REVIEW OF THE DRUNK SONNETS BY DANIEL BAILEY

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THE DRUNK SONNETS by Daniel Bailey (Magic Helicopter Press, 2009)

http://http//www.magichelicopterpress.com/drunk.htm

To be drunk is to swing between the poles of malice and beneficence; it is a state wherein the fist is as likely as the feather to make a statement, and subtlety becomes an impossible language no one attends to nor cares anything about. The drunk is dangerous precisely because emotion is tempered only by intemperate recklessness. For the drunk 'a considered opinion' is nothing more than weightless melodrama. At its most extreme, the condition of being drunk renders everything intolerable. And joyfully so. And monstrously so. It is the morning after, as the headache pounds the brain pan to black tissue, and the stomach roils at merest sense of shifting breeze, in which drunkenness leaves an invisible mark in memory: what actually transpired the prior evening is anyone’s guess. We refrain from trying too hard. I said what? I did what? One’s shit eating friends possess the testimony that defines our experience: Dude, you were fucked!

Daniel Bailey has written drunk sonnets, though I do not believe he wrote them while drunk yet even so these wonderful poems suggest much about an inebriated sea, waves moving like mountains above shifting plates. These sonnets, upper case throughout, are direct in their stumbling directness. One reads them and feels a finger jabbing at one’s chest:

I’M A LITTLE HUNGRY BUT DRUNK
I WANT FORGIVENESSS IN A BEEHIVE
LIKE A DOG WITH THE BENDS IN THE ARCTIC
AND COVERED IN ICE FURS

‘Drunk Sonnet 1’

Right from the start these poems establish themselves, uncluttered by any looming vocabulary, they nevertheless draw us in, simple language thick with a kind of bereftness. Which does not want to be anything other than what it is: poetry clothed in love and all of love’s varying confusions. The tone is shifting, we all know why because being in love is being drunk, and being drunk is to be ridiculous even as one proves the measure for what is sublime, lit-up, brilliant, an inward glowing matched by an outward.

There's conscious craft here. These sonnets (there are fifty-three) pay attention to an idea of the sonnet as a formal lyric construction. The first forty-three adhere to a strict form: two stanzas of four lines each, followed by two more stanzas of three lines each, for a total of fourteen lines. From sonnet forty-four on there is a breakdown, of sorts. It’s been a long night, we’re winding down, try as we might everything gets a little shaky.

The drunk imagination might very well be inclusive but it is frequently uninteresting. If you want to hear cornball, really pay attention the next time your friends are wasted and in a confessional mood. I love you, man. Really? I’m not even sure you know who I am? Bailey doesn’t ever resort to imitating the deep banality most of us fall into, or he does indeed resort to imitating this banality but he shores up this tendency with an invigorating high hilarity. Maudlin is dashed in these poems upon the rocks of its own parataxical awareness:

I’M GLAD THAT YOU’RE ALIVE AND DOING WELL
I’D HATE TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE YOU DON’T EXIST
I CAN SAY THAT HONESTLY AND I AM GLAD I DON’T
[HAVE TO LIE
IF YOU KNOW ME, AND I THINK YOU DO, YOU KNOW I’M NOT
[A LIAR

‘Drunk Sonnet 9’

This is special pleading, obvious sentiment, touching if overdramatic but the drunk seldom stays put – alcohol serving as steroid for attention deficit disorder – and Bailey moves him along (‘him’ because I imagine myself in this poem):

EXCEPT WHEN EVERYTHING GOES WRONG IN LIFE
AND I HAVE TO BACK AWAY FOR A LITTLE WHILE
INTO ANOTHER CORNER OF LIFE WHERE I’LL SAY ANYTHING
TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN ME RIGHT NOW

SOMETIMES THE ONLY THINGS THAT WORK OUT ARE MUSCLES
AND I GOT A VERY FEW OF THOSE AND IT HURTS
TO SEE YOU DOING WELL AT ALL

OR TO IMAGINE YOU DOING WELL, BUT YOU ARE
BUT I MAKE IT THROUGH THE DAYS
AND THAT’S OK, I THINK, AT LEAST I CAN DO PUSH UPS


Dulled physicality, dulled control over the body, these are aspects of a literal drunkenness. It is a perfect touch that in the midst of confession there occurs an assurance that one is able to perform up to a minimal standard of physical competence. Hand out the Presidential ribbons now. Which is very funny.

The pretty young woman sitting at the next table is reading from Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. We’re all clichés, even in the matter of things we love.

I don’t want to be someone for whom excess becomes a burden, a noise. I want to be that person for whom love is a matter of importance to living, whatever else I might say or not say about its presence in the small grim skies I often sit under. In the distance I see the thunderhead. I see people hurrying to and fro. They aren’t drunk, aren’t jabbing me in the chest with a finger. They aren't all: LISTEN, BUDDY, YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME! The music isn’t loud SO THAT I MUST SHOUT ABOUT WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WRESTLE WITH LOVE, because there is no music, for once. Perhaps these poems aren’t intended to be my pleasure, yet they are. I have no difficulty placing them beside Ted Berrigan’s SONNETS. (Another love besotted sequence.) In the distance is Petrarch and closer but still at some remove is Shakespeare and his monumental sonnets, that cathedral in words, but I can see it from where I sit, I really can. And this makes perfect sense to me. The compass of the heart aligns itself no matter what, sort of: “I FEEL LIKE A SMALL TRIBE OF HALLELUJAHS/ GETTING SENT UP TONIGHT, STUCK IN THE RAFTERS, ECHOING”.



‘Drunk Sonnet 53’