Alan Kaufmans Letter to Doug Holder and Review of The Esse

The Essential Doug Holder, New and Selected Poems

Reviewed by Alan KaufmanDoug Holder resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Because of my anthology, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, I am inundated by hopeful books of poetry, not to speak of the occasional slender volume that I purchase in bookstores, having read a rave review about it.

The bulk of such titles I march down to the used bookstore, to trade for credit. Others, failing to prop up my soul serve to prop up the sofa, which is missing a leg (I\u2019d throw it out if not for my Husky, Sloane, who lies enthroned upon it.)

The Essential Doug Holder: New and Selected Poem is too enjoyable to part with just yet, and too important not to be archived and preserved. So, after it remains with me for a time, I\u2019ll forward it for inclusion in The Alan Kaufman Papers in the Special Collections of The University of Delaware, thus ensuring that, at the very least, so long as there exists a State of Delaware, Doug Holder\u2019s poems will endure.

They must survive. They are important. Their impact instantaneous, their mastery clear. You go back, sometimes repeatedly wondering at how it is possible in a few lines of verse to have landed a KO punch so deceptively?

When coming out of his corner, Holder sports an easy shuffling style, spars with you gently, does a little footwork. Then bang, you\u2019re on the mat blinking up at the referee. The cumulative effect of a Holder poem is a bit fiendish, capped with lightening. There are poets like that. James Wright in the collections The Branch Will Not Break and Let Us Gather At the River; Sylvia Plath in her breakthrough volume, Ariel (especially the poem \u2018Daddy\u2019); Allen Ginsberg in the volume, HOWL and other poems; W.H. Auden in such classic poems as \u2018In Memory of W.B. Yeats\u2019 and \u201cSeptember 1, 1939.

In \u2018Daddy, Is He A Monster?\u201d , the first title in Holder\u2019s \u2018Collected\u2019, a kid traveling on a bus spies the poet\u2019s head \u201cpoking out of a protective shell of newspaper/ a suspicious crab\u201d and asks his father: \u201cIs he a monster?\u201d Holder, \u201cbloodshot eyes squinting/behind a shield of dark glass/the top of my head devoid of hair\u201d forces a smile. In response, the kid ducks behind his seat, screaming.

Holder, who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, plys a gambit worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Grasping that behind a child\u2019s curiosity lurks self-preservation, an intuition of the lurking potential for evil in all things, Holder forces a smile that just for an instant tears away reality\u2019s mask. The child\u2019s terrified response offers a scathing commentary on life: he vanishes. It begs the question: how many of us, confronted with life\u2019s terror, similarly disappear?

Or, take \u201cA Moose In Boston\u201d. What Holder sees trot down Commonwealth Avenue is not Bullwinkle but a regal creature \u201cwith patrician bearing\u201d that strides with \u201cthe precision of dancer\u2019s legs\u201d, peering at human faces behind shop windows as if strolling through \u201ca museum of surprise.\u201d This is lovely writing. The last we see of this lordly visitation are the \u201cpersistent flies\u201d of \u201cthe police/hot on its tail\u201d.

In an ironic twist worthy of his own verse, Holder worked for years in the McLean\u2019s Psychiatric Hospital, a landmark institution renowned for a client list of mentally ill versifiers that included Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Their peer in literary merit, yet Holden may be the only living poet associated with McLean who locked you into the straitjacket, rather than to wear it.

In \u20183A.M. on the Psychiatric Ward\u2019 Holder, walking the nighttime corridors of McLean\u2019s with a flashlight, is aggressed by a stark naked female patient. \u201cHer eyes beamed/sensitive as a doe\u2019s\u2013/then she lunged for me\u2013/I grabbed both of her arms/and we did our strange dance/ anointed by moonlight from the barred window/tripping the light fantastic\u2013/I was frightened and thrilled,/as she took the lead.\u201d

The poem\u2019s wry wit echoes Theodore Roethke\u2019s \u2018My Poppa\u2019s Waltz\u2019 in which the young Roethke\u2019s drunken father comes home: \u201cThe whiskey on your breath/Could make a small boy dizzy/But I hung on like death/Such waltzing was not easy.\u201d Both portray, with a mordant sense of humor, the frightening intimacy of irrational violence.

It some of his poems, Holder, who is Jewish, sounds schmaltzy subjects common to some Jewish writing\u2014hot dogs, grandma, the Yankees, pickles, the Bronx. As the author of a memoir, Jew Boy, that tightrope walked over similar subjects\u2013successfully, I hope\u2013I am aware of the pitfulls of tackling such iconic cliches. With deft skill and an unfailing eye\u2013and without abandoning Hamish values or virtues\u2013 Holder elevates such familiars into sharp, new vehicles for meaning and transcendence.

In \u2018The Last Hot Dog\u2019 he bears witness to the dying of his friend Sy Baum, who, as a last wish, requests a hot dog. Watching him struggle to eat, Holder sees rise \u201cThe mysterious, darkened delicatessens/under the elevated tracks/The Bronx gray afternoons/dining with his father./The sullen/ colorless meals/ though the franks/fully garnished, the bright yellow and green of mustard and relish. He swallowed hard/it was all/too much/to digest.\u201d In one particularly devastating poem, \u2018Where Is My Pocketbook?\u2019, the ravages of old age are mercilessly portrayed: \u201cI\u2019ve lived enough\u2014I\u2019ve done it all.\u201d/ She clutches her pocketbook/a weathered bag/to her weathered face./ Now it is resting/on her deflated breasts.\u2019/\u201dThis is unfair, I want to die!\u201d/ The light dims/ as evening surrenders/she screams shrilly/at the institutional walls/\u201dWhere is my pocketbook!\u201d And further along: \u201cHer fingers/move/like an arthritic snake/in search for/a flimsy thread/ to hold on./\u201dWhy must I suffer?/Let me go.\u201d The poem is almost biblical in its sonorous sorrow, but with a touch of Samuel Beckett in the spareness of the character depiction, the starkly set scene.

In his best work, Holder overlays an avant garde modernist scrim of unsparing concrete detail over the banalities of life, making his poems impossible to put down. Without Beat theatrics or Rimbaud-like behavioral extremes, yet somehow they shock us into recognition of the extraordinary beauty and terror to be found in the numbing, unavoidable commonplaces that assail our daily lives.

Like WC Williams, or Charles Resnikoff, Doug Holder opens himself nakedly to Life and gives us its poetry, unadorned and remarkable.