Defining N.J. Poetry - December 1992

 

Personal vision helps shape Palisades

  

There's jealousy in my admitting this: but Joel Lewis impresses me. This is not new. I noted growth in his poetic ability when he first came back to New Jersey from Allen Gingberg's writer's retreat in Colorado back in the early 1980s. He read new poems before the Great Falls Festival in Paterson. Something different had eased into the voice contained within his words. I thought it was me growing attentive, but over the years, Joel's voice grew stronger and his position in New Jersey poetry less and less tentative.

That voice took on weight when he edited "Bluestones and Salt Hay" for Rutgers University Press, the first significant anthology of contemporary N.J. poets since the early 1970s. While protest over exclusions rose from many quarters of the poetry scene, none could question the actual content. "Bluestones" defined the state of New Jersey poetry for the 1990s in a way no other publication could. His position in the scene became guaranteed.

A few years ago I worked with Joel on a Herschel Silverman Chapbook and he impressed me with his insights. But most recently, Joel exploded onto the national scene by winning Yellow Press' Ted Berrigan Award. The product of that contest has just been published, and "House Rent Boogie" is a work of art.

At his book party in Hoboken last June, Joel read selections from the book which I needed to read again, just to be sure the words were real, his poems bringing back images of Paterson and its CETA-era of the late 70s in graphic detail.

But Joel grew up in North Bergen and lived for a few years in Weehauken, before ending up a happy resident of Hoboken, and his vision of these places is a large part of what makes this book work. He opens the book with a poem called "Ringer":

 

                                Tonight, Hoboken is peopled

                                by absent men. Their shaved feet

                                speak of betrayal, their worlds

                                a walk of dreams where

                                nothing gets invented.

 

Joel captures moods in words the way impressionist painters did, with a swab of image that from a distance creates a total effect, making connections not always perceptible close up. It comes out of an intimate affair with this line of cities running north and south along the Palisades, involving other poets to whom he has enough affection for to allude to their unpublished works. Like images of his youth through fellow North Bergen Poet Michael Reardon and the teenage ritual of dangling old sneakers over power lines.

 

                                But in my eleven years in West New York

                                & fourteen years in North Bergen

                                I've never seen Anybody<197> Nobody!

                                perform this adolescent rite.

 

But there is a state of mind in these poems as well as place and time. Joel has long struggled to become the chronicler of his generation of poets, the poetic Keroauc, the 20th century Whitman. He has walked the Palisades studying their cliffs the way Whitman did Manhattan, finding symbols among the routine events and already invisible structures of everyday living.

 

                                The Palisades' approach was strewn

          with Thunderbird shards

                     & you couldn't escape

                                the George Washington Bridge

               & its mechanic lecture of engines

 

In "Journal Square" Joel brings us there with sharp photographic images of downtown Jersey City, yet managing to make these images serve a more distant pattern as if collage of cut up photographs making for a whole different scene, as from this description of people flooding out the Path Train at rush hour:

 

                                In the torn lid of a coffee styro,

                                I see zig zag fortunes against

                                hard siroccos

                                and seen from here

                                is the wide Manhattan skyline

                                in the evening's deck

                                with the black pips assembling

                                their own mingling

                                music.

 

In some of Joel's poems, here and elsewhere, I find it difficult to put the total vision together, as if somehow I have misplaced a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But this limitation may be my own. Walking the streets of these cities, I find myself lost in unfamiliar images of city life, where people seem strange to me. For Joel, they are unbearably familiar, each fitting into his world and poetry as much his creation as real things. Book stores or newspaper shops become the shadows of a deeper, haunting mystery. "Everything was edged in shadows," he writes in a poem on Paterson, "while cars hissed past my glasses."

Perhaps the overall picture is one of Joel himself, a complex, poetry-political creature who has spent years working up through the poetry scene<197>enjoying a reputation of sometimes blunt honesty with both friends and enemies. Perhaps the overall vision of his poetry has an honesty I don't yet want to see, about my life as one of the Journal Square dots piling out of the train station in daily robotic habit, or about Joel's life painted in poetry across the face of the Palisades: "Poems as so many old familiars heard read through/a half-decade of friendship/these pauses between the parts of our lives."

But the language and word-images and haunting sense of space make this work required reading for anyone attempting to understand life on this strip of land between Manhattan and the Meadowlands, and whereas "Bluestones and Salt Hay" defined other poets in New Jersey, "House Rent Boogie" makes Joel Lewis' personal mark on the land, leaving readers with a slightly altered--  and perhaps more.

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