A Study and Book Review

Sixty Poems
by Lee Evans

Editor's note: A shorter version of this book review originally appeared in ElephantJournal.com (originally a print journal). Elephant, or ELE, is now an online journal of "mindful living." I think that readers of TGL will find ELE particularly interesting and well worth visiting regularly.

Sixty Poems by Lee Evans expresses, as his three earlier books do, the Buddhist sense of the impermanence of things. His reaction here is to lament the inevitability of death yet affirm the right of each living being, human and nonhuman, to experience the cosmos in its own unique and irreducible way.

In this slim volume, we find several different styles of verse. We find here poetry that is soft and lyrical, poetry that is prophetic and declamatory, and poetry that assumes the voice of ancient parable. The reader will find many well-turned phrases here, some deceptively simply. In reflecting on a dying tree, the poet writes:

But now it rears its head
So proudly through the air:
Half living and half dead,
Without our human cares. (From "River's Edge")

The poet's sense of humor, irony, and genuine humility accompany the reader throughout the book. Sixty Poems is composed of several series of poems, grouped together roughly sequentially. They move through the personal, social, and spiritual dimensions of the poet's experience and thought. Having been prompted to publish them in this form to commemorate his sixtieth birthday (hence the title), the book begins with poems on the poet's own mortality and eventual demise, passes on to poems that criticize society and social attitudes, and then moves on to poems that describe attempts to live in the moment (the Tao), learning from the past but not living in blind obedience to it. The final grouping of poems is on love.

* * * * *

Like a righteous prophet who will not leave quietly, Evans first denounces the hypocrisy, sophistry, and false pride he sees around him, as well as the conformity to culture when it flies in the face of nature. In a struggle reminiscent of Thoreau's, he expresses frustration at being asked by his neighbors to cut his lawn to conform to the way that they do ("My Struggle"). This will probably not surprise the reader, who would have read earlier in the book his poem of homage to the dandelion ("Dent de Leon"). He derides a neighbor in this way. The poet tells the short tale in "Greek Mythology":

Lo and behold:
The Mighty Hunter,
ORION,
has stepped down
from the Heavens,
and moved in
next door to me!
He hangs
deer carcasses
in his yard,
from a Christmas Tree—
where they dangle
like ornaments,
for all the guys
to Envy. . .
My Stars,
what a Man!
When I grow up,
I want to be
ORION,
So I can stand
Alone and Awesome:
INDEPENDENT OF SUFFERING—
the Universe itself
my cowering
Shadow!

The poet denounces supervisors and bosses who demand that their workers look busy all the time, even when their work is already done (in "Look Busy"). That is but a prelude to the longer poem, "The Evaluation," which describes the workers' predicament brilliantly with a sarcasm that simply tells the facts as they are. The worker, who is at a periodic job evaluation, refers to himself in the poem as "nobody." This is both reminiscent of Kafka and a tale of another nobody, that of Odysseus, who, when the Cyclops asks his identity, responds "nobody." Another classical image comes to mind here: the boss's attitude of inflexibility and lack of understanding becomes like a Sisyphean rock which presses down on the workers and which they can never move. And so they never promote the worker who has done his work in an exemplary fashion, as they themselves said. Hopefully, the reader will seek out the whole poem. Here are the final two stanzas of "The Evaluation":

The man
Who sat before the panel placed his hand
Upon his chin and stroked it thoughtfully,
And said, "I am concerned with nothing but the work,
Which ends as soon as it is done.
All else
Is an impediment to me; and if this means
That I must end my days where I began,
Here in this entry level job, I say
Amen to that: I have my own reward."

The Chief sighed. The Committee looked away.
It had no choice but to present a page
With nothing on it for the man to sign,
To indicate that he had been advised
And that his signature meant only that
He understood—not necessarily
Agreed. He traced his name upon the page,
Which even when he signed was empty still.
He shook hands with the Interview Committee,
And left the office to go back to work.

A bit later in the book, the poem "Hello, My Name is" appears, which might well reference "The Evaluation." Here we see denunciation that has a Zen face and displays the range of the poet's style and power. I can't resist including it in full:

Those labels that you gave me:
I dumped them on the floor
As soon as I got home today,
And one by one did sort
Through every category,
While contemplating which
Neat designation might apply
To one so poor and rich
As I, who pinned each label on
Before that empty self
Which from the looking glass assessed
The features of my wealth.
"An artist you are not," I said,
"For Art is too much style;
Philosopher you cannot be,
Because of your denial
Of formulae to those who seek
A system. Neither do
You anything approximate
To teacher or guru,
But somehow are a hybrid growth
Evolved in sun and rain.
You spread your boughs, revealing
What labels cannot name."
I took your laundry tickets
And flushed them down the bowl.
So now when people ask me
What mantra suits my soul,
I say, "Hello, my Name is. . ."
And peel away my face!
And leave them with a looking glass
To occupy the space.

* * * * *

The poet's range includes the parable style, as we've stated. In "Pathways from the Past," Evans denounces archivists of human learning who attempt to manipulate knowledge through pedantry, sophistry, or personal gain, which doesn't necessarily help others. He contrasts them to Lao-Tzu, the famous historical/ legendary founder of Taoism, who is presented as a true archivist, one who draws from the past while living in the present. It is a long poem of ten stanzas, and it is hard to pick single lines or even a stanza to highlight here. To convey a sense of the poet's oracular style, here is stanza III:

Whoever ponders with an open mind
The pages of collective memory,
Will come to know that every word he reads
Originates within him; so he finds
That all must be unlearned and left behind
When the unfettered Intellect transcends
The present, past and future to show him
Such pilgrims as in Chaucer's paradigms.
A person of this sort you may have met;
An Archivist, who traced the hidden stories
Of Everyman's Accounts and Inventories,
And brought the buried past to life again:
In such a one the cycling ages fold
Their texts, as liber and as folio.

The poet's fury is tempered by the subject matter he treats, and he heats the metal of his verse to just the right temperature. Here is another example of how his poetic skill and sense of humor inform his poetic outbursts of righteous indignation. In "Unwanted Offer," the poet wants to give his poems, as that which is more valuable than money to him, to the phone solicitor, who promptly hangs up on him.

The distinction between openness to nature vs. technology is an important one for the poet. In "Experience," he muses on progress and technology in the voice of a poet who missed a chance to experience St. Patrick's well:

Been offered with a chance to kneel
Reborn beneath the flow—
He dreams he would have stripped himself
Of progress and its grief:
The armor that shields modern man
From wonder and belief.

It is important to note that the poet does not inveigh against technology per se, but only technology that misleads people to look only toward knowledge that impedes wonder. This echoes the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle: "Philosophy begins in wonder."

* * * * *

If the prophet of Sixty Poems preaches of a Hell, it is not one that exists outside of one's body or after death, but it is between people, in this life, as exhibited in their actions. In "The Anger of God," Evans cites some lines from Swendenborg's Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, section 569, which provides the inspiration for a number of poems:

Hellish fire or love comes from the same source as heavenly fire or love—from heaven's sun, or the Lord. However, it is made hellish by the people who receive it.

Getting caught up in their desires, people often create their own hell, and present day American politics is not excluded from this. Thus, the poet denounces the Predator drones for transforming the seriousness of dispensing death into a video game-type activity, in which hits lose their flesh and blood reality.

The poet describes self-delusion and how it limits a person's spiritual growth and depth. Even the poet's periodic personal lament for recognition and fame is grist for this mill. In one poem, he writes that his fame will grow slowly, like a monadnock, and will slowly be recognized. But there is irony and modesty even here:

No matter: what I earn of fame
Will take its sweet time to accrue.
My settlers will invent a name
That suits my life of solitude.
A holiday will mark my birth
One day in the Eternal Now—
When children scale the rugged earth
That wrinkles on my ancient brow! (From "August The Second")

* * * * *

This attitude of people to constantly judge and readily criticize their fellow human being, which the poet has described, sets the stage for the next grouping of poems. These describe the flow or the Tao of each thing. Speaking philosophically, by way of comment, we see the dualism between reality and appearance, as expressed in various human conflicts which the poet has described at length, resolved by the monism of just being in the moment and with the flow of the situation. The Tao, regarded philosophically, includes these aspects: the play of opposites, the beauty of contingency, and the unique particularity of each being of nature (in Evans's poem "Quiddity"). Inanimate objects have these qualities, too, as his poems about the fragments of found sea glass ("Remember Me") show. These poems, soft, lyrical, and reflective, appear near the end of the book, striking a contrast to the earlier sharp prophetic poems of denunciation of hypocrisy. These are relatively short lyrical poems which are hard to excerpt, so the reader will hopefully seek them out. "Jody's Garden," appearing near the end of the book, combines these qualities in a personal way for the poet.

* * * * *

The collection as whole is really a paean to love. We see the poet try to transform, and then put aside, that which he cannot transform through the vision of brotherhood or love or under the aspect of eternity (sub specie aeternitatus). Personal love between people, with its satisfactions and travails, is also transpersonal, and this eclipses human angst at inevitable death. In "Jody's Garden," the poet expresses, in the context of a relationship, enthusiasm and wonder as old forms dissolve in the compost pile and new forms of life emerge. His wit delights in paradox.

That everything from human experience is grist for poetry is a lesson the reader could take from Sixty Poems. The poet is the chronicler of the history that unfolds around them and their own history. The poet may denounce injustice and hypocrisy, but also speak of love. These poems have the effect of stimulating the reader to reflect and write and express themselves philosophically and poetically. His emphasis on the redemptive power of love is reminiscent of the importance and redemptive power of love both in Christianity and for classical Greek philosophers, as Plato, who wrote in the Symposium that love moves the cosmos as the ultimate object of each being's desire.
By the end of the book, we've learned to fully appreciate the eccentricity and caginess of Lee Evans in teaching us the lessons of right living. If it is his fate to remain an unsung poet, as he laments in one of the poems, then maybe he's an unsung Zen master too. If age 60 is the new 40, as I've heard it said, then this poet will hopefully be with us for a lot longer, delighting us as he writes and kicks his way across the page.

Sixty Poems by Lee Evans is published by Medusa and is available through Lulu.com.

Reviewed by Paul Dolinsky
editor@thegoldenlantern.com