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The Rocking Celtic Harp of T. S. Kerrigan
My subject will resist easy summary. Goose me, O Muse, that I begin. Thomas Kerrigan, whom I regard as one of the finest and most entertaining American poets alive, "entered the universe in flesh" (those are his words) in 1939 in Los Angeles, and has more or less stayed put there ever since. No scion of luxury and power but the son of a postman and a lady who sold shoes in a department store, he survived the public schools of Los Angeles and has characterized himself as "a daydreamer of a boy who was often assumed to be of limited intelligence by my long-suffering teachers." He did, however, make it into Berkeley, where as an undergraduate he studied poetry with Louis Simpson and geology with Ulysses S. Grant III (reportedly the spitting image of his grandfather). But unwilling to starve as a poet or as a collector of rock specimens, Kerrigan went on to earn a J.D. from Loyola?s School of Law.
To his surprise, for he hadn't expected to be good at anything, he turned out to be a smashing success at arguing a case before a court, winning landmark decisions galore. In 2001 he faced the U.S. Supreme Court, fighting to save a law to benefit working men and women that had been struck down in lower federal courts. Though some of the justices didn't share his liberal bent, all nine unanimously agreed with him.
In printing his poems both here and abroad and in letting his plays be staged, Tom Kerrigan signed himself T.S. Kerrigan lest his clients think him not dedicated single-mindedly to winning their cases for them. Besides having two plays produced, he belongs to the Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle; and for a time edited and published a poetry gazette called Hierophant, printing Robert Creeley, Jacques Prevert, John Woods and others. "I was a horrible editor," he recalls. "I gave in to any poet who gave me a sob story." But that experience taught him that poetry editors aren't infallible, which discovery gave him more confidence in his own writing.
Much of Kerrigan's work, I have to say, is as Irish as Paddy's porker. Well, though he's American enough, he plays a Celtic harp that really rocks. Several of his poems draw their landscapes from the Emerald Isle; or there'll be an Irish speaker, as in "The Muslin Dress," a light poem that voices deep feeling. A beautiful woman walks into a dance, and at once every man's yearning eyes are on her:
We watched her move across the room,
The scarlet muslin dress she chose
Revealing long and shapely legs.
We'd rarely seem the like of those.
And, oh, we thought, to be the man
Of all who danced with her before,
To hold her in our arms that night,
A heap of muslin on the floor.
This predilection for the old sod can hardly be held against Kerrigan, for he is a relative of Yeats; his family roots go back to County Sligo, and he and his wife are dual citizens of Ireland and America. As seems natural, he is also a devotee of James Joyce. His Branches Among the Stars, a play about Joyce?s Dublin years, enjoyed a well-acclaimed run at the Ensemble Studio Theater in L.A. a while ago. Then there's the title poem of his chapbook, Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone?s Pub (The Inevitable Press, 1999), some of whose diction recalls Finnegan's Wake. The poet is twitting some bar patrons who, ignorant of Joyce's work, use it as an excuse to celebrate:
God bliss us and salve us,
who said buggers can't be chancers?
But riddle me this, if you can,
my foin finicky scalder,
except for the scribbler in the corner
with his jar and his long face
(night of the doleful countenance),
which of those claptomaniacs
ever so much as opened or closed a book
by Seamus Joyce in his life?
There is, by the way, an actual Molly Malone's Pub in the Wilshire-Fairfax section of Los Angeles, where a rollicking bawdy show that Kerrigan co-authored with Irish actor Redmond Gleeson has been faithfully performed on every Bloomsday for the last twenty-one years.
Tom Kerrigan has written more excellent poems than you could count on the quills of a porcupine. Some are profoundly moving, some funny. Even in his light verse there's often a dash of bitterness, but it only adds flavor, the way a squeeze of lemon improves a bloody Mary. He keeps remembering how quickly time overtakes us all, how sooner or later every beautiful thing gets zapped. In "Ten," a star as bright as Garbo or Dietrich reappears in old age, her loveliness diminished by fifty percent. In "Elvis Kissed Me," a woman barfly recalls her moment of glory. (You'll find that lovely parody in Garrison Keillor's anthology Good Poems.) Not that Kerrigan is altogether bitter; no, he is truthfully wry. Long involved in large affairs of the world at large, he can't forget how grim that world can be, as any of us knows who reads the newspapers. In "Be Thankful, Unicorn," he addresses creatures of legend:
Behemoth, Dragon, Sphinx,
be happy you're ideal;
these times engender forms
more terrible, more real.
Forms like global warming, maybe? In "Further Reflections on the Sexual Revolution," the poet imagines a punishment in Hell to make that of Dante's two famous lovers look piddling:
With Paolo and Francesca doomed to spin
In swirling air for one pathetic sin,
I contemplate the cataclysmic gust
That waits to punish our prodigious lust.
You'll find that last in a chapbook from Scienter Press, The Shadow Sonnets (2006). But what this country sorely needs is a whole thick collection of Kerrigan's work, and luckily, Central Avenue Press of Albuquerque is going to supply it at last: My Dark People, in January 2008.
Kerrigan wins my fondness and admiration because of those and other poems, and moreover, for a candid remark he made to James R. Elkins, who interviewed him recently in Legal Studies Forum (XXXI, 2). Kerrigan quotes Joyce to the effect that a writer, like a priest saying Mass, transforms ordinary stuff into something transcendent. And he adds, "There are times, writing or conceiving poetry, that it feels otherworldly. You join with some higher spirit; I hesitate to say God." That may sound a bit grandiose and mysterious, but it must be a poor poet who hasn't also felt on occasion like a pen grasped and written with by some supernatural hand. Me, I admit I have felt like a such a helpless tool only on rare occasions when a poem or even a limerick has successfully worked itself out. Kerrigan is a brave man to confess, as I haven't seen another living poet do, that he can't always write poetry by himself, but at times has enjoyed a kick in the inspiration from above. ~ X. J. Kennedy
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