This Life Now. Michael Broder. A Midsummer Night's Press. Body Language 12. New York, New York. 2014.
When you wet the bed first
it is warm then it gets cold.
-James Joyce
The Body Language series of books "are devoted to texts exploring questions of gender and identity."
The poems in Michael Broder's This Life Now have a quiet elegance to them, like whispers in a lover's ear, yet they arrive with full volume, resonate with energy.
These are poems about a young boy's first knowing, dangerous and tense teen travails, the horrible plague. Mostly these very touching, searching poems are excellent vignettes about love, desire and coming to an understanding of one's own sexual exploration and expression.
Words and Things
Near the end we walked along the beach;
you said we felt disconnected,
like a sentence with no conjunctions.
Once we had shared--
razors, toothbrush, a blanket,
like sea and air share the horizon,
reflecting, penetrating each other,
each better suited to any given thing,
like air to birds, sea to fish,
yet both hospitable to rainstorms,
and each with something unique
to offer sunsets.
Near the end we talked about words,
how actions speak louder
but are generally inadequate
to hypotheses
and other logical or affective relations
whose truth or validity
are only apparent over time
as in
The pen is mightier than the sword
or the phrase
Killing with kindness.
...
Today's book of poetry is at an ignorant crossroads, a self-inflicted dilemma. Do I talk about Michael Broder and This Life Now as gay text -- or as I'd prefer -- just as good poetry? I don't want to overemphasize the context -- and I don't want to ignore it.
Today's book of poetry will listen to any constructive advice in this regard.
This Life Now, for TBOP, is Chet Baker smooth, all west coast cool, terribly handsome. We loved how Broder cuts through modern culture to find the perfect touch stones like a crush on the Beaver's brother Chip, leaving a particular hue to the cues and curbstones in his wake.
A Brief History
In 1960, by my mother, my father's bread is buttered
without irony.
Then, the word "luncheonette" was uttered without irony.
Sodium lamps surround our housing project like a stalag.
Home alone, watching Rosemary's Baby, I shuddered
without irony.
High school girls wonder why Michael won't date them.
In a pizzeria, over a vial of pills, her eyelashes fluttered,
without irony.
In the lower bunk I ask permission before removing my briefs.
From above, "I love you," stuttered without irony.
...
Broder's keen coming-of-age poems are real beauties. He navigates all those difficult moments with an adult poets' intelligence and aplomb and yet keeps all the innocent child's guileless magic. This is no small mechanical feat yet Broder does this sort of thing again and again in this splendid collection.
When Broder turns a corner he takes us with him. These poems tell the story of coming to consciousness in childhood, from teen horrors and joys, the spurting adolescent to the unrepentant young man who wrote these lovely poems.
You See, The Thing Is,
I've been in love before,
but never like this,
the way I lie, arm around him,
dark outside, can't sleep,
thinking of mother in a hospital bed,
lying awake while dawn comes,
yellow, gray, and slightly stale,
the hundred and eighty
degrees I turn, the away I face,
clock I check as he rolls over,
fast asleep, and catches me.
...
TBOP looks forward to Michael Broder's second book, this is a first class start.
He has taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Queens College, York College, and the Graduate Center, all of which are campuses of the City University of New York, as well as at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ) and The University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC).
He lives in Brooklyn with his lawfully wedded spouse, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and numerous cats, both feral and domestic. This Life Now is his first book.
...
Broder's keen coming-of-age poems are real beauties. He navigates all those difficult moments with an adult poets' intelligence and aplomb and yet keeps all the innocent child's guileless magic. This is no small mechanical feat yet Broder does this sort of thing again and again in this splendid collection.
When Broder turns a corner he takes us with him. These poems tell the story of coming to consciousness in childhood, from teen horrors and joys, the spurting adolescent to the unrepentant young man who wrote these lovely poems.
You See, The Thing Is,
I've been in love before,
but never like this,
the way I lie, arm around him,
dark outside, can't sleep,
thinking of mother in a hospital bed,
lying awake while dawn comes,
yellow, gray, and slightly stale,
the hundred and eighty
degrees I turn, the away I face,
clock I check as he rolls over,
fast asleep, and catches me.
...
TBOP looks forward to Michael Broder's second book, this is a first class start.
Michael Broder
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Broder (Freeport, New York, 1961) holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in BLOOM, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Classical World, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed, My Diva, Divining Divas, Rabbit Ears, and Ancient Obscenities.He has taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Queens College, York College, and the Graduate Center, all of which are campuses of the City University of New York, as well as at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ) and The University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC).
He lives in Brooklyn with his lawfully wedded spouse, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and numerous cats, both feral and domestic. This Life Now is his first book.
BLURBS
“Michael Broder’s moving and lucid poems have heart, music, audacity—and they give a quiet, lasting pleasure, like an ancient Greek torso reshaped for the space age. This Life Now is full of salt, sex, TV, and other riveting varieties of poised explosiveness, to which his lucky reader blissfully surrenders.”—Wayne Koestenbaum
—Peter Covino
Michael Broder
Cafe Be with guest, poet Michael Broder
video: Mark McNease
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