It's About Time

It's About Time, by Barry Wallenstein. New York Quarterly Books, 2022. 128 pp. $10   (paperback) 

I checked inside the back cover of Barry Wallenstein’s latest book, It’s About Time, for a CD in which his voice, mellow for a native New Yorker, might speak these poems to a cool, curvy sax or a pianist hovering above the keys as a jockey bends over a horse. No such luck—though a list of 11 “recordings” fills out a page below the titles of his books. And It’s About Time closes with a final section of eight pieces titled “Listen to the Music” and identified as “Performance Poems.” Many still associate the joint venture of poetry and jazz with old SNL skits about beatniks, but it’s an honorable approach, best known through the theory and practice of Kenneth Rexroth, a serious anarchist poet, an explicator of esoteric traditions, who always seemed to play Margaret Dumont to the Beatniks’ Marx brothers. Wallenstein says “Kerouac loved the idea of poetry and jazz, but he didn’t rehearse.” For the combination to work, balance and interaction should prevail.

That’s why university music departments now offer majors in Collaborative Piano. Pianists don’t “accompany” the singer or the violinist, they play with them. After seeing Cecile Salvant with her pianist Aaron Diehl, someone said “they’re finishing each other’s sentences.” Wallenstein and his various collaborators finish each others sentences or listen closely while the collaborator makes a statement, then offer something complementary—often complimentary as well.

The “performance poems” are about live music and jazz musicians Wallenstein admires.  Anyone who’s ever listened to jazz in a club will enjoy “For John Hicks,” which catches the frustration of having people sit down at your table and with chat or clatter prick the bubble in which you and the musicians were floating.

Even in a moment of impatience, Wallenstein doesn’t want the intruders hurled into the void. This says something about his work. His poetry is distinguished by the absence of narcissism. Other people are real to him, seen with tolerance, and clarity. The language finds a middle way, neither high nor low. Aristotle advised, “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a philosopher.” Wallenstein is philosophical in the traditional sense—using reason to live well and face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

 In fact I would call him traditional in many ways—a throwback pitching equanimity and balance, like an habitué of 18th century coffee houses, as if the springs of his inspiration have been fed by hearing how many jazz singers in how many clubs insist: “You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive/ Eliminate the negative/ And latch on to the affirmative…” But he’s no Dr. Pangloss. The poems certainly mess with Mr. In-Between. Their poise and self possession perform a useful counter theme for those of us still stuck in tragic mode.

 A poem like “Unfinished Dialogue” (p 46) illustrates Wallenstein’s ability to achieve equanimity without resorting to bromides. In this poem alternating stanzas dramatize a private crisis—the kind we carry around in our head for weeks. An old friend wants to cut the cord—not by ghosting but melodramatically (comically) with murder. Typically evenhanded, Wallenstein’s speaker describes the friendship: “For years I put up with his bluster; / He’d look past my vacuity,/ And we’d love each other that way.” Such straight-up candor is one of his strengths. The stanzas continue; the friend can’t be talked down by recalling “Our boat trips, acid trips, the guilt trips/ We never took…” so Wallenstein concedes: “I see your cause is true,/ your anger and determination, marvelous,/ but at the end of this episode,/ you’ll be off the page,/ while I continue to scribble and create.” A modest poem, but it touches something real and ends like an old-school hipster, slyly pulling the rug out from under the reader—and the former friend.

 Crossing the border into the ancient kingdom of modernism, Wallenstein brings his own weather. Two poems, “Nightmare Fantasy” 1 & 2, present what sound like anxiety dreams: a speaker is poised above the steep course of a downhill ski competition. The other skiers are pros in sleek multicolored suits—what is he doing here? Those who have watched these events in winter olympics, no sound but a grating scrape and distant shouts, speeds exceeding 100 mph, and deaths or crippling spills not unknown, can feel the potential for terror. But the speaker keeps his cool. Three judges approach, the crowd stirs, photographers draw near, “Suddenly I’m flying downhill…as if to safety.” There’s no net.

 In the second “Nightmare Fantasy,” a father walking with his four-year-old son is pulled into a deep, mucky hole by a slimy green hand around his ankle. Again, Dad keeps his cool. He sends the son for help and begins tearing off the “scaly arms” and throwing them out of the pit where they sprout as trees that will someday make shade for father and son.

 In Modernism, dreams always win. They are the rag and bone shop beneath our daily lives. They critique our conscious life and set the tone. Wallenstein owns these nightmares—that’s how he rolls.

 One section of …About Time, old Man’s Chatter, shuns the sentimentality—including faux stoic sentimentality—that pervades poetic treatment of this pervasive, topical, topic, age. Wallenstein is happy to be alive; has a full plate, misses those gone on, but is glad to be with us, and not with them. For me, this is a healthy and refreshing note after so much solemn bloviating about age from those “Full of wise saws and modern instances.” Wallenstein looks out the window, sees a world in vivid motion and says—“The past tense makes no sense” (“Dawdling Past Curfew,” 105). A retired professor throws years of files into the fire. An occasion for bittersweet reminiscence? No: “ ‘That’s that for that,’/ He chortles, clearing out obsolescence”(“Files,” 101).

 It’s my impression that these are fairly recent poems, though no statement to that effect appears.  Nothing is here from Tony’s World (2009), a Jimmy Cagney soft-shoe shuffle about a deft, elusive urban “cat,” a vulnerable hipster who sails close to the wind but doesn’t sink. However, “Unheard Words” in It’s About Time is a rewrite of “Tony to His Dad # 2” from Tony’s World, which inspires conjecture—is Tony an alter ego for Wallenstein?

 None of this will surprise those who descended the narrow creaking stairs to the (now defunct) Cornelia Street Cafe’s crowded, lively cellar, for one of Wallenstein’s jazz/poetry evenings. He would be focused, organized and having fun, joined by excellent musicians—I saw him there with Vincent Chancey, who played in the Sun Ra Arkestra—and often a young fledgling poet given a chance to shine. These gifts—generosity, intelligence, entertainment, talent, craft, concentration, are the qualities that make It’s About Time successful.   

—Reviewer Lem Coley is retired from Nassau Community College and SUNY at Stony Brook. He has reviewed poetry books for The Manhattan Review for many years.