Tim Earley. Boondoggle , Main Street Rag, 2005.

Tim Earley’s first book, Boondoggle, is full of intriguing, energetic poems, but it suffers from an identity crisis. This is evident from the outset. The book’s title is humble and ironic, but the epigraph Earley selected is Heidegger at his murkiest and most hyper-intellectualized. Together, they would paint an author who is as comfortable in his Teutonic intellectualism as he is in his Wranglers. This seems too intent on the poet’s image and the reader’s impression, and comes off as slightly insecure sign-carrying. I would happily overlook it were it not also present in the poems.

Take, for instance, “The Consolation of Philosophy.” This piece is, for the most part, a conventional treatment of the limitations of philosophy to fundamentally impact human circumstance, as seen in the fifth and sixth stanzas:

My best friend has been crying

for twenty years. The years

gather around him like hyenas.

[…]

What they meant to say was,

“Tell him to stop crying.”

What they said was different.

There are lovely moments here—masterful line breaks like “for twenty years. The years/,” the menacing hyenas as a metaphor for time. Yet there is nothing particularly challenging; despite the hyenas, the problem is clear. What is not so clear is what happens in the rest of the poem.

It begins quietly and skillfully; much in concert with the narrative described above:

The consolation of philosophy is small.

Books. A world, stripped or imbued.

[…]

Forgetting to do anything about it.

Continuing.

The next stanza, however, lurches into very different terrain:

Exactly how does one recline?

Hands wriggle in pockets.

The moon, silly hat, does this, does that.

On the cusp.

In the cosm (micro, meta, macro).

Living right.

The air is speedy.

Hands wriggling in the pockets and the silly hat of the moon read as gratuitous interjections of the offbeat, and seem curiously out of place in the poem. There is certainly a lot of play and attention to sound, but these neither add much to the larger piece nor provide room for expansive thought on the part of the reader. Instead, the stanza comes off as a compulsory exercise in pomo-linguistics.

This is the case throughout the remaining stanzas, until the powerful concluding lines, where Earley nicely blends the lyrical and intellectual with the colloquial:

The consolation of philosophy is small.

Tiny knives sing in the blood.

Afternoons. Particular slants.

Remember that one time parts of our bodies

were dead and other parts were still alive?

Remember that one time?

That was great.

To paraphrase Alice Notley, the best writing admits no wall between the poet’s innermost self and the poem. But Earley includes too many winks and nods, too many self-conscious or ironic moments that prevent the work from going where it could otherwise go.

This is evident in “Sublime Feelings Poem.” At least three things seem to be happening here. First, there is a sarcastic (and funny) send-up of Sylvia Plath’s confessional poem “Daddy:”

Father Dragon. Dragons Fatherasaurus…

I didn’t mean to pull up the stakes of your heart so your heart

like a red party balloon floated away in the dreadful breeze…”

Second, there is what I have come to think of in Boondoggle as “the earnest core,” the place where Earley reveals his sincere concerns. In this case:

…Father…

I ask only that you save me

before all the mad pocket knives whittle my body

into a switch to shake at the sky. Your sky

My sky. The thousand layers of intervening and delicate

and freshly unbroken sky.

Third, the cynical and ironic are liberally peppered throughout, lest anyone take too seriously the idea that Earley would do something so pedestrian as, say, write about his father:

Many days I do things the prime motivation

being to deepen my soul such as bowling

or threatening suicide. Drama is very entertaining

But Earley does write about things like fathers, sorrow, and love. That is not, in fact, the problem. The problem is his discomfort with doing so. Clearly, he is trying to strike a balance between more conventional poetry and experimental writing. He just hasn’t gotten there yet. The poet’s hand is still a bit too heavy, his intentions too evident, his telegraphs to the reader too persistent.

Though many of the poems in Boondoggle suffer from the aforementioned problems, there are several strong, memorable ones where he hits the mark, such as “Monopiety,” “Melancholy Poem,” “Fishing Poem,” or “A Picture of the Good Times.” In each, a narrative idea is carried through to its logical conclusion, but gets there through the force of original, energetic writing that avoids the overly ironic without sacrificing the fun.

In “Monopiety,” Earley explores the impossibility of singularity. It opens with lines that, in his other poems, might spell trouble.

I would like to say the world is one thing,

like a dog riding a unicycle.

In this poem, however, the dog on the unicycle is the only really wacky image, and it captures the unlikelihood and wonder of monopiety very well. As the poet continues his pursuit of the idea, things get very exciting:

…I have a suspicion

a surer god would have saved me

a lot of time, that a language made of letters

as palpable and funereal as tree bark

would grant me more sleep. As it is

surfaces are unaware of themselves,

the self is divided into everyone breathing

and everyone dead, divided again

and probably divided once more on top of that.

Here, Earley is at his best, skillfully writing about god, of all things, without sounding trite or pedantic. The closing lines show how breathtaking Earley’s poems are when they achieve equipoise:

[…]

I’d like to be Mr. Alpha or Mr. Omega

and point my huge finger into space and say that,

and have that fly from my mouth not as a word,

but as a riotous bird wheeling

through skies paler than human faith.

“Monopiety” lasts. It’s one of those poems that you think about before falling asleep, that embeds itself in the part of the cerebrum devoted to life’s big questions. I certainly don’t want Earley to stop pursuing such questions—I want him to pursue them more completely, because when self-consciousness overcomes the poems, it fractures the work and negates the importance of what’s said or what’s possible. In Earley’s poetry, what’s possible is as fantastic as a dog riding a unicycle toward god, and you can’t beat that.

— Marci Nelligan