Steve Orlen. The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005. Ausable Press. 2006. 145pp. $16.00

I’ve never met Steve Orlen. Until recently, I hadn’t even read much of his work. But after reading his latest book, which includes a section of new poems entitled The Elephant’s Child, and selected poems from his five previous collections, I’m undeniably left with the sensation of having shaken his hand, or of having talked with him over a drink at some airport bar in the middle of nowhere. Orlen’s work winds itself up in the gears of everyday life—sex, nostalgia, guilt, love, communication—and in doing so tugs at the questions of living, and goes searching for the joy of the movement from beginning to end. If narrative poetry is out fashion these days, I’m thankful Orlen didn’t get the memo, or rather chose to ignore it, because both the new and old poems here carry on the tradition of the storyteller—of one poet sharing his tale with the rest of us. Orlen consistently pushes the poem so that his story melds with our own, and in the middle somewhere we can share our thoughts, embarrassments, dreams and hopes.

Wallace Stevens writes that “Poetry is a process of the personality of the poet. This is the element, the force, that keeps poetry a living thing…” In The Elephant’s Child this is especially true, and not just because the concept of the self becomes a theme for Orlen in individual poems, but because this collection covers the span of nearly thirty years, and chronicles more than a lifetime. What’s remarkable is reading Orlen’s later poems next to his older work, and realizing that even if the topics might have slightly changed, the project is still the same. In “The Art of Conversation,” one of the new poems, he writes “Don’t you love it when two people actually talk?” In essence, this line captures what I think are some of Orlen’s best qualities: his straight-talk, his questioning, and his ability to subtly get at the strange and beautiful moments in life—those moments when we become aware of being in the moment, or in the poem, or in our own conscious story. There is no pretense in Orlen’s tone. He’s inviting, but he doesn’t dumb things down—he has too much respect for his fellow readers. If this book were a bar it’d be the best bar possible: slightly dark, with good music on the jukebox, and as he notes in “A Day in the Life” there’d be “No cover and no minimum / If you were broke you could stand by the ventilator….” We’d all be on a strictly first-name basis, just like in “The City of Poets: 1966”: “Not a last name among us yet.”

Part of the intrigue of Orlen for me is in the chances he takes—he constantly risks embarrassment, or stumbling, especially in some of his poems dealing with sex. In “Poem for Women and for Men,” one of his longer poems and the last of The Elephant’s Child section of the book, he notes “Sex will make a fool of us from the end to the beginning.” And yet even realizing this, Orlen writes about sex often, because even in today’s world with a media driven by sex (as erotic fetishism), the real sex as sex, or sex as we know it in our own bedrooms, in our own memories, still lies mostly in the realm of shadow, and “What nobody ever mentions / Is exactly what we need to know.” Just as the word “ambivalent” in “Poem Against Ideas” is “a story shrunk to a word,” so too is sex. Orlen takes the time to stretch the story out, to examine it, to speak about it at greater length.

Throughout this book, and thus throughout his work, Orlen makes a major commitment to the story: telling it, trying to understand it, building on it, revising it. We see part of the original intrigue of stories in “Reverie: The Saturday Evening Post,” which features Orlen at ten reading sentimental stories “Because a person could go on with life, a little bit chastened, a little bit wiser, / After the story’s end.” But Orlen takes this original concept of the story and stretches it, makes it his own. He’s often openly contemplating boundaries between one person and the next, between sincere communication and too much information, as in “Ars Poetica: Most Embarrassing Moments,” when he asks:

How open should one be? And where was that line you crossed

At your own peril, and of what value was the crossing?

To make us feel more comfortable

In a conforming world? Or harmful, alienating, casting a person out?

Orlen’s often at his best when he’s asking questions, because he’s asking about what constitutes an individual, or how we can better communicate, or what have we came through to get where we are. “Blind Date” features a litany of these questions spaced throughout the poem, and I’d recommend the poem itself as a literary guide for breaking the ice:

What parts of yourself have you given up on since leaving your home town?

Have you ever been lost? Broke? Have you ever asked your sister

What she thought of you back then, when you were kids?

Ultimately, I get the feeling that Orlen honestly wants the answers to all these questions, and more. He wants to know the world, and he wants to know his fellow people. What I respect about Steve Orlen is that he doesn’t forget. Later in “Reverie: The Saturday Evening Post” he writes “I’m still a nostalgic man. History cures nothing. Irony? Perspective? Nothing.” His questions about life often lead back to his self, and that self as constructed as a personality living in the world. Even if words can only mirror personality, in Orlen’s case I think we’re getting a pretty good view. He is, ultimately, that Elephant’s Child asking “What does the Crocodile have for dinner?” And we are the Crocodile, answering, “I think to-day I will begin with the Elephant’s Child!”