ANTOINE DOINEL’S SECOND COUSIN,IN THE CLASSROOM & AT LARGE

I first met Steve Orlen in August 1980 in an apartment in the Back Bay area of Boston—a third-floor walk-up above Brothers III, a bar located at the somewhat seedier end of Robert Lowell’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street.” Steve and Gail were packing up the place, having spent a sabbatical year in Boston. Gail’s canvasses were rolled up in various corners; open cartons of art and poetry books and suitcases of clothes were scattered about; a cheerful sort of disarray backlit by late afternoon sun and suffused with traffic noise. Their sofa, it turned out, had actually been Lowell’s just before he died—it’d been loaned to them via Gail Mazur.

Steve’s sabbatical year had been my first in the Arizona MFA program. Although I’d gotten close to Steve’s compadre Jon Anderson, I still felt like an alien among most of the other poetry students. At the time, Norman Dubie was the big influence on people there. My poems sounded and smelled like they were from another planet (there was a rumor that I had a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton—it must have been disappointing to find out that I’d only spent a year there as a grad student in anthropology).

Even then, my poems had a lot of the detritus of pop culture in them and a jagged sense of rhythm. They were narrated from odd angles; and besides being metaphorically dense, they were more likely to be about a character portrayed on a pinball machine (“Jungle Queen”) than about my mother and father. I was interested in the maximum amount of excitement per line, and that seemed to have little to do with writing clearly and directly about my life. I don’t blame anyone for feeling confused by or suspicious of the poems, they were so all over the place. Still, the criticism had a peculiar edge to it.

While Jon responded to my work enthusiastically, there was sometimes a dismaying hostility directed at me from the rest of the workshop. At The Shanty, after class one night, one woman came up to me, asked me how I was liking the program, and then announced that she didn’t like my work. “Your poems don’t do what poetry’s supposed to do,” she insisted, already half-lit. I hung out with George Shelton mostly (someone else who didn’t quite fit—his steeply musical and quirky miniatures were about as far from the Dubie Planet as you could get!), and fiction writers like Dave Schweidel and Steve Schwartz. My friendships with Tony Hoagland, Bill Olsen, Bruce Cohen and David Wojahn were cemented only later—during that first year I couldn’t really see them clearly because of the weird vibe. In the summer, I headed back east to live with my girlfriend.
I mention all this because I think I was looking for something from Steve when I phoned and arranged to meet him. Maybe some kind of psychic protector, maybe just some signal that I belonged. I was nervous about the visit. Despite the chaos of the apartment, Steve and Gail had a glamour about them, the handsomeness of good looks combined with experience and verve—as such things might seem if an insecure 25-year-old guy were looking at a worldly couple in their late 30’s.

This glamour clearly had much more to do with Gail than Steve. Gail has always seemed way more Paris than Queens. There’s probably a shot of her in some Truffaut movie, walking past a zinc bar on a rainy morning in the11th arrondissement. Steve belongs in a Truffaut movie too, as a cousin of Antoine Doinel, a sensitive bad boy grown up out of the districts of the working class and set mischievously and introspectively loose upon the world.

My memory of Steve from that first get-together is a bit blurry—the impressive hank of hair, yes, the tattoo of a bird on his forearm, the way he has of strolling rather than walking (he’s a cross between a flaneur and a hood, really). In one of his poems, Jon refers to Steve’s “masculine face,” and that was true; but it was an open and expressive face, generous in its curiosity. Big strong nose (or “smeller,” as Steve would say). The kind of light acne-scarring that actually makes some guys look “rugged.” His eyes were a little hooded, but reflective, warm; and the big-frame glasses he’s always worn lent his face a slight dramatic intensity. Steve’s glasses pull his face into focus and make it more willful. He liked then and still likes to tilt his head toward you, to get closer to yours. It’s a gesture of intimacy and confidentiality, it’s not invasive. You feel it as part of his attentiveness.

It was Steve’s voice that struck me then, and stuck with me. I trusted it immediately. In accent and pitch, he sounded a lot like the guys I grew up with, the men in my family, my cousins, brother and father. No surprise since we’d both come from Massachusetts mill towns. There was some of the same working class story-teller’s command of plot and pacing when he told about his childhood in Holyoke, or when he annotated the characters of various people he thought I should get to know in Tucson.

But the expressiveness of Steve’s voice was and is something else—it possesses some contradictory qualities. On the one hand, it’s very evenly-paced, and its deepness suggests steadiness and intention. But it’s also got a lot of inflection in it, and lots of asides and rhythmic pauses and hesitancies. Within the steadiness, there’s a lot of subtle modulation going on from phrase to phrase. And he often uses non-verbal sounds to signify approval, dubiousness, acceptance, transition—it’s an interesting kind of accessory to his very active sense of diction: with Steve you may get to hear “pussy” and “jacaranda” and “interstitial” all in the same sentence. In his tonal complexity, Steve is a walking breathing example of what Frost meant by “sentence sounds”: he communicates as much by how he says something as by what he’s saying.

And it’s all in his poems, that expressiveness of voice. It makes the poems alive with urgency, even when they are at their most calmly authoritative in terms of narration. People talk often about the Jarellian aspects of Steve’s work, but to me—in means, if not feeling and subject matter—there’s a lot of Lowell’s influence in it. Maybe the influence is absorbed into such a different character that it isn’t noticeable at all (or maybe Lowell is so unfashionable now that few people would recognize it). In any case, the subtle urgency of an Orlen poem is unique—unlike some better known narrativists of the moment, he never mistakes an engineered hysteria for drama. There is no melodrama in the work. And it should go without saying, but the narrator of Steve’s poems is compelled not only by a psychological need to tell, but also by a desire to entertain (now there’s a notion that we might want to see come back into vogue: that a poem should work hard to get you to think and feel by way of amusing and interesting material and means).

I was lucky to have heard that voice as much as I did in a classroom setting. As I discovered back in Tucson, Steve was a very different teacher from Jon. Tony Hoagland speaks elsewhere here about the allure of Jon and Steve’s friendship, and its affect on my generation of students at Arizona—the two of them had a Jules et Jim-thing going at that point, and if you felt a part of it, its aura rubbed off on you. Probably not everyone felt included; however much there was a value placed on emotional vulnerability and sincerity, it was definitely more of guy thing. Still, it tended to be pretty democratic.

Jon’s style as a teacher was pretty much in a hit & run, guerilla mode—he had six or seven things he wanted to teach you about poetry. They were big things. They had scope and were about an associative process or musical logic or the character of the poet or why Kurosawa’s Yojimbo could be important to your next poem—and he was not above messing with your mind a little, in a healthy sort of way. He was encouraging, but he didn’t make many demands.

You didn’t really go over poems with him outside of class; he was more likely to respond by reading you something out of James Agee’s And Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or by telling you an allegorical story about Jorie Graham and a coffee cup. It was all weirdly, intuitively helpful, even if you couldn’t quite understand how.

Steve was—as he remains—the best example I know of a hands-on teacher, one whose interest in craft and technique is equaled by his awareness of the moral and spiritual aspects of writing.

His primary lesson was that you had to remain a student if you expected to grow as a poet. “Reverse-engineering” might be a good term to describe what he would do with work by poets whom he loved—he was adept at taking poems apart and examining how they worked, their structural strategies or syntactical impulses, how someone might use a reflective image to develop a character’s presence, the ways in which a line might counterpoint a sentence as it propelled down a page, the shifting of beats from line to line, alterations in point-of-view and the scale of perception. Steve made it clear that poetry couldn’t depend simply on sensibility or character (despite the fact that his own poems had such a clear sense of personality and voice). You could acquire a syllable-by-syllable discipline by patiently picking through great poems, and you could bring it to bear on your own work. You had to.

Neither was he shy about entering into your work when you brought him poems outside workshop, as he always encouraged you to do. His judgment could be considered and tactful, generous in praise, but it was…unhmm…assertive in its attentions. Though it never felt like he was beating me up, Steve did annoy and piss me off at times—the infamous story of the semester-long personal tutorial he performed on “The Venice of The North,” maybe my first good poem, is told quite nicely by Tony over in his essay on Steve. What he doesn’t say is that half-way through this week-in-week-out lesson on revision, the poem got accepted by Crazyhorse. When I told Steve, he was delighted for me; it was my first quality publication. Then he started showing me again what I could still do to make the poem better, and on we went for another month or so, sometimes in his bunker-like office in the Modern Languages building on campus, sometimes at his dining room table or under the ramada in his backyard. I’m sure I had been hoping that the acceptance would put an end to all further interventions.

He did much the same thing with “Cures,” another poem that ended up in my first book. A good 15 years later, the piece got included in an anthology of rock n’roll poems called Sweet Nothings (an early Elvis rendition of “Mystery Train” figures strongly in the poem). The anthology was reviewed by Greil Marcus in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, and Marcus praised the poem and used it to illustrate an argument about the uses of pop music in both movies and literature. Marcus was a longtime hero of mine, a great culture critic who had written extensively on Elvis, Dylan, The Sex Pistols, etc. Needless to say, I was ecstatic. But I had to laugh when Marcus singled one particular line, a line of discursive commentary that Steve had gone over again and again, showing me how to compress the statement and rearrange the syntax so that it had a lyric intensity. Steve is as much the author of that line as I am.

Perhaps this makes it sound like Steve simply rewrote a student’s poems, which is not true. He worked like an architect, sketching out possible solutions to particular design problems. His teaching was open-ended, it required me to follow-up and elaborate upon his suggestions. It would have been a lot easier if he had simply re-written the poems. His technical concerns always seemed linked to seeing clearly the events and forces that shaped a life, your life. There was this sense that your soul was at stake when you wrote a poem, so you better get it as right as you could—Steve never said it this way, but then he didn’t have to, you could hear it in the way he spoke of poetry. Just as importantly, for me especially, was the sense you got from him that writing poetry was a really pleasurable and lucky thing to be able to do with your life. It was easy for me to get lost in those years in the difficulties I felt in growing as a writer. Steve’s sense of the “serious play” involved in writing was an antidote for those feelings.

And, as I’ve said, he taught constantly by example and reference to the work he admired and got pleasure from. My enthusiasm for Phillip Larkin’s poetry at this point in my life is much diminished (though I do not doubt his greatness). But first reading him under Steve’s tutelage helped give me a sculptural sense of a line; and Larkin’s methods of narration led me back all the way through Hardy to the English & Scots ballad tradition. Steve’s openness to a wide-range of poetry, and his sense of how it all might be useful to your writing, was exciting, at times inspiring.

Besides the syllable-by-syllable approach, he also made large, sometimes funny or absurd generalizations about poetry. Like: “You should have passionate beliefs about aesthetics, but you should change them every other week.” Or: “Even people you think are dumb can say smart things in workshop, so it pays to listen.” Or: “Who would you rather take a cross-country train trip with, Frost or Rilke”? Sometimes he would take you aside and utter some baffling observation: “So-and-so and So-and-so are better writers than you and Tony, but you two will end up being the better poets because you’re angrier.” A distinction like that could give you a lot to think about for a long time. And of course there was plenty of the kind of talk about poetry that crosses over into gossip (is there a bigger gossip than Steve?).

His literature seminars could be demanding in how they made you work, and both encompassing and quirky. One semester, he taught a fantastic class on journals, notebooks and odd prose forms—we read Camus and Elias Canneti and Cioran, and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and an “oral” biography of 60’s “it girl” Edie Sedgwick, and The Journals of David Toback, and the prose poems of James Wright. We kept notebooks and wrote short pieces of our own. It took me years to realize just how profoundly the class had shaped my own sense of what a notebook was for, and how important it might be for my work. Not to mention the notion that your job as a writer was to actually look at the world, to observe how you moved through it. I remember Steve reading to us a passage he had written in his own notebooks that revolved simply around the feeling of standing in front of a bank building downtown, a sort of phenomenological description. I wasn’t surprised to see something quite like it in the opening of “A Stairwell, Outside A Bank,” the first of the new poems in The Elephant’s Child:

Through the iron bars, a stairwell, and in it
The shadows of the iron bars, black, aslant, severe,
And gray concrete steps going up and going down,
And a dark well of coolness rising like an echo,
But no one, nothing flourishing, astonishing or dying.

And then how he returns to it at the end of the poem, after an encounter with a homeless guy, a sort of doppelganger whose life had gone wrong, and who has asked him simply, “Are you a spiritual man?”

And instead of answering glibly
I stood there and wondered what spiritual meant.
What people mean by it. I didn’t engage the man.
What came to mind were iron bars and shadows, and the stairs, and no
Meaning in that but some beauty I must have seen,
Cold as some beauty is, and momentary,
And through the gap between the beauty and the void
Something like an echo of water running over rocks.
If I felt lighter than my body
I didn’t have the means to weigh it then.

The beauty in this passage of lyric meditation is in seeing, and thinking hard about what is seen; it’s in the care that has gone into the writing, and the moral care the writing embodies. I don’t think there’s any other way to experience the metaphoric development in the poem, the working out of it, except as a form of mindfulness.

Because of these different forms of care, Steve may be the only person whose opinion of my poems might disturb or concern me. There have been moments when I have thought about how he might react to some new development in my work. It wouldn’t stop me from writing something or pushing in a new direction, but it would worry me. The worry is silly in a way. Steve is, as he was as a teacher, enormously supportive and/or gracefully tactful, even at his most honest.

I don’t think that this is some remnant of our teacher-student relationship, or at least I hope not. I think Steve has always been something of a tuning fork for me—I can test the trueness of my poems with it. This trueness is in the voice of his poems, and is their strength; and I certainly hear it in Steve’s voice when I talk with him, his good spirits and the thoughtful probing.

Nowadays I see him mostly in the summer, when he and Gail come to Boston for a couple of weeks to stay with family and friends. When he got to town this past June, we arranged a meet near Harvard Square. I picked him up at the corner of JFK Street and Memorial Drive, near the Kennedy School of Government, in the midst of a traffic squall of bad proportions, and he started talking before he had even sat down and shut the door. We started driving down along the Charles to my house. As always, I was amazed at how quickly we were back into it—“it” being what feels like a conversation that is uninterruptible. Its pleasures are one of my life’s most steady feelings. And Steve is one of my dearest friends in or out of the art, and terribly important in my life as a poet and a teacher.

Finally this: I would most certainly rather ride cross-country with Steve than with either Frost or Rilke—that one is pretty easy—though he would have to agree not to tease the waitresses too much when the train stops for food, and he would have to promise not to eat with his fingers, except when absolutely necessary (in both cases).