IMAGINE SISYPHUS HAPPY By R.G. Evans
Rod Kessler
Given that R.G. Evans’ poetry occasionally includes allusions—to Virginia Woolf or Homer’s Penelope or mythology’s Tantalus and Sisyphus of the collection’s title poem—I don’t mind advancing an allusion of my own: reading Evans’ work over the years has occasionally had me feeling a bit like the wedding guest waylaid in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Hey, I was going about my pleasant life, and here you want me to probe the depths of human angst and trouble? Life’s hard knocks haunt his poetry. Also the anguish of family life gone bad. Death? That too. Evans’ writing is always “the real thing,” powerful, artful, good on the ear (very good), yet it’s hard to imagine a review of this man’s work absent such adjectives as “pained,” “probing” and “profound.”
And in Imagine Sisyphus Happy, his new collection? Yes, pained, probing, and profound. But it’s also playful. In it, the poet is still mining the ore of our troubled human existence but not so relentlessly that he can’t glance up occasionally and wink. Catch the punning in the opening lines of “Just Like a Fool”:
This is the journey of a thousand
first steps. Did I leave the stove burning
with lost desire? Have I forgotten my keys
from Largo to Islamorada?
If this ancient mariner has us by the wrist, he also holds us with mirth in his twinkling eye.
About those literary allusions I mentioned? They’re not just to the dusty classics. Evans also nods at Jim Morrison and the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” His poems include Mister Softee trucks, chaos theory, and the kind of reading glasses you find at Walgreens. Social media too—check out this title: “On Seeing a Facebook Notification That Today is the Birthday of a Friend Who Died Last Week.”
The poem “Deal” opens with “[a] deck of cards with unfamiliar suits [tempting] me.” Evans’ playfulness shows in what replaces the expected hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades in his poker hand:
I look at my cards—the twelve of hats,
the murder of crows, the motherless son,
the question mark of suicide, the dunce of mirrors.
So, don’t get the idea that the author of Imagine Sisyphus Happy is one of those literary types writing only to other literary types and (us) English professors.
I’ve both warned and encouraged you: If Evans’ poetry is serious stuff, it’s not some joyless read. But let’s allow Evans, who knows something about relieving unrelieved uphill climbs, show us his stuff. Here’s his title poem, “Imagine Sisyphus Happy”:
Does he whistle as he sweats and groans
the boulder up the mountain?
Does he ever think At least I am not at home
where my daughter wants to die
trembling there at the summit
just before the rock rolls down?
As he follows it, his mind might wander
to the time his daughter screamed
Sixteen years in this goddamn house
with your failed marriage as my roommate!
What did she know about what god has damned?
Maybe he smokes, letting gravity do its job
one step at a time. Eternity is eternity after all,
no room here for a goldbricking soul.
If one can imagine Sisyphus happy,
it isn’t hard to picture him grinding his smoke
beneath his toe, cracking his knuckles,
and glancing at Tantalus in his lake
beneath the trees, bending as the water recedes.
And yet, Sisyphus wonders,
was that a wink he saw from his damned neighbor
when the fruit pulled away out of reach?
At least the bastard’s in the shade, he thinks
and shrugs his flesh into the stone.
The poem’s outer shell, its allusions to the two parallel myths, speaks to our shared human predicament: If our lot in life is unbearably hard and unrelenting, as the poem suggests, at least there are scenarios even worse—scenarios that, in escaping, prompt us to count our blessings. What makes this work typically Evansesque is the insertion of that tormented, tormenting sixteen-year-old daughter, that figure who grafts another, personalizing dimension onto the poem. If the poem is universal, addressing our human lot (e.g., life = an eternity of punishment), it’s also idiosyncratically personal, seemingly biographical, suggesting fault lines in the biography that hurt this poet into poetry (as Auden might phrase it—pardon the English professor elbowing in here). Evans pulls it off: the idiosyncratically personal is how we get to the universal. There’s no other way.
I always read with a pencil in hand. Naturally, I’ve marked up the margins of Imagine Sisyphus Happy with notes and observations: The violence of being alive, on god, humor, closeness to death, ironic humor, wild dysphoric love? imagery, and so on. One comment that repeats is Good ear! Evans is also an accomplished musician and performer, and it shows.
Consider how, in the opening of “The End of Worship,” Evans repeats the bluesy long “u” of “who” and then the long “i” of “alight”:
We who can’t endure
the tiny truth of our own
mortality presume to believe
that God is dead.
Something set the stars alight.
Nothing yet has snuffed them
one by one, like an acolyte
dowsing candles at the end of worship.
Those long “u” notes—would I be stretching it to suggest an echo of Sylvia Plath’s sonorous “Daddy”? You do not do, you do not do / Anymore black shoe . . . And that bit about the acolyte—am I the only reader reminded of the image at the opening of “Prufrock”?
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table . . .
Okay, maybe Evans’ lines do occasionally speak English professor to English professor, but his jazz is at work all the same. Those long “u” and long “i” sounds? See how Evans brings them together in the poem’s end-lines:
Let me live in the dust
the blinded way that others do
In a perfect world, this 86-page collection would be issued with a cd of the poet reading.
R.G. Evans’ Imagine Sisyphus Happy, in sum? Playful, if also pained and probing and profound. Readable. Accessible. And, as noted, Good ear.
Rod Kessler, a one-time faculty advisor to this magazine, taught writing classes for three decades at Salem State before retiring in 2014. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.