Randall Mann’s second collection of poems explores desire and death in the City by the Bay.
Randall Mann’s first book, Complaint in the Garden, had a lot to do with Florida. His latest, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, is very much a book of San Francisco. Having lived in both places (albeit in reverse order) might have a little to do with why I like his work so much—there’s a familiarity about the places, the smells, the sounds, the people in his poems that’s just so right it seems they could not have been written any other way.
The two primary themes of Breakfast with Thom Gunn are desire and place. Mann’s poems don’t seethe with sexuality so much as they explode with it, and I think the strict formality of many of the pieces acts as a sounding board for the raw and primal images he uses. For example, in “Song,” he writes:
I lure him to the house
online, with crystal meth.
I say to bring his friends.
I say I’ll fuck his mouth.(One time, I swear to God,
I fucked for weeks and weeks.)
These queens arrive all prim
and talk about antiques,and art, boring stuff.
But when they snort the best
crystal money can buy?
They beg to sit on my fist.
Formal poetry is often dismissed out of hand as the antithesis of cutting edge, even dead, but Mann proves that it need not be. It’s the formality of the poem that makes the final line of “Song” so jarring, so emphatic. It shatters our expectations.
There’s a similar effect in “The Mortician in San Francisco,” a sestina in the voice of the gay mortician who prepared Dan White’s body for burial. There’s no question the poem carries more resonance now because of the critical and box office success of the film Milk—Dan White was the San Francisco Supervisor who shot and killed Supervisor and gay activist Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone and then got an obscenely short prison sentence for the crime. A sestina repeats six line-ending words from stanza to stanza in varying order, and in Mann’s poem those words hit hard: queer, hands, white, milk, years, shot. The repetition of the form already lends itself to reflection on the past, and that’s how the poem ends: “In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White / And he was made presentable by a queer.” The formality of the lines adds emotional resonance to the closing. Mann himself acknowledges that he “would have been afraid of approaching a moment like this in queer history without the compression that form affords.”
There are other political moments in the book—the “uncounted ballots floating in the bay” in the poem “Election Day,” referencing the mayoral contest between Democrat Gavin Newsom and Green Matt Gonzales; the pantoum titled “Politics.” In San Francisco, politics is blood sport, where the battles rage between left and more left. It’s as necessary a part of the scenery as the trains, the neighborhoods, the fog which inhabits Mann’s poems. The book would be false without it.
Another great example of how Mann weds form to content is in the poem “Career.” It’s a darkly funny piece written in a loose ballad stanza about, well, using sex to get ahead.
But when the older poet saw
a photo of the lad,
the older man dipped his pen
and wrote that he’d be gladto offer up the highest praise:
If Bishop wed Magritte
these villanelles would be their spawn.
And maybe they should meet.
The lilting music of the lines adds to the humor of the moment—and it is humorous. The speaker “wore his tightest shirt” to the meeting and flexed a bit. Two people getting what they want out of a deal; the desire is mutual.
But as I said at the beginning of this review, this is also a book about place, about the city of San Francisco, and one poem that illustrates that well is “N,” short for the N-Judah streetcar. Mann begins this poem in the ironically named Sunset neighborhood, “the gray of the outer Sunset portending / the gray of the inner Sunset. And so on.” And anyone who’s been there, whether a tourist hoping to see the sun dive into the Pacific or a melatonin-starved local, knows just what Mann is talking about. Mann follows the train through “the long lush green / of Duboce Park,” but that’s where any sentimentality ends. There’s also a “locked men’s room / where a man was once found dead, // his penis shoved into his own mouth.” Even in a city you love, there are dark places.
Overall, Breakfast with Thom Gunn strikes a nice balance between ugly reality and hope. In the title poem, Gunn is the kind of man who “gives his change to men / who’ve lost their homes and looks.” In “South City,” Mann says, “even the pines are industrial-park green,” but also that “the pier, like a lean prehistoric monster, / has walked, headfirst, into the sea.”
I haven’t lived in San Francisco for nearly four years now, and when I visited last January, it wasn’t quite the same place I remembered. That’s to be expected. But Randall Mann has captured his San Francisco: its ugly, gritty, naked desire, the death that permeates its recent history, the drug use and sex—and he’s grown in it. In the volume’s final poem, “Fiction,” he says “What a mess,” and indeed, San Francisco is just that. But it’s also a place that’s constantly renewing itself, and Mann recognizes that as well, which makes this such a wonderful collection of poems.
**
Read “Ian Hamilton in Florida,” a new poem by Randall Mann, published today in The Rumpus.
