Karen Klein on Doug Holders poetry

INTRODUCTION

Doug Holder\u2019s
poems get to what is essential to him and to all of us --mortality. But

his poems aren\u2019t gloomy or preachy like the ubiquitous Latin
medieval poems known

as \u2018memento mori,\u2019 remembering death. Holder\u2019s poems are
vitally full of life, irony, astute observations, side-long glances of humor. Even
when there is an ending, there is, most always, a qualification making the
ending less absolute, as in the poem which commemorates the iconic restaurant Jacob Wirth (Boston, Mass. 1868 to 2019):

\u201calmost---/tolerate/them
all.\u201d Using \u201cquite\u201d and \u201calmost\u201d the
poet avoids stark alternatives: alive/dead or reject/tolerate and finds his way
to evade absolutes.

Whether he tolerates them all or not, Holder\u2019s observational
skills are magnificent and

magnanimous in his generous, wide-ranging embrace of our
common humanity.

Although his short
lines and complex line breaks are nowhere like Whitman\u2019s, his

inclusive scope of persons and places is, and ranges from teenagers at The Mall \u201cdoing

the twist/with their fingers/on their cell phones\u201d; \u201ca man at Ratner\u2019s whose life has been/reduced
to yelling at a round shouldered /waiter, \u201cyou call this a pickle!\u201d to his
dying friend in Lung Cancer:Stage 4 whose
only wish if he could do his life over \u201cmy parents/ had sent me to a private
school.\u201d The incongruity of the dying man\u2019s
wish, considering the situation, shows the poet\u2019s skillful use of juxtaposition
to temper sorrow with humor as well as his ability to listen well and capture
the perfect detail.

Holder\u2019s mastery of the art of the detail is convincingly evident
in the cascading plethora of descriptions from Portrait of An Artist as a Young Poseur 1974-1983. Grounding
details of his personal life in the exact places they happened, he gives us
a map of Boston\u2019s Ends and Squares,
Streets and Avenues, where his various jobs were, where

his preferred foods-- hot dogs at Buzzy\u2019s croissants at Savoy Bakery, roast duck at
Ying-Ying, the dark beers and dark bars and the women in them and in the mental
hospital where he worked the night shift; all the characters with their voices:
what\u2019s it going to be, hon, I can\u2019t stand all this eating! Look at
this fuckin\u2019 character.

There is theatricality in these energy driven, tumble of
associations organized only by place as their titles indicate. At Ken\u2019s Deli in
Copley Square, there\u2019s the fat manager, the rotisserie chicken, the dishwasher,
drag queens in the men\u2019s room, the waitress, and actors off from a gig. Shakespeare\u2019s
claim \u2018all the world\u2019s a stage\u2019 could describe these scenes, and all in them become
characters. If Shakespeare\u2019s right, we\u2019re all players and can imagine ourselves
into some of those scenes\u2014the \u201cloneliness/made visible\u201d in the bars at 3am, the
fire alarm driving us from our apartments\u2014the beautiful chaos of these dramas,
the astonishing voices of ordinary life bring us intimately into the poems.

Even the poet sees himself as a \u201dlate night character\u201d or in
a \u201cThornton Wilder play.\u201d

Naming himself a \u201cPoseur,\u2019 like an actor, he has clothing
props: a Filene\u2019s Basement jacket, red scarf , beret which cannot enhance his narrow
shoulders, flabby body, skinny neck, thinning hair. He mocks the absurdity of
his attempt to bolster his \u2018frail ego.\u2019 But
he does not mock his desire to be a writer, to be with poets and writers, to
have his own Algonquin. Discovering the Beat poets and their promise of freedom
from conformity,

he continues his journal entries, \u201ctrying to construct a
narrative of the chaos of my life.\u201d

Holder\u2019s sense of self is complex and fluid. Unsparing in
his self-descriptions, he could

be the monster as the child on the bus sees him, or I saw myself on the Dudley bus that day when
the poet sees a stranger \u201c that man/Perhaps me.\u201d a reflection? another life he
imagines he might have? An identification with a stage character, I Am Willy Loman from Arthur Miller\u2019s Death of a Salesman--the play\u2019s title never
specifically mentioned but immediately associated\u2014could be a mixture of himself
and his father. Doug Holder, both the
person and the poet, is a daily walker all over the city. Like a salesman
making his rounds \u201cto shoot the same old shit/another round of pitches\u201d the
poet says, half

humorously, half seriously \u201cThey love me, they love me in
Somerville,\u201d Holder\u2019s home

town. And they do.

The most incongruous, semi-serious merging of identities is
the poet walking on Truro

Beach, followed by
an old crab, \u201cwe were both in our shells/ suspicious narrow slits of

eyes.\u201d Whether we can read the crab \u201cshell\u201d image as
indicative of the poet\u2019s sense of himself or just his astrological sign, there
is a restraint in these poems, an avoidance of emotional verbal extravagance while
depicting disturbing material. Holder\u2019s detailed

descriptions of the deaths of two men, one on the locked
ward, the other on the Red Line

conclude with ironic comments which leave us smiling, not
sorrowful. His poetic skill

in presenting Diane Arbus\u2019 photo of the eleven year old girl
\u201ctrapped in a crocheted/

cocktail dress/a child/forced in a cage/of carnal contours\u201d --
repetitive alliteration

emphasizes her entrapment, the densely suggestive adjective
\u201ccarnal\u201d indicates both her

body and the viewers\u2019 perversity--distances us a bit from
the photo\u2019s awfulness as we

admire the poet\u2019s craft. Distancing has no part in his concise
evaluation of his father\u2019s

apologetic words while getting his morning vodka \u201cCaptured
in dementia/and the maudlin,\u201d maudlin a place Holder never goes. His tone is
consistently multiple: wary, clear-eyed, unsparing, rarely judgmental,
ironically generous, sharply witty with undertones of sadness. If there is bitterness, it is tempered by
compassion.

Both compassion and restraint combine in the poems about his
nonagenarian mother.

Most women can identify with her cry of Where is my pocketbook? her fear of losing it, her\u201cflimsy thread/to hold onto,\u201d as
encroaching dementia prevents her from knowing she holds it. The poet refrains
from describing his emotional reaction to his mother\u2019s cries not to suffer or her
wish to die. This poem is about her, not him, about her pocketbook, but his
detailed description of its contents shows what careful attention he is paying
to her. Some adjectives verge toward humor: \u201cerrant lipstick,\u201d\u201cdeceased phone
numbers\u201d; language, adroitly used, deflects tears.

But there are his tears, \u201cbarely\u201d contained, in Holder\u2019s
poem about his father\u2019s \u201cshrunken frame,\u201d his difficult urination. The pathos
of old age, the failed dreams, the inability to

\u201cface the dark\u201d when death is not an abstraction\u2014no ironic
relief or humor here. \u201cWrestling with My Father, the title of one section of
poems, indicates the complexities of that relationship, the unending problematics
of understanding it through poetry. At

Benson\u2019s Deli with Dad
reaches deep and comes up with treasure. Beginning with their failed attempt
\u201ctwo Jews\u201d awkwardly tossing a football to fulfill some All-American

father/son ritual \u201cthat neither had any belief in,\u201d the poem
moves to a luscious descrip-

tion of the deli food consumed by the poet, his father and
brother, the pleasure they feel

generously shared with the readers. The scene concludes, as
many of Holder\u2019s poems

do, with an insight:\u201d And for me/those afternoons/that warm
nostalgic hue/is all/that

rings true.\u201d

That may be all that rings true for Doug Holder, but so much
of what he has written

rings true for his readers, resonates with them. Writing
this introduction, I was tempted

to toss out all my verbiage and just quote line after line
after line from his poems. They\u2019re that good. One of my favorites, and a
surprise, is Canned, a serious
subject presented with imagination and wit\u2014pure Doug Holder. Who else could
write a poem about tinned fish? The haunting fear of the dead rat\u2019s carcass,
death\u2019s symbol, doesn\u2019t shadow this poem; the fish are already dead. They have
experienced \u201cterminal canning,\u201d an unusually humorous way of thinking about the
role of coffins. Death is obviated, no longer fearful because it\u2019s already
happened. The poet moves on to attempt a description of their \u201cpredicament\u201din
the tin, and decides no poetic flourishes, just the facts: \u201cpacked in, like,
well,/what they are.\u201d In a brilliant move, Holder anthropomorphizes these fish
(I\u2019m assuming sardines) and wonders \u201cwhat school/of thought they/were in,\u201d
punning on the usual term for the swimming formation of small fish and the term
used for Greek philosophers and peripatetics in their different schools of
thought. The poem moves

away from death to speculate about what was happening before
their \u201cterminal canning,\u201d

\u201cwhat were they planning?\u201d A very important question for us to ponder\u2014what
are we planning?-- and one which he could, and probably does, ask of many of
the characters that swim in his poems.

Drinking coffee in My
Mother Prepares Me for Death, she and her son sit \u201cIn silence/

we have said it all\u2014\u201c; the poet adds in a kind of throwaway
dismissal \u201cmore or/less.\u201d

But there is more. These poems are for grown-ups, whatever
their chronological age.

Read them and find out. You\u2019ll be very glad you did.