Lloyd Schwartz's “Who's on First?”
Lloyd Schwartz is, by any measure, a potent force in American letters. As a critic, his work as the classical music editor for the Boston Phoenix garnered him a Pulitzer in 1994; as a scholar, he co-edited the Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop, and was the editor of Bishop's prose for the centennial edition published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. And as a professor, at UMass Boston, where he taught for nearly forty years, he has helped mold and guide generations of younger writers (including yours truly) with his constant generosity of spirit, his gentle curiosity, his sly humor, and the sheer, inexhaustible depth of his knowledge.
In an early poem, written for his longtime partner, the painter Ralph Hamilton, Schwartz (quoting Hamilton) declares that “every painting is a self-portrait.” The implication is that every poem is a self-portrait, as well. No wonder, then, that Schwartz's poetry, as evidenced by Who's on First?, Lloyd Schwartz's new collection of selected and new poems (out now from University of Chicago Press), resembles the man: humane, artful, erudite complexity overlaid with a kind of humble simplicity—real feeling, real pain and real darkness, held at bay with warmth and wisdom and wit. These are poems about love, often doomed—love for a beloved who won't love you back in the way you need to be loved; love for a dying mother, love for a friend who breaks off the friendship without warning or word. (Schwartz has, like his mentor and friend Bishop, mastered the essential human art of loss.) But they'll also make you laugh out loud.
Many of these qualities are on display in the title poem, which is also the first poem included in the book. The poem takes the form of a dialogue, or many dialogues spliced together: we hear two voices, shorn of identifying detail, in conversation with each other, as if overheard through thin walls in a motel, in the middle of the night. It's a vaudeville setup, by way of Beckett. These are lover's arguments, of the kind where you talk at cross-purposes, reacting to each other without actually communicating anything. There's a Wittgensteinian eschewing of what can't be said; what shouldn't be said, in order for the poem, and the conversation, and the relationship, and the world—the world of the poem, but maybe also the world itself—to continue, for the voices to keep on orbiting around the unsaid in ellipses of love and rage. You've said these things, or things like it; you've had these things said to you—but these voices say them better, with daunting economy and grace: “Do you love me?” asks one voice. “Of course—; but I resent it,” the other voice replies. That “—;”— the em-dash indicating an absence, something that can't be said, can't be sustained—followed immediately by the semi-colon, to indicate both rupture and continuity—is vintage Schwartz: infuriatingly clever, but unobtrusive; economical almost to the point of miserliness; surgically precise; utterly necessary, functioning simultaneously to capture (to the point, almost, of caricature) the second voice, and also as a metaphor for the relationship between the voices: we can't go on—; we do.
This early virtuosity comes to fruition in a later poem, “Six Words,” a tour-de-force in which Schwartz employs, well, six words—“yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “sometimes,” “always,” “never”—their permutations and repetitions forming what is surely the most condensed sestina in all of English literature. In many ways “Six Words” reads as a sequel, at a distance of some thirty-odd years, to “Who's on First?”—here again there are two distinct and individual voices, here again we have the sense that we are overhearing a moment of intimate discourse that somehow encapsulates all such moments—and Schwartz does it all without using a single verb. It reminds me of Bach's “Air on a G String”; it reminds me of the interplay between Blake's songs of innocence and experience; most of all it reminds me of the hinge between Hopkin's Leaden and Golden echo, that moment in which ruin and hope rhyme: “despair, despair, despair, despair. // Spare!” In a later poem, “Titian's Marsyas,” Schwartz writes of the “pan-piping satyr who dared challenge a god.” Marsyas’ expression, hung by his feet as he is being flayed alive by Apollo—by Art—“reads like a smile.” That, too, might be a self-portrait, as is the last line in that poem: “A work is complete […] if in it the master's intentions have been realized.”
For those of us familiar with the man, it's impossible to read these poems—any of the poems in this book—and not hear them in Schwartz's own voice, an instrument as expressive as any orchestra, rich with humor, warm as woodwind, plaintive, plangent, and triumphant all at once. We are the lucky ones. But so are you, if you are new to his work. I have long had Lloyd's voice whispering to me as I write—my own tutelary spirit. Now you can, too.
Sam Cha is from Korea. He earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A 2017 recipient of the St. Boltoph’s Club Emerging Artists Prize, his work has appeared in apt, Assay, Best New Poets 2016, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Memorious, and Missouri Review. His chapbook, American Carnage, was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018. His full-length collection of cross-genre work, The Yellow Book, was published by [PANK] Books in 2020. Sam lives and writes in Cambridge, MA.