Short Poems To Read

TONY GLOEGGLER GREATEST HITS 1984 – 2009 by Tony ...

, Or, even, anything of the magic of the famed Brubeck/Desmond chemistry that I now hold in holy awe. Greatest hits, I believe, are about impatience or ignorance. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I really wanted to buy a Brubeck album that day, thumbing through stacks at the music store but perplexed— Time, Time Out, Time Further Out, Time Way Way Out, Time In, Time Changes , which begins the chapbook and my interest in the author—is like a radio single that ends with a quick trip to Tower Records, in that way. Book in hand, I cracked the book open to read a short introduction by the poet, then quickly moved on to the first poem whose title is seemingly as nostalgic as all those radio-hits, albums, compact discs, brick-and-mortar-record-stores and retrospectives I remember. Rife nostalgia is an overall theme of the Greatest Hits series by Pudding House, and this poem—which speaks of Little-League baseball, first kisses & cigarettes, World Series games, Communion and Mustangs—is an appropriate opening. The poem seems, on the surface, to be about loss & death and a family’s grief & coping, though its theme is actually something quite different. In the poet’s introduction to the chapbook, Gloeggler says, “While I have two younger brothers, none of them have died in Viet Nam or anywhere else. Sometimes that fact has surprised, disappointed and pissed people off.” Maybe it doesn’t piss me off because the war in Viet Nam is not a direct memory of mine, as I wasn’t alive during that era. Nevertheless, the indirect on TV, and Robert Duval proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Rife nostalgia, or not even nostalgia, or nothing but nostalgia—Gloeggler admits it is a fabrication, though brought on by the symbols and liturgies of war that have affected him much as they affect me, as we are all affected by them. The poem shook me the first time I read it; it still shakes me, the way Johnny’s Mustang with his father sitting in it revving the engine shook “every tool hanging in the garage”. A host of car songs comes to mind, including Marc Cohn’s Silver Thunderbird is full of vulgarity and sex and masturbation and one very descriptive account of an abortion that made me cringe, uncomfortably. Despite that, “Scraping” is a good poem, packed with self-doubt, inner turmoil and rage, and, yes, the ability to turn my stomach. Quite good because I get the genuine sense that my discomfort in reading it is Gloeggler’s own—that here we have honesty that hurts and a subconscious that is haunted. He’s unsettled, but at the time he “was young and dumb/and in love, and would have done anything/for her.” Like the Antlers’ song “Bear”: “We’re too old/We’re not old, old at all…We’ll be blind and dumb until we fall asleep.” Gloegger continues, “She wasn’t ready to be a mother.