The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Four): Kevin Thomason [by Angela Ball]

BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH OF A RELATIVE

Edges cut strange

shadows this time of day.

As sunlight strays,

roof shade falls short

on the porch, its doorway

a slate-black slab behind

a crouched man. Contrast

dominates the scene,

these dual grains of age

a resistance to one another.

Trees abate themselves

in ashen air, their blades

and pools of light crossed

no more in the give

and take of wind, branches

lost against the bitter

pale spates of sky

that separate them. The cabin’s

contours soften under

scrutiny till a blotted

onyx form remains.

Nightfall hesitates

at the backdrop’s wan

broadness, absence locked

in its momentous failure

to arrive, unable to fade,

unable to clarify.

-Kevin Thomason

Kevin Thomason is from Memphis, Tennessee and has lived and taught in Canada and South Korea. His work can be read in Narrative Magazine, Arkansas Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Last year, his poem, “Second Marriage,” was featured on Terrain.org. He currently teaches at McNeese State University and lives between Lake Charles, Louisiana and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Four): Kevin Thomason

Kevin Thomason’s mysterious and compelling ekphastic poem, “Black-and-White Photograph of a Relative,” is a great example of a work that’s subtly influenced by The New York School of Poets. Its salient features—a somber tone and insistence on diminishment—recall both Philip Larkin and Thomas Hardy. And its crepuscularity conceals a Yeatsian grandeur.

Nonetheless, I contend that the New York School influence is present, leavening and transformative.

For good reasons too numerous to go into, a bred-in-the-bone distrust of optimism and language play has to some extent persisted in British poetry. The brilliant biographer and essayist John Lahr has used American musical theatre to articulate the difference between British and American sensibilities. “No British person,” he said (to visiting American students) would write a song called, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”

Thomason’s poem, while charged with fatalism, is subtly animated by the playful perversity, the sense that a thing is also what it is not, found in Frank O’Hara’s “Why I am Not A Painter,” in which he says, of his new poem, “it is even in / prose, I am a real poet.”

First of all, the poem’s title over-insists on its genericness, drains its color with the phrase “a relative.” And this is nothing so personal as a “portrait”—it’s a “photograph,” merely.

Exaggeration is by nature playful. And the exaggerated effacement of the photo’s subject—not mentioned until line seven, and then as a “crouched man” backed by a doorway that is a tomb-like “black slab”—renders the setting, a cabin’s porch, a combination cave and crypt. This is anything but the stock family snap, with its celebration of togetherness and possibility. In fact, the photograph’s subject is somehow absent while present. The sharply enjambed opening lines are ominous, dangerous, and packed with denial: “Edges cut strange / shadows this time of day,” and “roof shade falls short / on the porch . . . . Trees simultaneously provide and deprive:

their blades

and pools of light crossed

no more in the give

and take of wind

Derek Walcott once characterized rhyme as “language embracing the loved world.” But here, rhymes draw language in on itself, emphasizing a grim isolation. Surprisingly, even perversely, we see nothing more of the “relative”: only the scene that he seems to have projected psychically outward, an internal chiaroscuro in which “Trees abate themselves,” a strange, absorbing image.

The poem, in its tight pattern of self-canceling imagery, creates an aura of deprivation that also evinces art’s indomitable playfulness. The text entices the reader by depriving them of mitigation. We are left instead with something richer: the solitary mysteries of nightfall and its “pale spates of sky.”

I would call this a noir poem, one that acts on us the way films of the genre do, subsuming possibility in dread. Noir’s primary action is the playful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring cancellation of hope. Only American optimism could have given rise to this dramatically pessimistic genre.

In Kevin Thomason’s noir/photograph/poem, we join a film already in progress. We get only an ordinary catastrophe that can’t quite materialize:

Nightfall hesitates

at the backdrop’s wan

broadness, absence locked

in its momentous failure

to arrive, unable to fade,

unable to clarify.

“Black-and-White Photograph of a Relative”’s idiosyncratic power lies in nightfall’s “momentous failure / to arrive.” “Arrive” and “clarify” rhyme–unite against closure. The triumph of noir, and of this poem, is failure that could easily have been avoided, were circumstances and/or human nature otherwise. Something or someone might have altered the relative’s (a secret sharer of the poet’s?) defensive posture, his shadow domicile. A moment here and gone, a lonely aperture.

-Angela Ball