58
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
number 21
Courtesy of David Rigsbee
before the locomotive of History, rather than face the vivid memory of errors committed when the face was hot and stared into the eyes of that intransigent, that other face.
suicide but poems as well for the poets Joseph Brodsky and John Logan; the philosopher Richard Rorty; and the poet-musician Gil Scott-Heron, a one-time classmate of Rigsbee’s. There is a painterly aspect to Rigsbee’s work, and there are references in his poems to Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, Michelangelo, and many other visual artists. The first line of the book’s first poem, “Harp,” describes a “bad painting, at once aggressive and shy.” The poet is sitting “in a room / not mine” watching while “a young, bespectacled mother puts out the wash,” and as the poem progresses, it becomes a textual version of the painting described in the first line. The poet keeps watching the ordinary scene he has drawn for us, wondering about a child’s blue smock and the “absence of its little owner.” “Pointless speculation, says a contrapuntal voice, / and yet that is what I did with my life,” the poem concludes. Yet Rigsbee is self-aware enough to know that this is what poets do: they watch and speculate and try to transform that watching into language. For Rigsbee, a simple description of the scene is inadequate. Visual art offers a way of thinking about the world, and Rigsbee is nothing if not a thinking poet. And he is a poet who is consoled by art, as in his Pushcart Prize poem “Russians,” a poem that begins with memories of youthful folly before reminding us to: look in on the Russians passing out at the feet of their superiors, emptying their wallets into the fireplace, throwing their brain-stuffed heads above David Rigsbee at a reading for the North Carolina Poetry
Society’s Poetry Series, McIntyre’s Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 22 Aug. 2011
Here visual art offers a kind of consolation, if not absolution. It is worth mentioning that few of Rigsbee’s elegies deal in the sort of fashionable gossip of so much modern elegy where we are presented with the departed poet or friend saying something witty or profound, thereby leaving a brief, pithy impression upon the audience. In “Umbrian Odes,” Rigsbee’s elegy for Joseph Brodsky (about whom Rigsbee has also written a book of criticism), the deceased is mentioned only in passing, and then he is only addressed as “you” or by his first name. There are no tales told out of school here, no passing on of clever bon mots, only a stoic meditation on landscape and on the inadequacy of language to express grief: “As for us, our best lines lie in canceled stanzas, / no doubt, homogenized by a silence as thick / as ennui.” Yet, if Rigsbee can acknowledge the presence of ennui, no such ennui ensues from his poems. Rigsbee too profoundly respects the things of this world to surrender to any modish hand-wringing and despair. In “Gil’s Sentence,” a poem that will in future years be read as elegy (it was, in fact, written before Scott-Heron’s recent death), Rigsbee remembers a brief poetry workshop encounter with the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron when both were students at Columbia. Scott-Heron rises to the defense of the speaker’s poem but rebuffs any attempts at further intimacy when they meet again: “But this was the weekend. He was in his / other world with his band, his other means.” What is left is the speaker’s memory of Scott-Heron “risen to that defense when justice / was poetic.” Yet Rigsbee is a poet who understands that art and philosophy provide only a temporary stay. At the end of the day, we are confronted with our own mortality, a topic Rigsbee does not shy away from. The most affecting of his mortality-grappling poems are those concerning the suicide of the poet’s brother. In “Four Last Songs,” the longest of Rigsbee’s poems about his brother’s suicide, the poet’s insistence on logic breaks down when faced with immutable death. For the most part, Rigsbee’s poems play out like well-constructed arguments or exercises in logic. While the poems are seldom predictable, they follow