Writing A Misfits Credo

Misfit Hearts by
Russell Thorburn. (Rocky Shore Books, 2012) 90 pp. $16.00 (paper) ISBN
978-0-9823319-6-5.

In this, the third of my reviews from Michigan writer Russell
Thorburn’s five poetry works, I explore the poetic credo arising from his well-structured
presentation of human tempest.  In my
review of Thorburn’s first work, Approximate
Desire, I saluted him for bringing both gravity and grace to us with words
that moved readers between blissful young memories and heavy adult responsibilities.
Some of the characters he chose to enliven those memories were Ty Cobb, Albert
and Mileva Einstein, Apollinaire, Rilke.

Reviewing a second work, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, I bowed to him for “bringing it,” to
use the sport show cliché. There, he portaled his ancestral stories through
music, risk, eros, generational angst and triumph. The poems celebrated many
deaths, while along the way highlighted the erotic and its inner physics.

In his second work, I resonated with the theology and
psychology of the generation gap as the first spade-full of dirt excavating
family story, I understood erotic quivering as the petite mort moving the world, I followed his sport and music angles
as a former college baseball player and a guitarist, and my theological
training helped me to take seriously any writing that exposes that gap (the generational one) as the
first letter in the alphabet of the human condition.

Here, in Misfit
Hearts, I’m reading of Thorburn and sons chewing the same chipped bone.
He’s evolved beyond generational struggle or the bliss of playing catch in the
backyard, beyond the slap of oars and the shock of Albert and Mileva Einstein
sitting in a boat arguing, to the mature and Olympian task of expressing his artistic
credo. He does, and the clues are already written here. We live by grain and
rain, pain and brain. This may be the illustrative quaternio, from which his artistic
credo along with the ethos and pathos of Misfit
Hearts rise: elemental, common, organic, inescapable, necessary nouns.

These are not troubled poems, they’re not happy poems, but
they’re real poems with real subjects. There’s eroticism, there’s alliteration
and meter, there’s the word as cigarette, pill, comb and sidewalk.  He puts it like this in “Fathers”: “…So many words/are
combustible,/fire burning through to the end/of a phrase. A word in German or
Czech,/what is the difference when it’s aflame?”

In these words, the only subject I find deeper, wider,
and more infinite than angst is the pull of love – as when the cowboys eye
Marilyn Monroe at the bar fussing with her blonde curls. Thorburn’s imaginative
eye creates this scene, and a half-dozen others, based on John Huston’s film, The Misfits.

Perhaps that bar scene is at the end of a long days
shoot, when the stage hands, extras, stars and crew gather. Having a drink, in
the hot desert, you might imagine it as a potent container giving birth to lust
and longing. He does, and the poem lets us see it:

her thighs sliding across the
soft rubber

               in
the sizzle of grease

               and
corned beef hash, as they envy

               her
for the way her hand

               fusses
with a curl

               limitless
in how they can be twisted

               around
a finger

               her
wide, untested mouth

               cool
as the stream…

His gospel for cowboys is disguised, for it looks at
first like a tease, but really its everyman’s limitless hope to be held by the
physical image of his anima. In the stanza above from “Each of the Customers,
in the Cool Water of His Glass, Drinks Marilyn Monroe,” Thorburn can trick the
reader if he/she doesn’t read the third person pronoun correctly. What is
really being twisted around the finger?

Marilyn Monroe is a key subject in five poems. She fuels
his muse for some of his finest stanzas in image and meter. In “Six Stills of
Marilyn Monroe on Location for The
Misfits,” the meter is pleasing and even: “her black dress a shadow/of lust
left on the floor,” and again “the last white-coated lie/when the pills talked
to her.” The muse doesn’t stop with Marilyn although she certainly animates and
agitates; I note this and mark how I love these poems bristling with
intelligent erotic as in “Sting,” and “A Film Is only a Film if You Can Change
the Ending,” and “One Week Last Summer.”

From “Sting,” with “her hair, she loved when he touched
her,/ a husband who undid the pins/ for her hive of honey. His fingers/
involved in their study of hair, bangs/ over her brow, strands in their/ flight
over her ears….” And from “A Film is only a Film if You Can Change the Ending.”
“…This place they stood/ side by side, hands fumbling for hands; if they could
only/ back each other into the wall, hike a dress, find/ each other’s coda in a
fleshly interlude.” Or again in “One Week Last Summer,” “and her nipples are
the color/ of this pink orchid, bees in that flute-like sound/ they buzz around
the skin/ the dress undone in the heat.”

When I finish some of these poems, I’m overcome with a
feeling that’s not always welcome. I know it, I just don’t’ know if it’s
classified as a single feeling; it happens when I buy something and spend lots
of money. I’ve had that feeling a lot recently, as I moved and have replaced
all household furniture, a car, a grill, silverware, all the money eating
devices that were packed into depressing stores but are now in my possession.
Every time a few-hundred, or a few-thousand dollars went, I had that feeling of
guilt, that I’d done something wrong. Mixed into this life draining stress — after
spending money — is a fear, connected to loss. Whatever it’s called, that’s
it.

Consider this fourth and final stanza, in the light of
that feeling, from “The Opera Is the Saddest Thing to Hear on a Cold Day”:

               Suicide
is the best opera ever, those icy thoughts

               grasping
my brain, wanting only someone

               to
talk to me, a man admiring the knot

               in
the noose about to be thrown up around

               a
chandelier in an empty house.

How does this stanza make you feel? But this feeling, and
the situation giving rise to it can also be redemptive in its own way. And
while each poem in this volume arises from Thorburn’s deeply experienced credo,
you find the mother lode in stanza two of “Rain and Thunder”:

               Since
it rains wildly

               nothing
needs to be done

               and
blessed are the dead that the rain

               rains
upon. But here I pray

               that
it makes me a better man

               who
speaks to the tempest

               and
finds more than loneliness.

THERE IT IS! It makes no difference what metaphor
Thorburn uses, for every one of them drags up, dries out, polishes and presents
this credo. “I pray that it makes me a better man.” That’s the credo which
keeps this poet grinding out the poems even if he’s getting soaked in a brutal
rainstorm and nobody else is outside. It’s lonely out there, and he can’t even
borrow an umbrella, but worse, the wind is such a tempest that the dead are
almost envied. He knows how to make his point, using the word rain seven times
in this poem. But reconstruct rain, as he does, and it becomes the gateway to
writing, loneliness, and making him a better man and that’s how self-redemption
and sacrifice work in profound ways.

If rain and writing in the storm make Thorburn a better
man, crafting poems that are just plain fun help him celebrate it. I found that
playfulness in “Babe Ruth Riding Home on the Train to New York City with
Apollinaire.” Here, the sultan of swat raps an unlikely conversation with
Apollinaire. They need one another’s perspective, and for me, the poem is two
home runs on the same page. “The Babe, that other orphan, grabs a porter:/’Bring
us sandwiches and a multitude of beers.’/And the Babe wants to know everything
about the Eiffel Tower and women, and Apollinaire, a poet,/wants to understand
baseball.”

The ladies man wants to understand the poets’ world and
the poet wants to understand baseball? Wherever this is true, I want to go
there.

Moses climbed the mountain for sacred words, and since
they are sacred, Thorburn uses them with great reverence. This is no poetry for
the poorly equipped, the poems and their zeitgeist
will keep you on your toes, for while Thorburn doesn’t make a habit of choosing
the obscure word, here’s one I didn’t know: somnambulists. Just for fun, try
working that one into your next sketch, workshop or assignment.

Thorburn’s Romantic sensibilities remind me more of
Coleridge than Wordsworth. His verse is well hung with the grit of an ancient
mariner and strung out poet over the righteous rectitude of the Prelude’s stolen boat or naiveté of a
blessed babe. Certainly the nightingale and its song shows up in this poet’s
musical selections – and they are many – but the piano is a drunken piano,
worse yet it’s dangerous. A man watching some other men moving a piano nudges
his grandson in “The Drunken Piano,” and says “with a curled lip,/Pianos are
killers. The rain streamed/ with ghost images of Jerry Lee/ pounding out how pianos
can kill.”

In “All the Friends I Ever Had Are Gone,” Dylan sings but
its cacophony.  …”Dylan hell-hounded and
snarl-tounged,/as if Hibbing were going to burst in the song/ he’s singing from
World Gone Wrong.” In two other music themed poems, George Harrison plays as if
cancer is chasing him, and John Lennon is dripping rain –everywhere! He drips
so much that it turns to a river. That’s why Thorburn strikes hammer to the
anvil over and over, making sure to craft just the right amount of fun along
with the rain, a dual ambition evolving to redemption.

The Babe, on the train ride, concludes his conversation
with Apollinaire by bragging of his freedom. I would guess many of us will envy
this pontification, “the Babe pointing at the horses,/saying, ‘They are wild
like me.’”

Everyone finds a few poems in each book that become
favorites and a few that one doesn’t care for. Here, I most enjoyed “Autumn,”
and “Mingella Wears a Bathrobe at the Porch Door.” When reading Autumn, a Donald
Hall poem about leaves came to mind, but even without that reference and even
though this poem is autobiographical, anyone who’s ever been in a health-food
store, a cooperative or even a small grocery store can get to a place of seeing
and feeling the tragicomedy within this delicate sketch:

               Her
tallness reminds me of something so fragile

               that
I can’t even say it, always being far

               from
a kiss, or the fear that scars a heart

               when
I ask about her poems, her smile opens

               wild
precise windows of those nuns

               undressing
for bed; she’s written about their skin

               the
color of chrysanthemums.

               She’s
slender as we stand together.

               I
want to pull one of her braids like I did

               to a
girl in second grade.

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, autumn is short-lived, the
beast of winter is about to crash the party and everyone living there knows it.
That’s why, as this tall girl ends her shift and “prepares to enter a dark
October,” a high crisis point exists. I love the tension here as I sense an
imminent smashing of the delicate.

In the second, Minghella’s yard is full of leaves as
Thorburn directs the paper to Mighella’s front porch door. “Minghella, bald and
pajamas undone/ to a silver chest, doesn’t notice a leaf/ dripping on his head,
nor his bare feet/ deep in some frozen cellar.” 

Minghella is presented via the facts, yet I see a
complicated customer. He doesn’t understand what the leaves say as they swirl
around, nor does he feel the leaf on his head; he fails to appreciate the
paperboy, and he appears to be frozen and stuck in ice. Yes, it looks bleak,
but then Thorburn presents the paper as a baton, a sword and “winter’s old
bone,” and amazingly Minghella notices this. The presentation of this
pajama-clad persona creates a rock-hard duality for every reader. It can keep
you thinking for a long time.

Critics will certainly accuse Thorburn of being too
white-male centered and that is true. Yet cancer strikes both genders and loss
and love know no bounds. Still, he is bound by his life and locale. All I can
say in using a common expression these days is, “it is what it is,” whatever
that means.

I found “Dust Jacket Photo” went one stanza too long and
this is a criticism I’ve leveled before. In “George Harrison Wants to Play My
Son’s Guitar,” I was on a journey with Thorburn, his son, and 50 percent of the
Beatles. A journey where ghosts were rising up rather than coming down from the
rafters or through the walls.

The poem raises a premonition of John Lennon’s
assignation and George Harrison’s cancer; however, the poem took a wrong turn
at the end as it moved from the driving edgy grit of rock and roll and his
story of now-dead Beatles, back to himself and the pastoral image of his heart
in a chord. Sometimes the musician can get in the way of the poet. I know what
he wanted and I know what I wanted.

Writers, I understand drive and excavation, meta theory
and metaphor, I get the technical and the artistic, the hermeneutic and
historical, but until now I didn’t really get the sacrifice, the pain, the
rain. How do you poets do it?

Why do you sweat, anguish, and fight with yourself and
others over each word for at best, a half-pence? Now I know. I know because I
read it here … “to make me a better man.”