The poetry of the everyday

DEEP in his wondrous journals, Thoreau wrote that an “old poet comes to watch his moods as closely as the cat does a mouse.”

So he or she must, though it’s probably too often forgotten that even the most profound introspection is simply an extension of writerly observation. Poetry is most satisfying -- and magical in that ancient sense -- when it becomes a window through which we simultaneously gaze out and inward.

Realizing that anew is one of the many pleasures to be had from 58-year-old David Tucker’s first collection of poetry, “Late for Work.” The poet Philip Levine selected these poems as the winner of the Bakeless Prize, which is annually awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In a brief introduction, he points to one of the poems’ considerable strengths: “The writing is so precise and economical, the language so familiar and ordinary that if you’re not reading closely you can miss how glorious the achievement is.” Indeed, some large part of these poems’ success resides in the stark eloquence of perfectly ordinary expression. Take these lines from the bedside of a dying parent:

My father talks between

emphysema gasps

about his high school days, the

shot he made

to beat Hohenwald one night

sixty years ago, the arc of it

high and too sharp but in it went

with a kiss

from the top of the backboard....

Like a Shaker chair, these lines are beautiful because the maker is unashamed of his joinery and has confidence in the integrity of everyday material, which in this case is the distinctive rush of American speech. Tucker’s technical virtuosity tends to be overshadowed by the novelty of his day job -- he is the assistant managing editor for metro news at the New Jersey Star-Ledger -- and by the fact that newspaper journalism is the subject of many of his poems.

In “City Editor Looking for News,” he captures the restless, primal appetite of a local news honcho prodding reporters toward the day’s deadline:

What did Nick the Crumb say

before he died? What noise

did his fist make when he begged

Little Pete

not to whack him with a power

saw? Did it go thub like a

biscuit

against a wall or sklack like a

seashell cracking open?

Did he say his mother’s name?

Has anybody even talked

to his friggin’ mother? Is she

broke or sick and

abandoned?

Is she dying of a broken heart?

Do I have to think

of these things all by myself?

“Morning Edition” precisely conveys the feeling that descends over a daily newspaper when that day’s deadline is past:

When I walk out of the

newsroom,

usually around midnight these

newsy days,

there’s always a scattering of

copy editors left,

tapping out changes for the first

edition.

No one is talking, no one looks

up,

hands flying, they lean over

their keyboards

like racers on motorcycles.

How peaceful to be one of the

lucky ones

off deadline now, to walk

through this light rain

to the parking lot, thinking, what

the hell,

it’s just a newspaper.

In an introduction to a chapbook of Tucker’s poems published three years ago, Robert Pinsky -- no mean poet and critic himself -- caught the symbiosis of this poet’s vocations with great precision. “His seismograph tracks the newsroom’s trembling for event,” Pinsky wrote, “charting the peaks and valleys of our general human need for sensation or knowledge. He writes about that need clearly, cleanly, with a reporter’s respect for information and a poet’s awareness of the undisclosed.” In a recent interview Tucker himself described this duality: “Journalism is about what the facts tell us. Poetry’s about what the facts don’t tell us.”

That’s the sensibility marvelously and unsentimentally at work in “And This Just In”:

Those footfalls on the stairs

when the night shift went

home,

the sunlight fanning through the

dinosaur’s rib cage,

the janitor’s sneeze -- we’re

asking questions,

we’d like to know more.

The moth in the clock tower at

city hall,

the 200th generation to sleep

there -- we may banner the

story

across page one. And in Metro

we’re leading

with the yawn that traveled city

council chambers

this morning, then slipped into

the streets

and wound through the city. The

editorial page

will decry the unaccountable

boredom

that overtook everyone around

three in the afternoon.

Features praises the slowness of

moonlight

making its way around the

house, staying

an hour in each chair, the

inertia

of calendars not turned since

winter.

A watchman humming in the

parking lot

at Broad and Market -- we have

that --

with a sidebar on the bronze

glass

of a whiskey bottle cracking into

cheap jewels

under his boots. A boy walking

across the ball field

an hour after the game -- we’re

covering that silence.

We have reporters working hard,

we’re getting

to the bottom of all of it.

A decade or so ago, I worked a job pretty much like Tucker’s, supervising reporters who covered cops, transit, hospitals and local government in all its grinding -- but consequential -- minutiae. Some part of the job involved bucking up young reporters who had undermined their own morale by comparing their gritty daily lives with the superficial glamour of their colleagues’ foreign and national assignments.

These talks usually came at the end of a long day’s reporting, and they were weary enough to be tolerant of the slightly elliptical. So I’d ask them if they’d ever read Patrick Kavanagh, and when they’d shrugged their “no,” I’d tell them how he fought to find his voice as a poet while farming his family’s 16 muddy acres in Ireland’s dreary County Monaghan. In his short poem “Epic,” he recalled the months in 1938 when the rest of the world hung on the outcome of the Sudeten Crisis and his neighbors were utterly consumed by a dispute over a small, rocky field. The poet despaired of ever making art from such lives lived in such a place:

Till Homer’s ghost came

whispering to my mind.

He said: I made the Iliad from

such

A local row. Gods make their

own importance.

Thoreau found the world in a snowflake. Tucker has discovered it in a New Jersey city room and within his home’s four walls. His fortunate readers have this sparely elegant collection as an affirmation of the epic in the everyday.