Little Elegy

When it comes to poetry—and especially in the more unorthodox voice of Jonathan Aaron—the math doesn’t always add up.  I understand the normal accrual of details within a lyric poem: how images mount to form complex descriptions; musical phrases interlock to intensify emotion; and together a more complete scene takes shape—1+1+1 equals 3.  Jonathan seems to take a special pleasure in surprising feints, unexpected detours, elliptical leaps that leave our minds scrambling to fill in the missing pieces.  Within his compositions, sometimes 1+1+1 equals 3⁹.  Or X.  Or “baby ghosts.”  But there is such a relaxed colloquial tone to the writing, we can’t help but join that spirit of play.  Jonathan is the author of four fine poetry collections, and his work has graced such journals as The New Yorker and the London Review of Books.  Five times, he’s been highlighted in the annual Best American Poetry.  Typically, he employs a diction so straightforward and unpoetic, we’re caught off-guard when he casually starts up a conversation with Bach in one poem, or in another with his talking dog who happens to be partial to the work of Russian novelists.  Raising the dead through verse feels as matter of fact as sipping Calvados.  When I received my copy of his brand-new collection, Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press), I was planning to reprint the poem “Lateness,” a mournful narrative about his childhood friend.  But instead, I gravitated toward the much more provocative “Little Elegy;” I simply could not resist investigating why such a devious bit of joy had such a hold on me.  So perhaps we can think out loud together, pool our resources, relish the unanticipated delight.

We awaken inside the poem (so to speak) just as the houseguest enters the kitchen—none other than the Russian-exile and Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky.  At first, the relationship is unspecified: old friend?  Mere acquaintance, crashing after a reading?  That “mysteriously comfortable guest room/ bed”—do you think it grants a peaceful night’s rest because of some uncanny cushioning, or the deep affection surrounding it?  With the simplest interchange—“How’d you sleep?” “Terrific.”—the ease of the connection is becoming clear.  A normal moment: the houseguest sips black coffee, steps outside to smoke (how courteous!)  But when the Russian returns, he does something that not only conveys the intimacy of the relationship, it represents the sort of unselfconscious liberty we associate with teenagers: he opens the refrigerator (no permission asked, or needed) and happily gazes at the contents.  What gesture better demonstrates one’s membership in a household!  That icebox interlude—Brodsky “stoop[ing] into its cold glow”—felt to me oddly magical, like a prophet gazing in toward an oracle.  But it also brought to mind a bit of the history of this unique figure.

The very first time I came across poems by Brodsky was in Suzanne Massie’s 1972 anthology, The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad.  The once-exquisite city was just being rebuilt from the effects of 20^th century devastation.  The editor described the thriving literary scene: coteries of young idealistic poets (hundreds of them!) sharing hardships and relishing each other’s new work.  Massie recounts how they’d talk deep into the night until, inevitably, they’d end up at one apartment or another where someone would make scrambled eggs, pour glasses of vodka—a poor poet’s feast.  It’s an intoxicating combination: hardship plus innocence and a faith in the power of art.  Then: deeper crackdowns on dissent, a political trial, and Brodsky is branded ‘a cultural parasite.’  Soon, exile becomes his only option.

Making his appearance in today’s poem, Brodsky was already internationally famous, his fate secured—but does one ever fully outgrow deprivation?  (Until the day she died, my mother never had less than five loaves of bread in her freezer, a talisman to ward off the remembered pain of the Great Depression.)  And thus Brodsky speaks his holy litany: “I see ham. I see a chicken leg.// Do you have any meatballs?”  Ensconced in his new life, face luminous with a cold 60-watt glimpse of the promised land: what a picture!  We cannot know whether Jonathan is reporting or inventing the next declaration from the Russian master—“Times like this, nobody dies.”  Patently untrue, but emotionally accurate: sometimes it feels as if even our seemingly-simple lives contain an unearthly abundance.  How could death dare to exist at such a moment?  And yet of course it does.  Brodsky’s absence today attests to that.  But within Jonathan’s modest unrhymed sonnet—or in all the poems through which we learn to relish our capacity for shared delight—the dark shadow is forestalled.  The feast is ours; pass the plates around.