Andy Levy
Paper Head Last Lyrics
publisher: Roof Books, 2000
isbn: 0-937804-83-5
price: $11.95
Levy sets out upon his poetic project with an ethics of observation and agitation, setting out with no definable goals but with a quasi-Buddhist, quasi-materialist calling to be in the world, moment-by-moment, recording its contradictions and, when there is beauty, its necessity and how it is learned:
A surfer in methodological self-consciousness
forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting
to wipe clear tihs screen with
some cloth of disparity
What we will try to become, that labor
curious about each
Not curious about God, or sexual mores
[69]
The idiom in the long title poem which takes up most of this book is somewhere between Williams' "Asphodel" and the fluid, polyglot and cross-spliced rhetorical strategies of Barrett Watten's Progress or Lyn Hejinian's The Cell (echoes of Oppen also abound). Levy never sounds entirely like he's "speaking" to one singular figure, like a Flossie, but this poem-including-history seems poignant in a way that suggests the Modernist, never entirely submitting itself to the rigors of method or foregrounded structure.
Indeed, Levy is willfully "transcendental," not minding to point the eye up toward an ideal or universal Other, even if it is one he doesn't choose to name: "Did you write the great line to take everyone / to another earth," [69] he writes, and later, as if turning directly on his Language poet heritage:
A philosophy of pissing off the other side
abandoning the secular car
making and unmaking time.
[74]
Later, however, he takes shots at what might be called the subtone of transcendental philosophy in mainstream, class-defined American culture:
A memory of light
The turd of transcendence establishes a hillside estate:
Transcendence Hill Club
Croquet is the game of choice for its ladies
All the members are ladies at
Transcendence Hill
[51-52]
The tone is primarily meditative, but occasionally the "news" breaks in (not to mention the occasional Andrews-esque obscenity-as-direct-address) to trouble the isolation of this mind.
The worst one can say about the poem is that its politics, when they take center-stage, seem undeveloped; one section riffs on potential lines of a Nixon biography and smacks a bit of preaching-to-the-converted, while some other targets for a sort of name-calling include the GOP and the Democratic National Convention ("Troglodytes and Neanderthals"), the NRA, and the military, while passing up the contradiction inherent in some of the Protestant "good-works" philosophy of the poem -- the Poundian "make it new" -- and their linkages to the basic power structures of these institutions.
But as a whole, Paper Head Last Lyrics along with the beautiful essay "An Indispensible Coefficient of Esthetic Order" -- with their guerilla attacks on the problematic rise of "virtual realities," and hence virtual moralities, in a de-spiritualized America -- presents the image of a complex, invested mind at play among words, and with a poetic ability that is rare.
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