on the sleeve of her
blue cotton jacket
The poet-narrator is simultaneously present in the moment and yet elsewhere mentally, emotionally, twelve years in the past. The exact nature of the relationship between the narrator and Karen is never spelled out, which adds to the poem's mystique. My initial assumption was that Karen was an ex-girlfriend, but on later readings, I questioned that. She could perhaps be an old platonic friend, former neighbor, cousin, or sister. We don't really know. While it is a pretty good assumption they were romantically involved, it is nonetheless only an assumption.
Creson's lifelong project is to imagine how his past determines the quality of the unfolding present.
The second section begins:
We sat on the low
ledge of concrete
curb, beer
in hand sipped
between talk about art,
her show in nearby
town a challenge
a tone that said “if you
want to see it you can, by
bus,
it's not that far.”
Creson gives us concrete details but leaves interpretation to the reader. This is the sort of scene that, as a fiction writer and eavesdropper, I love to encounter when I'm out and about in the world—a brief glimpse of strangers interacting and perhaps a snatch of intriguing dialogue. What was that she said? Why did he react the way he did? What has happened between them? One's mind is off and running to fill in the blanks, turn strangers seen momentarily at a glance into characters, and create their world.
In the second stanza of the second section of “Karen in Brighton,” the view expands from the two old acquaintances, probably ex-lovers, to some history of the area where they sit together. We go (or at least I, this one particular reader, went) from a sense of straddling two times at once to wavering among four:
From the grey chill breeze
off English Channel-stone &
pebble beach of Brighton, England,
of the Mod Rumbling leather
& glittering scooters—blew through
the alley venue where we
sat
in tension of reacquaintance
and “you can get there
if you want.”
Added now to the immediate present of the poem and the poet-narrator's memories from twelve years earlier, we have an allusion to Quadrophenia, the classic youth-in-revolt movie released in 1979 that was filmed in Brighton, and based on The Who's rock opera about the mid-sixties Mods vs. Rockers riots, one of which took place in Brighton. The brief allusion meshes well with the rest of the poem. Quadrophenia is the tale of a disillusioned young man returning to the beach town where he had a great time and had felt a part of something bigger than himself, only to find that, in the passage of just one year, the time he hoped to return to was already gone forever.
Creson returns to this theme of time's passage and how we remember the past while continuing with life in the present repeatedly throughout the collection. In “A Day in the Heart” he writes:
Time has placed,
passing as it does, swiftly, irreversible
various on a plane,
parallel memory, fresh, somehow out of sync.
“Time Is No Scholar,” in its entirety reads:
Time is a measure
translucent, intermittent
multi-modal and
out of sync with one's action—
act of living, art of emotion.
Experience, memory, self-
evident, parallel, rational
outpacing time's lessening value
I found myself thinking about two films by Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas and The American Friend while I read Big Day. Nothing written in the poems reminded me of those films. Rather, what wasn't written—the gaps, spaces, open air between phrases, reminded me of Wenders. Creson's poems, like Wenders' films, include moments of ambiguity and space where the viewer/reader may fill in their own answers, much as we do in life. As has been said about musical composition, the spaces between the notes can sometimes be as important as the notes themselves.
Opening with two ekphrastic poems and closing with questions on the existence of God in the collection's final section, Book of Prayers, Big Day covers a surprising amount of ground. Creson contemplates matters large and small, domestic and cosmic. Some of the poems, such as the aforementioned "Karen in Brighton," are composed of short lines and use quite a bit of enjambment, which creates the impression that the poet treads on shifting emotional terrain and chooses his words with great caution. In other poems, though, Creson stretches out, lets his lines flow more freely, and treats his readers to some really evocative descriptive language, as in this selection of "From the Beach," with which I'll end:
The dogs, dogwoods,
sand dollars, wind-battered pine
kelp whips, carcass: black-and-white-breasted
sea bird, crab shells, barnacles, and mussels ringed
by prints in the sand, having paused, shuffled deep
and scattered imprints of heavy boots, about the driftwood
log where in the soft conversation and long silences
the ocean came in then out
as we smoked, the conversation in its eddies,
some refuse left: the eddy pool, driftwood,
litter, remains of walks, alternating one day
through the forest on the east side of the road
the next on the beach to the west.
Steve Potter's writing has appeared recently in E·Ratio, Golden Handcuffs Review, Otoliths, Pacific Rim Review of Books, Parole, and Word For/Word. He is the author of Easy Money & Other Stories and two poetry collections: Mendacity Quirk Slipstream Snafu and Social Distance Sing. Gangs With Greek Names, a novel, and Haunted City, a poetry collection, are forthcoming.
BIG DAY, New and Selected Poems
by Steven Creson
ISBN: 978-0-9818567-7-3
Elik Press Books, Salt Lake City, Utah
elikpress.com
2020, 113 pages, $14.95