Spiel Through the Looking Glass: A Review by David Chorlton

A reflection on the occasion of the publication of once upon a farmboy by The Poet Spiel, Madman Ink, paper, 52 pp., $10, Madman Books, 89 W. Linden Avenue, Pueblo West. CO 81007

After meeting Spiel in person, you are likely to go away with the impression of a quiet person, sure of his ideas but not confrontational about them, and you’d probably not expect the kind of poetry he published in his 2007 book from March Street Press: THEY. It is not a book to pick up and begin without having an idea of its author’s past. Random samplings are dangerous and might plunge you into:

who the fuck do they think they are
sticking they faces in you bedroom window

government
finding any trick they can to bust you ass

just because you sleep with you mother
                ferchrissake
(they get you for it)

As one who has long argued poetry’s case by claiming it provides reading pleasure, I am challenged to make the case for such writing, but make the case we must if we are to see poetry as more than decoration and a voice whose speaking purges pain. If you listen to a Shostakovich symphony for example, you hear music that impresses, delights, and sometimes assaults you. To have an outsider understand haunting memories or the weight of depression takes both a personal openness and a writing persona that doesn’t sidestep issues. As Spiel put it in “Pieces of blood” (from “it breathes on its own,” Pudding House Publications, 2005):

You’ve come to recognize,
throughout your life, why your behaviour
was peculiar, laced with sorrow, far beyond
your reach and understanding:

and why your friends have walked away
amid your endless chatter, bursts of rage,

So, the introspective fellow you met that time isn’t the whole story. Neither is the poet of any one of Spiel’s collections. Now with once upon a farmboy he shifts a little to bring us anecdotes and some atmosphere of a rural childhood. This book is one which is less dangerous to open at any page and read. It asks for understanding in a lower key than has often been the case with this poet. You might just open page 11 and find “nickel Charlie/WWII” :

maybe you knew him
down at gino’s café
his regular perch
first stool to your right

raggy elbows
spread across the counter
his fluffy hair halo
color of a peace rose

or you might meet Spiel as the worrisome son:

last time i visited home
mother had converted my self-upholstered
wrought iron radio bench into
a table for her african violets

The visual indications of details remembered with clarity over the years bring vigor to these poems as well as providing the reader with the tangible reminders of objects that are ordinary in themselves yet become almost mythological in the context of lives remembered. There is innocence both in the time recalled and in the eye of the author seeing what he saw at the time, yet the calm moments feel ominous. Something is going on, has gone on, what you see with people going about family business and going to church an’ all ain’t the whole story. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. Spiel scratches some of the surface away in his delightfully named “norman rockwell love,” a title worthy of being used for the book!

could not wait
from this moment to that
to feel together
yeah like norman rockwell love

to sleep over to gab into the night to kiss
to tease each other’s dicks upright to trade
underwear for school then weekend nights

Each person’s story is an individual one, not something in a one-size-fits-all mode, but the telling of the circumstances does, when it is honest, create references for others to see they are/were not alone on their experiences. In fact, none of us are isolated from the world Spiel knew and its continuing influence on America’s image of itself. Writing this in the last days of an election cycle, it is all too easy to see a country in love with its love of church and convinced of its own innocence while prejudices continue to flourish, even to win votes. Understanding one person’s journey through life is a huge step in understanding the big picture.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. He enjoys listening to very old music, birding, and hiking in the Arizona landscape. Along with poems in magazines, he has a list of chapbook publications with Places You Can’t Reach (Pudding House Publications, 2006) being the latest, and recent books: A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press, 2003), Return to Waking Life (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2004), and Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press, 2006).

Email: David Chorlton

Spiel the Writer was 6 months old when the dark years of WWII were unleashed. He was 50 and in psychotherapy when it dawned on him the fear present in his parent’s bodies at that time of unprecedented upheaval surely must have had a profound affect on him. His newest chapbook, “come here cowboy: poems of war,” recently written at age 65 and released by Pudding House Publications in the fall of 2006, focuses on how wars, stretching from WWI to today’s aggressive hostilities, have imprinted his life.

Email: Spiel the Writer

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