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Sylvie Thode on Tim Dlugos ("The Far West")
1.6k Plays10 months ago
How might a poem map the passage from life to death? Sylvie Thode joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West."
Sylvie is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics, with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Though that focus roots her in the 20th century, she has written on poetry from a range of time periods. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket2. You can follow her on Twitter.
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get an occasional update on the pod and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sylvie Thodey and Tim Delugos's Poetry
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very happy today to be bringing Sylvie Thodey to you, to the podcast, and to talk about a poem called The Far West.
00:00:18
Speaker
which is by a poet named Tim Delugos. That poem is linked to in the episode notes, so you'll be able to find a text of it and look at it as we talk about it, if you like.
00:00:32
Speaker
And we will have lots more to say, or really Sylvie will have lots more to say in a few minutes about who Tim Blugos was, what the poetry was like, where this poem fits in to his career, his work and sorts of related poems. But first, let me tell you more about our guest.
Sylvie Thodey's Academic Focus and Influences
00:00:56
Speaker
So Sylvie Thode is a graduate student in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics.
00:01:07
Speaker
with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV AIDS crisis. And so one thing to know about Lugos and this poem in particular is that it fits very much into that interest of Sylvie's. But her interests in writing cover more than just that perhaps narrow seeming historical period. In fact, they vary quite widely and she's already
00:01:34
Speaker
though early in her career, published in such illustrious places as the journal Victorian Poetry, which, for those of you who don't know it, is what it sounds like. It's on a poetry of a very different period. She has a fantastic article on Elizabeth Siddle, which is also, and the idea of de-creation, and is also, in a way, an article on the poet Anne Carson. So, I mean, even in that
00:02:03
Speaker
or sort of indebted to the potent critic and essayist Dan Carson. So in a way that even in that one article, I think we get some sense of the wide ranging curiosity that guide Sylvie in her work. But she's also published
00:02:19
Speaker
reviews and essays in Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket 2.
Kamran's Encounter with Sylvie and Initial Impressions
00:02:28
Speaker
I first met Sylvie just recently, or didn't exactly meet, but I mean I could tell the story at the MLA conference, which for those of you who don't know and like
00:02:40
Speaker
God bless you if you don't. The MLAs, the Modern Language Association, and every year going back to, I don't know when,
00:02:51
Speaker
the big convention of academics who work in literary studies gather at an annual convention that rotates from city to city this year. It was in my home city or just about my home city of Philadelphia, and I went to the conference
00:03:11
Speaker
I mean, often I'm there because I'm giving a paper or something like that myself. I had the really kind of blessed experience, this MLA, of going without doing anything like that. And instead I was just going to panels that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to take in as much poetry scholarship as I could.
Sylvie's Analysis of Delugos's Poem 'G-9'
00:03:34
Speaker
partly to thinking, oh, I want to meet people that are outside of my immediate social circle in part so that I can get to know their work, in part so that I can invite people onto the podcast who are up and coming and whose work seems exciting to me and amenable to this format.
00:03:53
Speaker
So anyway, I went to a panel where Sylvie was giving a paper, indeed a paper on the poet that we'll be talking about today, though not specifically on the poem that we're talking about today. Sylvie gave a paper on Delugos' great poem, G9, which, as she and I subsequently exchanged emails and were talking about what a good poem might be for this podcast format, we thought, oh, that would be a great one, except that it's probably too long.
00:04:22
Speaker
to do well in a format like this. But you know, I guess I can say that part of what just really struck me and what I admired so much about her paper was how she was taking the tools of prosodic analysis. So that was a panel that was on grammar and poetry.
00:04:39
Speaker
But what Sylvie was really thinking about there was prosody. So, you know, for those who don't know, would refer to things like doing metrical scansion, talking about the sense in which a poem's rhythm does or doesn't conform to certain metrical schemes and sonic patterns and
00:05:02
Speaker
all well and good to do that kind of analysis, but what I found so striking in Sylvie's case was that she was using some of those tools to talk about a poet who seemed
00:05:14
Speaker
like not the most obvious candidate to bring that kind of attention to bear on. And in order to make it work, and boy did she really make it work, she had to sort of adapt to that kind of analysis to have a kind of flexible and ad hoc sense of what meter is, what prosody is. And, you know, for a kind of poetry that
00:05:41
Speaker
is often understood sort of sociologically or in terms of its kind of testimonial status with respect to a moment of historical crisis, political crisis, medical crisis. It certainly was not the case that Sylvie was evacuating or setting to the side those kinds of considerations which are just obviously present and urgent in
00:06:08
Speaker
the poetry that she's looking at. But actually, what she was doing was something much more interesting, which was to show how, by paying attention to the way the poem sounds, the way the poem does and doesn't conform to certain kinds of metrical schemes that she was finding, how along those avenues in those ways,
00:06:33
Speaker
it was precisely how it was becoming meaningful in all of these sorts of extra literary ways, all of the reasons why we might care about the poetry. In the first place, she was bringing that kind of attention to bear on poetry that we, I don't know whoever we are, tend not to grant as easily this kind of attention to.
00:07:02
Speaker
And I was just blown away by the paper and I had to run while the panel was still in queue. Like I asked a question during the Q&A.
00:07:11
Speaker
And maybe we can talk some today about the kind of interest I had there too.
Invitation to the Podcast and Discussion on Delugos's Work
00:07:16
Speaker
But anyway, I asked a question and I had to run. I felt badly because I wanted to go say hello to Sylvie afterwards. And then I thought, oh, I should write her an email and tell her how great the paper was and ask her to be on the podcast. And as soon as I pulled up my phone, there was an email from Sylvie to me saying hello and talking a bit about the podcast. And I thought, oh, well, we've definitely got to do this. So that's how this invitation was born.
00:07:39
Speaker
I'm so excited to have such an exciting young scholar on the podcast. I'm really excited to talk about the Lugos, who is not a poet. I know very well, but a poet that I'm eager to learn more about. Silvie Thody, welcome to Close Readings. You're joining us from California today. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk about the Lugos and everything else. Yeah. Joining you from Berkeley, California. It's been not funny, but very rainy recently.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, I've been following the news. Has the rain stopped? Is it dry today? It has. We will continue to be quiet and not raining here.
00:08:19
Speaker
a recording. But good, good. Yeah, I hope so. Well, you know, maybe a little bit of rain might create an interesting sonic atmosphere or something for us if it happens. So let's oh, yeah, we don't need to worry. Okay, so Tim Tlugos, Sylvie, I wonder if you might just tell us a little bit about
00:08:42
Speaker
how you became interested in this poet, but then also, and in whatever order you like, for people who've never heard of him or read anything by him, how would you sort of situate him in literary history or in other kinds of ways?
00:09:04
Speaker
and maybe eventually tell us something also about where this poem, The Far West, fits into his life and his work. But maybe just start by telling us sort of how you came to read Tim Lugos. How did that happen for you?
00:09:24
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, so I first came across Tim Gallegos in reading two anthologies, actually, and they're two anthologies of HIV AIDS poetry, both edited by Michael Klein and also Michael Klein and Richard McCann. And the anthologies are called poets for life and things shaped in passing. And something to say about HIV AIDS poetry, even before kind of getting into Gallegos in particular, is that it's made up
00:09:52
Speaker
of a really eclectic group of writers. And a lot of how this group kind of came together, if we might say that, is through the anthology. So we're in the 80s and 90s, kind of a big era for anthologies, both anthologies of poetry and also anthologies of criticism and theory. So I came across Lugos in reading these anthologies, and I came across his poem, G-9, first, which he mentioned in the introduction.
00:10:18
Speaker
G9 is a kind of incredible, almost an epic poem. It's 637 lines of short bursts and this kind of wide-ranging, brilliant
00:10:31
Speaker
explosion of spirit in life that Lugos wrote while he was in G9, which was the AIDS ward in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.
Sylvie's Reflections on Delugos's Poetry and Themes
00:10:40
Speaker
And I was just kind of stunned reading and quickly, you know, ordered his collective poems online, edited, published by Nightboat, edited by his friend David Trinidad, and just got reading more and more of his work and kind of fell in love with it.
00:10:53
Speaker
But I think it's worth noting the reason I bring up that I first read him in it in an anthology was that I first read him as a poet of HIV AIDS and I think that is still what he's most known for and Yeah, I'm thinking a bit about you know What is the poet poetic response to this crisis? That was kind of the question that was first fueling my interest in it and first time I came to him and
00:11:18
Speaker
Right. But it might, I mean, I guess I'm telling if I'm sort of reading your implication correctly that it might seem insufficient or somehow
00:11:36
Speaker
reductive to say of any artist or writer or person for that matter that what should define the kind of category. I mean, we don't put people into categories with quite the same sort of
00:11:57
Speaker
I don't know, kind of instinctive necessity that we seem to want to put writers into kind of schools and camps and so forth, though of course we do that with people in other ways. It would seem reductive maybe to say like, okay, what defines this poet's career is their
00:12:20
Speaker
response to a kind of medical condition or to an illness or to a historical event or a period, you know, a particular kind of moment in their lives. So, you know, obviously I'm sure Delugos, you know, was writing poems before he became ill, right? And that his poems aren't
00:12:49
Speaker
totally mappable necessarily under that rubric. But having said that, that was an important part.
00:12:55
Speaker
of his poetry. And I like this, I mean, that's really useful to think about the anthology as something that was doing some of that conceptual organizing for you, at least at first. Once you started reading him out of the anthology and once, you know, that David Trinidad edited, collected poems, arrived and you cracked it open and got immersed, were there surprises for you at that point? Or
00:13:25
Speaker
is the poet of G-9 sort of recognizable throughout the pages of the collected poems. Yeah.
Background on Tim Delugos's Life and Influences
00:13:37
Speaker
So reading kind of further back in his career, he starts writing poetry in the early seventies. He sounds a lot like Frank O'Hara, who was the model for him. And you can see, especially in some of his early poems,
00:13:51
Speaker
very, very, very influenced by O'Hara. He was also, maybe this is maybe a moment to get into some of his biography. From his earliest days, Delugos was deeply involved with the church and felt a vocation. So he joins the Christian brothers when he's 18 years old and enters La Salle College. And really for a while thought he was going to be a priest and actually we'll come back to this maybe in a bit, but was in training to become a priest when he died. But in those early poems, there is
00:14:20
Speaker
kind of city life. He moves to DC after he drops out of college. He drops out because he gets involved in Vietnam War protests and begins discovering himself as a gay man and decides that a Christian brotherhood is not the place for him at that moment.
00:14:36
Speaker
He moves to DC. He gets involved in urban life and there's this urban verb that you get from O'Hara that's in his poetry at the same time. Did you tell us what year he was born? Did I miss that? No, sorry. So he was born in 1950 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
00:14:52
Speaker
Okay, great, great. And I'm sorry for interrupting, but that just helps me sort of track the sense of belatedness with respect to O'Hara as one model. Totally. And then thinking about the Vietnam War and all that, it sort of helps. Okay, so 50. Yeah, so he goes to college in 1968 as well, which is quite the year to enter college. For sure, yeah.
00:15:14
Speaker
So yeah, go on with this. Yeah, go on with this. Right. Yeah, so he, some reading his early poetry, I think the, obviously the historical moment of HIV that's in his late poetry isn't there, but the kind of driving forces in his poetry throughout his life, which is both kind of
00:15:35
Speaker
the city humor, this kind of urban wit, and then at the same time an interest in grace and transcendence. When I read O'Hara, when I read Delugos, I think of O'Hara, I also think of another poet who's a favorite of mine, the Trappist monk, Thomas Martin, as maybe another influence on Delugos, and those are two very different voices.
00:15:57
Speaker
And I find, that's part of why I find Deluga such an interesting poet is that you have these scenes of kind of comedic, almost kind of a Lana Turner poem, just like one of O'Hara's famous poems. And then suddenly you'll shift registers and be in this moment of grace, of transcendence. Deluga at one point said,
00:16:21
Speaker
that grace in a very orthodox sense was his major preoccupation in his life and poetry. And that really comes through from the earliest work until his final work as he's dying. Right. Yeah. I mean, I was trying to think, you know, the O'Hara comparison made sense to me. But, you know, then you introduced this idea of like, he thought he might be a priest, you know, and I thought, you know, that
00:16:48
Speaker
part of me wants to say, oh, when O'Hara is writing about grace, he means like a person named Grace Nod. But then again, I think, does he really? I don't know. Now I want to complicate my own instinctive kind of reading of O'Hara. But this is a really interesting kind of multivalent or sort of multiple streams coming into
00:17:11
Speaker
what counts as poetry or, you know, influence for De Lugos. Is it relevant for us to know when he, I mean, so born in 1950, how long, when did he become sick? When did he die? Should we know those things?
00:17:38
Speaker
Yeah, like I mentioned, so he moves to DC when he drops out of college. He at one point there reads with John Ashberg, he starts writing, but he moves to Manhattan in 1976. And once he gets there, he becomes very involved in the poetry project at St. Mark's Church. He's friends with poets like Joe Brainard. Eileen Miles was a friend throughout his life. He also is writing as a journalist for gay newspapers in New York. So that's Christopher Street newspaper and the New York native.
00:18:06
Speaker
He tests positive for HIV in 1987 and is diagnosed with AIDS two years later. And during that time, he enters Yale Divinity School and becomes a postulant for holy rites in the Episcopal Church.
Delugos's Writing During His Illness
00:18:22
Speaker
So he starts his life as a Catholic, becomes an Episcopalian.
00:18:27
Speaker
And soon after he entered divinity school, his health takes a turn for the worse. And in summer 1989, he's admitted to G9, the AIDS War at Roosevelt Hospital. And while he's in the hospital, he writes many of what I think people call his best poems. So the poem G9,
00:18:45
Speaker
a poem called Parachute, a poem called Powerless. He has a kind of explosion of creative output there. He gets better for a little bit after his hospitalization, and he travels to San Francisco in early 1990. During that trip, he went to a town called Bolinas, which would be relevant for the poem today. That's why I mentioned it.
00:19:07
Speaker
writes a little bit after that, and then he dies on December 3rd, 1990, of eighth-related complications. He's 40 years old. Which strangely, isn't that how old O'Hara was when he died? It is, yeah.
00:19:29
Speaker
So I think earlier, Sylvie said in talking about poetry of the HIV, AIDS crisis and the anthology as a kind of form of organizing that work that it was a really kind of heterogeneous kind of writing. It occurs to me actually as maybe one example, so I don't know if he would have been collected in any of these anthologies.
00:19:53
Speaker
that actually this podcast has already had one poem of the HIV AIDS crisis featured on it very early when we did James Merrill's poem, Christmas Tree with Lanny Hammer, another poem written from a sick bed in a poet's dying days. They're written a few years after Lugos's death.
00:20:18
Speaker
Can you give us some sort of sense of like where in the very tapestry of the poetry that you're focusing on in this, I take it that maybe you'll be writing a dissertation on poetry and other kinds of writing that fit into this historical period, this moment.
Diverse Voices in HIV/AIDS Poetry
00:20:38
Speaker
What's the kind of nook or corner of it that Lugos occupies? And I mean that question as much sort of
00:20:47
Speaker
in terms of his style or his approach to poetry or what the poetry sort of feels or sounds like formally or by way of kind of genealogy or something, sort of how do you place his poetry relative to other poetry that was collected in those anthologies?
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, just to respond to a second further to the Meryl question, because Christmas tree is an incredible poem. It's not in one of the anthologies, because it comes out too late, actually, the anthologies are 87 and 92, I want to say, I think it's in one that comes out in the 2000s. But something that's interesting about, you know, if we want to call it HIV AIDS poetry, like you said earlier, I'm always also a little bit uncomfortable with that label, because it feels reductive. But
00:21:34
Speaker
for ease of conversation. We can use it.
00:21:39
Speaker
It's a wide range of poets and a wide range of poets in terms of career and stature. So you have someone like James Merrill, who's writing Christmas tree and is one of the most, one of the foremost poets of this generation. And you also have poets who are writing in zines who maybe aren't or are self publishing, who aren't as well known and who have kind of a scattered, don't publish full collections, the kind of scattered output. And they also get collected in these anthologies.
00:22:07
Speaker
There's a wide range of poets. A lot of them are writing from New York. There's a lot of them also around this kind of poetry project scene. I would say Lugos, in terms of how he fits in, he
00:22:31
Speaker
It's hard to say because he moves in so many different directions in the poems. There's a mode of HIV AIDS poetry that's very angry, very explicitly angry. And that's an important element of the poetry that kind of falls in step with the activist movements at the time. So Act Up New York being one of the most famous ones. I wouldn't say Delugos is part of that. He is kind of a bit of a remove, a bit more
00:23:04
Speaker
in a kind of personal vein, a vein of witness of standing back and kind of thinking through and processing what's happening in his own life and the lives of the friends around him. He's also a poet like O'Hara who often mentions his friends and he's kind of almost like a coterie poet.
00:23:32
Speaker
I wonder how much the devotional training or his religious interests, what that does in particular to the kind of tropes or moves that one might expect in a poem of this kind, but I guess probably the best way for us to
00:23:52
Speaker
discover an answer to that is to have a poem to talk about. But did you have more to say with respect to this kind of context setting or would you rather us get onto the poem, Sylvie, your call?
00:24:09
Speaker
I think it'll help us to go on to the poem. Good, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. So the poem is called The Far West. I love it when we have a recording. Unfortunately, we don't have a recording of this one. So I also love it. I'm happy to say when we get to hear the guest and the expert read the poem in their own voice. Sylvie, would you be willing to read The Far West for us? I'd love to. Thanks.
00:24:40
Speaker
The Far West. The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way. At the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous plain set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach equivalent. A black top margin where the drugged and dying trudge queue up for Hades.
Reading and Analysis of 'The Far West'
00:25:02
Speaker
Bolinas had its junky lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with a short burst intensity and long-run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I'd huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit.
00:25:28
Speaker
Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream, past a vest pocket park of great formality and charm in the far west village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a ponytail and cruises up the street on a hog, a chopper, which seems a perfect locomotive choice. I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for the other side.
00:25:54
Speaker
Not New Jersey anymore, any more than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped away Bolinas Hill. Oh, western edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable, even in a dream. I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of leafy.
00:26:25
Speaker
So that's Sylvie Thode reading Tim DeLucas's The Far West. Sylvie, thank you for that. That was really great.
00:26:37
Speaker
I wonder maybe just as a way to begin, it's obvious enough, I guess, and we could talk about the title of the poem a bit, which seems to me to be, on the one hand, it seems relatively straightforward. And on the other poetry critic that I am, I'm thinking, I see sort of interesting ambiguity right from the beginning. What do you think about when you think about that title for this poem, The Far West?
00:27:18
Speaker
to me, it kind of clues us into that this might be an elegy of some sort. And that's because the West or the Western horizon in a lot of as kind of as a set as a set piece of elegy in a certain extent, and for the simple reason that the sun sets in the West, the day ends in the West, and kind of does life end in the West as well. And so already kind of placing us in the mode of elegy
00:27:35
Speaker
It's a title that's laden with a lot of meaning, actually.
00:27:44
Speaker
knowing what we do about the glucose about his biography, this is also kind of a self-elogy. And that opens up a lot of questions about what does it mean to to elegize yourself and things you can get into further. I'll also say that the West and kind of going West has a particular valence in a lot of AIDS literature and media. And some of the most famous examples of this kind of come after glucose.
00:28:13
Speaker
But one is in the great play, England America, by Tony Kushner. In that play, Heaven, we're told, is a place much like San Francisco, and there is this kind of
00:28:26
Speaker
gesture towards going west and one of the final scenes of the play is a famous monologue given by this character named Harper in which she's on a plane going to San Francisco. It opens night flight to San Francisco, chase the moon across America, which is just a line I find so beautiful and think about all the time, but this kind of this character in her final in this flight is in a scene of triumph, the kind of triumphant move to go west. The other example from
00:28:55
Speaker
of AIDS media going west is the song called Go West, which was originally recorded by the village people, I want to say 79, maybe 76. So obviously, the village people places us into a certain gay genealogy. But- And another sense of what the West might signify too, right? Absolutely, absolutely. But I'm anticipating things, go on, yeah.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yes, no, for sure. We're going to get one more in a second. So that song was then re-recorded by the British band, The Pet Shop Boys, after the gay British filmmaker, Derek Jarman, asked them to perform it at an AIDS fundraiser. And
00:29:33
Speaker
that recording of the song is really incredible. And in the music video for it, it's all kind of set in this Soviet red. And the music video, I check it out. It's really fascinating. It's kind of strange animations of the USSR, in which so in that case, going west kind of takes on a post-Soviet call.
00:29:59
Speaker
All of which is to say there's a lot of, the word West is really polyvalent in this moment in time that Dooligos is writing, both in the kind of poetic history and gay history and the history of AIDS. So we have a lot just from the first, just from the title alone.
00:30:16
Speaker
Right, right. And the Far West might suggest, or I mean, I'm just thinking, for instance, about, you know, how might we feel differently if the poem were just called The West or something. And some of this is perhaps already latent in even what the work that title would have done.
00:30:41
Speaker
But to my ear anyway, and tell me if this sounds right to you, obviously in part here I'm guided by knowing now where the poem winds up getting by its very end. But somehow that adjective far suggests to me that we're in the realm here, not just of geography, but of myth or something, of something beyond
00:31:05
Speaker
reality in any kind of straightforward sense. This isn't just the west, this is the far west. And maybe Bolinas, you know, which is this town with this interesting artistic and poetic history just north of San Francisco, I think, right?
00:31:23
Speaker
Maybe that's one version of what the Far West would be. But in another sense, too, at least to my ear, that title wants to push us a little bit farther and like off the map, as it were. Yeah.
00:31:38
Speaker
And then I think back to, you know, traditions as old as I don't know, like Homer, where, you know, in the Odyssey, where like the boat, the, you know, sailing out west, like you go too far, you get beyond the kind of reach of human of sort of known human civilization or whatever, and out into the into the unknown.
Geographical and Mythical Themes in Delugos's Work
00:32:03
Speaker
And I guess to the underworld, which is maybe also, you know, not maybe, also relevant here.
00:32:10
Speaker
Okay, so even just in the title, we get this kind of interestingly thick sense of what might be indicated. The first lines of the poem seem to want to do a kind of geographical work, but maybe there's more to them than that too. So people who aren't looking, I mean, I guess one thing to know about this poem is for me looking at it, it's kind of a skinny poem.
00:32:37
Speaker
Did Lucas write a lot of skinny poems, Sylvie? Is that a kind of preferred line for him? He did, especially towards the end of his life. Yeah, so the poem would be also worth mentioning for those who aren't looking at it is all, there's no stand to break. It's all one column of text that extends over almost three pages. That's great. I printed it out. Yeah, and perhaps, yeah, sorry, go on. Yeah, please.
00:33:05
Speaker
It's loosely an iambic trimeter. There's some occasional lines of iambic tetrameter, and I mean loosely, quite seriously, it's very loose. But like with his poem G9, that oscillation between trimeter and tetrameter calls up something called hymn meter, which is, it's the meter that a lot of Christian hymns are written in. And for Dooligos, someone who's deeply steeped in and
00:33:34
Speaker
liturgical rhythms. I think that's quite a live, prosodic element for him. I think that's probably why we see it so much in his later work, both that he's trying to become a priest. He's thinking actively about the afterlife. How does religion help him to understand the afterlife? How does going through the rhythms of liturgy help him to conceptualize what that might be? I think you see that quite a bit in his poetry here.
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So I'm sure that what you just said is crystal clear to most of our audience, but I don't want to leave anyone entirely behind here. So just tetrameter and trimeter. Sylvie, you're the real prosodic expert here. Just for the totally uninitiated, like how would you describe, like what do those terms mean? Tetrameter is four, trimeter is three, but four of what? And three of what? And when you say loosely, what do you mean?
00:34:32
Speaker
I guess just say a bit more about that, yeah. Totally. So a tetrimeter is a line of four feet of, in this case, I am, so bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, tetrimeter, the same case, but three, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
00:34:47
Speaker
And I can give an example of the hymn that I was talking about, maybe the most famous example, which is Amazing Grace. Let's hear it. I will not be singing it, but I will say it. That's good enough. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a rush like me. So that's tetrameter, centimeter.
00:35:10
Speaker
I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind enough. Great. I don't know if I got those final words right. But you know the rhythm. Right. Right. Yeah. So so hymn meter, you hear it also in ballads in in the English tradition. You'd hear it. You often hear something quite similar in Emily Dickinson's poems, which are also indebted to this kind of hymn meter.
00:35:42
Speaker
form alternating lines of four beats and three beats, the I am's. An I am is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Those are kind of relative terms. You'd hear it sort of in the natural cadences of your speech. Now, but Sylvie, just and this goes back to sort of some of what I was talking about when I was saying how wonderful your paper at MLA was.
00:36:03
Speaker
I take it that it's not your view that what De Lugos is, and maybe we can't know for sure, but just your kind of implied, your inferred sense of what it is he's doing when he writes a poem is that you think he's kind of internalized
00:36:25
Speaker
certain rhythms, they come pretty naturally to him because of what's been important to him, what he's heard over the years, so that when he sits down to write a poem, it's not as though he's thinking, oh, I need four beats in this line and three beats in this and four beats in this one and three beats in this. Instead, it's as though what comes out tends to fall in something like this pattern because it's been internalized before the poem ever began. Is that a fair description of what you think is going on in terms of poetics here?
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. He's not a poet who I think is particularly concerned about making every word fall into exactly the right stresses in exactly the right places, to maintaining that meter throughout. Some of what then comes of that is this feeling of urgency in his poetry. So again, these long, long poems, D9, the 600 line poem I mentioned, also has no stands of breaks.
00:37:24
Speaker
a few of these long columns of text that have a hint of meter, but it feels like Lugos is almost outpacing his own meter. So often there's words that will kind of drop onto the next line when they should be on the previous line if the meter was going to read what we would say correctly maybe. So you get this sense of kind of an outpouring of voice and of language. It feels almost a little bit prophetic.
00:37:51
Speaker
in maybe because of the context that Dilgos is writing in, it makes me think of kind of like a prophetic utterance of just this expansion of text. Like there's a container here, maybe the right hand margin or the end of the line or the end of the metrical unit as we expect it to fall and the lines keep spilling over the edges of that container. I mean, I'm noticing
00:38:16
Speaker
And I guess this is a function of what happens when you have a skinny poem that, for instance, the first sentence in the poem doesn't end until line 11, if I've got that right, on the word Hades.
00:38:36
Speaker
So I'll read that first sentence again. But then just keep in mind if you're not looking, this is 11 or 10 and a half lines of poetry. The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way. At the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous plains set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach equivalent, a black top margin where the drugged and dying trudge queue up for Hades.
00:39:03
Speaker
So those lines are pretty heavily and jammed, meaning we get to the end of the line and there isn't the end of a grammatical unit, but instead they're spilling over. And interestingly, I guess the thing I want to hear you talk about, Sylvie, is how what we've been talking about for the last few minutes here, the
00:39:27
Speaker
Delugos's relationship to form and even something we might call more simply like format, but the kind of appearance of the words on the page, how that is related to the poem's sense of geography and of like placing us on a map, you know? So like both of these seem to me like,
00:39:50
Speaker
I don't know, borders are involved and sort of outlines and things sort of spilling over. But I guess I want to know what you think of putting those two things together. So sort of verse form on the one hand and geography on the other. They wouldn't seem at first to have much to do with each other, but I suspect there's something interesting going on in their relation. Yeah, absolutely.
00:40:21
Speaker
I think, so Delugos includes the word margin in the poem at the end of the sentence you just read, a blacktop margin where the drug and dying trudge, I think that maybe is a word that feels relevant to both. So the margin of the page, of course, and then also the margins at the end, at the edge of the map, like we were talking earlier, the far west seems to be this is almost a space off the map. And these figures that we see in the poem are kind of
00:40:47
Speaker
right at the edge there, kind of waiting to go beyond the map, beyond the limits of the world. And maybe it's worth mentioning now that just clarifying the city and the continent, that's the first line of the plot. The city in question is New York, and the continent is North America, and the edge of the continent that he's talking about is the edge of California along this town, Delinas.
00:41:11
Speaker
where you've never been to one of these kind of northern California seaside towns often, and this is the case with the Linus, they have a similar geography, which is incredibly striking, where you kind of are in the mountains, you come down a little bit, you put the town, you come down off of a cliff, and there's the ocean, and the ocean kind of crashing up against the continent, and it really does sort of feel a bit like the end of the world.
00:41:37
Speaker
There's incredible. I was going to say there's an incredible, this poem makes me think of an incredible Joan Didion line, actually, that I think captures this sense of California being the edge really beautifully. I can read it if that's. Please. I'm never going to deny Joan Didion's presence on the podcast. That's great.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah. So Gideon writes in her essay, Notes of a Native Daughter, that California is a place, quote, California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet an uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here because here beneath the immense bleached sky is where we run out of continent. That's great.
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful sentence, but I think also capture something really palpable about California and that, and I think the California that Delugos is writing about where it's kind of.
00:42:43
Speaker
There's often, there's not really like, at least actually in Northern California, there aren't the kind of pretty beaches of LA. It's a pretty sudden and jagged drop into the water and you look out into the Pacific and it's just kind of blurry horizon. And I love what Gideon writes about that. If things don't work out here, we're kind of screwed.
New York and Bolinas as Personal and Mythical Geographies
00:43:02
Speaker
This is it.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's a recognizably Didionesque sentiment. But there's something confusing going on, and I want for us to try to be as precise about it as we can. I mean, you told us the city named in the first two words of the poem is not
00:43:26
Speaker
San Francisco, or it's New York City, and yet we're immediately, in your view, superimposing one geography over another. Is that right? So all of that stuff we were saying about what's indicated by the West
00:43:49
Speaker
as a concept, but also as a real sort of geographical direction, what is New York City, which, you know, we have listeners all around the world, that's not in the West, right? That's, at least in American terms, I mean, I understand directions are all relative to each other, but for a US audience, right, New York City is very much the East, or as I learned to say,
00:44:14
Speaker
as a Californian child back East, right? So what's New York City doing here and what's its relation to the geography which you've just so, you know, vividly evoked for us in this description of the California coast? Yeah, so Delugos is talking about
00:44:36
Speaker
what you might call the west coast of New York, which is a very, if you were to narrow, narrow, narrow down your scope and just have New York on a map, the western edge of New York is... And you mean New York City. Hudson River. New York City. Yeah, sorry. New York City, specifically actually also Manhattan. I think that's what the ghost was writing on.
00:44:54
Speaker
and the west end of New York is bordered on the Hudson River and then across the river is New Jersey and Lugos compares kind of superimposes Bolinas this town in California on the edge with the West Street piers and those are piers on the lower
00:45:13
Speaker
edge of Manhattan, kind of bordering, or the edge of Chelsea, the neighborhood and the West Village, which is a neighborhood that comes into this poem explicitly. Also, again, the phrase, the far West comes explicitly with the far West Village. We can talk about that in a second. So he's superimposing two coasts of a version. One would rarely call, I think,
00:45:37
Speaker
the piers of New York or the West Village, a coast, it's kind of a strange image. Yeah, I don't even think if you were Walt Whitman, you would do that. No. But yeah, it's strange. And then also maybe it's just worth pointing out, right, that Chelsea and the West Village as neighborhoods in Manhattan are also going to be neighborhoods that were then and, you know,
00:46:03
Speaker
we could just leave it at that, like pretty tightly associated with gay culture and with sort of important moments in queer history and in the AIDS crisis too, right? So, important neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods and specifically the piers that Delugos mentioned, so the West Street piers, the piers along those neighborhoods are, just to be explicit about it, are
00:46:31
Speaker
strips of land that jut out into the water that are on kind of poles in the water and when in the 80s and 90s they were places of cruising for people who were looking for connection, for sex, etc. They were largely populated by queer and trans people and they were a place of
00:46:55
Speaker
connection of a kind of liberation away from supervision. So they were really important scene for gay life in kind of this from the 60s to the 90s, maybe 50s to the 90s in New York. Nowadays, they've
00:47:09
Speaker
completely been changed, they've been privatized. So I grew up in lower West Manhattan to use De Lucas's terms. I grew up playing little league on these peers. So they've really changed quite a bit. But that's the context that De Lucas is writing in for the kind of West edge of Manhattan is not only an edge geographically, but also a kind of societal edge, those who are on the margins of society.
00:47:35
Speaker
Is it your sense, Sylvie, that the poem is being spoken from New York City, right? But that other geography to the extent that it sort of comes into the poem, it does so, seems to do so in the past tense and as a kind of memory that gets superimposed. And I mean,
00:47:58
Speaker
that might be to naturalize or to make more kind of readily available what we've been treating as a real strangeness. I mean, I don't mean to take the strangeness away, but of the opening of this poem, like, isn't this the kind of thing that if you have lived in more than one place, you might be want to do, or if you visited more than one place, you might think, oh, this coastline reminds me of that other coastline, or I orient myself the same way because
00:48:28
Speaker
I have a kind of internalized sense of geography, maybe in the same way that De Lugo's had an internalized sense of meter. If the sun sets over there, that's where the water is, you might think. So in this case, that first sentence
00:48:52
Speaker
a blacktop margin, ends this way, a blacktop margin where the drugged and dying trudge queue up for Hades. That blacktop is in New York City, right? Am I? Yes. Yeah. And so if they're queuing up for Hades to like cross the river, then New Jersey is Hades? Is that sort of the implication here? I think it is. And I think that's kind of a,
00:49:18
Speaker
something of a classic New Yorker joke, I'm afraid. Right. Apologies to all the New Jerseyians out there. Maybe we should quickly just go ahead and say, Hades would be like the kind of ancient Greek underworld, right? Underworld. Yes. Yes. And maybe we'll talk a little bit more actually about the geography of Hades, too. Oh, good. Well, I'll mention it now, but to cross into Hades, you cross a river, which is River Styx. You're guided by a ferryman named Karen.
00:49:43
Speaker
So the drug and dying kind of queuing up along a river to get to Hades immediately kind of makes in the geography of this poem the Hudson River into a kind of sticks. We're gonna get another River of Hades at the very end of the poem.
00:49:58
Speaker
Um, we'll hold off there. Yeah, maybe, maybe. And in part, because before we get, I mean, it's interesting. So we get that first sentence ends on the word Hades in the middle of the, I think I had it as the 11th line. I think that's right. And then.
00:50:14
Speaker
pretty disorientingly to my eye, anyway, the next word of the poem which begins the second sentence of the poem, not stanza, there are no stanzas here, the second sentence of the poem is the place name Bolinas. And then there's another line break, so really that eleventh line just has three words in it, four Hades, Bolinas. So putting those two place
00:50:39
Speaker
very different kinds of place names, actually, sort of face to face here or what have you is interesting to me. And so so maybe, Sylvie, what's your account of like, what's the thread that's being followed that allows for the leap from we're in New York City,
00:51:04
Speaker
but it's a kind of mythical New York City whereby to cross the Hudson River is to go to Hades, not to go to New Jersey, but to go to the underworld, to go to Hades. And then immediately we're in some other place in some memory here. What's the kind of thread that's connecting those things? Or maybe just talk about that transition into this description of bulliness.
00:51:28
Speaker
I think the thread is something about looking into the horizon, looking off into the water. So to just return to the opening of the poem for one more second, the city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way. So there's a sense in which even though in one we're in a crowded city, in the other we're in a pretty desolate town on a California coastline.
00:51:51
Speaker
they fade off into darkness in a similar way. I find it interesting, actually, that this isn't a sunset we're getting in the horizon. The sun has seemingly already set. We're in cold, black water. I wasn't sure if I was going to mention this, but because it's her birthday, I might. I hear in cold, black water. I know what you're going to say.
00:52:18
Speaker
Sorry, it won't be your birthday when people are hearing this, but yes, okay, go on. Yeah, it's the day of recording. So on the day of recording today, it's February 8th, it's Elizabeth Bishop's birthday. And in her poem at the Fish Houses, there's a line, two lines that repeat. She's describing water, cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear element, bearable to no mortal. I hear an echo of that in Blue Ghost. Yeah, me too. The city and the continent trail off into cold, black water the same way.
00:52:46
Speaker
So it seems like there's a sense of ending that perhaps is the thread between both of these places, ending both of the land and also of the day of life in some sense. Right. Right. So that sense of sort of looking off into the edge, into darkness is the thread that's getting us from, you know,
00:53:16
Speaker
the West Village to Bolinas, which had its junky lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with the short burst intensity and long run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. So by the end of that sentence, we're back to the other place, right? We keep sort of toggling back and forth between these two Wes. Yeah, totally.
00:53:40
Speaker
And then I love this moment, you know, just because of the way it sounds, West Street peers, that sentence ends, the second sentence of the poem, the next sentence and the next line begins, dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years. So it's not a poem that rhymes.
00:53:57
Speaker
regularly or very much, but there is a rhyme that you can't not hear, I think, right? So what's the work that rhyme is doing for De Lugos in that moment or anywhere else, I guess. I mean, I've heard up to this point some internal rhymes like where the drugged and dying trudge was a kind of internal almost sort of slant rhyme or something.
00:54:21
Speaker
But yeah, what's the work that Rhyme is doing for you in this moment? The long run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. Before I saw it. Yeah, it's an incredible moment of Rhyme.
00:54:39
Speaker
I think what it first makes me think of is it's a way of the Lugos kind of inviting us into the collapsing of these two places that we've been talking about. So the West Street Pier repeats sonically in the dreams of Bolinas that have haunted him for years. It feels like almost one of those kind of like synapse firings where we don't quite know why this connection has been made for him.
00:55:08
Speaker
Clearly it's been made and we kind of are meant to follow it through the kind of quickness of that rhyme. I also find it a kind of a deceptively simple sentence. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. He's dreaming of a place he's never been, he's never seen. This is kind of, again, kind of prophetic dreaming, something that hasn't yet happened, but that seems to maybe have, through the rhyme,
00:55:34
Speaker
a seed planted in New York in the piers that he's been on. You have a kind of temporal collapse that's beginning here as well, besides the geographical collapse. It's like you might almost think that, okay, so a rhyme conventionally might be there because two things have become associated
00:55:57
Speaker
in the poet's mind and therefore the poet is inclined to make them rhyme in some way. But here it's almost as though the kind of arrow of causality runs the other way. It's like the thing, the thing's rhyme, which creates the kind of memory before it happens. Right? Yeah, which is kind of interesting then that the writing of the poem seems to almost
00:56:20
Speaker
preempt or come before the events that are being written about. Which brings us again, is this kind of sense of urgency, which is where the writing feels constantly at the fore for him and for us as readers, even before what's actually being depicted in the poem.
00:56:37
Speaker
I wonder, you know, there is a way of like maybe explaining how it might have been that dreams of Bolinas could have haunted him for years before he saw it, which is that I guess within certain sorts of communities of artists and writers, it was a kind of legendary place or it had a kind of lore to it, right? But that ability to kind of dream about something before you've seen it yourself,
00:57:03
Speaker
is also an assertion about kind of weird sort of poetic power or prophetic power to use the word that you'd given us a moment ago. And actually what follows that line is kind of confusing to me too. I wonder if you might want to try addressing it for us. But
00:57:24
Speaker
I'm interested in the verb tense of, so dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years. And then the next words are, I'd huddle at the foot of the cliff. So the I'd, which is, you know, I guess a contracted form of I would. There's a kind of, I don't know, how should we describe that? A kind of
00:57:44
Speaker
that we're in the past, but we're in a kind of habitual past, like a French imperfect kind of past or something. But where is he? Where is that cliff? And where is this huddling that he would do as though habitually? Yeah, can you orient us in that way, Silby? Yeah, so it seems like he's saying, just to explain the habitual past a little bit more, that when he had this dream, which was often enough that it became
00:58:14
Speaker
a pattern he would huddle at the foot of this cliff, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. It's kind of interesting, I'm not sure where he'd be huddling because these cliffs often there's not really a beach at the bottom. So is he huddling maybe on a rock or kind of in a crevice of some sort of this kind of wall of land that then crashes into the water? And where are the people around him? Where are they all huddling?
00:58:43
Speaker
Something that's interesting about this poem is that, sorry, go ahead, go ahead. No, no, you, I'm more interested in hearing from you. He's almost always with people in the poem. So there's the junky lady of Bolinas or the crackhead hustlers of the peers. And those descriptions are difficult descriptions. These are people at the margins of society. They're kind of almost a little bit cruel descriptions, I think. Yeah, for sure. And
00:59:10
Speaker
He's here waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. He's kind of sitting and waiting. Seems like at the end of the world, something that I didn't know about before I got to California is the big one is coming, which is this big earthquake that threatens to destroy all of California. This is not something I knew about before I got here. And I hear that with before the temblor, which is a word for earthquake hits. And they're kind of waiting at the end of the world, perhaps to cross to the other side.
00:59:40
Speaker
Yeah, there's an air of environmental catastrophe there as well. Yeah, like I said, I grew up in California and yeah, the idea of the big one was capital B, capital O was something that sort of haunted the imagination of my imagination and I think
01:00:00
Speaker
pretty regularly, we'd have earthquake drills in school and stuff like that, and sort of all this catastrophizing about the earthquake. Yeah, so I think we're there. It almost doesn't matter. I mean, I heard you saying, Sylvia, this is when I really interrupted you a moment ago, what I meant to say in that moment was,
01:00:17
Speaker
It almost doesn't matter that the geography he's imagining or the topography he's imagining doesn't really work or map on to the place as it is because he's dreaming it before he goes there, right? Yeah, right. You know, it's the sort of made up, no doubt, kind of error prone and romanticized or imagined composite version of a place rather than the place itself.
01:00:44
Speaker
And so who could those people in the dream be except strangers? I mean, they're not real people after all in some straightforward way. But then there, to sort of contrast with that, that sentence which puts us in that kind of habitual past, which as you say is like the habitual past of a dream life,
01:01:07
Speaker
as though contrasting with that pointedly, the next sentence begins, tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream past a vest pocket park of great formality and charm in the far west village. I think I know the park he means. Do you think you know the park he means? There's a couple options that come to mind. My hunch is Abingdon Square.
01:01:33
Speaker
Maybe talk about the old friends in a new dream. There's clearly a kind of clever paradoxical or witty play on words happening there. Do you have thoughts there?
01:01:48
Speaker
Yeah. And I feel like that moment sort of leads us into the next kind of movement of the poem, where those friends are described in sort of vivid terms and we get this ponytail and the hog and the chopper and all that. So I guess I'm just inviting you, Sylvie, to say something about that sort of section of the poem and how you see it developing or relating to the poem as we've discussed it to this point.
01:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, so we've taken a step away from the strangers, the kind of anonymous figures who are waiting, waiting with him on the cliffs in California, and suddenly we're in a vest pocket park and I kind of I love that expression. You've ever been to the Westville today, these little parks that are kind of
01:02:33
Speaker
a quarter of a block in their timing. They do feel like a best pocket. There's also something in that phrase, best pocket, very quaint, private. You almost hear like a pocket square, the location of wealth here, especially coming out of the scene of strangers, of people at the margins of society. These are also the best pocket parks, like privatized parks. This is what the peers have become now. So I think it's interesting to read this poem, kind of 20 years on.
01:02:59
Speaker
But to speak to what you're asking is about old friends in a new dream. This is a move back into where Delugos often writes, which is about his friends, about his friends in New York. And we might also notice in this sentence, old friends in a new dream passed a best pocket park of great formality and charm.
01:03:23
Speaker
in the far west village. So we have the title coming back to us again.
Contrasting Dreams and Reality in the Poem
01:03:27
Speaker
And for those who aren't looking on the page, the phrase the far west village spills over two lines. It's an enjambed phrase. We have the far and then line break west village. So it takes a second to notice that we've been given the title.
01:03:42
Speaker
And I think there's something of a wink and a nudge there. It's a little bit comedic, kind of undercutting the seriousness of his title of the Far West. And here we have the Far West Village. It's very pointed and jammin' that relies on that line break.
01:03:59
Speaker
That's super interesting. You're describing something which is undeniably there in the kind of phenomenology of reading, like we've read the title, now we're reading the poem, and there's that moment where we think, oh, there's the title, but it's done in this kind of winking or slant sort of way. But I'm guessing, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, I'm just speculating.
01:04:18
Speaker
that what happened here was that De Lugos wrote the poem and then plucked the title out of the line and sort of mythologized what had been ordinary, or more ordinary, but always in a kind of latent way, mythological or something. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's super interesting.
01:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, what do you make of this character? My disaffected former confidant has grown a ponytail and cruises up the street on a hog, a chopper. You know what I hear in those lines is like, oh, it's weird. I had not thought of this until just I read it just now. But that sounds to me almost like the Robert Lowell of life studies, like the
01:05:03
Speaker
And maybe I'm thinking of the poem Memories of West Street in Lebke, and maybe that's sort of why I'm in that place. But this sort of turning of the people who populate the poem into sort of ridiculous characters or... Yeah.
01:05:18
Speaker
And that kind of, for people who aren't looking at the poem, the word hog and the word chopper are put in quotation marks as though they're being like, ironized in some way. Like, Delugos feels a little silly using these sorts of slang terms for, you know, motorcycle or whatever. And so,
01:05:38
Speaker
that that feel that something about that pose feels low alien to me in a way that I wouldn't have thought of him as among the influences here. And maybe it's not there at all. Maybe I just sort of I'm revealing more about myself at this moment. But I guess I want to I want to know what you think of that kind of portrait of the confidant and and and what it's doing to the
01:06:02
Speaker
sort of situating of the speaking subject of this poem to sort of name and describe a friend in this way. Or maybe a former friend. A former friend maybe. Already in that phrase, my disaffected former confidant. It's a very arch phrase, very loaded phrase. So what has happened to make this confidant former? What has made this confidant disaffected? We don't know and we're not really told. But already there's a kind of ironic remove there.
01:06:31
Speaker
And then we're told that this continent has grown a ponytail and cruises up the street and on a hog, a chopper. And I had to look up what a chopper meant. To my mind, it's like, oh, a helicopter? Who's on a helicopter on the street? That doesn't make sense. You haven't seen the movie Pulp Fiction, Sylvie, have you? I haven't.
01:06:53
Speaker
That's what everybody's thinking. No, there's this moment where Bruce Willis's girlfriend in that movie says, she refers to it as a motorcycle and he's like, it's a chopper. Anyway.
01:07:11
Speaker
Go on, yeah, it's a motorcycle. I'll have to watch. Yeah. It's a motorcycle. But this kind of like, also, this image is almost a parodic masculinity versus riding up on a hog on a chopper. It makes me think a little bit mentioning the village people earlier in this recording of that version of parodic masculinity. It's the village person who dresses up as a sailor, as a cop. This is an image of gay parody that's pretty familiar.
01:07:41
Speaker
And then we're told that the hog and the chopper seem a perfect locomotive choice. And I love that shift from the kind of slanginess of hog, of chopper, and then to perfect locomotive choice to go back into the kind of archaic addiction of locomotive. Are archaic for locomotive to be adjective there, right? Yeah. To be adjective and just to use that phrase at all, that word at all.
01:08:09
Speaker
De Lugos loves those kind of high-low juxtapositions in terms of addiction and sound. There was one earlier on, too, where the drug-and-dying trudge, comma, cue up for Hades to move from the kind of harsh, almost Anglo-Saxon sounding trudge to then cueing the very Britishized language is very typical of De Lugos.
01:08:41
Speaker
now the maybe here where the I walk out that where that line begins after that perfect locomotive choice we enter into at least to my reading and again I don't know why I feel like it necessary to try to divide a poem that's not divided into stances as though it were up into little sections but I feel like now we're into a kind of final movement of the of the poem where where the
01:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. That's great.
01:09:10
Speaker
the other side that the enormous gondola departs for is no longer New Jersey. But so it's as though the kind of, I don't know, that kind of knife's edge where, and it seems related to me actually to what you were just saying about De Lugo's liking, that kind of high-low juxtaposition where there's also this sort of knife's edge or palimpsestic kind of relationship between the
01:09:40
Speaker
actual geography and the kind of mythological geography where there's sort of both at once kind of feeling that we get. Here it seems like there's a sort of decisive turn happening towards the mythological. Is that your way of reading that kind of final movement's tendency?
01:10:02
Speaker
I think so. And I think the sort of joke he makes that the other side isn't New Jersey anymore kind of clues us in that we're now moving beyond this kind of scene of New York.
01:10:14
Speaker
Humor with the hog and the chopper into something more serious where you know The boats going to the other side aren't the ferries from new york to hoboken there these enormous gondolas That are kind of carrying us perhaps to the the world of the dead which is kind of for you The word the phrase the other side is also in quotations Seems to imply that that euphemism of going to the other side. Yeah. Yeah Right
01:10:46
Speaker
And then we get that, oh, western edge line. I mean, I guess one thing that I've been wondering, and maybe this is an invitation into a discussion that we might have of the poems, Final Lines and, you know, by Final Lines, take that however you like, but anything from here on out, I guess.
01:11:06
Speaker
You know, we set up this poem and this poet as like, and your scholarly interests as, you know, you're interested in, you know, among other things, but in poetry of the HIV and AIDS crisis. And we described Lugos' life and career relative to that crisis. And the implication, I think, or maybe more than implication throughout is like, well, this is one of those poems. And yet, Sylvie,
01:11:33
Speaker
the word AIDS doesn't appear, the word HIV doesn't appear, there isn't even really a kind of, I mean, what I just said might also be true, for instance, of the poem Christmas Tree, but in that poem, there was illness, you know? There's an IV. Yeah, there's death here, but there isn't, I mean, I guess I,
01:12:03
Speaker
I guess I'm wondering what your perspective is on
01:12:07
Speaker
what it means that a poem that I'm not trying to sort of quibble with the categorization of this poem as a poem of that that sort of fits into that category, but what does it mean that a poem that does fit into that category isn't giving us that kind of diagnostic language or medicalized language or even necessarily illness as a kind of concept or experience or what have you.
Mythology vs Medical Language in Addressing AIDS
01:12:38
Speaker
So I say that that's maybe a question about the kind of ending of the poem because I think the mythologizing here is in part sort of what the poem does instead of what I was just asking about. But I want to hear it from you. I want to hear your way of describing that.
01:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, I love that question in part because elsewhere in his poetry, Tim Blugos writes really explicitly about HIV and AIDS and AZT and the other kind of
01:13:10
Speaker
realities of living with that illness at that time. Being a medical treatment. But also, I know he writes about symptoms of his illness, right? Okay. But not here. Not here. Not here at all. And you're right that it's almost all kind of
01:13:34
Speaker
illustrated through this mythological language. I also find the focus on myth kind of interesting because, like I said, he's also a Christian poet. I think you could just as easily, as I'm kind of thinking about him in an HIV history, think about him in a Christian poetry history, that would be a kind of interesting experiment as well. So to see him turn to the language of Hades, language of the leafy, is kind of fascinating. And I think
01:14:03
Speaker
Part of why I like this poem is that
01:14:05
Speaker
using the mythology gives him an alternate way of exploring the realities of living with that illness at that time. And in that place, we do get local places, we get the West Village, we get this kind of localized language, but it's also places that experience something that's trans-historical, that's transcendent, that's mythologized. This is an elegy that could be read alongside Milton's, or yeah, Milton's Licitis.
01:14:36
Speaker
So there's a way in which he acknowledges the specificity of his own experience, but in doing so also brings that experience into communion with the experience of death that others have had. And I find that quite beautiful as an expression of poetic history and of poetic inheritance.
01:14:58
Speaker
Maybe just of human history. I think I was hearing the suggestion in what you were just saying, but tell me if I'm hearing it right, that the kind of work of communion, as you put it, or of creating a kind of not just
01:15:24
Speaker
a community that exists not just synchronicly, like, you know, at this moment in time, but diachronically sort of across time so that people who are dying or have died now might be seen as participating in a tradition that is, you know, as sort of old as we have
01:15:51
Speaker
in art and in human experience and culture, that that might be doing a particular kind of service for people in the late 1980s and early 1990s who are dying of this illness in particular and in this kind of gay subculture
01:16:15
Speaker
if we even agree to that term in particular, because of the particular experience they were having, which was of being sort of treated as this feeling of wanting to be that maybe was felt more broadly in society of wanting not to see these people, wanting not to hear from them, wanting not to touch them, or to this kind of homophobic,
01:16:44
Speaker
marginalization of the victims of this crisis, that there's a particular kind of compensatory work being done by the trans-historical mythologizing here. Is that the kind of thrust of the, or at least some of the thrust of the point you were making a moment ago? Absolutely. And maybe one way of illustrating that a bit more is to
01:17:12
Speaker
look back just for a second to some of the poem we've talked about already. But I mentioned earlier the figure of Karen, who is the fairy man of the underworld takes souls from the living to the dead. He's what's known as a psychopomp, which is a phrase that means literally to carry the soul, psyche being soul, carrying the soul to death.
01:17:34
Speaker
I think we're offered a couple of different figures in that in this poem for that role of psychopomp. One is the person on the motorcycle who's kind of carrying us right by the piers that we've already been told are kind of like a sticks, the river that's kind of like sticks. And there's the junky lady in Bolinas. There are the hustlers on the West Street piers. There are these figures that seem to kind of gather around in the poem.
01:17:58
Speaker
And what does it mean for these disenfranchised figures, the hustlers, the junky lady, to be in the ancient role of psychopath, in the ancient role of Karen, those who guide the dead to their final places? I think there is a kind of
01:18:18
Speaker
a compensatory move there to incorporate those who have been cast out by society into this grander lineage of the afterlife or how Western culture has conceptualized the afterlife in this poem. That's quite lovely. In light of that, I find myself wondering how to take the
01:18:48
Speaker
I guess what is the final sentence in the poem that begins with that phrase, oh, western edge, which does feel to me like a phrase rich in kind of English poetic history too. I mean, I hear things like a western wind or, you know, but okay, oh, western edge,
01:19:08
Speaker
This is how the poem ends, a western edge where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable, even in a dream. I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of leafy. Sylvie,
01:19:39
Speaker
What's the, how to phrase this? I mean, the structure of that, excuse me, of that very beautiful sentence seems to me to be, I'm addressing myself to this bit of, whether it's mythological or actual geography. And I'm saying to that thing,
01:20:06
Speaker
I had thought one thing was true, it turns out another is true. It's funny, you and I were talking earlier, I mean, before we started recording about teaching and about paraphrasing of poems, and we, you know, we invoked the old Clanth Brooks' new critical saw of the heresy of paraphrasing. So now I'm asking you to go ahead and be heretical.
01:20:31
Speaker
for a minute and to sort of paraphrase and then maybe we could talk about ways in which the paraphrase feels not entirely sufficient or whatever if you like. But what is the thing that I had thought and what is the corrected sort of less naive view that he's nevertheless arrived at at the end?
01:20:58
Speaker
Yeah. So it seems like if, just to paraphrase it, so I thought that sleep was meant to blunt the sharpness of the Western edge. And here, I think the Western edge is something like death. Said sleep is meant to make death easier. Rather than, so not to hone and polish, rather than to sharpen death with the hungry waves of leafy. Maybe now it's worth mentioning that leafy is another river in the underworld.
01:21:27
Speaker
Another river that has a lot of resonance with English, the history of English poetics. But in this river, souls are submerged in the river and forget all memory of who they were. It's a process that if souls want to enter Elysium, which is the kind of the field of the blessed and the underworld, you have to be reborn three times. Each time you're reborn, you're dumped in the leafy, so you forget all memories of who you used to be. It's the river of forgetfulness.
01:21:54
Speaker
And that was the paraphrase though. That's really, that's good. And that gloss is important. So I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness. I mean, it sounds in a way like leafy is doing
01:22:15
Speaker
not the thing we, you know, are sort of accustomed to think of it as doing, which is this kind of, I mean, maybe tragic, maybe poignant, but nevertheless sort of gentle and, you know, I don't know, caring or something, work of softening and
01:22:40
Speaker
taking almost in a kind of narcotic way, taking the edge off. I think it's a good phrase for where we are here. But this is honing and polishing and the waves of leafy are hungry.
01:22:58
Speaker
Maybe another way to ask the question about those lines beyond the simple matter of the paraphrase, which I think you gave really succinctly, would be to say, okay, what relation do these as the final lines of this poem bear to the poem that we've just been reading for the last hour or so? What kind of ending is this? Does this have you go back into the poem and reconsider
01:23:27
Speaker
or think differently about the kind of arc of the poem or the journey that the poem takes us on if this is the destination.
Poetic Elegy and Resistance to Forgetfulness
01:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think
01:23:47
Speaker
Well, maybe to respond to something you said initially about kind of, I thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, that the leafy kind of river forgetfulness was meant to make things easier. I think it's no surprise that for De Lugos, that's not the case, writing with the illness that he has, which is an illness that is
01:24:10
Speaker
fueled in no small way by a kind of a program of genocidal neglect from the state. It's an illness that really relies on forgetting those who are dying.
01:24:24
Speaker
So, and in which like the activist response of course is, do not forget us, see us, hear us. I think one way to think about the end of this poem is, you know, what is the role of poetic elegy in a time of political funerals, of protest funerals, which specifically call for the refusal of forgetting, the refusal of leafy if you want to put it in Blugos' terms.
01:24:51
Speaker
in the context of an illness that went for so long, purposefully ignored and unsaid. To end with the word leafy is pointed. In a moment where at least one effective and memorable slogan among many was silence is death, right? Yes. Here is...
01:25:18
Speaker
Well, now I want to I'm not I'm not sure I want to be careful about how to orient this poems. Yeah, it is striking to end with leafy in that context. But this seems to be a different kind of leafy, I guess. So maybe there's the answer. But but but but but I feel as though I'm going to trip myself up if I try to articulate it any any differently from the way the way you just did. I also love the
01:25:48
Speaker
the kind of breathlessness that I was experiencing even. Hard to read that final sentence. Yeah, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable, even in a dream, like getting on to all of that. It's the sort of phrase upon phrase that is extending the vocal performance that's required in order to get to that sort of gentle rest of a comma.
01:26:15
Speaker
But yeah, that last I had thought comes in like a hammer, I think. Well, Sylvia, this has been fascinating. Is there, I don't know, have we left any stone unturned at the end of this poem? What is it that
01:26:43
Speaker
T.S. Eliot referred to new critical, exegetical kinds of readings as the lemon squeezer school of criticism. Have we squeezed all the juice out of this lemon? I mean, it's ironic because, of course, he was responsible for it.
01:27:02
Speaker
But it turns out he thought it was silly, I guess. Is there anything that you want to say that we haven't yet gotten to? Maybe one thing I'll add, just two things on the note of Lisi, in addition to what I talked about.
01:27:23
Speaker
The first is that it's also the last word of another poem, a poem called A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg that I think is in Delugos' mind, perhaps, in which the supermarket is also in the Bay Area. But in that poem, Karen is a figure who's kind of overlaid with Walt Whitman. So again, we have this kind of
01:27:45
Speaker
gay lineage, gay history, who goes out on a smoking bank and watches the boat disappear into the black waters of Leithi. So it places Blugos into a kind of broader history there as well. The other thing that I wanted to mention about Leithi, and this maybe gets back to some of the biography of Blugos that I mentioned right at the beginning, is that
01:28:06
Speaker
we see the word is related to the word Aletheia, which means truth in ancient Greek. And it's a very biblical word as well, kind of the truth of God. So I think that's also present in Delugos, or at least would be present for Delugos' mind to end on a word that kind of
01:28:22
Speaker
is both a word of forgetfulness of devastation in his context, but also a word that seems to gesture towards a possible kind of divinity. You hear that also earlier in the poem, the word temblor, which means earthquake. It's a strange word to use for earthquake.
01:28:41
Speaker
is comes from the Spanish meaning trembling. So again, you kind of have in here, you might think about like, fear and trembling kind of trembling before God, these words for for devastation that also seemed to have a hint of a kind of Christian divinity in them. And you always kind of see that with those where he's, you know, portraying his historical moment, his, his experience of crisis, and yet always has a kind of
01:29:08
Speaker
eye on what's beyond on a kind of horizon like we've been talking about on this western edge. Yeah. Oh, that's great. No, both of those notes are wonderful. I
01:29:22
Speaker
I hadn't been thinking of the Ginsburg, but as soon as he said it, I think, oh, yeah, that's right. And that must be somewhere here in the background as well. Sylvie, could I ask you to read the poem one more time so that we can, having heard this lovely discussion, our listeners can have it in mind as they hear the poem from beginning to end? I'd be happy to.
01:29:51
Speaker
The Far West. The city and the continent trail off into cold, black water the same way. At the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous plains set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach equivalent. A black top margin where the drugged and dying trudge queue up for Hades.
01:30:13
Speaker
Bolinas had its junky lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with a short burst intensity and long run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I'd huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit.
01:30:38
Speaker
Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream, past a vest pocket park of great formality and charm in the far west village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a ponytail and cruises up the street on a hog, a chopper, which seems a perfect locomotive choice.
01:30:56
Speaker
I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for the other side, not New Jersey anymore, any more than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped away Bolinas hill.
01:31:12
Speaker
Oh, Western Edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a death unfathomable, even in a dream. I'd thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of leafy.
01:31:31
Speaker
So that's Sylvie Doty reading The Far West by Tim Delugos. Sylvie, it's been really a pleasure to get to spend time with you in talking about this poem. I want to thank you so much for making the time and giving us the benefit of your critical attention. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been an honor.
01:31:59
Speaker
Yeah. Well, anytime and listeners, thanks for spending the time with us as well. We will have more episodes coming for you soon. Please do, as I always say, tell your friends, you know, use your social networks to spread the word about the podcast. Leave us a rating and a review. It helps
01:32:26
Speaker
It helps other people find the podcast it's really been a totally unexpected and miraculous delight for me to discover that we do have a real community and and audience here and I just love to
01:32:42
Speaker
see that grow and change in ways that are both a surprise and a source of joy. So thank you everyone and stay tuned. We'll have more for you soon. Be well.