In Tom Laichas’ latest, compelling collection of poetry, Three Hundred Streets of Venice California, the eponymous city and its ‘Three hundred grid- / woven streets, stab-stitched to one another’ are present at every turn, each poem taking its title from a Venice street-name.
Through a series of poetic vignettes, Laichas’ clever use of prose poetry, employed almost entirely throughout, lends an element of reportage. We sense that the poetic voice is investigating, probing, not simply reflecting on, but also grappling with what emerges; the reader riding shotgun to poetry that journeys by car, on foot or even rooted to the spot, observing from its own front yard.
Perhaps, what is being sought is meaning in Venice’s contradictions: one street forgotten, another famous, one safe while its neighbour threatens, until street by street what emerges is a composite picture of truth, embracing its contradictions and making for a collection that is as believable as it is striking.
At the same time, a vivid poetic imagination constantly cuts through realism to take us elsewhere. In the poem, “Cordova Ct,” the omniscient power of the poetic voice transports the reader into the head of a sixteen-year-old girl, the poem’s last-line volta landing with devastating effect:
She walks slowly. It is December but warm. She walks
beneath the generous city’s tree shade.
In her head, she’s telling herself a story about herself. In her story are people she
already knows: family, teachers, friends, ex-friends. It’s a small story but for her, the
story that matters most.
The names from that other story, the violent story, lean in and listen.
Elsewhere, Venice’s longest street, Washington Boulevard is ‘an arterial road, meaning that the city moves its blood along its length.’ The street appears in several poems that Lachais uses to effectively punctuate the subtle shifts between the collection’s constituent parts. In the second of the series, “II Washington Bl,” there’s a feeling that memory is being wrong-footed or at the very least, having to constantly adjust to accommodate a shifting city:
Here I remember a storefront theater.
Here I remember a hardware backroom and running fingers through buckets of
bolts.
Here I remember, after the bombings, King Fahad Mosque.
It is also where the speaker’s ‘otherselves’ emerge:
On every block is a younger I: the I who slowed for stop lights who signalled left and
right, who parked and bought and paid. That man is no ghost. He wanders these
blocks, applauds at the end of an act, buys 1×8 planks, exchanges shaloms for salaam
aleikums. He is the otherself, the man who recites his movements.
If not ghosts, then these ‘otherselves’ represent echoes of human experience that the speaker sees all around, mirroring what he has already lived. It is as if the poet is turning the dial as he seeks for Venice on the airwaves, the city and its myriad lives coming in and out of tune with a picture that flickers from mid-century portable tv to modern day, revealing the shadows of other Venices that are tuned to the distant frequencies of life’s what ifs.
The final “Washington Bl” poem is also the collection’s last, by which time:
We’re tired of driving, me and my otherselves. At the end of the pilgrimed road,
there’s just another street. We could drive for days and never get anywhere else.
We make a U and head on back.
The final line of this poem and the collection it belongs to, I won’t reveal here, other than to say, I think we are in the hands of an immensely gifted poet and that it is a line that strikes just the right note in drawing the collection to a close, the recurrence of those ‘otherselves’ lending to the sense of transience, of movement (while moving nowhere) and of the shared experience (while remaining utterly alone in the world).
Elsewhere in Three Hundred Streets of Venice California, Nature thrives, squirms, and wriggles, as evidenced in the poem, Animalia:
Among the three hundred streets of Venice, they live in their billions. They obey no
human law. They are born from gelatinous sacs. They each other creatures alive.
Animalia is a horror show.
But besides the horror show, there is a gentler side to nature that includes honeybees and lavender, trees, hens, spiders, sand crabs. On “Rose Av,” a fugitive coyote appears. The poem subtly conveys a sense of territory and of a boundary that has been crossed:
The neighbor says to his son, They probably think this isn’t an emergency, but if they
don’t do something, it sure will be. Coyotes, the neighbor goes on, eat people’s pets.
They even attack little kids.
Fear of the outsider lies at the heart of the poem, the father quick to characterize the coyote as ‘wild,’ his son recognizing that ‘Wild is the part of the land that burns, the part with the mountain lions / and deer.’ But ultimately, it is the child, not the man, whose empathy serves the poem’s humanity, captured in its poignant final line: ‘The boy thinks: everyone needs a home for / the night.’
Meanwhile, during ‘the first months of the plague’ a peacock escapes a yard ‘and all year long drags his dreamy gown along the streets.’ On “26th Pl”, beyond the surf ‘swathed in / white chiffon, seabirds wail.’ Such well-drawn details give the reader a clear sense of place but are also at work on a metaphysical level, exploring our interactions with the landscapes we inhabit, how they shape who we are, how we live, work, play, and ultimately, die. On “Horizon Av”
On mornings like this, I hear my own pulse. My heart draws blood into itself, then
releases that blood to my body.
Blood’s not the same thing as ocean, but they have a history. This close to dawn,
in such quiet, they remember what it is to speak and to be understood.
Equally evocative is the collection’s sense of a city as a living entity. In “Courtland St”
It’s a long wait. Year by year, malignancies pock the pavement. Streetflesh oozes from
open wounds. Asphalt scree scabs the gutter.
The street waits it’s turn. Finally, the Resurfacing and Reconstruction Division arrives, closing it to through traffic, patching things up, and getting this street on its feet again and straight back to work for the people who inhabit it. Other streets, aren’t as fortunate:
Two streets away, another block blisters. A wound gapes and winter rain, like a
reptile’s toxic saliva, dissolves the interior tissues. The front passenger tire hammers
into the pit. No city is ever wholly saved.
In this poem, as with the collection as a whole, there is always a tension between permanence and transience, two halves of the same city, the same self. What such compelling poetry reveals is that life is layered, at times simple, at others, complex; its seeming contradictions making it what it is.
Three Hundred Streets of Venice California is a conceptually tight and exceptionally well-crafted collection, handling its subject matter deftly; its pages full of beautiful, sometimes funny, often poignant, and always deeply affecting poetry.
Martin Jago is a British-American poet based between L.A. and London. His debut collection, Photofit is published by Pindrop Press. His writing has appeared widely in literary magazines like Agenda, Acumen, The Moth, LIT Magazine, Presence, The Penn Review, The High Window, The Indianapolis Review, and Sierra Nevada Review, among others. He holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford where he was an F.H. Pasby Prize finalist and recipient of an H.E.F.C.E scholarship. More @ www.martinjago.net