`Very Excellent Company'

I spent some of Sunday afternoon reading The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate’s first book of poems, and experienced the rare feeling that I was in the company of an adult American, a mature contemporary, who happened to write excellent poetry. In his work I detect no whining or preening, no confessions or gratuitous self-displays. He seems, literally, a man of the world, with interests, learning and experience beyond the cloister of self, even beyond poetry. In “Warm Canto,” named after a Mal Waldron composition, he writes:

“I don’t know how to behave
in the face of ultimate things.
It’s the kind of ignorance that creates
A sound, like a blind prehistoric fish
That hums to the passing of an ocean storm.”

I immediately memorized the first two lines, and wished I had written them. Judging from references in the poem and the book’s dedication, “Warm Canto” concerns the death of his father-in-law. Slate tactfully solves the problem always posed when a poet is moved to write an elegy: How to render one’s reaction to the loss without eclipsing the one who has died. Slate concludes: “The heat kills/the reverie that kills the real.” “Kills,” for once, doesn’t read like a metaphor.

Slate is, among other things, a business executive, moving in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives – American artists in disguise, in a culture that expects its artists to be conventionally bohemian. Finance and geopolitics show up in Slate’s poems, not drugs and pop-cult references. If Frederick Seidel grew up, he might write like Ron Slate. One poem, “End of the Peacock Throne,” concerns the suicide of Leilah Pahlavi, youngest daughter of the late shah of Iran. I’m tempted to share the poem with some Iranian friends, but I’m afraid it might break their hearts. Slate often ends his poems in a key of bittersweet beauty:

“Life is the keeping of a single breath.
With a final glottal gasp, Princess Leila dies
Between two annihilations:
The time before the garden
Was imagined, and the time after.”

After reading most of Slate’s poems I turned to Robert Pinsky’s foreword, where he says, “these are distinctly the poems of an adult.” I was reminded of the entry James Boswell made in his journal on May 16, 1763, the day he met Samuel Johnson in Tom Davies’ bookshop in Covent Garden. He describes Johnson as “of a most dreadful appearance,” speaking “with a most uncouth voice.” Fear overwhelms him, but admirations triumphs:

“Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company.”