Keith Gaustad, High Art & Love Poems

I know Keith Gaustad, and I also blurbed his recent chapbook High Art & Love Poems (Broken Bird Press/The Conium Review, 2012).   So I guess this isn’t a review, really, but I just wanted to say a few things about the book anyway.  My blurb reads, “Keith Gaustad’s poems are concise, deliberate in diction, at times terse — they are, as Pound would put it, ‘free from emotional slither.’ Yet there is deep feeling here, which emerges side by side with Gaustad’s subtle sense of satire.”  There is even more to his work, though.  As satire, it is often funny, and many of the poems turn on wordplay and puns.  The book’s title obliquely references James Liddy’s Art Is Not for Grownups, which, as Brian Arkins writes in his introduction to Liddy’s Collected Poems, is “the volume of Liddy that most obviously employs wit…. Here the target … include[s] literary pieties of various kinds.”  And so it is for Gaustad, whose first section in High Art & Love Poems is titled “The Poet Warrior” and begins with the quip, “I’m not afraid of paper cuts.”

Where the aforementioned Liddy collection is composed of short epigrammatical pieces, Gaustad gives us lyrics of a page, two pages, some even three pages in length.  The book’s structure of five sections seems to add up to a narrative of sorts, and the poet has told me that this is a conscious echo of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, each separate section representing a stage of artistic and/or personal development.  Gaustad, however, is not Irish like Joyce (though he was a student of Liddy’s and shares his idiosyncratic Catholicism).  Instead, he is Wisconsin German, living and writing in the poetry mecca of Milwaukee.  His satire, his own irony, works against the hipster irony that one encounters in any such American city. 

In “Philosopher’s House Party,” for example, he writes of “The men in the kitchen from the city with beer in their / beards” while in “Apollo the Cubist and Paul and Saul” he charges, “Post Modern lovers / you / never seem to fall off your horses.”  Many of these poems reflect a struggle with alienation and the desire for some sort of communal feeling.  Their speakers are alternately appalled by people’s displays of vapidity or posturing, and galvanized into seeking out a semblance of meaning, whatever that could be (here I’m reminded of the singer Jonathan Richman of the band the Modern Lovers [emphasis mine]).  He is serious about this.  Thus, his work will no doubt be rejected by about three-quarters or more of all current poetry outlets, since jokey, quirky, prosey stuff is what’s in now — there’s a difference between serious joking, which is what Gaustad does, and quirky/silly, if that makes sense.

Perhaps this chapbook’s subject matter is nothing more than the struggle to become a serious person in a hipster world.  But then, isn’t this similar to Stephen Dedalus’s struggle, only in a vastly different context?  And the poetry that springs from it here is both unique and strong.  Of that same struggle, Gaustad has also written to me, “maybe I’ll get lucky and leave that behind with the book.”  High Art & Love Poems is overtly what it is — a poet’s first book well-composed, a well-structured short collection.  It is a substantial book (that is, it has substance), though, setting the stage for what one can only hope will be a substantial, ongoing career.  Incidentally, it features cover art by the great Milwaukee painter Kyle Fitzpatrick, one of my favorite contemporary artists.

($9.95 from the link above, 37 pages including Gaustad’s humorous bio note, perfect-bound)