In the final section of his eagerly anticipated new book, Lloyd Schwartz writes, “The older I get, the less and less/I understand this world,//and the people in it.” (“To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death”). But throughout Little Kisses, it’s clear that Lloyd—a dear friend whose first name I’ll use throughout this review—has also taken to heart Rabbi Tarfon’s commentary from the Mishna: “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Each poem in Little Kisses enacts the poet’s attempt to sound the riptides of this floating world with wit, empathy, sophistication, humor and brio. To read them is to discover how our common tongue can shape extraordinary music, and how art can free our deepest feelings as it contains our thorniest perceptions.
Lloyd Schwartz is a poet whose accomplishment, reputation, and influence have been at the core of American writing for nearly forty years. His work has appeared in the field’s most distinguished journals—Agni, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1994 as classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix, and I’m one of thousands who listen for his classical music reviews on NPR’s Fresh Air. A noted scholar of Elizabeth Bishop, as well as her friend, he edited the Library of America’s edition of her work. But it’s as a poet that Lloyd has made his signature contribution to the life of contemporary literature through his exploration of the idiom and nuance of ordinary American speech.
Many writers have testified to this. “He enlarges the range of living speech as artwork,” poet and critic Peter Campion has noted. And David Gewanter has written, “No poet since Marianne Moore has listened more keenly than Lloyd Schwartz, and few as kindly . . . Only a poetry of his peculiar music—the flats of conversation voiced in the sharps of wit—could manage this.” Robert Pinsky perceives “a moral generosity that cannot be called `forgiving’ because it refuses to condemn in the first place . . . Schwartz’s writing always has integrity. Nothing is pumped up or dolled up.”
Throughout Little Kisses, honest speech and moral imagination are inseparable. The title poem is a series of dialogues between the poet and his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s but is aware enough to hate “the daylight—one more new day.” “She doesn’t know she’s speaking to her son,” Lloyd writes:
I have to tell her she’s speaking to her son.
“Oh, then I’m not alone! I have a son!”
“Please, don’t forget that.”
“How could I forget that?…and you—who are you?”
The anguish on both sides of the conversation is emphasized by the repetition throughout the poem of “mother” and “son” like a mnemonic device that’s doomed to fail. When the poet’s mother identifies him as a “friend”:
I can’t stop myself: “Where is your son?”
“Where’s my son? What do you mean?”
“Where is your son now?”
“He’s dead.”
How can this poem end? Neither love nor loss can stop itself. Instead, “Little Kisses” resolves with a song, as the poet’s mother sings:
Gimme a little kiss, will ya huh?
What are ya gonna miss. Will ya huh?
Art makes a momentary stay against confusion, as the singer says—proud, then frank—“‘See, I know all the words!//(I probably won’t remember them tomorrow.)’” Two sentences, twelve words in all, contain a world of feeling and perception that surges from character on the page to reader holding the page. It’s as powerful as an electric shock.
“Little Kisses” introduces a formal device—the prose stanza composed of a single sentence—deployed to great effect in several poems. “Little Kisses” and “Goldring” aren’t quite prose poems, and they’re not Lydia Davis-style stories, either. Often the shorter sentences in these poems look like, and read as, verse. In “Goldring,” they embody the structure of thought as thought erupts from consciousness, shaped by the back-and-forth of inner dialogue. The isolation of each sentence through a stanza break undermines a reader’s expectations of poetry and prose, while performing what Mark Halliday has called the “air of meaning” that “suffuses any poem, including the most ‘plainspoken.’”
Perhaps Lloyd’s most playful, plainspoken poem is the tour de force “Six Words.” This is the world’s shortest sestina, and the most pithy—41 words, each dependant on a tone of voice, each stanza a conversation, transforming the language of polls and questionnaires (including student evaluations) into human drama. It’s an example of how Lloyd’s work constantly distinguishes poetry from the “poetic” as it expands our definition of what poetry is.
Other pleasures in Little Kisses include translations (from Brazilian poet Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna and Ukrainian poet Viktor Neborak), refreshing takes on art and opera, and Lloyd’s everlasting love of pop culture. In “Jerry Garcia in a Somerville Parking Lot”—the book’s final poem—“a man in late 60s, tall, with/long gray hair and a bushy gray (almost white) beard” apprehensively approaches two men “smoking, leaning against the car next to his.” It’s past midnight, and the pair are slightly menacing; one ask “Want to hear a joke?” This could be the introduction to something nasty, but the worst thing is how corny the joke turns out to be. “I only asked/ because you look like Jerry Garcia,” the kid says after offering the older man a toke. The poet drives off, “chuckling/at lucky escapes,/wildly mistaken identities, sweet//dumb jokes.” May Lloyd keep truckin’ through the joys and sorrows commemorated in his poems, mile after mile past the example of “his latest temporary reprieve.”