daryl hall is my boyfriend by erica lewis
Barrelhouse Books, 2015
96 pages – Barrelhouse / Amazon
In the poem “Write Something About Poetics” from her most recent collection On Time, Bay Area poet Joanne Kyger laments, “Now the local ‘wild’ is looking pretty trimmed and tame / with ‘Extreme Conditions’ / being the new weather norm,” a disappointment Kyger pursues with the question, “Where did / all those late night thoughts go?” But as lamentable as the yield of poetryland might be said to be, we can take up succor in erica lewis’s terrific new collection daryl hall is my boyfriend to return our ears and imaginations to “those late night thoughts,” spun with wisdom and pop.
I must hope that wisdom is not a word of slander for poetry because this book offers it in spades, even amid the unfolding of its procedure. As lewis discloses in the daryl hall’s outro, “I’ve never met Daryl Hall. And this book isn’t about Daryl Hall… The title daryl hall is my boyfriend suggests both an intimacy with the past and a distance from the past. I grew up listening to Hall and Oates, but these poems are not ‘about’ their songs or what they ‘mean,’ but rather what the songs trigger and mean to me now.” In this vein, each poem quotes and brackets (sometimes literally, but not always) the raw material of popular culture only to stretch it out and meditate upon the grain of its world and worlding. For example, we might be surprised to find the poetic impulse likened to canine puke in this poem, “like the flame that burns the candle the candle feeds the flame,” an oblique rumination on the Hall and Oates standard “You Make My Dreams”:
d crying alone in my apartment, thinking
about something i’ll never be able to redo this is a tribute to those years
of innocence where everything was perfect
& into sweet rhythmical lullabies
pieces of the people we love
d
d but i was like a dog returning to my vomit every time
knowing something of this world
i have to leave
i am not doing things of great importance here
and one should always be doing things of great importance
The restlessness of lewis’s tone—straying from maudlin to sweet, to ruthless, then wry—lends substance to the exploration of Hall and Oates’ oeuvre, scavenging through this realm of the faded popular for attachment and commitment. If, as Lauren Berlant states in Cruel Optimism, “all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept or scene,” we can witness in daryl hall both lewis’s moving out into the world and her determination to upend the enchantment of popular life, its set of givens and bland collectivities, to name what is cruel in her attachments, what, in Berlant’s phrase, is an obstacle to her flourishing, and quite possibly our own, too.
daryl hall insistently reminds us that its work is the work of growing up, and we are so lucky that lewis’s poetry brings such pleasure, such complex pleasure, to her portrait of exiting childhood, “whose haunting power” lewis warns us “we recover at our own risk.” lewis’s maturity is not a disavowal of nostalgia, however. Instead, daryl hall concretizes nostalgia into an object of meditation—a genre, a trope to be turned over by the poem. This means that for lewis growing up doesn’t require a severing of childhood experience but a new vantage and therefore a new vocabulary to make her childhood, generic as it is, differently significant. Consider this fragment of “you know there’s something you need right here and now,”
d we’re like those kids jumping with balloons between their legs,
d trying to make them pop
no, it’s not the singer, it’s the song
maybe it’s just very contrary of me to try to write simple shit
d but we keep coming back to imperfection and fragility
d
there are days as we know them and the world as we imagine it
“the next time you see me, i’m gonna have a new song”
We are given several instances of the typical—in the likeness of “those kids,” the givenness of “the song,” and what and who keeps “coming back to imperfection and fragility,” what or who will see me next time, when I have a new song. It is this new song that gives us, through its reordering of childhood, a portrait of lewis turning over fantasies and memories from her youth, checking the common sense of “days as we know them and the world as we imagine it,” the wandering and heretofore unregistered persistence of childhood in her adult life. lewis gives us another instance of this attention to maturation in “what’s this thing all about true blue”:
d around the edges of these involvements
contradictions that are so amazing and sad
that’s what really moves me
these toy-like feelings that fall out of sequence
d
d we be astronauts i am fencing off the stars
d
someone said once upon a time and we believed it
The language of stars reigns supreme in daryl hall. Here lewis the astronaut combats these celestial bodies, perhaps to allow her truly free-fall “out of sequence” through space, beyond the influence of their gravity and heat. The poet is a space traveler who sails through “involvements,” to chart “contradictions that are so amazing and sad,” if only she could stay adrift, unmoored, mobile. Though in this instance “stars” are something that must be fenced off, this might not always be the case, perhaps, to properly consider their cruelty, we must attach ourselves to the stars, get a grip on their pull on us. In “it’s you and me forever,” lewis writes,
d slits are stars /
d stars are slits
d
[into] something so random/ the random of opposites
and people will always be trying to make sense of what exactly this is all
d about
d what makes it last
And in “everyone high on consolation”:
i speak of the stars but it’s my mistake
these tiny objects
a heap of space
just sad for everyone else
[…]
we roam in search of a language that can grapple with our multiple
d realities including
d the delusional one
In the search that daryl hall recounts, stars become a shorthand for what is out there influencing and inspiring life, the events that we check in on from time to time to give our lives meaning, to reinforce identity, to keep the lines of our thoughts taut. This is the star power of celebrities, of pop music too, as the Hall & Oates epigraph for daryl hall reminds us, “The old songs never end / Gives you something to believe in.” To read erica lewis’s new collection is to read her warping the stars.
