Check out this great review of "Birthdays Before and After" by George Wallace.
Originally published on the POETRYBAY site on Facebook, link below.
To
raise the shades, to look out into the New York City day
by
George Wallace
Birthdays
Before And After, Puma Perl
Beyond
Baroque Books 2019
For countless
authors, New York City is a metaphor -- the overwhelming city, with its charms
and caresses, its turn-ons and turn-offs, its nooks and crannies, its sheer
titanic girth. Its opportunities and dangers, its callous and dismissive
disinterest in anything but itself, the pure expression of itself, myriad,
unassailable, New York.
But for
Puma Perl, in her new collection Birthdays Before and After, New York
City is more than a metaphor. It is a life itself – told from the inside out.
Intersectional
New York City, with all its contradictions, and with all its scales pitched in
perfectly cacophonous array. The New York City of railroad apartments and Coney
Island chicken coops, where you grow up afraid to get a dog because they killed
your cat. The New York City of speedballs and rainbow cookies, where love is ‘waiting
on the corner in the drug dealer’s boots.’ Streets ‘smelling of blood,
death, car wrecks and maybe a little bit of hope.’ The contradance of
junkies and bill-paying American thieves, and beautiful lost poets who have
lived so long writing poems for a gig in neat handscript (and then throwing
them out) that life itself has killed them.
Old men
playing dominoes in the park. Tattoo’ed girls proud of their shoulders. Vampire
cups of coffee brewed at sunset. New York City -- where taxi vomit is for
amateurs, where being homeless is ‘not the same as a bottle of Wild Irish
and a doorway,’ and where vacancy is an art unto itself.
A city
that lives above and below the radar, carrying on multiple simultaneous
existences most of which are invisible to visitors and passers through.
Today
is a New York holiday
The
transplants are gone
Streets
are deserted and promise nothing
Neither
do we.
In her
new collection Perl offers us a kaleidoscopic glimpse of it all. She prowls the
streets of Gotham with the elusive skill of a tried and true ‘denizen’ of the
city, and does not even bother asking if you want to tag along -- because
obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be here. Living in a city like this, as she
has, there are simply too many small matters in ordinary human existence to
tally it all up like a waitress presenting the bill. Terrible and delicious
matters, intrinsic to an overwhelmingly brutal and specific city, a city as
uncertain as it is bold, a city as tantalizingly flirtatious as it is
unforgiving.
Puma
Perl’s poems possess a devotion to the discoverable in the ‘off-moment,’ a
quest for aperture, a la Frank O’Hara, who knew how to find a revelation in a
doorway, on one or another of his lunchtime strolls through midtown.
They
also possess the gritty insistence on the possibility of hope in a seemingly
hopeless city, a la Lou Reed, who claimed there’s a book on magic at the bottom
of the garbage can, and if you can get hold of it and count to three you can
disappear.
Birthdays
Before and After, by contrast, is no disappearing act. What we have here are
moments of clarity in an overilluminated world, approximating insight.
Drop a
five dollar bill on a homeless girl if you want to, it ‘may or may not be her
birthday,’ and it ought to make you feel good to do it. But know this -- the
gesture carries in itself the very seeds of doubt and disappointment, and
anyhow is little more than ‘a shot of dope/lasting a minute and then you’re
back where you were//sitting on cardboard. ‘
Give
away all your stuff – band shirts, tight skirts, silk dress, workout gear – to
people more virtuous than you, and they’ll just worry and think you’re going to
kill yourself. Of course you’re not going to do that:
“It’s
been done
and 4
am phone calls and railroad
stations
will haunt me forever.’
Though
they do not attempt to shock or tease, these poems succeed as well as they do
in part because they don’t have to go that route. There is a wry
believability in these poems, a street-weariness told with survivor aplomb, and
with an undertone of unextinguished resolve that makes it possible to believe
that a person can swallow the indigestible and keep on going, can keep asking
the unanswerable questions.
What
does it mean to open your eyes in the morning to ‘bridges and rivers, trees
hurting more than the ugly,’
What
does it mean to ask ‘when do you cry? When do you stop?’
What
does it mean to declare I’m not afraid of my city, and ask us to believe
that the sheer pluck of saying so can make it true.
Here in
80-something pages is a life revealed with as much honesty as the facts
themselves allow. Half a dozen lives really, rolled up into one, so far. Lived
way beyond the punk thing -- an oversimplification of the author’s wide-ranging
aims and attitudes -- that help to give dimension and full human context to the
label ‘New Yorker.’
Though
for those seeking a glimpse into ‘that’ scene, they’ll find much that is
satisfying in this book. Deglamorized though, not your standard anti-glam punk
chic. Punk made real. I have no doubt Perl could do a whole chapbook
name-dropping punk celebrities -- but that would be doing it on the cheap and
easy, and if this collection is any evidence, this is a poet who decidedly aims
higher than that. And anyhow, if you hang around in New York long enough,
brushes with celebrities are not the point.
is the
point is the way the human drama reveals itself, teetering on stilettos and
dirty martinis, leaning against incoherent walls, doing shots with the girls,
sprawled out blind in the middle of a party, spiked on LSD on some stranger’s
couch. Shouldering onto some stage for a moment of tinsel glory before all the
souls around you break into jagged pieces.
“We
were all born broken,” observes Perl in an understated inner city
drawl. “I was born broken too…
I break
soft in hard places
I break
quiet on rooftops and subways…
…Men
slit their throats for me
Each
time I break.
This is
neither bravura nor the stuff of leather femme fatale. It is cold, hard,
authentic. Human. The kind of poetry that is only possible to write if you have
lived it, been a citizen to it, part victim and part perpetrator, part
instigator and part accomplice.
A world
that offers a kind of transcendence to have simply survived another night of
it, woken up with the eyes still in your head and a willingness to open them up
and take a chance on another day -- the silences and the sighs, the curses and
blessings littered among the sirens, the smacktalk and sidewalk lies.
‘Every
morning I raise these shades and it’s still too beautiful not to hurt a little
more.’
To
write poems like these is to raise the shades and look out into the New York
City day. And no matter the conditions of society or the weather, have the
resolve to either plunge yourself back into it, or shut your eyes and save
yourself for another day.
And
along the way, put some of it to pen to paper.
“It
isn’t depression,” writes Puma Perl “It’s August.
like a
bad play that never ends...
Why
bother to talk at all?
People’s
intelligence rises
As
temperatures fall
Look
for me in February
I’ll be
wearing boots and black jeans
Just
like August but smarter.
George Wallace is
the author of 36 collections of poetry in the US, UK and Europe. He is Writer
in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace and a fixture on the NYC
performance scene. Wallace is the winner of numerous international awards for
poetry, and he travels internationally to perform, lead writing workshops, and
lecture on literary topics.
Photo of George Wallace by Robert L Harrison
"Birthdays Before and After" cover art by Chelle Mayer
Graphics by Dennis Doyle
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