Cover image from The Executive Director of the Fallen World
by Liam Rector, University of Chicago Press, 2006
Never heard of him before; I just saw a line that was quoted by someone:
Change is slow and hope is violent.
(from Song Years)
I was intrigued; I looked up the author, Liam Rector. "Liam Rector is one of the most linguistically liquid and gifted poets of his generation," said poet Lucie Brock-Broido. "His is the oddest and most hallucinatory romance with Romance in American letters."
I bought his final book, The Executive Director of the Fallen World, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006, a year before Liam took his own life by shotgun.
What I found in it was poetry that is honest, raw and vulnerable. After reading his work, I still can’t say I know the man that once was. But he sure left some windows open. A taste:
From When the Parents Went:
How miserable Mom looked
In the photo. It had been a shotgun
Wedding, occasioned by me,
There already
In Mom’s belly, six months
Before I, unwanted, came to be.
From The Worry of the Far Right:
He, the Reverend, wanted again an America
In which he could drive his convertible into town,
Park it, leave his keys in the ignition,
And worry only that it might rain,
Rather than worry about Liam Rector.
From Off to the Country of Cancer:
It comes on.
Comes on with the word,
A doctor’s word,
The doctor saying cancer.
“But do I have cancer?”
“Yes, cancer.”
Doctor has to say cancer
One more time
Before the cancer
In me
Becomes the word
I give over to it.
From This Summer:
I think I may die without god,
My single comic integrity
That I have remained
An atheist in the foxhole,
Though I am ready
To roar through the gates
If there are gates.
From First Marriage:
All those years ago. So many
Things turn this way over time,
So much tenderness and memory,
Problems not to be solved
But lived, and I resolved
Right then to start living
Only in this kind of time.
Cancer gave this to me: being
Able to sit, comfortably, to get
Over her finally, and to
Get on with the fight to live while
Staying ready to die daily.
From Beautiful, Sane Women:
Looking back I wonder
What the hell those
Beautiful, sane women
Must have thought
Was happening. What
Was happening was
I was on script
Betraying poverty
And then betraying
My need to betray
Poverty, poverty
Put in me so deeply
As my family early
Shifted around endlessly,
Leaving me,
I thought, with no choice
Other than to be
Some kind of Gandhi.
From So We’ll Go No More:
I’ve operated that way. That way
Almost the entire caper, the way
For people, places, things:
Abandon, abandon, yea abandon before
Being abandoned...
Mr. Rector, it seems you accomplished the abandon you sought. Thank you for leaving some windows open for the rest of us.
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