Hand a barfly a ballpoint and a napkin, and you might just end up with a poem.
You probably won’t. But if you do, watch out: the smoky atmosphere of a bar is a better place than most for incubating a poetic sensibility. Such texturally complex tableaux automatically lend themselves to the kind of careful observation that literacy professionals call “close reading.” The sensory extremes of a classic dive fall into the same category of images that animated the minds of Byron and Shelley, for whom ruin and decay were everything. For Charles Bukowski – whose headstone bears the dictum, “Don’t try” – a poem like “Ozymandias” was, maybe, the only kind of poem worth emulating. He spent his career charting (one might say embodying) the vanity of human striving.
When Bukowski died, it was a Spanish poet, not an American one, who took up the torch. His name is Karmelo C. Iribarren, and if you aren’t familiar with the name or the body of work, you aren’t alone. All you need to know for now is that the two men’s lives mirror one another in a number of striking ways. There’s the ubiquity of all things boozy, for starters – all of the pain, longing, shame, and cynicism that are indispensable to the life of a hard drinker. There’s the fact that both men, writing for decades in relative obscurity, weren’t “discovered” until middle age. There’s the purely visual correspondence of the poems, which tend to stack short lines in short columns, in the natural expression of an occasionally leashless compulsion to enjamb. Above all, though, both poets consistently exhibit a thoroughly sensible devotion to clarity – each poem an opportunity to say something sharply and swiftly, with an effortless narrative sense that tends to speed each poem to a strong and memorable finish. One such poem is simply titled “Doors.”
Open ones
are no big deal:
you’re either in or you’re out.
Shut ones
have got their mystery, true,
but they often disappoint.
It’s the ones ajar
you’ve got to watch out for,
as they can prove irresistible.
If Iribarren carries calling cards, they’re the same gut-punch concision and world-weary insight that make this poem do double duty as an aphorism. Just shy of a hundred pieces, similarly exacting, form the case-hardened structure of his English-language debut, which sports the tonally perfect title, You’ve Heard This One Before. And maybe you have (heard this one, or that one, or that one, before). But it’s never been a matter of merely having heard a bit of wisdom. Most of us have ears that work. What counts is fixing it to the foreground of daily life. Thence springs the pertinence of a poet so resigned to truth-telling that it’s easy to confuse him for a philosopher. Sometimes, as in a poem titled “A Day Later,” Iribarren sounds like no one so much as the Romanian master of despair, E. M. Cioran.
They found him
the next day,
still dressed,
on his bed,
as he was caught
by the deluge of solitude.
Such stabs at bewilderment keep easy company with the koan-ish utterance of a poem like “Sunday, Afternoon” (“If it isn’t raining / what am I doing / watching the rain.”), which only appears to overdose on simplicity. Something much subtler has transpired when the flux of a poem’s central image manages to survive, rather than baffle, the mind’s insistence on unity. What that means for us is that the book’s translator, John R. Sesgo, has done a remarkably deft job of replicating and adapting Iribarren’s masterful facility for understatement.
Few accomplished artists of an ironic, hard-boiled bent find themselves capable of resisting that turn. The world is (they say) too dissatisfying, too disheartening to muster the barbarism behind a good, bracing yawp. After spending a few days leafing through these pages, it’s hard to disagree. Iribarren’s understatement cuts to the bone. In “Those Days,” an ode to discontent, his typically low-key register hits a note of subdued terror.
There are days
when getting out of bed
is not just an ordinary
deed
but an epic gesture.
And I’m not talking about hangovers
or God-awful weather
outside
or your girlfriend having left you.
I’m talking about mornings
when someone loves you and the sun is out
and nothing hurts—
when the world lies conquered
at your feet,
and it’s not enough.
And maybe he’s right. For restless readers worldwide, the very prospect of reading is a symptom of the perennial bother to find out. Until then, there’s God, family, and country – and the extraordinary honesty of poems like these, which manage, all in the same breath, to remind us of what’s missing from our lives at the moment that they provide it.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.
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