Frank Dark by Stephen Massimilla Review by Ruth Danon
Frank Dark by Stephen Massimilla
Review by Ruth Danon
Publisher: Barrow Street Press
ISBN: 1736607561
Publication Date: September 28, 2022
Pages: 112 pages
Stephen Massimilla’s brilliant poetry book, Frank Dark, opens with an aubade of sorts. Not quite an aubade, because although it is dawn and the speaker awakens, he explains that “the night is too long with no love.” Rather than offer praise of a sleeping beloved, he “squints” to “wake up images” of “fish hawks,” birds that scavenge the shorelines, as seen through that squint. With squinting, the precision is greater but the field of vision narrower. This ocular action is the first of many in this riveting exploration of our present historical moment when, as Robert Creeley wrote, “the darkness surrounds us.”
The world is “not safe,” the speaker reminds us. The initial challenge is to take an unsparing look at what is painful to take in. In the poem “What You Don’t Want to See,” the speaker nearly loses his eye; and the wryly (slyly) named Dr. Seymour fails to say, “You saved / your own eye”; but at least the good doctor predicts, “You’ll see your sight / later.” Dr. Seymour speaks rightly. As Massimilla’s book proceeds, the field of vision expands. Speaker and reader face more and more of the messy world we share. We cannot, with open eyes, evade what we see, any more than the speaker can “re- / write the / retina.”
What then do we see when we are led to look? Among other horrors, “locked-down New Orleans,” “a fish’s wake / in fluid poison,” “skeletal moss,” “[t]wisted black coil uncoiling along the Gulf Coast,” “exhaust trails sticking to an ill-lit sky,” and the “bee colony collapse.” We confront a blighted landscape and the human interventions that have created it: the decimation wrought by Hurricane Katrina; the BP oil spill; Covid; air, light, and water pollution—all the devastation of the Anthropocene dragging us along “with a few entangled octopi / drained of color, like lost human parts.” If Massimilla had only presented these horrors, he would be another voice in an increasingly futile chorus of despair. But Massimilla is asking a much larger question: have we, in the midst of all the darkness, lost our capacity to be what humanists call human? Were we wrong all along about our humanity? Have we indeed lost our human parts?
The speaker, named as a “scavenger’s double,” muses on his own flirtation with oblivion, admitting that he has not “gone under,” even after admitting that he has not learned “to read / the airbrushed deity on the universal billboard.” The poet vacillates between despair and hope. Aware and wary of limited perspectives, he aims to see the world more fully. The book progresses: the visual field expands. The camera might have left “the man out of the picture,” but this speaker puts the humans—including a woman diverted from suicide—back in.
As he turns more to the human, he asks questions: “Why would I bother crying / that the universe / is inhuman?” and “How could I / have missed so much?” Amending the early narrowed vision, he witnesses the sleeping beloved, the sick and the dying, the beauty of what’s human, seeking faith and love and compassion even as he avoids evasion.
The complexity of Frank Dark is reflected in the book’s title. Is Frank Dark a character? Does the title suggest an open darkness, an oxymoron condensing the questions the book asks into two words? Does it suggest the alternative—that the book is a frank—i.e. honest—look at darkness within and without? All these readings are possible and perhaps simultaneously true. The reader has to construct meaning out of conundrum. Speaker, poet, and reader have to brave the dark together.
Difficulty is rendered in gorgeous, surprising language rich with literary allusion. Melville, Frost, Montale, Mann, Woolf, and Dickinson show up, reminding us that Massimilla works within the Western humanist tradition the book interrogates. At times, Massimilla’s phrasing is challenging to parse, as in this excerpt from “Little Wheels Burning Past”:
My mind—as the sky—
always was/is today, bluesy torn soul etc. etc.,
over boats like a shore full of thorns,
under clock hands acting crucified
This one small passage bears a fractal relationship to the whole book. We know that the speaker is examining the vacillations of his own “mind,” that he speculates on a natural world (the sky), lives in the world of human creation (bluesy), aspires to a condition of spirit (torn soul), returns again to the shore, invokes religious possibilities (“thorns” and “crucified”), operates in mortal and epochal time (“clock hands”), but how the multiple and embedded similes actually work is a bit mysterious and frankly (if I may play with that word) a bit opaque. But just as the poet can lead us into a maze of somewhat bewildering connections and associations, he can also utter a cry from the heart, simple and direct, as he does at the end of the same poem when he states, “I want to try this again.”
The artist wants in some sense to be reborn, to do it right and better. This longing leads to two very important aspects of the latter part of the book: the willingness to face the limitations on human life imposed by illness, war, death, and grief, and the limitations of art, literary or otherwise, to produce adequate responses to those realities. Given all that is brutally difficult, the question recurs—why make art in the face of what we cannot explain or justify or change? No amendments to mortality. Poetry can’t make people happy or keep them alive.
Massimilla asks:
Where do the vagrant refuge
themselves? It’s a curse
to remain at sea
having paid this price
The speaker, a “vagrant,” like the fish hawks and gulls that function as doubles throughout, is often “at sea” (the literal seascape joined to this colloquial expression of being lost) as most of us are when confronted with the inexorable. We do the best we can.
In answer to his largest question, the poet writes in “Misdirection: A Poem”:
I could wind up with some overblown statement about God.
You come to that point in life where everything points
[…]
somewhere else.
By the end, we are taken somewhere else. In “Last Poem,” Massimilla concludes with a humbled coda to all that is difficult to manage:
[…] each spot
of life is in trouble, but poised
to show us what untrained
observers refuse to notice:
the ubiquitous, particulate facts
of transit, our unscripted
planet whipping through
the universe, though maybe
that’s taking things
too far.
Yes, the world is a mess; yes, we are the ones who have messed it up; but if we can train ourselves to see, to become humble in the face of all of it, we may discover we know less than we think we do and so find for ourselves a more accurate and perhaps more hopeful view of our own damaged humanity.
Massimilla’s Frank Dark refuses pat answers to complex questions. It demands much of the reader, both in terms of what the poet asks us to confront and in the complexity of language and thought with which we must engage that confrontation. The challenge is well worth undertaking. This is a beautiful book that bears careful and repeated readings.
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, painter, and author, most recently of the award-winning Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and the 2022 co-edited award-winning social justice poetry anthology Stronger Than Fear. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Previous books and honors include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Poetry Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Poetry Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; a study of myth in poetry; and award-winning translations. His work appears in hundreds of publications from AGNI to Poetry Daily. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches there and at The New School. Website: Stephenmassimilla.com
Ruth Danon is the author of four published books of poetry, most recently, Turn Up the Heat, just out from Nirala Series. After retiring from NYU, where she created, directed, and taught in a creative and expository writing program for adult degree students (SPS), she moved to Beacon, New York, where she founded Live Writing: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry. She teaches through Live Writing and New York Writers Workshop and curates programs in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
8 November 2023
Leave a Reply