The Low End of Higher Things

by David Clewell

Comic books, beatnik kitsch, and all that jazz.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2003

About the author

David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010-2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri.

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much as I love Matthew Dickman's sprawling poems--and that's what I was hoping for with Clewell--that isn't quite what I got in this collection. The poetic leaps force some of the more expansive poems in this collection from "lyric story/essay with an usual form" into poetry, and the word choice hums with energy, but often I found myself frustrated by just how long a poem continued.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Clewell's best book, the projection of a style (the amorous arts) into the poem's subject, whether the subject be comics, connoisseurship, telepathy, as well as other forms of the parapsychological magic, movingly persuades the reader of what is at stake in this poet's insistent assembling of a cultural cut (the volume-title spells out the latter). It's the effort to imagine a place for oneself in the future, to come in underneath the certainty demotic mainline religious faith offers to the mysticism, or exceptionalism, of the American town-hall, still promising its mostly material, but no less meaningful (or was it just pleasurable?), rewards. What to do with all that American swag? I'm most moved by Clewell when he finds those folks who, like Shams Tabriz, get a foot in his door, whether it's his young son accompanying the connoisseur sans terre on one of his estate sale jags ("The Collector"), or the mailman curious to see inside what's happening to all the loot delivered to the poet's doorstep ("Short-Order Feng Shui"). Wouldn't we all like to see that! Worth noting in both these cases: that "the foot in the door" is death, no less, and the short-order improvisations intend to extenuate a plea that style was only ever about love. That's about what we'd expect of this secular mystic. Love with his wife is "our very good idea," readers, like another idea you may have read about. Thus proving the critique of solipsism in American poetry as tautological as what it critiques -- sure, it's all about him. What other bullshit species of love have you got?

[Matt Morris]

Read my review of this & other books at https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2018/08/...