By Todd Moore
If the poetry is any good it comes to us with the poet’s blood smeared on it like a primitive announcement, a declaration. Here I am, it says, complete with all my anger, my rage, my skin and my bones. I have wounds to show you and I have stories to tell. And, it is through this story telling that the poet somehow heals himself and in that process of healing, also reinvents himself and what he is writing.
This ritual is as old as the cave paintings in southern France and Spain. And, this ritual is also as new as today. CRUDELY MISTAKEN FOR LIFE, Wolfgang Carstens, Epic Rites Press, 2010, is certainly proof of that. This first book of poetry reminds me of Maria Sabina’s book of Veladas, her night chants for curing the sickness in us all.
i was daydreaming
when i stumbled
upon the
large Australian
cockroach
on our
driveway
i scooped
it up
in an empty
paper cup
and brought it
inside
the house
i remember
my wife
screaming
bloody murder
before i
had even
showed it
to her
she must have
sensed
its presence
but that’s how
it goes…
one night
you’re sitting
alone
on the couch
watching TV
when suddenly
bugs arrive
to eat you
up
Those last four lines really serve as a kind of key to the whole book. “…when suddenly/bugs arrive/to eat you/up…” might be the way a child would explain the monsters he finds in his room at night. Except that these are the words of a grown man casually talking about finding a cockroach in his driveway. What I like so much about this poem is that Carstens has learned how to take something as real as the dead cockroach in the driveway and use it to talk about a universal fear.
Of course, monster bugs and ultimately death is the universal fear. And, also that fear becomes part of a kind of universal wound. We are wounded from birth because we are both immortal in the way that we think and act and create and we are mortal in the way that we kill and are wounded and make love and dream.
deadbeat tenants
i rapped upon the door
with the handle of my cane.
it was the middle of the night
when i woke him
from a sound slumber.
he squinted through parted
curtains into the darkness.
the front door opened.
no sooner had he accepted
the eviction notice than his dog
ran outside barking
into the busy street.
we stood dumb like trees
as a speeding automobile
mowed the creature down.
a harsh reminder
that strangers are waiting
to rouse us from our dreams,
force us to pay our bad debts,
that we are all deadbeat tenants;
and no matter how loud we bark
or how fast we run
there will always be
a busy street to cross;
we are all dogs
with a steel bumper
moving toward us.
This poem reminds me of something similar that happened when I was a kid. We were playing catch in my front yard. The neighbor kid’s dog kept trying to snatch the ball whenever one of us over threw or missed a catch and it went into the weeds. On the last throw the neighbor kid missed the catch and the dog went after it out into the street and under a bus.
First books of poetry are often like first novels. The poet seems to try hard to call up all the old demons so he can exorcise them out of his skin. Not only that, he wants to keep remembering all the best names, the Annies, the Stevies, the Luckys. Writing poetry is part of the great ritual of remembering. It’s the stick we throw into the fire for the burning and it’s the story we tell about that stick that is the remembering.
My favorite poem in CRUDELY MISTAKEN FOR LIFE is “happy birthday Mr. Cool. Every honest poem about a father is one related as a rumor of war. No writer I have ever known has had a calm relationship with a father. Charles Bukowski’s father must have been very difficult to live with. My own father was an unpredictable and often violent alcoholic. So, it comes as no surprise that Wolfgang Carstens’ father was someone who could also resort to violence.
one time, when his second wife died,
and her family blamed me because
i never accepted her as my stepmother,
my father put his oversized fist
through a plaster wall –
it broke clean through to the other side.
From “happy birthday Mr. Cool.”
If you are going to be a poet, the first person you have to fight in order to do it is your father. He is the monster who stands at the door you must enter, he is the one you must confront at all costs if you are ever going to find your truest and most authentic voice. He is the dragon that you must kill. Because, it is his meat that you will make poems from. Wolfgang Carstens must know this better than anyone else. This book stands as powerful testament of that knowledge.
Crudely Mistaken For Life
By Wolfgang Carstens
ISBN 978-0981184463
93 pages
Epic Rites Press, 2010
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