Reflections on Mazer’s “January 2008”

“Landis [Everson] was the dearest, sweetest man I ever knew. Everybody had that reaction to him. He also was madly in love with me, and very demanding about my attention. He claimed he was writing all the poems for me, that I was the reason he was writing them. I can’t really describe how much fun it was to have him come alive that way, or how much he affected my life because of it.” — Ben Mazer, Dark Sky Magazine

You can't pick up January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), written just after the suicide of Landis Everson, and not think of the connection between Ben and Landis. Not hold in mind the shadow of their love — philia, the Greeks might have named it. This is a narrative of loss, full as it is of the variety of life. Mazer doesn't bare this anguish blankly, though. He doesn't lyricise his struggle through mythologies and narratives, as, say, Lowell did. There is none of that directness in Mazer’s book, a series of mostly untitled lyric poems; at least, nothing quite so simple or so clear. Ben's lyricism is always askew, is gestural where Lowell’s was figural; they take largely place within moments instead of reflecting on them from a distance.

Nonetheless, January 2008 is still a document that responds, immediately and fully, to this unique experience of loss. It responds from within a complete life, Joycean in its fullness. Thus, apparently ephemeral lines such as “I think that then my morale sank / because the peanuts and the pretzels stank” sit together with the more evocative, imagistic (and recognizably “poetic”) lines, “Shards of midnight cooing on the heath / are not more clever or more silver sad / than darkness glowing which envelops you.” Mazer's poems, hanging together, paint the picture of a whole life in the shadow of Landis’ death; or, as Hill writes, “More than I care to think / I am as one coarsened by feckless grief.”

Mazer occasionally employs a formal, epigrammatic compression; poems of just a few lines, such as: “Talk of yourself and history / embellishing with civility. / Of each story weave each thread / making your tapestry of the dead.” — reminiscent of Ben Jonson or Thom Gunn, distinctly musical and packed with insight. There is a more important connection to Gunn as well, in the way that Ben fit his playful, musical, lyric verse to a subject so penetratingly human, and moving, just as Gunn did when he began to deal with the death of his own friends. Mazer often addresses another directly, in terms of affection and loss, as in “Do I Know You?”

To love you I have to know you,
but what I know you will never know,
and what I know is what I know of you,
to know the world, to love to know
to know to love, and by loving me
love to be loved, the only way of knowing.

The lyric is a reflection on perception and connection, and the poem moves into images of storm and cityscape, of stone pounded by rain — the obscurity of lost meanings and possible signs, of a darkness and an opacity that arbitrates love between us. It could perhaps be the theme of the whole collection,

The hook of dawn across the virgin sky
revives a night’s fantastic promises,
to see it real — the workers lifting steel,
the docks receiving ships, tall posters
arcing over the new light with phrases
said by chrysalis of light in winter
by the orphan without breath.
The dispersals of books, of rags of paper,
through the dark low streets might met with love
inspire a city of angels. Our new year.

Beauty, humor, intellect, loss: in January 2008 Mazer gathers these disparate aspects to find a point of intersect. It's a remarkable book, and a testament to the depth of friendship between Landis and Ben.