Review: Conceit Without Irony (A Review Of You Still Have Yourself By Fernando Samalot)
By Hugh
Blanton
The short
poems with the short lines that make up You Still Have Yourself have the
dispersed and uninformed feeling that are common in debut collections and are
full of the solipsism of the self-obsessed. Samalot tries even harder than
Ocean Vuong to put his sadness on display, but where Vuong tries to make
readers fall in love with his sadness, Samalot just drags its decaying corpse
back and forth in front of you until you glance at your watch and say you're
late for an appointment. He rarely raises his diction above monosyllables; not
in an effort at some sort of meter, he's simply seduced by the surface of
emotion (and things) without any curiosity at what might be below. He plays the
part of an overly despondent Eeyore most of the time, but once in a while some
Gloria Gaynoresque I Will Survive bug gets in his ear (as if Tony Robbins were
singing it at karaoke night).
The
subtitle is Poems and Reflections because the book contains a lot of narrative
prose, but when we finally get to the first poem we find the poetry is little
more than chopped up prose:
I'll
offer you a trade,
she
said.
Everything
for Everything.
I
didn't get it at the time
but
life,
oh,
she
had plans for me.
Obviously
the “oh” isn't there for either rhythm or meter (in fact there's very little
rhythm or meter in any of the poems here) and does nothing more than raise the
campy tone. Samalot's plain prosiness, thankfully, means poems very rarely need
to be reread. A reader may occasionally stumble upon canter, but it's
completely accidental.
The trauma
in You Still Have Yourself is minor domestic trauma where nothing has
been inflicted on its victim. A reader might think that Samalot is a teenager
suffering his first breakup and then be shocked to find out he's actually forty
years old. It's not that the poems are bad, though they are plenty bad enough,
it's that Samalot isn't sure what a poem is, so they fall back on
near-pointless wailing and adolescent melancholia (and often doesn't even rise
to adolescence: “when life seems scary or uncertain/ we can brave the storm/
together.”) Sometimes it looks like he's rehashing folded notes he used to pass
to crushes in junior high:
true
intimacy lives
underneath
all the layers
and
masks we wear
between
ourselves
if
you want to bridge
the
great divide
that
separates
your
heart from mine
show
me
show
me
show
me your real side
Samalot
understands the emotions of romantic relationships but not that having emotions
isn't the same thing as writing poems. Repeating “show me” three times might
work in a song, but in this enjambed prose narrative it adds nothing (he could
have at least thrown in some exclamation points). His poems make more of his
sadness than the sadness deserves, as if he's waving them about and crying, “Look!
This is poetry!”
You
Still Have Yourself
has both a preface and a prologue. He tells us in the prologue that the words “you
still have yourself” accompanied him “through countless seasons of life, loss,
death, and rebirth” and that those seasons have become this book. The first
season was in 2017 when hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and uprooted his life.
He also informs us in the prologue, “It wasn't that I was writing this book. The
book was writing me.” Such hackneyed cliche in the prologue is of course a
warning of what awaits us later in the book—Samalot makes even Rod Mckuen look
profound. Like a lot of bilingual English/Spanish writers he likes to show off
for his monolingual readers with bits of untranslated Spanish, but he takes it
easy on us with mostly simple phrases like “mi corazón.” (There are thirteen
pages that contain untranslated Spanish.) Not only are his unpoetic poems short
on metaphor and simile, there's hardly even an adjective about; just teary
nouns and verbs. He occasionally resorts to rhetoric, but it sounds like something
straight out of a self-improvement TED Talk: “Hold yourself in your arms for a
second if you need it, and repeat to yourself in your most nurturing voice, 'I
am held. Even if only by myself. I am held.”
It's of
course not unusual for poets to write about themselves, they are in fact their
favorite subject most of the time. Samalot, though, has taken self-centeredness
to a whole new level:
From
this moment forward
the
only people allowed to share
sacred
space in my life
are
those who embody selfless love
and
reciprocate my energy.
His energy
is that of a chronic depressive; whatever it is he wants reciprocated here is
obviously a delusional fantasy, and he's overthrown even a pretense to modesty
with the “sacred space.” He does step out of himself at one point in what
appears to be an apostrophe to his ex-wife, or it may be that he's addressing
the reader directly: “you are still worthy of Life/ worthy of Joy/ worthy of
Forgiveness/ worthy of Compassion.” The plethora of short vacuous lines becomes
irritating—he even has an eighteen line, eighteen word poem here.
In the
epilogue Samalot gets out his crystal ball and takes a look into the future
where we find out that this debut collection of his is but the first of a
series. He doesn't tell us exactly how far into the future he's taking us, but
we get an idea: “Fifty years ago, my daughter was born on a Thursday, and it's
always been a special day for me.” His oldest grandchild paws over all the
books he's written, the grandchild pausing to point at one of his favorite
pages. The benevolent grandfather smiles: “'That was a pivotal moment for me,'
I say, in a deep and warm voice. 'Back then, I was always scared that I would
have to choose between being a traveling sage or a family man.'“ Samalot's
self-esteem is such that he believes he would have no trouble being a sage if
he wanted to, but one can't help but wonder what a self-absorbed depressive
could offer in the way of sagacity. In fact, the last section of the book
before the epilogue is titled “The Sage” and contains such lines as “I'm doing
the best I can/ with what I have” “The less I do/ the more I am” and “If others
can't handle my honest truth, then perhaps they don't deserve me.” When conceit
meets a total lack of irony we get Fernando Samalot, whether we deserve him or
not.
Hugh
Blanton's latest
book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.