Now We're Getting Somewhere

by David Clewell

David Clewell's graceful, honest lines accumulate and remind us that poems can be as tangible, as substantial, as redemptive as those things the poet will not let go unspoken in the world. His compassionate witness is born out of immersion in doggedly bittersweet the cock-eyed wisdom of 1950s science fiction movies; Do Not Disturb signs; vegetarian physics; the perils of bed-and-breakfast lodging; flying saucer disciples; what to do in case of Rapture; Debbie Fuller, reluctant childhood angel; the theory and practice of Spontaneous Human Combustion. His passionate transformation of that raw data into song - no matter how fragile or raucous - provides irrefutable testimony about the consequences of being nothing less than human, where "every day someone crawls out of his ocean of sleep / and takes those first tottering steps on the planet again / he's playing with real fire." And with Clewell's insistence on the unlikely grace in that condition, along with the generosity of his unabashed inclusiveness, his poetry is a powerful antidote to the bad medicine we're too often asked to swallow. By turns tough and tender, feisty and nearly serene, this poet travels some of the darkest roads between the brain and the heart, singing his way through even the darkest stretches. And in these times, where there's always a better-than-even chance of rain or psychic wreckage tomorrow, it's no small Clewell imagining whatever light, still believing that "some of us are not about to be stopped if we can help it, not / this time, now that we're finally getting somewhere." This is a book of sustenance, of fresh assurances that come to us - ready or not - out of the blue of this spirited poet's most engaging work yet.

Genres: Poetry

85 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1994

About the author

David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010-2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clewell's vernacular science stretches out quite a bit in this collection, Now We're Getting Somewhere, where the where we're getting to seems precisely enough Clewell's subject matter, an America of defrocked positivism, the sheer wealth of un-categorizable data a language of belief for Americans otherwise more alienated than the happy mythographer of Rexroth's The Old Free America. Clewell shares a lot with Charles P. Pierce, in his affectionate nostalgia for an older and more gullible incline to middle-class obsessiveness. The imposition of a style is not all that different from the crank's fillibuster. The sequence "Lost in the Fire" is quite at home in the persona of the early rock 'n' roll disc jockey, spinning tales of spontaneous human combustion and finding all kinds of sympathetic irony "in the boondocks of what's possible," as he puts it. A note below, on the limits of precision in all this spreading out, should not deter readers from seeking out the two really fine poems in this collection, "America's Bed and Breakfasts," and "I Can't Believe the Face on Mars."

The Limits of Ambiguity: The first sentence in David Clewell's "Holding On," while hyperbolic, takes a not-unwarranted risk: "On any ring of keys we've ever carried, | no matter the size, there's always one that means | absolutely nothing." The detail is suggestive, yet look what the next sentence does to the suggestion:

  
In all these years accumulating
like loose change that never adds up, of keeping things
private in so many different places, it's no wonder 
we've drawn another sentimental blank: is this one
still useful? Or obsolete, a fossil? And we keep it

The "it" in "it's no wonder" is precisely the key; however, the way the sentence has opened, with the simile comparing those "years accumulating" to "loose change," the key is itself now compared to both those "years" as well as a pocket's "loose change" (holding also the "ring of keys") -- so that the ambiguity in that "it" is considerable, and unwieldy: which "sense," among those indicated, "draws" the "sentimental blank"? The bother of the ambiguity, from my reading, is that the key is made both synecdoche of the "drawing" as well as the metonym of the "blank," and conceptually cannot operate in both positions. Empson discusses this type of ambiguity that comes from demanding too much of the language, of allowing, in short, the "atmosphere" of the dispersing tropes to carry the sense. "The sentimental blank" is almost a bit of autopoeisis trying to make a problem in the logic self-describe a new subject. If atmosphere is Empson's way (gotten out of Riding and Graves) of getting at the emotive qualities in words' secondary associations, then "sentiment" may not be so far from the very thing Clewell is getting at, but it's an odd bit of self-exposure -- exposing, as it does, that the poem has not yet proposed a subject, only a pathetic modality.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have to respect my professor and poetry pimp, David Clewell.