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Introduction: The Elemental Prance of Life
It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than
anything else in the world.
Frank O’Hara
Measure, measure your life in love.
‘Rent’ lyric (cited in Román’s Acts of
Intervention, 283)
death comes in it doesn’t say hello it stops and will not go
death comes in I taste it on your lips your ass your cock your
tits
Joe Lewis
death . . . I taste it; At the outset the stage is set for a collection of
poetry that simultaneously laments and celebrates both life and
death as elemental to each other’s existence. Any rudimentary
online thesaurus reveals the presence of prance - “the elemental
prance of life” - as something akin to strutting, flouncing, cavorting,
frolicking, swanning. Thus death is introduced within a complex
lexicon of living life to its fullest without forgetting – by re-
membering – the love that has left us but continues to live – to
prance - through our hearts.
to prance: The list of verbs describing fey physical gestures is
endless. In David Román’s formative text ACTS of Intervention;
Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS we are reminded of the
“anxiety and sense of inevitability already experienced by gay men
in daily life.” (Román 237). In the poetry of Joe Lewis this prance –
this anxiety - becomes a kind of self-elegy, an almost musical
refrain for the poet himself to begin with and to go back to over
and over again over the course of twelve elegant meditations that
move in and out of mirth and tragedy, testifying poetically to the
life of someone living with HIV for a prolonged period. Within a
larger personal scheme this self-elegaic quality radiates outward
toward a single object of desire (dedication to Michael Kelly). But
within that singularity lies the central paradox about sharply
personal poetry that attempts to speak of historic tragedy around
mistaken perceptions of illness. When we speak of a kind of death
still so fraught with scapegoating and homophobia we speak to a
multitude of suffering and surviving as we speak privately and
intimately of and to ourselves.
death sentences/syntax; The AIDS pandemic, having claimed so
many lives, finds a quiet knowing solitude in this collection of
poems, and garners strength for those of us coming into the
awareness of HIV within our own lives and bodies during a very
different period than the one when Joe was first diagnosed. When
I was diagnosed, almost twenty years later, Joe was among the
first people I spoke to about it. I had remembered telling him, when
I first heard his news, that this was not a death sentence, and
soon after, when I first heard Joe read some of the work included
in this collection, I was struck by Joe’s repetition of the idea of an
approaching death. It became – and continues to be – an affirming
and cathartic moment for me, where I can simultaneously embrace
and expel the intense fear of the kind of death that has taken the
lives of my closest friends. Joe is among the few who survived that
early period and his poems speak of a survival that sustains itself
through what he calls a “re-membering” throughout the collection.
His sentences and stanzas are crafted with the syntax for
surviving.
die laughing; In Die Laughing we are confronted with a journey
through a party-like loop of sorrow laced with fun-loving, lightly
erotic and popular images that bring us this sense of mirth and
sadness through a wondrous run-on lyricism.
dreams ending forgotten re-membering lush undergrowth
mould, oxidized copper broken glass sometimes I feel like
laughing in your face kissing your eyelids your spine making you
mine I hold you we cry yesterday a friend of a friend reported your
death last night I saw you and,,, .stillness in my heart dreams
ending forgotten like Roy and Dale we ride off into the sunset
make history bake pies swim in the Nile and die laughing
And then Sing Me A Song, with its beautifully hedonistic litany of
remembered screams, games, and unsung possibilities;
. . . We danced drank beer in discos too old and too young to care
about yesterday and too unaware to make plans for the day after
next
Too much was left unsaid I’m too mad to be sad and so sorry
for you to care about myself
I can not believe we still play these games, but the game isn’t over
till the last man is gone but we can still sing songs . . .
I don’t need to know “what’s going on”
Somebody
Please
Just sing me a song
But finally, with the closing poem Really I Forgot, the sum of the
poet’s collected parts - whether they exist in twelve poems or over
a prolonged period of a profoundly unwelcome awareness of
mortality – they rise up out of this extended elegiac refrain, as it
soothes us, frightens us, and teaches us to survive through the
presence of memory.
You tell me a well constructed poem is like a house,
I laugh and call you a louse, love like art like life is a bad
dream, sometimes, sometimes its just good plain fun, a deep dark
green woods overgrown and dank, decaying, feeding on itself, a
video image courtesy of the rock and roll industry, my mother, old
and broken down on hands and knees planting tulips in suburbia,
you stand screaming alone and forgotten loved
I said I’d call, say I didn’t have time, but really I just forgot
It is now September the cool night air, that smell one
remembers so well the colour of the sky, moon light, memory.
Re-membering.
This is not a dream, not a sad song, but life, sweet life. You reach
back a day a year a minute and you forget grammar. You lose
language you scream you laugh and in-ability you pull stones from
the earth.
You look forward to yesterday and you love yourself.
The mocking playfulness of the opening rhyme, followed by the
notion of looking forward to the presence of yesterday as it filters
in and out of daily – hourly - consciousness - identifies those of us
who have used performance - whether it be poetry on the page or
aloud onstage or in a cherished conversation with a close friend
and/or lover we do not want to lose too soon - a suitable
conclusion and introduction to the beauty and the value of these
twelve poems.
postscript - rent; An especial love of Broadway and the many
conflicted attempts to bring our lives to the musical stage finds
subtle expression in these poems as they majestically move from
one death refrain to the next, soaring across years of life and loss,
ultimately ending and beginning in a thirst for what Joe has called
“look[ing] forward to yesterday and loving yourself.” Past and
present commingle strategically and beautifully as Joe Lewis
allows himself and his reader to measure our lives in love.
David Bateman
