Frank Lima: The poetry of everyday life and the tradition of American darkness

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 1997 by Shapiro, David

Frank Lima's poetry is a poetry of everyday life, but only a poet of enormous strength and fearlessness is capable of describing the everyday. One might say that the life Lima describes is so exceptional that it cannot or should not be placed under the idea of the everyday. But I think his inventory of traumata in childhood, of drugs and dangers, of incarceration and release, of his triumphs as a man, a father and husband, a cook, a translator, an artist--this inventory in its inclusiveness of urban space is exactly what the French thinker Lefebre meant by the production of the everyday. Lefebre suggested that the real philosophy of modern life could be accomplished by the description of a single day. Lima, learning from poets as various as Villon, Neruda, O'Hara, Lowell, and Corbiere, emerges with a mixture of day and dream that is a maximal realism and rendering of his more than a half-century of living. It's a story of survival and, crowned by his compassion, much more than any facile listing of a victim's horrors. He concludes Inventory: New and Selected Poems with extraordinary poems of religious depth and poems that create a public, even vatic voice--poems for all victims, for a Hasidic youth, for those bombed in Oklahoma, for an older mortal prophet, and for is own children glimpsed in their fragility and resilience.

This development towards poems of wisdom is an unexpected delight and a sign of his status as a major poet. When I met him in 1962 Frank Lima had already written extraordinarily sensuous descriptions of the street and the body, and he had already conquered any timidity in poems that shocked everyone, concerning incest, drugs, and violence. Instead of pursuing this as a single reductive mode; Lima accepted influences and worlds that made him larger and richer. He showed a disdain, he once told me, for Beat poets who wanted to return to a poverty he wanted to transcend. He was always willing to look backwards and even with nostalgia he studied, but he had a ferocious way of engulfing new experiences. After the first volume, and early poems that are as poignantly particular and sharp as prison slang, he learned from Frank O'Hara and wrote poems that sweep us into abstractions and stories that are mythical and urbane and humorous. He had always had this humor, as in his eerie comparison of a lover to a judge of the criminal courts, but the poems now accepted and assimilated a disjunctive poetics of the New York School. He loved this tough art of welding disparate poetic worlds, and dedicated his own art to that of David Smith's heraldic and monumental sculpture.

He has never stopped learning, never stopped being a student of himself, language, and the city. He became a master chef, cooking having always been one of his talents, received a master's degree from Columbia with the same earnestness that had led him to study Villon in his teen years even while in rehabilitation, and he has now become the master of a magical-realist style that I identify with Marquez as much as with Neruda. Strangely, he has turned a prose fragment into a dazzling lyrical-narrative autobiographical sequence. In the future, we may expect more from this novelistic mode that includes amazing cinematic sequences, for example, a horrifying scene in which he observes his father drunk and near death in a park. Lima, a New York surrealist, completely seizes the rage and detachment and strangeness of this vision. It is something he accomplishes from his earliest work, but now it is not just snapshot photography at its best--no small achievement itself--but a masque-like architecture of great scale, where the instants add up to a whole social vision.

After our first amazing meeting, I was touched by what Kenneth Koch called, in his introduction to the first chapbook of his poems, his courage and his honesty about pleasure and poverty. These early poems are still luminous achievements, and there can be no anthology of the last fifty years of poetry that does not include something of these amazing poems without a loss. No poem that I know of speaks like "Mom I'm All Screwed Up" about childhood torments and its ferocious intimacies. No city poems about Spanish Harlem have ever yielded the completely convincing tones of these early works. They are fast, furious, and alive with the musical grace found in this sudden bit of landscape and church music from "Abuela's Wake":

Dios te salve Maria Dios te salve Maria

outside

the snow-mouth of December tinked on the windows

"Pudgy" rises to the sweetest and most serious sensuality in "O my chocolate princess/ I lay in bed/ smelling of Lifebuoy soap and toothpaste/ light a stogie and watch the smoke/ unshoe ghost-nude thoughts." This is a poetry of a young man with great insight into the body's possibilities, but it is important to realize that he didn't stop with this kind-of expressiveness.

He went to school with the "ordinariness" of the New York School and the empiricism of his great friend and mentor, Frank O'Hara, and always learned too from the perfected finesse of Kenneth Koch. With such a different vision, it is hard to believe that he could synthesize these elements, to sublate them into his turbulent scenes: "where the fish bring light to the sun/ waiting for the weakness of a dreamer." But that is exactly the task of his middle-period lyrics and prose in which he mixes hedonism, picturesque whimsy, and his particular form of honesty, emerging with extraordinary strange tales of the ordinary as in his "1/2 Sonnet," or his suddenly violent "Plena" or "Postcard" or "Patchouli." If his usual forte and dramatic instrument was naturalist description, he had now expanded his palette to include something as large and "anthropologically" vast as his "Cuauhtemoc": "I always bring captives here/ and let the grapevine choke them."