Every
Insomniac Has A Story To Tell. Patrick Bizzaro. Independent
Press: Greenville, North Carolina, 2005 (perfect bound,
72 pages).
You don’t have to be a biographical critic to
believe Pat Bizzaro’s poems. They are true enough
to not equivocate over whether they happened. Whether
he sat behind “Dennis Beasock” or not, enough
of us have that we are instantly “assigned to
be punched.” It’s the blend of art and truth,
artifice and reality, that is Bizzaro’s strength
and charm.
Even if we haven’t specifically been forced into
“Waiting at Church,” we’ve been where
we are “weeping against the moment and must endure.”
That grittiness is the backbone of Bizzaro’s poetry,
as often tempered only by a slip inside a surrealistic
fantasy for an escape, but not always to a safer place.
Rather, it may be to “the soft skin of a dream,
all language, a memory.” Or perhaps, as in the
title poem, “Every Insomniac has a Story to Tell,”
we find “things roll over in the dark before morning
bursts through the house.”
This kind of poetry, blending where we come from with
what we have been taught to be, is reflected in “Chain
Reaction,” one of several poems in which a speaker
remembers a very particular childhood, a father, a poignant
pain. Of the father in the poem he says:
He's not the kind who'd kiss my bald spot. No,
he's the kind who'd knock to show
the hand dissolve to knuckles.
The poem is pre-eminently well-schooled, yet cutting-balancing
between artifice (a conscious creation) and something
actual and true. Life is, by definition, far crueler
than art. Even Aristotle, after all, explained tragedy
as something terrible that we enjoy because we can walk
away from it!
A poem like “End of the Century, End of the World,”
starts with an epigram by Robinson Jeffers: “When
the cities lie at the monster’s feet, there are
left the mountains.” Only a serious academic could
begin that way! If the book continued in that fashion,
however, many readers could be bored. But Bizzaro can
balance against such erudition, lines from “Violence”
describing a place where “every beer bottle turns
sideways to duck.” I, personally, appreciate the
art but admire most the authenticity. Bizzaro becomes
that marvelous blend of talent that has grown from the
most rudimentary roots.
Sometimes he gives us obscurity born of deep study,
sometimes a conscious desire for deception (the very
essence of artifice). Best, the roots of Bizzaro’s
art are the tough streets of some cold, hard city, fathered
by men who cared as best they could until their own
sons could defend themselves.
In Part II of the book, the longest of the poems, “The
Dream Undreamed,” gives us smoke puffed back down
the chimney the way dreams can haunt us. The father/son
riddle that Bizzaro fathoms in his own past unwinds
into a new generation. Other poems that play on the
power of personal emotion and disappointment resonate
through the book. “Alone at the Palace Burlesque”
gives us a marvelously melancholy sexuality:
... Women danced
onto the stage,
women older than I had planned
to watch. And when they disrobed,
I thought of flaccid layers of skin
tucked into girdles.
Bizzaro, a native of Buffalo, NY--which itself is not
known as a particularly funny place--can weave these
tough observations in between some well-trained metaphors,
as in the poem “Taking the Cue” which gives
us “young academics urinating in wastebaskets.”
Any book that can blend well-school poetics with humor
and hard reality is well worth a read. When we are told
“a bill for damages is $20 to clean human feces
off the floor,” we know the poet is not a liar.
He is a man who can admit in “The Product”
that he’s “not learned a thing.” Rather,
he tells us, “I will eat from the garden of faith
until my tongue turns dark as the mysteries I dream.”
In the final lines of the final poem, “First Step
into the Invisible,” Bizzaro reassures his children
and his readers that “something invisible will
be there to hold you.” Indeed, the beauty of Patrick
Bizzaro’s creations is both palpable-earthy and
convincing-and ephemeral-as mysterious as conscious
metaphor. The poet and his creations are well worth
the read. The book, the poetry will, itself, “be
there to hold you.” |
