FOREWORD TO DAVID AXELROD

FOREWORD TO DAVID AXELROD'S POETRY

by X. J. Kennedy

In the United States, no official gunman of the state has come looking for David B. Axelrod. In a memorable poem, Axelrod seems to regard this safety as a mingled blessing. It would almost be desirable to be taken seriously--as he and other local poets were in totalitarian countries where they whispered dangerous poems to audiences who risked prison in order to listen to them. In America, however, the poet is regarded as a harmless kook. Even if he had any listeners (the assumption goes), how could he possibly trouble the general complacency?

In the case of David B. Axelrod, this situation is particularly ironic. If any poet working in America at present has the power to smash complacency, it is he. If you'd test this claim, please see that unique poem about advertised charity, "Once in a While a Protest Poem," or a most recent protest, "The Children of Shenzhen, "among the "China Poems" of this book. Now one of America 's most international poets, David Axelrod has relished living abroad, meeting poets and exchanging poems, steeping himself in the language and life of another people. His deep familiarity with Sicily and the Italians is reflected in his previous new and selected poems, Home Remedies.

In his book, The Universal Language, the poems rise above just travel writing as the title poem itself suggests. Again, in this newest volume, he continues to recount his experiences as an American poet in Yugoslavia and most recently, China. Poems like "Black Dream," in The Universal Language, and "The Children of Shenzhen," among the newest, go well beyond the cataloging of far away places with strange sounding names. That Axelrod's work has been translated and published in so many languages attests to the fact that it is becoming known and admired throughout the world.

If his newer poems also show a certain increasing darkness and seriousness, they remain as compassionate as ever. Among the most moving, for me, is that immense poem "Resurrections," with its unforgettable glimpse of the sixteen-year-old girl stricken with terror on the birthing table. The sequence in White Lies gives us a view of childhood entirely frank and without sentiment. In its short title poem, "White Lies," using a direct and simple line, Axelrod captures an essential childhood moment of terror, just as the books longest poem, "Buggy Racing," with its poignant ending, recounts a childhood rite of passage. In an earlier glimpse of childhood, "The Vandal," portrays the school drop-out who returns to seek vengeance. Axelrod understands to a wonderful degree the thinking of the outcast, the enemy of society. That understanding is reinforced in poems like "The Logic of Assassins:" "All the years a peaceful man, patient sufferer, he dreamt and drenched his night clothes. Out of body, he rose to kill.'

It is this tough-mindedness that won me in his earlier poetry and Axelrod's street-wise contempt for cant. He is clearly aware of suffering that, among the Jews, goes back five thousand years. For all the artfulness of his poems, there is something unliterary about them--that is, they don't smell of the scholar's lamp, they seem at times to have turned up in the Lost & Found department of a hotel in Long Island City . Their language sounds as if it came out of people's mouths--a quality invaluable, too, in the poetry of David Ignatow, at one time Axelrod's teacher and friend. Those who don't ordinarily care for poems, I'd expect, will like Axelrod's poems.

A devastating satirist, Axelrod is an open and disarming humorist besides. (I think of Andre Maurois' distinction between satire and humor. Satire is poking fun at others; humor at oneself.) In the earlier and newer poems alike the poet ranges between a wit that is not too cute and those darker moments, which are by no means totally dark. Throughout his work, Axelrod devotes his infectious humor to affirming life, hard though it be. See, for a wonderful instance, the brief masterpiece, "Kissing in Front of the Microwave"--a love poem of which no other poet I know could have been capable.

In Resurrections, one can see this range in poems like "The Critical Weakness," and "Seeing the Specialist." In Love in the Keys we have "The Macho Myth of the One-Night Stand," with its self-deprecating humor and we also have "The Slaughter," perhaps one of Axelrod's most brooding love poems. And then there are lyrical moments such as in "Watching You." Although not usually a formalist in his work habits, Axelrod is fond (like Robert Creeley) of using rhyme to ironic effect. In "American's Are Sentimental," we find American's pitying the Tsar--they "pity the bullet / holes like dimples in his head / and whisper 'Better dead than red.'" (For instances of ironic rhyme, see "The Wedding of Two Greats," a poem that still breaks me up; and the ending of "Who Will Go First, a vision of aging fox-trotters at old Miami Beach.) As a master of such word music, Axelrod's art is never purely decorative. He keeps hitting us with bursts of common sense as he moves comfortably within these realms.

In the selection of [new poems in The Chi of Poetry], we have a set of thirty-two pieces entitled "China Journal," in which, again, we weave rapidly between the humorous but not trivial and the serious but not morose. There's the light touch in "Climbing the Great Wall,' which even by its end turns back on itself to "imagine a stone snake asleep/ atop a ledge of mountain," and there is a discomforting prophecy in "The Politics of Dragonflies." The same poet who can play "The Art of Chinese Street Crossing," also gives us a beautifully economical poem on car crashes, "We Are All Hit-and-Run," with its final question, "On impact, where do we go?" It is hard to read such poems without feeling the barbs of such dangerous questions. Without hearing, perhaps, the soft crashing of favorite smugnesses.

In his "New Poems for My Family [Chi of Poetry]. we visit everyone from "The Upstairs Tenant," determined to die of drink to those scarred by divorce, to "Diogenes in the Diner." These poems are built on long years of observation as were the first "Poems for My Family" included in Home Remedies. In "Alone in Your House," he gave us someone who stole not TV sets but the secrets of his victims' lives. Poem after poem continues to bring human relationships down out of theory.

In one, the cast of a musical visits a women's prison to affront the inmates with songs of uplift and cheer: The Hair cast cameras got their publicity shots and left, but oh, baby, what we do to each other. A similar social commentary can be found in the newer long poem, "Who Will Remember the Six Men?" Whether it is in the immense satire "Blaiberg with Racial Heart," or the astonishing richness and compression of a poem like "Godiva of the Stoplights," (if there can be another poem like that one) there is always warm-heart humanity underlying Axelrod's work. Indeed, that is what makes it easy to hear that consistency of voice which Axelrod himself confesses he has longed for in the "Author's Note" to one of his books.

If his work is news to you, you're lucky to hold this book in your hands. Here, from [fifteen] prior books, many now hard to obtain, are some of the most lovely, harrowing and outrageously funny poems, selected from [forty] publishing years. For good measure, there's a trove of new work besides. Listen and you will find a strong and engaging coming at you through an open window. Take it before the Secret Police arrive.

--X. J. Kennedy

This foreword is adapted from earlier selections of poetry of David B. Axelrod entitled Home Remedies and The Chi of Poetry first published in 1982 and 1995.