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Review by Joyelle McSweeney
Lake Shore Drive is the sixth volume by Cambridge-cum-South-Bend poet John Wilkinson, and its title embodies much about Wilkinson’s career-long political and aesthetic concerns. Most directly, it alludes to that seam in the American landscape where the 20th century optimism of the Chicago skyline meets the cold green abstraction of Lake Michigan along a thin and silvery scimitar of road. This split landscape suggests every immensity modernity comes up against and fails against or batters against or shrinks next to: globalism, genocide, survival as a race, the impossibility of treating each other humanely or preserving our own resources. More specifically, the image of Lake Shore Drive, and even its lexical yoking of a natural location, a lake shore, to a manmade one, a drive, represents a kind of ever-hybridizing littoral wherein the manmade contaminates the natural zone. For example, in the second installment of the excellent “Marram” sequence that ends Wilkinson’s volume, we meet this sonic and linguistic vision of nature and dump becoming one:
Xerophiles throng onto their club floor,
a teeming underthatch
soak the wodge of thickener
voluptuous with veins
dead sheet, wrinkled verge
sucking at their slow heels.
water strops a salt ledge
dogged, automatic, licking
out some lodging place, a lick erosion
spiriting the sand
as though pile-up
were a highway’s purpose, watch-making
were a whale’s or if a junk oil,
actually it claims here its true flame
stinks & gutters sootily…
look actually the thing was
the thing was
saprophyte, delicately lipped.
Here the saprophytic and xerophilic post-growth is not anthropomorphized, remaining “throng” and “thing,” but it grows like and over mankind’s refuse and forms a fused and merging layer that will survive us all—or with which we will all have to grapple next, and in our grappling come to resemble its own scavenging but resourceful form. Despite this imagery of collapse, Wilkinson’s characteristic agility with language provides an upward thrust that keeps the passage in motion and aloft. Scientific diction (“xerophiles,” “saprophyte”) is bound on tendons of Anglo-Saxon onomatopoeia (“soak the wodge”) and alliteration, and Wilkinson’s always tender affection for the unwitting aptness of vernacular phrase—“look actually, the thing was/the thing was”—delivers us to the sole lilting description in the passage—“delicately lipped”—a phrase itself a metaphor for eloquence.
The model of the leveling verge, dump, marsh, or margin might be the most optimal in this book, a superior alternative to the gruesome urban visions related elsewhere. The “Cité Sportif” sequence revolves around the sports arenas which, in a perversion of urban planning, have presented themselves as ready sites of internment, torture and execution around the world from Chile to Palestine. Wilkinson points up the atrocious duality of these sites, where
[…] young men
rounded up, having their measurements taken
end up in the first position.
high school kids up for it.
The passage ends here, and so we don’t learn what type of struggle these young men are “up for”—the athletic contest which the Greek root for ‘agony’ denotes, or ‘agony’ as it is used in English, a humiliating and deadly ordeal. Elsewhere, Wilkinson works this ambiguity until it is barely tolerable to the reader:
[…]a man will round the bend
for first place on the last lap
mount the impregnable dais
A hard day
A Riefenstahl
fitness course
The epithet “A Riefenstahl/fitness course” flashes with knifelike doubleness at the end of this run—it could refer to the physical perfection touted in Riefenstahl’s Olympia, or to the dire outcomes of the political program that film supported. In a handful of words, Wilkinson is able to construe both a classical and modern lineage for contemporary carnage, and so impart a pessimistic view of history that cannot but crash to its death from its own corrupt weight. It is telling that much of the “Cité Sportif” sequence is occupied with sightlines and spectation, the points of contact global capitalism and consumerism so rifely provide on events all over the world:
Turn a corner down, turn down its dog-eared
corner, take the corner to see the velodrome
assemble all loose objects including humans
Here, virtual and real proximity are indistinguishable—turning down the corner of a page is the same as turning a streetcorner to the scene of the crime. This inability to distinguish, to make distinctions, is at the heart of our moral culpability, because we also can’t distinguish human beings from the rest of the “loose objects” heaped on the global bazaar. Our consumer stance entails a kind of passivity that entangles us in global networks and renders us helpless: “this/ is how life pans away, more or less alleviated,/
[…] texting texting above the superbowl.”
Against such vistas, the image of the conquering “saprophyte, delicately lipped” becomes an optimistic one. In this brutal planet of corpses and multistory cenotaphs, decomposition and recombination may offer the last, best hope for ongoingness. Wilkinson’s linguistic method, pasting dictions, lingos and languages into urgent rhythms, by turns jerky and mellifluous, itself resembles the scavenger saprophyte, and like it provides a model of possibility. The promise that explodes from the concatenation of even the basest advertising language, as when one speaker channels the wet dreams of butter ads and croons, “I like it sweet, I like it whipped, I like it salted, I like it fresh churned,” preserves an extremely modest portion of humanity amid the urban warzones and vectors of exploitation and near-extinction otherwise documented in the book. But therein lies the nagging paradox of Lake Shore Drive: the same network of global capitalist contact zones which supplies our agencyless vantage on one another’s suffering also enables this messy, pell-mell ultrahyrbid argot which Wilkinson so mesmerizingly mobilizes. “TriBeCa Bridge? Your I.D.!” exclaims a voice from “The Shoal of the Ditto Ship,” while others trill “O fallen arches O articulacy!”—though whether in grief or celebration we can’t be sure. Is Wilkinson’s distinctive poetic, then, a humane alternative to a toxic system, or its beguiling byproduct—or can it be both? Such unsettled and unsettling contradictions render Lake Shore Drive an unillusioned yet passionate book of complex questions and still more complex implications.
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