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 The Daily Mirror
by David Lehman
Scribner, January 2000.
160 pages.
Our Price: $12.80
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The power of the present moment to distract the poet from his
self-imposed discipline is great. The more vibrant the life or the more
revved-up the surroundings, the more likely the poet is to be pulled
away from the writing and toward what is happening right now. A
conversation, a phone call, even a tune that persistently plays itself
in the mind—all are mire, all potential quicksand into which the writing
can be easily sucked, never to re-emerge. But what if one were to
capture that vibrancy, incorporating its exuberant detail—even its
seeming irrelevance—into the writing itself, so that the snippets of
news and gossip, the weather, the music playing blankly in the
background, come to constitute the very substance of which poetry is
made? Poetry, in this case, might merge with experience, and the writing
of it become an activity frequently indulged in, a manner of preparing
oneself to meet the world in all its haphazard glory, a fitness of the
mind, inde! ed, a desirable vice.
The Daily Mirror,
David Lehman's latest book of poetry, demonstrates by its example the
power and fecundity of this approach. Lehman wrote the poems included in
this volume at the rate of approximately one a day over a period of
several years. The poems were then selected and arranged so that the
book spans a single year, starting with January 1 and ending with
December 31, and each poem has a yearless date as its title.
The daily poem, as Lehman remarks in his introduction, "allows the
poet to talk to the present...(obliging him) to be more attentive to his
immediate surroundings... than he might otherwise be." This works in two
directions. Just as the poet is more tuned to the moment, the moment
seems to be more yielding than it would be had it not been so intently
observed, so keenly lived. Because these poems are often occasioned by
the sort of chance observation that life in the city so generously
affords, there is little time between the experience itself and the
writing of the poem. This sets up a current of intimacy that runs back
and forth between the poem and the moment of life that it captures. And,
as the poet keeps in mind throughout the day his promise to write the
poem, experience becomes more poignant, enriched by the need to find in
it, or to make of it, something worthy of the poetic page.
Revitalizing the tradition of the urban pastoral, The Daily Mirror
picks up where Frank O'Hara left off, and the message is clear. Poetry
is not happening elsewhere; it is here, in the daily panorama of our
lives, "in the alley out the window" where the view of garbage is
"incomparable" (from "April 9") or over lunch, where, "Except for the
food this is / a great restaurant" ("February 5").
The Daily Mirror is
filled with what are clearly real events and people in the poet's life.
Specific names of places, musicians, writers, films and their stars
serve as icons for the reader, conjuring a cultural segment, a decade,
an ambience: "Jorie Graham is waiting / at the Knickerbocker ... she'll
have a gin and tonic / I'll go for a Tanqueray martini" ("April 19"); "A
book could be written / on the moment swing turned / into bop" ("May
12").
Throughout, the poet celebrates the joy of place, and the place is
unmistakably New York,
... where the sky retains its blue
as darkness descends in the
empire of light
on Thirteenth Street and First Avenue
"April 4"
Lehman's view of New York is sentimental, though self-consciously so:
hard as it is to live in
this city I'm still a sucker
for the
lights of Amsterdam
Avenue the bright yellow of
taxis in snow
"June 1"
A general gratitude for being alive is closely linked to a specific
gratitude for being alive in New York:
Fifty-two degrees light rain
and a thirty-minute delay at
the
Midtown Tunnel I'm back
giving thanks
"May 16"
Or, again, in the Whitmanesque lines:
The bridges that make Manhattan an island
and Brooklyn part of
another island
I sing
as Joe and I cross the Williamsburg
bridge
on the way back from our tour of the Brooklyn Brewery
"November 10"
Many of the poems do not so much praise the New York landscape as
incorporate its pulse:
Every minute is vital
...
I like looking at my watch
in
the dark when there are still
thirty minutes before the
first
blast of espresso breaks my thirst
"March 12"
Of cities I know New York
wins the paranoia award
the place
you'd least like
to be stuck between floors
on a temperamental
elevator
on 14th Street
"October 11"
The predominant tone of these poems is one of elation, an elation
that comes most often from a deep appreciation of the small things that
life presents to us, which may be enlarged if we accord them a
particular attention.
... The cabs were
on strike on Broadway so beautiful
a necklace
of yellow beads
I breathed in the fumes impossibly happy
"January 24"
am I happy I certainly am
as you would be, my friend, if
the
Queen of Sheba returned your calls
as she does mine
"April 15"
Some of the poems remain sequestered within the moment they report.
In others, Lehman pierces the surface that he perceives, pinning it to a
personal memory or to history or, wonderfully, to both. In "March 5,"
for example, Lehman starts with a weather report, goes on to announce
the murder of a deli owner, and then recalls a scene from early
childhood; rather than end there, however, he leaps to a bomb that has
gone off in Israel, thus associating the individual murder with a
wide-flung net of terrorism that claims Jews as its victims. Here, as
elsewhere in Lehman's poetry, time is a traveller's purse, a pouch of
worn leather containing two currencies, memory and history; poetry, the
string that draws it closed.
Thus, although the poetry is grounded in the whirlwind exterior of
what presents itself to the senses, its sources are more complex. For
example, historical events may be extracted from chronological time and
interleaved with the present:
and the date on the front page changes daily
today is December
16, 1997 yesterday was
December 7, 1941 and tomorrow the
treaty
will be signed in a railway car in Versailles
"December 16"
It is perhaps from dreams that Lehman derives his sense of the
historical present: "there is no past in a dream / everything is
happening now" ("April 3"). In the dreams that are reported in several
of the poems, as well as in the drift and stutter of dream-time, which
seems to be the setting for others, there is an odd sense of a history
still happening:
the door opens but no one walks in
something brushes lightly
against his skin
the professor is still talking
but the text has
changed
"November 16"
The guy in the gangster suit with the violin case
said "I have
something to give you," toothily grinning
It turned out to be an
orange pharmaceutical vial
but it contained ashes instead of pills
"September 30"
The implicit message that The Daily Mirror sends forth is that
happiness is attainable, but it is transitory. It is so fleeting,
in fact, that if we are not keenly alert to it, not sufficiently
receptive, we will miss it without knowing that it has come and gone.
Happiness is feather-light, ephemeral, a dust that fails to settle. Yet,
Lehman suggests, it can nevertheless be deeply experienced. The point is
not to ignore its fleeting manifestations, the small kindnesses and
gratitudes given and received. It is in the hesitancy with which this
fragile thesis is set forth that the full charm of these poems lies:
& here comes a thin old man swaddled in scarves,
he must be
seventy-five, walking slowly,
and in his mind there is a young man
dancing,
maybe seventeen years old, on a June evening—
he is
that young man, I can tell, watching him walk
"January 31"
Love is likewise assured, but likewise momentary, suspended in the
present. In lines reminiscent of Paul Reverdy's poem, "Pour le moment"
(particularly its final line, "C'est aujourd'hui que je vous aime"—It's
today that I love you), Lehman writes:
... a winter storm is coming
midweek I'll worry about it
later
for now the only storm I want
to think about is your
golden hair
"March 17"
... but we're too busy
kissing to notice or care
failure is not a
possibility
I like what's in your basket
"July 11"
The very mode in which these poems were written parallels the thesis
that Lehman tentatively proposes. Writing a poem a day is a way of using
the material that lies at hand, what the day really consists of;
furthermore, the process elicits "a willingness to take chances... You
may as well try anything," as Lehman writes in his introduction. Rather
than scorn the small, the ordinary, the "everyday," Lehman delves into
it, gleaning what there is to be had; in fact, redefining it, so that
each day does provide cause for celebration, an occasion for poetry:
Some people confuse inspiration with lightning
not me I know it
comes from the lungs and air
you breathe it in you breathe it out
it circulates
"January 1"
Finally,The Daily Mirror
brings to mind the many meanings of the word "fix": (1.) To tinker with
something until it is made right; (2.) to become obsessed or fixated, or
(3.) a quantity sufficient to keep one temporarily sated. Each of these
meanings is explanatory of The Daily Mirror.
The quickness, the alertness, the spur-of-the-moment, "try anything"
approach of these poems represents a tinkering with our notion of what
the poetic is, where its limits are drawn. And to write a poem a day
must surely reflect a state of obsession! Lehman also fixes his
attention (and that of his readers) on the immediate, perceivable world,
without losing sight, however, of its continuity with what is dreamed,
what is remembered. Finally, the "fix" that these poems provide is the
enhancement of experience that comes by bringing desire into the same
plane of focus as being.
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