Good Housekeeping, poems by Bruce Whitacre
Poets Wear Prada Press, $18.00
This is a very "slender" volume of poetry by Bruce Whitacre, only 44 pages, published by a small poetry press, Poets Wear Prada, but the poems in it create a whole domestic wardrobe of memorable effects and boiled-in-blood affects. Whitacre loves haikus, those short Japanese darning needles of poems that are based on word associations and stainless-steel-cut images. This extreme concision shows in his poems which also use word sounds and associations beautifully. One of the most memorable is "Narcissi, We Drown in Our Own Eyes." It's in two-line stanzas, and the second line of each stanza ends in the word "radiance," beginning with:
I love you like a leisurely country drive, the curves, the gradients.
Coffee streams the windshield. We lean into the radiance.
and ends with:
After forty years, I am your Bruce, setting another table,
breaking bread and feasting on our radiance.
These could easily be kind of gooey poems of domesticity, and Whitacre in the book's initial poem called—of course—"Good Housekeeping," recalls Mrs. Dalloway, one of the great novels of domesticity, but starts off with a real kick in the kishkas:
I sing the body domestic in sonnets Hooveric—
OK, you get it already: a lot of things are going on this house besides dusting and emptying the dishwasher. These are poems of gratefulness, but also about the confines of housekeeping, relationships, and acquaintanceship. In a poem dedicated to a distant friend, "Once More for Elizabeth," he ends:
We promise to see you again soon
as you shut and double-lock your door.
. . .
For love you as we do,
distance divides us.
And our memories, even this one,
spill into the void.
What Whitacre has understood so beautifully in this short but memorable book of poetry is that relationships, like "housekeeping" itself, exact an exorable price for all their rewards. They are draining as well as exalting; but without deeper, intimate relationships and the housekeeping necessary to keep them going, we can easily end up "breakfast for blue jays," for those sparkling but noisy aggressive birds that make a summer day, maybe, interesting, while it's the smaller robins and their more humble kind that create the real community of feathered creatures. For this poet, domesticity, home itself and the love within it, are his protection against an unrelenting world. There is no telling what's out there, just as there is every need to tell what's in here. What "housekeeping" really is is sharing—it is sharing a good warm, decent space and the effort needed to keep it. It's about time men wrote about this, especially gay men many of whom are still mired in Dancer from the Dance, or maybe even some of my own sexier stories (Smoky George, keep the hell out of here!), when what we really want is a perfectly soft pillow at 2 o'clock in the morning, and someone proven over the years wonderful to rest his head at the other side of it.
You can learn more about author and activist Perry Brass at www.perrybrass.com, on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and . . . OK, just Google the crap out of him. On May 10, 2024, he will be appearing in THREADS at BAAD (Bronx Academy of Art & Dance) with dancer/choreographer John Ollom. For more info: BAAD.