Percival Everett’s first novel was published in 1983. How long ago was that? It was same year Madonna, R.E.M. and Metallica released their first albums. Much of the world has only recently begun to catch up with him.
His current renown, a long time coming, is thanks to the success of “James,” a subversive retelling of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that won the National Book Award this year, and the movie “American Fiction” (2023), which was based on Everett’s publishing satire, “Erasure.” You can almost hear the mass of eyeballs swiveling in his direction.
He also writes poetry. Since 2006, Everett has issued six books of verse. His latest, “Sonnets for a Missing Key,” is out now. He’s hardly the first important fiction writer to commit poetry on the side, as if with his left hand. Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, John Updike and Alice Walker are some of the others who come to mind — as well as, among a younger generation, the omnidirectionally talented Ben Lerner.
What’s Everett’s poetry like?
The best of it puts on display his deep reading and his willingness, so often apparent in his fiction, to tinker with the reputations of characters both historical and literary. Few writers pay more rapt attention to the fact that history is, fundamentally, storytelling.
My favorite among Everett’s collections is probably his first, “re: f (gesture),” from 2006. (Count on a critic to dig the early stuff.) Here’s the opening of a long poem from that book, in which big names, as if particles in the Hadron Collider, bump crisply off one another. Written in free verse, it’s titled “Zulus”:
A is for Achitophel.
It was he who put Absalom
up to the big naughty.
Dryden called Achitophel
a great wit. Not to
Blow Dryden off, but the
wit was Solomon’s.
Sawing a babe in two?
“And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
The poem also includes a riff on Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the middle-aged tavern owner who is the protagonist of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”
E is for Earwicker,
the eternal scapegoat,
listening to insulting
soo-wees through a keyhold.
The better you recall Joyce’s own scene, the better this tangent is.
Everett’s first book puts his readers on alert. “G is for Grab Your Ankles, America,” he writes. In other words, bend over and prepare for what’s coming.
What was coming, 12 years later — I’m going to skip over some lesser intervening books — was an electric volume titled “The Book of Training, by Colonel Hap Thompson.” This is the Everett poetry book most worth attending to after “re: f (gesture).”
The book is a mock historical document, a D.I.Y. guide to the buying, training and punishing of slaves. It gives off wood smoke from its opening sentences. Indeed, it might have fallen out of a different version of “James.” What lends this book its scorching wit is the fact that, in the margins, it has been annotated by one of its readers.
Colonel Thompson, the author, reads the Bible every day and considers himself “a good Christian man” who is — here he perhaps betrays some anxiety — “white from head to tip of toe.” A typical entry begins, this one under the general heading “Working Conditions”:
A good near-drowning is
wonderful for making the slave
at once more interesting
and interested.
The handwritten comments in the margins are imbecilic (“yes,” “how true,” “good point,” “well said”). They sometimes show the note taker missing obvious points altogether. Coarse brutality and fine comedy combine to project strange visions onto the dark insides of your skull.
The poet Anne Carson has said that if “prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.” Everett has always seemed to be on fire in his best novels. He can seem less so in his poetry.
In many of his volumes, including his most recent one, the poems read like exercises and improvisations. Meaning threatens to coalesce but often doesn’t — not quite. His attempts at classic forms, like the sonnet, are loose, though he deploys repetition to uncanny effect.
Everett is more aw-shucks about his poetry than most novelists who attempt it. In 2020, he told an interviewer: “I write poetry to offer proof that I cannot write a poem. I try. One day I will write a good poem. Does it influence my fiction? I suppose, but I am not smart enough to know how.” Here the gentleman doth protest too much.
We usually find him working out his obsessions, which include painting, nature, music and — perhaps most important — the frames we attempt to put around these things.
The reader pounces on the poems that do work. Take “Box,” from his 2015 collection “Trout’s Lie.” The speaker is delivering last wishes to his descendants. He wants no grave, but instead:
Let me lie where I die,
All cozy and deathy.
Cover me where I fall.
The dark is gathering, but the speaker wants free of pretense and mysticism. The poem ends with:
So, put me outside on the ground.
I don’t care whether a tree is near.
There can be grass or no grass,
Sand or clay or granite.
The moon will be out in the daytime when I go.
Look at it for me.
Utter some clichés.
What a last line. Count on Everett for a sting in the tail.
His new book, “Sonnets for a Missing Key,” includes a poem that begins:
Pour this garden into a glass, while
explaining to me the difference between a creek
and a stream, an ocean and a sea,
a lie and a confession of love.
Ouch again. A pebble in every shoe. It’s the Everett way.
The post Percival Everett’s Prose Is Having a Moment. How Is His Poetry? appeared first on New York Times.
