Here We Are

Lewis Warsh (1944–2020) was inspired as much by Frank O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ style as he was indebted to Gertrude Stein’s experimental life writing. That said, from his earliest works to the posthumous collection Elixir, Warsh’s poetry sounded like no one else’s.

Take the very first poem in Elixir, titled ‘Night Sky’. It opens with the oddly funny tercet ‘Night-life in the country, / beyond the sighting / of a raccoon’. These lines are essentially a loaded and cartoonishly absurd question. What, we are asked implicitly, might constitute the essence of night-life in the country ‘beyond’ the mere sighting of a raccoon? The poet, these lines propose, will lead us forward by showing what is possible beyond our own limited imaginations.  

Humour however is complicated by a sensuous and simultaneously melancholy emphasis on sound. For example, the repetition of the word ‘night’ that opens seven out of the twelve stanzas creates a practically incantatory effect. ‘Night-life in the country’; ‘night life in the treetops’; ‘night-time in the’; ‘Night-life in the Bronx’; ‘Night-life on the Pacific’; ‘Night-life anywhere filled’; ‘Night-life in the baggage’. Stanzas six and seven revel in the sonic pleasures of place names and consonants:

North train
arrives in Wassaic, I get
off at the last stop.

Tuesday matinees
at the Triplex. The forklift
operator’s wife at the end
of the bar.

Words here are as important for their percussive and slant-rhyming effects as they are for their signifying qualities. Warsh is a poet who excels ...