Michael Lista leans heavily and lightly on rhyming couplets in “Barfly,” the eponymous poem in his latest collection. A couplet is a miniature packet of meaning, an entity unto itself, yet after each pause, it progresses to the next verse for cumulative resonance. “It calls to me, my final vocation, / To fall out of time, my family on vacation.” Iambic tetrameters are finely balanced by caesuras in the middle of each line, and fricative fulcrums that take into account syntactical flight and lingering fate. This opening verse teeters between ubiquitous barfly and the end of life, the call and fall in each line. Chiasmus joins caesuras in the next stanza to highlight the poet’s predicament: “From the wooden joist, the bar, the crossbeam, / From which I would hoist – don’t be cross – me.” Rhymes echo architecture and structure, the bar almost hidden, like a barfly on the wall, a constant witness to the poet’s wit that leaps and lingers. The first sentence concludes with a clipped couplet: “Then drop / Then stop.” The poet’s fate lies in the balance of grammar, punctuation, syntax, rhyme, and unusual reason.
A much longer second sentence develops the call and fall from the first couplet: “It hangs there calling while I watch TV, / And gains a following when it’s just me.” In his brawl with the self, the poet is alone, yet in the company of poetry, domestic order and chaos, couplets of wit with their double duty. The “It” of finality and barfly “Enters my mind like a line of poetry, / Inters what’s kind, and calls me a pussy.” Internal rhymes inter simile and the likeness of love and death: “For delaying our engagement, that I am not / Obeying our arrangement to tie the knot.” Couplets tie the knot of noose and marriage, as they delay immediacy from love to line: “Not like a couplet / But like a couple.” Negative “not” doubles the couple. Hand in hand, “Barfly” is ambidextrous with its punchy line as “battery” and “party” – Lista’s pugilistic comedy, Covid couplets, and rapper’s rhymes.
“The opening poem in Barfly pays homage to Leonard Cohen.”
Lista invokes T.S. Eliot and Hamlet, as he ranges from “high standard” to sudden drops. The bar in barricade and baritone ends with a Shakespearean question: “When the soldiers call to my ghost: Who’s there?” This final call completes the opening call. Barred during Covid, he summons The Bard.
The opening poem in Barfly pays homage to Leonard Cohen. “Forgive Me, Leonard” uses couplets to align with Cohen: “And hanging banners – once he’d died – of Leonard Cohen / Above baskets of shawls from Patagonia.” The bookstore commodifies Cohen: “The guy wrote: ‘Give me crack and anal sex,’ / But the market wanted tea-and-orange-scented Durex.” Cohen’s monosyllables are opposed to the elongated, hyphenated adjective; his give, to Lista’s forgive. Lista pauses with punctuated commas, dash, and colon: “And his other famous crack, the one in everything -- / Though opinions, they say, are like assholes.” And the concluding punchline – “That’s how the light gets in” – illuminates Leonard, literature, and couplets.
Just as couplets rest and fly within a poem, so a number of poems adhere to others in this collection. The “bar” tangent recurs in “Bar Fights” and “The Bar in Hell,” while Hamlet shows up in “Hamlet, Hamlet.” Rhyming quatrains sound notes of Leonard Cohen:
It doesn’t ever close.
You’d need a firehose
To clean the locals out,
And even then they’d just go on burning.
This inclusive infernal bar sings:
A forbidden song in your heart,
A minor affair in a minor key.
And the bar in Hell is never empty –
It’s packed. I’m talking wall-to-wall snacks.
Lista’s demonic barfly dances and romances from wall to wall, and couplet to quatrain.
The bar is also a musical measure, and Barfly measures the clever couplet. Lista’s self-inflected drinks spill over to other poets. He guzzles ghazals with “John Thompson, John Thompson, John Thompson – we / Get it.” Thus begins “The Bill,” which plays on “couple” and “measurement.” In a similar vein, he repeats “Anne Carson, Anne Carson, and uh oh right: / Anne Carson.” Or, multiples may end poems, as in “Traitorous Former Editors & Cultural Apparatchiks”: “To grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. Similarly, “The Zoo” concludes “With you and you and you and you and you” to complete the iambic pentameter. Jason Guriel and Carmen Starnino enter other poems.
More clipped couplets appear in “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 3/5 Stars,” which satirizes Hitler, as does “Lebensraum.” “Battle Raps” highlights the influence of rap on these poems whose postmodern couplets respond to Alexander Pope’s neoclassical The Rape of the Lock. Lista’s wise cracks, bar raps, “Booze,” “Nose Beers,” and “Draughts” soar in “Going to the Moon,” which also ends with Anne Carson. His lunar vision is counterbalanced by descents in “Fuck You”:
Shall
I call
This
Book
Fuck You
& other poems
?
?
The shortest poem, “Snow,” polarizes heaven and its opposite:
It makes me feel like someone’s up above.
It falls like drunks down a fire escape.
It’s like love –
Pretty as hell and hard to navigate.
With liquid refreshment, firehose, and fire escape, besotted Barfly is a sobering experience.
About the Author:
Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough; Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of long-form journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus, Canadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean's.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Publisher : Biblioasis (June 4 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966114
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966115