CORBIN LOUIS POETRY EDITORIAL

by Theadora Siranian

 At one point in Anne Carson’s Red Doc> the speaker tells us [if] …prose / is a house poetry [is] a man in flames running / quite fast through it. Corbin Louis’s poetry is the man in flames, the house on fire, the world a conflagration of polluted skies and self-harm, spiritual ennui and existential disenfranchisement. And, too, fun. And, too, the ecstatic. Though the feature’s initial poem, “Star Tooth Banner,” may seem elegiac, asking us to Behold, the dead friend glossary, Louis defies that label through his dedication to friends, living or not, and when the poem’s speaker declares We are such doomed birds in the third line, little may the reader know that we, too, are part of this tragic, glorious flock. Though brutal at times in their portrayal of addiction, poverty, and physical, psychological, and cultural malaise, Corbin Louis’s poems are, individually and as a larger composition, also a kind of groundswell of compassion and love, for those living and not, for those known as loved ones and those considered to be strangers. We might even say his poems offer a certain form of mercy.

Louis’s themes are decidedly rooted in the dark experiment of “The American Dream”: the long road trips and epic speeds; gas station fumes and unctuous tang of fast food chains; pharmaceuticals and glucose and dishpits; the 9 to 5; the poverty line, which really, we might call a yawning chasm. This is how I learned to love / Overdose / Mania we’re told in “Sugar, Sex and Zig-Zags,” but not before the speaker explains: But still I’m here / telling you that / a recklessly good time / is a shining blue marble…. However, the “American-ness” of Louis’s work goes beyond theme. Indeed, the grief and grit and fervor of both his imagery and his form align with a rich lineage of writers who have conveyed the complexities of existing within the United States of America. When we are led into the doomed avian throng captained by the firebird in “Star Tooth Banner” Louis soothes, or at least offers a sense of solidarity, in his homage to Walt Whitman: I am with you, flock of crash test dummies, I am with you /…I too have cried and worked and spread-sheeted / the future into flat circles…. In these lines I hear the anguish and love that occurs in part six of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” that heavy turn inward in the middle of the poem, Whitman whispering (or screaming, or singing, perhaps arms lifted high into the air or wrapped around our shoulders): The dark threw its patches down on upon me also…. Our thoughts, our lives, so often seemingly blank, meager. The spirit of Ginsberg’s “Howl” also resides in Louis’s poems, of that endless train of ghosts—those who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley…purgatoried their torsos night after night / with dreams, with drugs…, and when the speaker of Louis’s magnificently sincere “Instructions for Living” sings out Our skull of skulls / split open as the mind soup pours into the sky I delight, not only in the imagery and imagination, but also in how I’m reminded of Denis Johnson—the opening story of Jesus’ Son when [u]nder Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation…. This connection is like a faint memory of discovering my first oilslicked puddle as a child: the beauty and disembodiment, and too, the feeling of sadness at realizing the cost of such an experience.

Louis’s distinctive perspective on such things as the epidemics of addiction and disability in the U.S., and the tangled mythos surrounding such concepts as “self-reliance” and “upward mobility,” create a sense of urgency and kairos in his voice and vision of now, this 21st century plane of reality. This perspective contributes a unique thread to the larger unending conversation, the cosmos of poetry that is rich with incantatory power, which does, in fact, transcend such weak, illusory boundaries as “nationhood.” Though located in that most singular and bizarre place of “The American Dream,” Louis’s poems are also ultimately, necessarily, linked to the greater mind soup of humanity. Humans have been bellowing into the firmament with agony and joy for as long as we’ve had voice. And though there is a sense of communal suffering and celebration in Louis’s poems—the rallying cry of “Star Tooth Banner” and the camaraderie of “Sugar, Sex and Zig-Zags”—the work does not elide the reality that we are, each, undeniably alone. His feature as a whole underscores the delicate balance between our significant isolation as individuals and the collective, cosmic power and possibility of human-ness. More than once I was taken to the edge and almost jumped / Since then it’s been very clear / Nothing is made to last and I love you for that, we’re told in “Instructions for Living.” To survive (overdose, illness, suicide), to know such survival is temporary, and to be grateful for that—the survival, the mutability, the knowledge of and gratitude for both—seems to me perhaps the greatest effort we can make toward the sublime. In The Art of Daring, Carl Phillips writes about the potential for mercy, how poetry can be “a testimony at once to a love for the world we must lose and to the fact of loss itself—and how in that tension between love and loss that the poem both enacts and makes a space for…we experience, incongruously, a bittersweet form of joy in what at the same time remains disturbing:…our uniquely human consciousness of mortality, and of abstractions like love and loss…[m]ercy, then…as a kind of respite—not oblivion, but a strangely heightened consciousness.” Louis’s poems are luminous with the awareness of how proximity to death—the death of loved ones, one’s own demise—incites aliveness, the necessity of loving all that is ephemeral, indeed, all that is, which is of course by its very existence forever fleeting. Like all good poetry, Louis’s work provides no answers, only candor, and in that terrible candor, through it even: respite, mercy: Hello again / Welcome in / I am here for you / Inasmuch as I bleed the selfsame star / Dripping those questions I cannot answer.