Reviewed by Carolyn Steinhoff
By This Time—Poems
by Ian Ganassi
Finishing Line Press
Paper, $22.99, ISBN: 979-8-88838-475-6, June 2024, 92 pages
It’s fitting that the cover of this and of all Ian Ganassi’s poetry collections are collaborative collages, because his poems and the collages are language and visual versions of the same project. The collages, which he calls corpses, are combinations of Ganassi’s words, his art partner Laura Bell’s painting, and the detritus our way of life leaves strewn around, pieces of broken toys, a leather whip, an antique tile, candy wrappers, newspapers, ancient texts—everything and anything.
Living, for the speaker of these poems, is a matter of casting one’s gaze about one, maintaining a respectful and also self-protective distance from reverence, but quietly, almost covertly feeling it. The speaker politely declines the invitations to excess that our passions extend to us: “If it’s relief I’m finding here, it’s a double-edged sword./ But even though we’re high strung, at least we’re not bored.”
The flotsam and jetsam of phrases the poems accumulate are sometimes altered, sometimes combined, always recognizable. There are bits of songs (sometimes in italics): “’The girl with kaleidoscope eyes’”; “Why don’t we do it in the road?”; “And the beat goes on”; “Our Lady of Sorrows cried us a river . . .”; fairy tales: “Someone has been sleeping in my crib;” “ The breadcrumbs dropped;” ”’What nice luggage you have grandma.’/All the better to visit you with my dear;’” sayings: “Making hay while the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home;” jokes and superstitions: “The black cat crossed my path to get to the other side;” musicals: “The rain in New Haven falls mainly on the pavement;”, cartoons and comic books: “. . . love of truth won’t win Olive Oyl;” “Popeye is in the rigging,/ Who never had the pleasure of a spinach salad . . . As reported in crumbling comic books,” and more. The poet places these scraps and humorous sometimes jarring revisions politely before us without fanfare.
The tone throughout is wry, erudite, humorous, highly intelligent and attuned—I wanted to say “ironic” but there is no cynicism here. Ganassi maintains his distance from the material, but also his humility.
The speaker turns this way and that and all around, gazing—at the world around him as well as at his internal world—placing pieces from both in proximity with each other on the page, letting their significance exist however his readers may find it.
I’m sure I don’t recognize all the references, but the many I do ring a bell in me that locates me in a milieu. They snap me into an awareness of my membership, my participation in this mélange, this chaotic, often alienating, complicated maelstrom of life, that I hold in common, with the poet, with Americans, with fellow “boomers,” with New Yorkers, which until I read these poems I wasn’t quite as conscious of.
Each tidbit, presented as random in its choice and arrangement, contains history, muted yet impactful revelations about late-stage capitalism and the Anthropocene, gathering force inexorably, reminding us that we live in an apocalypse we cannot solve or escape. “Over what was left of the marshes the jumbo jet boomed.” “What’s left of the wilderness is no analgesic.” “For instance it’s surprising/ That there’s anything left to burn/ In California . . . The fires indicate the end of time.”
Then there are the glimpses into the speaker’s internal world, that add the intimacy, the vulnerability, that give the poems poignancy. Yes, I am distant, the speaker is saying, but I am mortal. I’m living, seemingly helplessly, in my body, in this swirl with you in your body, too.
Yet even at those points where the speaker directly expresses his suffering: “The state of my digestive system is always making trouble.” “’You’re a rough customer’ she said/Implying that I should have been either married or dead;” “They accused me subtly/Of being under the delusion/That ‘it was all a dream./But I went about my suffering anyway,” it’s never personal. He isn’t requiring sympathy, because these are objective facts of life, of all our lives. “Desire is endless/And then you die.” If this affects you so be it. I’m not responsible for that, he’s saying. The speaker is only asserting that, yes, he is here, a human is here, exposed and tempest-tossed, just like me, like all of us.
There emerges an ever-present They, a sometimes explicit, sometimes inchoate threatening force: “The little traps laid for us by the world,/The danger of falling glass…” The forces of fate, of destiny, of accident and illness, that push and shape us against our will, to which we must orient ourselves, may overtake or sometimes “drown” us—a recurring threat even when mitigated with witty wordplay: “Don’t scuttle the boat till you can see the shore./ It would be a shame to drown;” “It’s a witless outlier or outsider/Tied to ceramic insulators,/ The new style in cement shoes.//If you tie on enough of them/They’ll pull you down/ Into the water . . .” “Too much water under the bridge./ A danger of drowning was averted.” “With a rock tied to his leg he came up to breathe/ One last time, torn up, tickled to death . . .” “Are we being punished for our sins?” the speaker asks. “If you’re looking for trouble you don’t have to look very far.” “It didn’t come in handy to have a pacific disposition./ The very bottom of the pile was my usual position.”
The external and internal will come together in the inescapability of death itself, which Ganassi doesn’t let us forget about. “I wonder who death thinks he is,/ Coming around and spoiling all our fun;” “Just ignore the corpses scattered in the dust;” “ . . . you’re alive//Which is more than some of us could say;” “”’Keep your chin up,’ he said,/ As his chin sagged to the floor. He was better off dead.”
The body that moves among the debris that flies about us like objects in a tornado also is itself an object, awaiting, living over and against, its own mortality. Illness—“The abstracted pedestrian was busy nursing his sciatica,” darkness—“Things are never what we intend/ When push comes to shove or worse to worst” and death are a kind of basement floor into which the structures of the poems settle, from which they rise.
The poet will never tell me what to think or feel, but there is a sense that the poems present me with an implicit test. One is even titled “Is This a Test?” They ask me a question, vibrate there awaiting my answer after I finish reading each one, and don’t fade after I’ve finished the book. The range of the reactions the poems evoke is as varied and surprising as the lines. It’s impossible to dismiss the flurry of feelings, laughter, thoughts, challenges, frissons of dread each poem leads me through and evokes. I find the question they pose—
What do you make of all this?—is hard to answer, and maybe cannot be answered, but the challenge of it keeps me reading and changes me.
The poems never allow me that comfortable affirmation many other poets’ poems reach for, that feeling that the poet and I are sharing in a truth we both know. If there are lines that make an assertion, there are sure to follow more that contradict it: “The huskies/ Were champing at the bit.//Although I don’t think they use bits./ They might not even use huskies,” whether it’s by switching out the usual word for another or reversing their order, or by formal repetitions that reconfigure or transform the sense and impact of a line or phrase by placing it in ever changing contexts of the next and the new lines that surround it.
Ganassi sets up surprising black/white polarities: “Normalcy and sanity . . .” that imply a spectrum of grays, and couples the speaker’s every move toward an assertion with its undoing. He offsets sappiness with aggression: “You deserve a brick today–/ Some smack in the head;”, cynicism with humor, yearning with insouciance: “I was craving something but I didn’t know what.// Whatever it was it has nothing to do with you;” “Just when I thought it was getting good it began to suck,” existential dread with a shrug: “Take me out to the ballgame,/ Just don’t leave me there, speaking of trapped.” And nostalgia is simply banned. “As for nostalgia, it’s a toxin.”
There is the sense that the lines find the poet as much as the poet finds the lines.
By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency.
I judge art of whatever sort, visual, language-based, music, by whether and in what ways it changes my ways of seeing, of hearing, of perceiving the world. Now that I’ve run Ganassi’s poems through my brain, I am perceiving everything as silently important potential artistic material. Recurrence of a line, word or phrase, often with variation, can’t help but add weight: “Purple weather is all the rage.// And the purple grapes in the vineyard/ Are suffering the weather with the rest of us.” Weather foregrounds itself here. In “Trap Door,” we find the word “joke” repeated, first in the opening line: “The trap is corrective, until you get the joke,” then in the middle: “Even if we don’t know when to laugh just yet,” and again at the end: “What if he performed the joke and nobody attended?” What are jokes, anyway? the lines invite me to wonder. In the poem “Helicon” he repeats the rhyming lines “Don’t get locked in with the cold” and “Especially when it’s time to get old,” juxtaposing them with radically different other lines that change their impact, thereby jolting us yet again, by the seeming arbitrariness of their placement, into a questioning of the meanings in language we unthinkingly accept as fixed and unchanging.
While we are always at risk in his world, Ganassi also offers some shelter, antidotes, and reassurances: In “The incredible Shrinking Man” [italics his]: “The 250 year old barn still stands up to the rain.// Look, an ant, get out the antibiotics!// Here comes a candle to light you to bed.” Let us not be contented, though; shelter is temporary and solutions are not to be trusted. We are still “Hung out to dry.”
The lines and their steadily accumulating, steadily more confounding effects on us are like slippery shoes Ganassi glides through life on, evading ever being grabbed or pinned down by meaning just one thing, or by too much feeling, be it love, pleasure or terror. We are always to be finding and losing our footing in Ganassi’s world—which is the world of all of us.
About the reviewer: Carolyn Steinhoff is the author of two poetry books: Under the World (2016) and History of the Future (2023) published by Nauset Press. Carolyn’s poems have appeared in Book of Matches, Global Poemic, The Indypendent, Cape Rock, And Then, House Organ, Emerge Literary Journal, The Hat, Conjunctions and many other journals and publications. Her chapbook, Plain English, and her play The Setting Face to Face with the Clear Light, were published by Texture Press. She has had nonfiction articles in numerous magazines including Multicultural Review, A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine, and Today’s Latino Magazine, for which she was a staff writer. She published the paper magazine of art and writing, From Here: Sex, Politics and Power, and was a recipient of the Jingle Feldman Award for Performance from the Tulsa Arts and Humanities Council, grants from the Oklahoma Arts Council, the MidAmerica Arts Alliance and the Puffin Foundation.