Lohrey, David. Bluff City. Terror House, Budapest, 2020
Bluff City is a collection of over 40 poems, stories and dramatic pieces, followed, for good measure, by an interview with the author. The main difference between the poems and the other pieces is that the former are more intensely ironic, so that it is harder to identify the authorial voice. And in a time when confessional poetry (often shot through with less compelling versions of surrealism than Lohrey's) reigns almost unchallenged, how welcome this is. In poetry, prose and drama alike, Lohrey has a talent for letting his subject matter speak for itself, for entertaining a myriad voices and points of view without endorsement or apology.
To speak of the poems first: these are no earnest explorations of the psyche, but truculent, absurdist divagations into social mores and public discourse, of contemporary American life, and life in this ever more American world. How much and how many of the lives on display, from Los Angeles to Saudi Arabia, are Lohrey's, cannot be readily discerned, though this is a question the reader cannot help but ask.
The defining trope of Lohrey's verse is parataxis--that, and non-sequitur. If the speaker's thoughts seem disconnected, at once fantastical and banal, it is because the adhesive of the lyric 'I' is lacking, having been replaced by the metastatic logic of media representation and cultural reverberation. The characters who appear in the emergent narratives are often political and media figures, the likes of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Kanye West. In this, Lohrey's collection is very much of its time, which is the other thing that makes good satire hard to achieve--besides the fact that what has sometimes been dubbed our 'clown world' culture comes already self-satirising, with super-size absurdity built in, while its prominent figures come and go with such rapidity, being consumed and, as it were, shat out in the space of a single Presidential term, if not less. As such, reading Bluff City a year into the Biden Presidency produces a quaint effect in places, even though the themes still resonate where the toupee-sporting subject-matter is yesterday's man.
There are terrible shades of Bill Clinton in Obama's dream of life
after the White House: "I want a private jet and I want a valet."
He wants a man to hold his underwear. What you really need,
my coach said, is an attitude adjustment,
'bend over.' There was a time Polyanna had it right.
The paratactic statements, delivered like deadpan one-liners, pile up in their polysemy. What is the allusion to Polyanna? The knowing leer of the Cheshire cat is everywhere.
One idea leads on to another without any constant theme, unless it be cultural decline. When inhabiting the persona of the sentimental baby boomer, Lohrey likes to insinuate that it was better in the old days; but then, he also says '[Cher] is my moral compass'. One never knows what is ironic and what, if anything, is earnest. Much of what he writes about political celebrities sounds as if it might have been written by a hack biographer and then hacked up into verse paragraphs. It is an absurdist, a dadaist aesthetic of deliberate ugliness conveyed in a tone of jocular masochism: 'There's an enormous dog turd in my garden, / but I'm required by law to love it.' Given such a funny idea of love, a paean like the following is a little hard to process:
Donald J Trump is often very good. What he is great at is being Donald--
the only one we will ever have. When he dies, any outpouring of affection
will come about because the American people feel he remains in some
indefinable way close to them, one of a kind but one of their own--a regular
guy who at heart just wants to be rich.
Wordsworth had 'visionary dreariness'; Lohrey has a sublime banality that borders on and frequently tips over into hideousness. But the writing is journalistically breezy, its texture loose and vague. The appeal lies not in details but in overall, cumulative impressions. The absurd and the banal mingle line after line to create an open structure based as much on discontinuity as its opposite across the terrain of America's advanced cultural dementia.
[...]Let's face it: having dogs has made me
Into a canine. They made me feel compassion and I've lost
My sense of identity. I no longer feel superior. When I meet
A fluffy mutt I no longer want to run; I want to fuck it.
A loss of culture understood as that which separates us from the animals would seem to be the subject here. The word 'compassion' stands out in the above passage from a poem in which the speaker complains that his liberties do not include the right to kick his dog in the stomach, because, as he explains, 'The Geneva Convention' requires him to clean up after his dog, to the point of '[wiping] his ass'. We are over-civilised, over-socialised with caring, liberal values. Compassion over justice, empathic cooperation over competition. There is no contradiction here: the dog is a domesticated animal, and we are all to become fluffy, neoliberal, consumerist lap dogs.
And yet Lohrey is willing to entertain the idea that the state is not capable of indefinitely ameliorating every aspect of life and death. Horrible things will always happen from time to time, even in America, although we have come to expect that evil should appear only as a historical curiosity, as something with which to smear our enemies, the conservatives, the sympathisers with the bad old days of patriarchal violence. This is gospel of the 'Regime of Glad Tidings', as it is called in the title of the poem just quoted. When violence and evil do, inevitably crop back up, we simply do not know how to process them. The result is the black comedy of a concerned citizen writing a letter to the editor in outrage at a chief of police who has not been able to instantly solve a murder case. The hysterical correspondent perorates:
Chief MacDonough, answer our questions!
President Trump, tell us what happened!
Mr Putin, have you no decency?
Prime Minister, have you no conscience?
The logic of the poem is as unarguable as it is unpalatable. We have come to expect that life should be free of tragedy. How did it come to this? And how many people readers will have the stomach to grasp Lohrey's point without making asinine accusations about excusing violence against women in a day and age when such crimes are so routinely politicised?
Now for the stories.
'Daylight Savings Time' is a long short story about a young 'gopher' in Hollywood, a male ingenue working for an attorney in an ill defined client-liaison role in which he is able to see ever more degraded and deranged layers of the city's upper-middle class subculture. Although it is written in the style of a memoir (something the piece shares with many of the other stories in Bluff City), the absurd humour, the grotesquerie, is dialed up to ten. Take this encounter between the narrator's country-bumpkin cousin and a tofu-eating Elvis impersonator whom he takes, for some reason, for Mighty Mouse:
It was a great honor [my cousin] said, to meet a famous mouse. Could he have his autograph, could he try his tofu, could he sip from his cup? Yes, he would be thrilled to join him for dinner. "Can I get a menu?" What's it like to be famous? "I just love Saturday Night Live." When I finish kissing your ass, would you care to have your balls licked?
The writing is expressive in ways one does not often encounter. The use of rhyme and near-rhyme within a passage of prose, for instance, creates a distancing, alienating effect predicated on the deliberate blunting of meaning. Here we have a purposive delimitation of reference, an interchangeable use of synonyms such as one finds often enough in colloquial speech. The effect is humourous and self-ironising:
Shunning is an act of cunning. It is brutal and above all, cold. I must have done awful, something very wrong, to be ignored. [...]
Shunning is not withdrawing, it is not an act of defense. It is an attack, it is offensive. She expected me to disappear. But we had been friends, there had been kisses. Like sister and brother, united and connected. I knew her mother, I knew her brother.
If these lines were arranged into free verse stanzas the passage would read like the lyrics of a pop song that might be translated into and out of any language in the world.
'Thrown Together: A Memoir' is a text in a different genre, realistic through and through, albeit absurd in ways those who have had similar experiences will find compelling. Lohrey tells the tale of his early teaching career in a ghetto school in one of America's great cities. It is a tale of bureaucracy versus the good natured cynicism of those who actually do the impossible job of teaching chronically disengaged young people how to read and write.
Another student was a kooky Mexican-American boy named Zeus. I loved his name. He was rather happy-go-lucky in his manner, not at all full of urban rage. He did and said little, but he loved to eat pencils. [...] Then he'd cackle loudly, "LOW-REEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Yes, there are many laugh-out-loud moments in Bluff City.
It would be remiss not to mention the third genre represented in this anthology of Lohrey's diverse oeuvre, namely drama. A one-act play entitled 'One, Two, Three' explores the idea that, as one of the characters has it, 'What happens between a man and a woman gets mirrored in the world'--and vice-versa. Two college co-eds are coached by sexual archetypes, the Marlboro Man and a Cover Girl respectively, on how to conduct themselves on a date. The complication is that, while able to assume these masculine and feminine roles with fluency, they are unable to quite believe their own act. It is Hamlet and Ophelia, in a way, each sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Once again, Lohrey explores his favourite theme of the over-mediation of human nature and relationships, the intersection of ideologies and animality in our lives. The pessimism that comes across as the moral of all these stories is that there does not seem to be much else to the human experience as Lohrey depicts it. But then, the greatest writers have often taken a limited view of humanity and developed it into profound insight.
***
I cannot say that Bluff City is an attractively produced volume, although the cover art is perfect. Aesthetically, I must protest at the way the poems are printed one after another without leaving a gap in between. Also, the text margins are too narrow. This 160-page book should really have been at least 300, I feel. That said, Terror House has put out some attractive volumes in the few years they have been publishing, and I suspect that what has happened here is that they had a hard time accommodating the long lines of Lohrey's verse, which then resulted in some very wide paragraphs in the prose sections. My recommendation would be to buy Bluff City in e-book format.
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