ASKEW: not in a straight or level position: her hat was slightly askew | the door was hanging askew on one twisted hinge.
wrong; awry: the plan went sadly askew | the judging was a bit askew.
I probably know my partner of many years as good as anyone can know another person. Like when two people can finish each other’s sentences. Yet I found myself looking today at the water bottles she had bought and could not tell where the new stock was separated from the old. I don’t know her system. She is a lefty and I’m right-handed and sometimes she does things in a way that feels backward to me. Robert Vaughan’s poems in his new book Askew evoke the same kind of feeling. They are sketches of intimacy in which something is off-kilter. No matter how well one thinks one knows another person, mysteries, secrets, lacunae remain. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, these things are part of the glue or magnetism that keeps fascination alive. If you’re not so lucky, they lie buried only to emerge, perhaps years down the line, causing eruptions, ruptures, breaks and, to paraphrase one of Vaughan’s poems, the axis of one’s world becomes tilted. Askew deals with the unlucky. “No more I love you’s,” as he quotes Annie Lennox.
Luck is related to chance and whenever the vagaries of nature are evoked in these poems it’s not good: threatening clouds, floods, cyclones, just to name the weather. And then there are the human catastrophes: betrayal, war, death. Add to these words that evoke more intimate forms of inclemency, such as “frenzy” and “maelstrom.” We see, in “Divested,” a human wreck, with “Room in this avalanche/ to maneuver,/ just barely.” We see, “the madcap/ arena we once/ called home” in the poem “In Sandy Hook.” There are even a few poems in which inner and outer turmoil are so interfused that they evoke an overall feeling of disorientation, as in the poem “Circles” in which it is not certain how one is to be an agent of change in one’s own life. And the beat plays on.
I think of Robert Vaughan as a sketch artist. Some of his sketches are quickies and leave me wishing for a little more, but that is more a matter of my own taste than a criticism of what he does. In my favorite poems he uses color, evokes sound and is adept at selecting the right details. He is a writer who shows more than he tells. But if one were to look for a statement of the theme of the poems of Askew, I would suggest one start with “I Always Believed I Would See Her Again.” Divided into two stanzas of equal length, the poem describes two people living in the same house searching for clues to each other. “Full of longing,” they “ransack the house,” going in circles until “we divided ourselves,” which suggests to me that the dividing was not simply between two people (they were already divided) but was internal to each of them. And then, “we pushed,/ jettisoned/ away forever.” For a long time I have thought of people as worlds, entire worlds with their own orbits. Sometimes worlds come close, touch or almost touch, then bounce away into the cosmos. This poem encapsulates that for me. People are very complex. But at the same time frustratingly, beautifully, and sometimes tragically simple; Robert Vaughan never forgets that.
Many of the poems in Askew are about the uncertainty of the self in relation to others. “When you leave/ I scatter” he writes in “Ode to the Dead.” I take that to mean that when a connection to a loved one has been ruptured, the “I,” one’s inner core, one’s sense of identity becomes disoriented. In a broader sense, people create each other. We are even made, as one of his titles puts it, “of those who don’t know we are listening.” Perhaps these are truisms, but even if they are that doesn’t stop people from believing the ego (particularly their own) is the most stable structure on earth, nor does it stop Vaughan from bringing surprising new colors to the theme. He brings humor to it in “Out of the Fire and into the Lake,” a sex fantasy in which the object of lust slips out of control, causing the fantasizer to ask, “If my life isn’t mine,/ then whatever will I do?” While the poems “One Fine Sunday” and “They Play to Lose” pose the question in more serious forms: how is penetration and the sexual act of swallowing in particular connected to issues of self/other/identity? Vaughan expresses the theme the fullest and, for me, the best in the poem “The West was Once a Direction,” a remarkable accomplishment for the truths it packs into its small size, its fresh imagery and truly startling last line. He asks, “How does one remain oneself in the ongoing search for discovery?” and continues:
And neither my childhood nor my future grows any smaller. Look how I touch the world, not as myself, but as an echo of who I was. And as I delve further and further West, will I be lost in the story I tell my fractured self?
These are important questions that anyone wishing to be a mature human being must ask. Recently I wrote about my arduous experience rereading John Ashbery’s Three Poems. Vaughan’s style is not reminiscent of Ashbery (in fact I can’t think of who I might compare it to) and I don’t know if he’s even read Three Poems, but lovers of that book might be interested to know that Vaughan has condensed the whole issue of it into one tiny prose poem.
There are other truly stellar poems in Askew. I’d like to conclude by commenting on two more of them. The first is “Wax & Wane,” the beauty of which I missed in my first quick read. Going back and taking my time I consider it to be one of the strongest in the collection, and, not to knock the Cocteau Twins, but it’s much better than the song it takes its title from. We have the word “scatter” again, and the fear of disappearing with the other’s absence. In our culture a person is considered weak if they are too emotionally needy. But there is a beauty in vulnerability that tears away judgement in the line, “eyewitnessed I bear fruit.” One might inject here a note about Vaughan’s eye for arrangement. The poem that follows “Wax & Wane” is a kind of white contrast to its blackness.
Finally the poem “The Dollar Store” deserves comment because, to my eye, it brings together in excellent form a few of the key notes of Vaughan’s poetry: pop culture, childlike vision, vulnerability, and a quality of oddness. This last feature, described by my partner as “weirdness” when I’ve read the poems to her, is sometimes expressed in the language itself, other times in the imagery, or in the case of “The Dollar Store” it’s in the vision of our culture that the poet presents to us. We are living in strange and troubled times, and our poems should reflect that. “The Dollar Store” does that, but not without humor and charm. After listing a few of the things you can now get at The Dollar Store—“timed bombs and gas masks”—the speaker suddenly shifts to telling us about the “young maiden adrift on a lily pad” he is in love with. Whether this is a real person or pure fantasy we don’t know, but the tone comes from a person who wants to drift away to a better place—a much better place. The final note—the so-called real world—comes crashing in like an alarm with the final line that seems to come from a person with a mind still tethered to the child within, and it’s a beautiful vision.
The Mockingbird Sings 