Broad
Freeman
A book review—
"Claptrap: NOTES FROM HOLLYWOOD" - poems by Stephen Gyllenhaal
www.cantarabooks.com
ISBN 978-1-933688-03-9
Modern poetry is seldom read today with any enthusiasm by a general audience, and no wonder. Mostly it falls into three categories: the academic poetry which says very little but says it well and is read mainly by academics and other poets; the political protest/minority poetry which attempts to say much and rarely succeeds; and the purely personal and cathartic poetry which is simply therapeutic and even when relatively well-written is difficult for the average person to understand and not usually worth the trouble.
There are exceptions to these categories, however, and one of the latest is a fine book of poetry from a very unlikely source: a Hollywood film director. The book, Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood, by Stephen Gyllenhaal, includes an introduction by the well-known actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, which is both frank and insightful and leads us into the poetry which is itself both frank and insightful. The forty-six poems which comprise this slim but elegant volume range from the epigrammatic brevity of "Axiom" and "Pilot", through the ruminations on romantic and marital love contained in "Madonna", "Confession", and many more, to the quiet dignity of the elegaic "Shoe Polish"*:
At
the airports
where the older men buff
there’s the smell of it
(sweet and acrid like my
father’s breath)
My Grandfather (Mother’s father/President
of the Michigan Sugar Beet Factory—his breath
smelled of it too) must’ve risen
into one of those elevated Louis Armstrong chairs
before his flight, thinking of my Grandmother,
also smelling/angrier—as she pushed
the nutty stuffing into the turkey cavity
and I sat on the white metal kitchen stool,
but I’ve seldom had my shoes polished there.
I do it myself on our guest bathroom floor,
bent over chipped white octagonal tiles
and tired newspapers.
It was in the attic I’d found the WWII gifts
—my father’s second lieutenant bars
gleaming in my kindergarten fingers.
Even now my chest warms
with the whiskey of that memory:
beautiful bars mistaken for gold,
relics of opening the concentration camps
in my other grandfather’s case,
with a rope in the attic when my Dad was 12.
My Dad’s Mother had the first TV I ever saw,
though my Sugar Beet Grandfather and
his queen got an even bigger TV
with flecks of gold in the speaker cloth.
It was during the war he learned the truth
about his Father. They had to take a growth
off his ass. And on the medical release he
had to sign, filled out by his Mom (he’d been
too young to sign his marching orders, she
never thought he’d see it)—father: suicide.
Drunk, my father would wheel out to me that sto
—the whole of Patton’s army stopped
for the doc to cut off his growth.
Then there’s the satisfaction of the brush
sweeping over the leather
—warming it into a dull shine.
Not gaudy, but moonlike, reflective.
And the bending over,
the being on your knees beside the toilet.
I never used to throw away
the super thin translucent recyclable
cooler to wear no pre-powdering needed gloves,
though that’s the idea:
drop them in the trash when you’re done.
I kept them for 2, 3, maybe 4 polishings,
saved them with their drying flecks
of brown (or black) polish,
removing them carefully
so as not to get my fingers stained.
I suppose I’d hoped that one box
of Recyclable Poly gloves would last me
a lifetime.
It didn’t.
The box of gloves: gone.
The house with the guest bathroom: gone.
My father: gone.
The polish and those shoes: gone.
It was on the New Jersey coast near the elephant
planted like rock on Ocean Ave., rising over my five
year old head—a concrete port for souvenirs,
we’d been swimming with my Uncle Geoffrey,
waves rolling in like shelves. Salty, we showered.
In those days the water, desalinated,
tasted like soap. And my father with a towel
moments later, still dripping,
looked down at his feet. At my feet.
“Ugliest part of the body, wouldn’t you say?”
I didn’t say. I had no machinery for disagreeing,
though his feet looked beautiful to me.
All the poems are well-crafted and honest.
Many contain complexities of language and cadence that make us read
them over and over again. There are astute political observations
("Careful
There, Pardner", "The Enron in my Face") alongside endearing whimsy
("Bread", "Plan B"). The subtitle "Notes from Hollywood" is
particularly
well chosen as Mr. Gyllenhaal deftly conveys in such a poems as "On
Opening
Night" and "Watching You Strip/My Daughter"** his sense of awe and
pride
at seeing his two actor-children on stage for the first time:where the older men buff
there’s the smell of it
(sweet and acrid like my
father’s breath)
My Grandfather (Mother’s father/President
of the Michigan Sugar Beet Factory—his breath
smelled of it too) must’ve risen
into one of those elevated Louis Armstrong chairs
before his flight, thinking of my Grandmother,
also smelling/angrier—as she pushed
the nutty stuffing into the turkey cavity
and I sat on the white metal kitchen stool,
but I’ve seldom had my shoes polished there.
I do it myself on our guest bathroom floor,
bent over chipped white octagonal tiles
and tired newspapers.
It was in the attic I’d found the WWII gifts
—my father’s second lieutenant bars
gleaming in my kindergarten fingers.
Even now my chest warms
with the whiskey of that memory:
beautiful bars mistaken for gold,
relics of opening the concentration camps
in my other grandfather’s case,
with a rope in the attic when my Dad was 12.
My Dad’s Mother had the first TV I ever saw,
though my Sugar Beet Grandfather and
his queen got an even bigger TV
with flecks of gold in the speaker cloth.
It was during the war he learned the truth
about his Father. They had to take a growth
off his ass. And on the medical release he
had to sign, filled out by his Mom (he’d been
too young to sign his marching orders, she
never thought he’d see it)—father: suicide.
Drunk, my father would wheel out to me that sto
—the whole of Patton’s army stopped
for the doc to cut off his growth.
Then there’s the satisfaction of the brush
sweeping over the leather
—warming it into a dull shine.
Not gaudy, but moonlike, reflective.
And the bending over,
the being on your knees beside the toilet.
I never used to throw away
the super thin translucent recyclable
cooler to wear no pre-powdering needed gloves,
though that’s the idea:
drop them in the trash when you’re done.
I kept them for 2, 3, maybe 4 polishings,
saved them with their drying flecks
of brown (or black) polish,
removing them carefully
so as not to get my fingers stained.
I suppose I’d hoped that one box
of Recyclable Poly gloves would last me
a lifetime.
It didn’t.
The box of gloves: gone.
The house with the guest bathroom: gone.
My father: gone.
The polish and those shoes: gone.
It was on the New Jersey coast near the elephant
planted like rock on Ocean Ave., rising over my five
year old head—a concrete port for souvenirs,
we’d been swimming with my Uncle Geoffrey,
waves rolling in like shelves. Salty, we showered.
In those days the water, desalinated,
tasted like soap. And my father with a towel
moments later, still dripping,
looked down at his feet. At my feet.
“Ugliest part of the body, wouldn’t you say?”
I didn’t say. I had no machinery for disagreeing,
though his feet looked beautiful to me.
This
is the stream that moves to lakes and rivers
rocks and ocean tides of something oh so far
much grander all than what the critics see
and who they’ve been and what they think they know.
The future stretches out her nasty reach
and you can’t hide. The growing hurts—remember
sudden ten year old long arms knocking down a
glass?—and now you move in heels and silk
with grace that takes our fear away.
rocks and ocean tides of something oh so far
much grander all than what the critics see
and who they’ve been and what they think they know.
The future stretches out her nasty reach
and you can’t hide. The growing hurts—remember
sudden ten year old long arms knocking down a
glass?—and now you move in heels and silk
with grace that takes our fear away.
The qualities that make modern poetry accessible and desirable are all evident here: universal themes extrapolated from the personal; a fearlessly-stated world view; and a wealth of deeply-felt emotions laid bare on the printed page. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of good poetry, but especially to those who have given up on the narrow, insular poetry being written today. It might just change the way you look at modern poetry—and the world.
*excerpted from "Shoe Polish" - originally published by Nimrod International Journal.
**excerpted from “Watching You Strip/My Daughter” - originally published by Many Mountains Moving.
Broad Freeman is a freelance writer whose online cultural zine, Global (Id)entity, has been running for about a year and a half.
