TAM Devaney "No-Fun Zone"

David Lehman’s “February 21”

Written by Francis Raven

David Lehman’s two most recent collections of daily poems, Daily Poems and The Evening Sun, have been exercises in the poem as journal. Both books consist of poems which are each about a single day and are named after that day.Lehman's daily poems show the reader the arbitrariness of a day while somehow hinting at the fact that the self does, in fact, cohere. I recently had the opportunity to see Lehman read from his latest collection, The Evening Sun, at Washington University in St. Louis. I found many of his daily poems intriguing, but the poem which I found the most interesting is the poem which was given, as a beautifully printed broadside, to the audience of the reading: “February 21”.

One factor which might alter one’s reading of a poem whose subject was a particular date is how that date has functioned in your life. Is a critique of one of David Lehman's daily poems also a critique of the day that they are presumably about? Of course, this is more or less true of every poem: a poem about the death of the narrator’s mother will strike the reader whose mother has died differently than the reader whose mother has not. The strange thing about dates (and the interesting thing, in the end, about Lehman’s daily poems) is that they function as places in time where meaningful events (such as your mother dying or your child being born) may occur. This is why if February 21st was your birthday you could rightfully call Lehman’s poem a poem about your birthday, but if Lehman had a poem entitled “Birthday Poem” you could not correctly call that a poem about your birthday. Dates function as spaces, as cracks where interesting crumbs might fall. They are a perfect space for the self because it is the self which reunites these crumbs back into full-fledged pastrami sandwiches. In essence, what Lehman is doing with his daily poems is begging the question of the self. He is letting the days’ poems fill with whatever arbitrary music they might and then seeing whether they hang together. His daily poems are experiments which hold the self as their unproven hypothesis. “February 21” is no different.

It begins with the monkey who wrote Hamlet explaining to his uncle why "Wallace Stevens/is Keats on acid". This first image is a self-contained explication of gossipy literary history: first, the monkey who instigated language, then Keats, then Wallace Stevens on drugs, and then, presumably John Ashbery and finally David Lehman himself. This genetic theme is kept up with the next image of this "monkey's uncle" turning into Lot's wife as the narrator follows angels, that he pictures, following Gerard Manley Hopkins in the “Windhover”, as a “deep gash vermillion” explosion. The present in the poem begins at this point with Lehman's assertion that the explosion of these angels could be equated with that fact that each poem is “a time/capsule meant to pop open on some/unspecified future day which will come..." Lehman wraps up this image by writing that the poem will pop open “when all of the options expire”. This is Lehman using the sub-lexicon of finance to his fullest.

The premise of David Lehman’s poems in these books is that everyday he sits down and writes a poem and then names his poem after that day? Had Lehman's reading not been quite so long I would have asked if he ever lied about this premise. I mean, did he ever write 10 poems in a day and then name them after different days? Or did he ever forget when he wrote a poem and thus have to give it an arbitrary name? Or did he ever feel like a poem felt like February 21st when it was actually written on January 2nd? Lehman admits as much play when he writes in the acknowledgements to The Evening Sun, that “a few dates had to be changed in cases where more than one poem worth saving was written on the same month and day." All of these questions and observations render the nature of the poem as journal and of the day problematic.

Because poetry is edited far differently from real life, the poem "February 21" is positioned between the poems "February 20" and "February 26" instead of between the 20^th and the 22^nd of February. This doesn't change my perception of the poem, but it surely might. If, for instance, a day in February was set beside a day in May my perception of a poem about that day would surely be altered. Single days, like single poems, change meaning depending on what color they are wearing. For my undergraduate degree, I attended The Evergreen State College where there was once the rumor of a class devoted entirely to one day in history. I never did find out which day the class studied, but maybe it was February 21st. I'm not sure if anything important ever occurred on that date, but it does ring a bell as perhaps a regular day. It is exactly one week after either the joy or sorrow that is Valentine's Day. It is exactly a week before the end of February (when not in a leap), which is actually the shortest, but poetically the longest, month.

Just as a critique of one poem leads to an examination of a poet’s entire oeuvre so a critique (or poem) of a day extends towards a poem which reaches in many directions.