The Lookout Man
by Stuart Dischell
University of Chicago Press, $18.00 paperback, 80 pages
Back in Greensboro in the early nineties, I was one of Stuart Dischell’s first students in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I was, in fact, his teaching assistant for an introduction to poetry class. I will never forget his syllabus. Right below his contact information, office address, rotary phone number, and no email, he dropped in a poem by his friend Bill Knott. “The Juggler to His Audience”—
One in my hand.
One in the air.
And one in you.
That’s Stuart. Who else has a motto for his syllabus? Elegant, graceful, never overdone, a master of tone, even when he writes a big and audacious poem like “Days of Me,” which I personally think should be in every anthology. Dischell poems are painterly and cinematic—they can be movies that are improvisational and beautifully clear. But don’t let that fool you. His poems show us how we construct ourselves and our affections with language and images of ourselves and others, an imaginative spirit that is also an investigative spirit. If you are looking for a poet whose poems are elegant and witty and full of life, I would get Dischell’s latest books, the brand-new The Lookout Man, and add it to the cart with his 2017 collection Children with Enemies and, if you can find it, the chapbook Standing on Z.
In terms of writing, there really is no literary world, just micro-climates. Stuart Dischell is one of the poets other poets actually prefer to whomever is cutting an impressive popular or institutional profile or who has any kind of institutional sanctioning at any given time. For instance, Terrance Hayes is a promoter of the lasting poet’s poet with his edition of Wanda Coleman and his book about Etheridge Knight. O’Hara, a poet’s poet for decades, celebrates John Weiners, another poet’s poet. All poets’ poets are masters of tone, a rude but subtle virtue that tends to speak towards anti-social values and signature individuality because social values tend towards rhetoric, and so poets’ poets tend to at best run parallel and sideways to the more virtuous, obviously civic kinds of poetry, which does not mean that there are better political poets on the block. As we can see from the sheer quality of her translators, Patrizia Cavalli, celebrated by Koch as a giver of awful romantic advice before anybody else heard of her here, is a poet’s poet, when she speaks of her animating desire in ways that people less concerned with emotional nuance, internal contradiction, and the voice of the self beyond set masks of rectitude would ever consider (“It’s like in the summer when lifting the eyes/ to heaven, hoping to see a star/ fall, or one that might fall, uncertain/ of my vows I entrust myself lazily to that ambiguous/ secret part of me, separate from me”). What Cavalli does with Dante emerging and starting towards Heaven and other prominent stargazers as well in a form subversive counterpoint, Stuart Dischell does with Frank’s Steakhouse music in a six-line cabaret poem from Backwards Days called “At the Hammers” (“This is the hour/ Rings dissolve in liquor.// Each tide of the chorus is dangerous./ I keep my faith below the knuckle// And sing to you across the piano./ And to you, too.”) To create and celebrate a sense of privacy, which always involves a working bullshit-detector immune to rhetoric, is one of the basic conditions of lyric poetry and its artifice of intimacy, and is thus the engine of poetry’s civic obligation to run counter to canons of taste of every sort.
For Dischell, poetry is a theater of selfhood as the self is created through imagination, endured experience, and with a sense of ironic proportion in being set against other selves within the self and in the world of families and relationships, in the social world at large. I studied with Stuart in the years after his first book came out, and he had already moved from Light Industry, a chapbook that showed the formative influence of the clarity and cooler tone of Donald Justice, and he was exploring writing poetry in a way that fully explored his approachable sensibility and sense of the world. Justice had told him to move to Boston and be a city poet. In that Introduction to Poetry Class where I served as an in-class assistant and interlocutor in a tour of the Norton, I remember when we got to Whitman, how Stuart diverted into a discussion of Paul Zweig’s book about Whitman, Whitman the dandy who finds an embroidered handkerchief, the theatrical and opera-loving Whitman with his sung speech, and his consciousness of others. Whereas the centerpiece poems of Dischell’s first book Good Hope Road were a sequence of close third-person limited portraits of self-obsessed and trapped young professionals living in apartments in the legendary and once-upon-a-time rent-controlled apartment building of poets and artists at the corner of Linnaean Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, the big poem in the book he was writing at the time, Evening and Avenues, was a comic riff on the construction of the self, “Ellipses, Third or Fourth Dot Depending,” a litany and a celebration of the beings a single being would want to be, from a graffiti artist who is forever shaven and pierced and twenty-two to an opera diva to the clouds themselves. Shortly after this book came out, the hilarious “Days of Me” came out in the poetry section of Slate Magazine with an audio file. I remember being a party in Pittsburgh and my friends there listening to this poem online—an early Internet, Windows 95 moment— and laughing their heads off as the screensaver on the Apple became a school of animated goldfish. The poem is not unlike the scenes in Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich enters his own head, the poem not just a commentary on the narcissism of contemporary life, but a celebration of the imagination’s ability to forge, to construct, and embrace multiple and contradictory identities.
This vision of the constructed self can take multiple forms and express itself across a range of poetry, from the comic to elegiac to the political. The most ambitious poems in The Lookout Man manage to work across all of these ranges, exploring the limitations of the notions as the poet reflects on the experiences of contemporary America and the constructions of imperial masculinity, life-giving love and sex, and our familial experiences as people who migrate, suffer, and endure beyond platitudes. Platitudes in Dischell’s work are gendered—he is a sort of spy on conventional masculinity—and related to the narratives of the self and culture, themes that characterize the large-scaled poems in earlier books (“Days of Me”) and which we see get further development here in a poem that literally inspects the hollow confines of an unnamed but suggested Statue of Liberty that could be some other colossus of self and nation to see how the official story of America, of liberty and free immigration, constricts us:
Before climbing the statue,
I was a citizen like anyone.
Everything was large to me.
Then the wheel of the years
Rode me to this moment.
I should have seen it but looked elsewhere.
There are smaller statues in the world.
You think you are in armor;
Some where you enter you cannot move at all.
That is the mind of the poem, but the thing that stays with me is its irreverence and inventive satire on J.D. Vance-style pieties around white poverty that sometimes mask racism and claim patriotism which you might hear while arguing in a bar.
Someone has opened a tavern here.
A bald owner brews coffee and pours the drinks,
And two pale daughters serve them on trays.
They are the color white
People get when living in a mine,
But they are not in a mine.
Fluorescent tubes light them.
I ask for water, and they point at bottled water
In the cooler. They are without speech.
The statue is wired for electricity,
But there is no plumbing inside the statue.
The poem right before “Inside the Statue” is called “The Foreigner.” Somehow, when we read “In the Statue,” we think of Emma Goldman and her beautiful platitudinous poem that we are doing a bad job of living up to lately. The public stuff is so large. Why mention it? It’s there, even as Dischell turns the whole Liberty Island experience into a theater for his sensibility. “In the Statue” is an anomaly in Dischell’s work in that it is centered on a symbol that represents a complex network of themes, a nod to the most conspicuous mode of the classics of nineteenth century America, with the poem’s low-key, off-hand and plainspoken diction an expression of decadence as well as a meaningful, even sorrowful democratic tonal gesture.
Another of the larger-scale poems in The Lookout Man is “For Oksana Schako, a surprising elegy and celebration of an artist who was an immigrant in France and radical feminist activist, if we think of Dischell as a gazing poet of guy-dom (guy dumb) who was anthologized by Garrison Keilor at one point during his Penguin Books days, but then again, Dischell’s own first artist, his mother, was a painter, and his sense of person-hood is that whatever people are, they are not rigid, but multiple and changing. The stanzas of the poem reflect the contradictions and tensions in his attitude towards being a person with their contradictory first lines: “I am Oksana Schako,” “I wish I were Oksana Schako,” “But nevertheless, I am Okssana/ Schako, her naked body the instrument/ Of social justice, in underpants,” before the poem ends with a recognition that the poet’s limited ability to challenge the limitations of the constructed self with a gendered one. There is something Yeatsian about the ending of this poem, the piety of tears and the limitation of them, the closing lines of “In Memory of Robert Gregory” in particular.
I am Oksana Schahko
But cannot pretend I am half my age
Or stand at an easel and know that even
In the dark to a blind person I am not
A good likeness of a woman,
Yet I wanted to speak not just
From my self but my selves.
I wanted to say something
About July 23, 2018, when Oksana
Schakho hanged herself in her apartment.
I just had left the city the day it happened,
And her voice caught in my throat.
The act of writing poetry, the line break, severs the parts of the self in this elegy for a suicide, but the mystery of relationship, which a writer may experience as relational, as somebody else’s known voice catching our throats. The deceptively plain-sounding phrase “Her voice caught in my throat” is wonderful, with the plain sense of grief that “my words caught in my throat” would evoke more narrowly given a turn that evokes being trapped—caught like a criminal—and also sickness, as if he has caught a sore throat, all tonal suggestions that evoke the complex character of the tragic figure he is celebrating and the difficult psychology of mourning a suicide as well as the contradiction and trespass a man may feel in claiming to be and to represent a tragic and radical feminist and her provocative sexuality by charting his own responses. Dischell’s poems recognize the essentially imprisoning nature of identity—and that issues of the body and representation change from mouth to mouth, much as the n-word changes in mouths depending upon whose mouth is speaking, and thus paying tribute becomes transgressive—while also asserting the need to cross lines of gender and space to identity with other people in their struggles for liberation and self-determination. Once, reading through the first draft of my thesis in progress at the end of my first year of graduate school, Stuart told me that he thought too many poets had forgotten that good poems have tensions and contradictions in them, formal, thematic, and in aims. No tensions, no stakes. The implication was we should let in the unmanageable. Stuart seeing himself as being a painter at an easel who is not up to the task of doing any more than claiming this self that has entered into his throat is a good example of this. His saying “I am Oksana Schako” is like highly unlikely people saying, “I am Charlie Hebdo” in solidarity, except Stuart is literalizing the idea, really trying to go there, and what the poem finds is you can only say you are somebody else in a world of loss, a world that admits imperfection, pleasure and discomfort and transgression, and embraces them. When people say, “I am Charlie Hebdo” or other political slogans, they really don’t have much skin in the game. Stuart puts his skin and his love of skin in the game:
I wish I were Oksana Shachko because
In this life I did not mean to
Fit the body of a man,
Wearing a towel around his middle,
Shaving after a long shower,
Living on a wooded lot in NC,
No longer able to contain himself
In the boredom that surrounds his skin.
This is a mixture of darkness, desire and humor, self-deprecation inseparable from panache. “I did not mean to fit the body of a man” is another way of saying, “But I do.” Imagination, love, despair and trouble are all things that can begin with boredom. The intelligence of this poem is that its ending enacts and mourns the failure of its own proceedings. He had just left Paris the day before, “and her voice caught in my throat.” While the poet mourns a suicide and stands up for feeling, the poem is for living and not dying.
It’s worth talking about these longer poems, not just for themselves and their nuance, but because they show us how to read the shorter poems in The Lookout Man, poems that celebrate sexuality and survival, and which embrace mortality and love as limiting and yet generative experiences of the self. Whereas in earlier books Dischell has written about his experiences of romantic relationships, of relationships and love gone wrong, the survivalist Dischell has gotten more interested in what we can take from the generations marked by the hardness of immigration—a concern in this book that makes it timely—the Depression, and war, the old-fashioned lack of sentimentality. One of the book’s more cheerful poems describes a man in morning suburban traffic not listening to the news on the radio, all that bad news of today, mass graves, illness, anti-immigrant supposedly soft fascism on the rise, and instead going into a rhapsody of sumacs and roadside garbage and possibly sighting a deer’s hind quarters hopefully still attached to a deer, finally ends with a subversive and imaginary bumpers sticker “Honk if you love ugly,” and he does not mean Jesus.
How did Stuart Dischell get this way? He grew up in Atlantic City and spent time in Philadelphia with some old crusts and salts, so he now he can write about the man who knew “Action in the Pacific” whose cuffs “are worn/ from too many pressings” and has some worn beautiful quality because “The flaming oil he dove into/ That clung to his face and neck/ Like the jellyfish that once got him/ Bodysurfing in the waves/ Off Brigantine/ When he was still a person/ Who went out in sunlight.” It’s not just that we construct ourselves. We are constructed by other forces as well, as this poem’s bodily sympathy and sympathy for adornment shows. Meet Stuart’s parents. His mother holds up a glass of water and says, “My father drowned in this water,” and the story is a true one about her father drowning in the New Croton Reservoir north of New York City, hunting wild canaries. Meanwhile, his father is in the same hotel room, looking under the cushions for bedbugs, canny, experienced by struggle, worn. They are the same people that Dischell saw through a the kitchen window of a ranch house “having at each other” in the garden furniture one warm day, and all he could do after that was step into the Garden of Eden and bring them a plate of fruit, a gesture sweet and transgressive, carrying the family resemblance, generous and wry.
