Of all the styles of poetry, perhaps the most difficult one to write is “plain style,” the kind of poems we find in William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, or going back a few hundred years, Ben Jonson. A poet who writes intricate, baroque, or surreal lines may dazzle us, even when what is said is either ambiguous or downright incomprehensible. The plain-style poet disdains language that draws attention to itself and speaks not only in words we understand but speaks to experiences that are not so different from our own. This plain-style poet performs up on the high wire without the net of beautiful rhythms and inventive forms. If the poem moves us, it is because we have been taken inside someone else’s emotions and thoughts. If there is a narrative, we recognize it. If the poem fails, there are no excuses; if it succeeds, our own worlds have been expanded.
Tony Gloeggler is one of our best contemporary poets, and his work has been dedicated to this plain style of poetry. To some extent, this is unavoidable for him. He writes out of a personality that despises pretense of all sorts. His poems push away sentimentality and embrace the grittiness and pain of people who have been injured, whether physically, mentally, or in spirit, and the pain of the people who care for them and even love them, not in spite of their injuries or, God forbid, because of them. The people who inhabit Gloeggler’s poetry, including the poet himself, have a gift, the ability to see others in their entirety and appreciate them for who they are.
For this reason, the poems in Here on Earth ring true. The world he describes, the group home where he worked for forty years and eventually managed, the residents whose outbursts he handled or wasn’t able to handle, the friends who go out to concerts with him, the girlfriend who got married and moved to Austin, his family, his mother who’s dying and terrified of dying, and especially Jesse, the autistic man he regards as a stepson—that world is as real as a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway or the mondongo and a quarter chicken he orders for lunch “from the Dominican place.” The poet who tells us about this life is real too. Gloeggler does not portray himself as a hero and knows that in some ways we’re always failing, always being presented with needs that are greater than our ability to satisfy them. This is the tragic element that underlies the narratives of Here on Earth.
While this kind of everyday tragedy can be found throughout Gloeggler’s work, Here on Earth contains one of its finest examples, the poem “Overwhelming.” Like almost all of the poems in this book, it begins in the quietest, least assuming of ways. He writes, “I’m getting to know our recently- / hired, part-time, two-half-days- / a-week nurse over morning coffee.” This is deliberately the diction of management and administration, about as anti-poetic as any three lines could get. I doubt that there is another poet writing today who would know where to go with a poem after that opening. Gloeggler, however, does. He knows to keep himself out of it as much as possible and immediately lets the nurse’s story become the subject of the poem:
She’s thinking about trying to find
a group home for her son. I offer her
half my bacon, egg n cheese bagel.
Levi’s 13 years old, severely autistic.
He’s growing bigger, stronger, out
of control, biting, hitting, constantly
masturbating with an active seizure
condition. With her divorce, part-time
job, a younger daughter and the 24 hour,
7 days a week worrying about her son,
it’s starting to get overwhelming.
I smirk, sigh I can’t imagine why.
The poem continues with a discussion about finding a placement for her son, how few alternatives there are, and Gloeggler gives her pointers about what to look for before getting back to work. The second-half of the poem is the poet imagining what their conversation will be like over lunch and then what he knows she’ll encounter when she gives up her child “to a bunch of strangers.” The poem is not about passing judgment, and no good options will magically appear. She can’t take care of her son, and she has an obligation to keep the rest of her family and herself safe. Gloeggler pictures, though, what she will feel when she finally drops off her son, who has “probably / never spent a day without her,” “smothering / him with sloppy kisses and leaving him / behind as panic pops into, fills his eyes.” Poets are usually tempted to stop with that type of leave-taking, but this poem follows her back home, through dinner, through answering her daughter’s questions, frantic multiple phone calls to the residence, and a promise to visit on the weekend, “bring him his favorite snacks / a word search book.” “Overwhelming” ends in a moment of guilt and honesty.
She promises to come back
every weekend, tries not to cry when she hugs
him goodbye, but maybe never tells anyone
about the slivers of relief she sometimes feels
peeking from beneath her deep, haunted grief.
If asked, Gloeggler would probably deny any intention to go beyond telling and preserving those stories about himself and the people he knows. He doesn’t intend to persuade us to a particular political viewpoint or even to be more moral or just. In “Kind of Poet,” Gloeggler declares what kind of poet he wants to be and disavows identifying with any group or poetic tradition:
I hate footnotes, never remember
how many circles of hell
add up to Dante’s inferno,
who killed Othello or where
Ulysses landed. My references
bring back Mickey Mantle
hitting a home run, putting
his head down and trotting
around the bases with a slight
limp, Wes Unseld throwing
an outlet pass, Earl the Pearl
peeking over his shoulder, backing
in, twirling to the hoop, a boy, a girl,
twelve years old, sitting on a stoop,
summer of 1966, Good Lovin’
bursting out of a transistor radio.
While Gloeggler doesn’t want to join any clubs and won’t allow anyone a shortcut to figuring him out, I have to push back just a little here and point out that the anti-literary poet is very much a tradition in American poetry, one we can trace from Whitman through William Carlos Williams and then through Frank O’Hara and Charles Bukowski. Tony Gloeggler happens to be one of its outstanding exponents. His language, for all its plainspokenness, is intensely vivid, and his poems are as real as poems get, such as when in “Show Don’t Tell” he describes how at the group home he
did the Heimlich
twice and chunks of meat shot
across the table. Once I did mouth
to mouth when Jimmy died
and I can still taste his breath
if I think about it for too long.
As much as Gloeggler positions himself as anti-literary and as much as he resists tradition, the themes of the poems in Here on Earth are time honored. They are centered in loss, how enormous it is, and how impossible for us to comprehend. “Cover Me Over” describes going to a Steve Earle concert after Covid, after his friend Ted took his own life, and soon after the death of Earle’s son, Justin. Earle performs his son’s song “Harlem River Blues,” and the poet wonders, with sorrow and admiration, how Earle could manage to sing “a song written / by the son he recently buried.”
Because other people’s needs are so much larger than our own limited ability to respond to them, we exist in a space created by what Harold Bloom called “biblical irony.” Next to the whirlwind and Leviathan, Job is almost ridiculously small, but what Gloeggler recognizes is that this incommensurate irony can also be a source of unexpected meaning. In “Autistic Feast,” he acknowledges the distance between himself and Jesse:
I try to follow his sight line, but never see
what he sees. He leaves my questions
unanswered whenever I interrupt
the delight fizzing in his eyes, ask him
what he’s looking at. I imagine some
mystical autistic power that understands
how everything fits together and moves
as one that’s beyond my vision, my grasp.
This scene takes place in a restaurant where “[t]he waitress recognizes Jesse, smiles / while he recites his ritualistic order.” While neither Gloeggler nor the waitress may understand Jesse and what he sees, they both take part in enacting the ritual and take pleasure in it.
Still, Gloeggler doesn’t delude himself. In “Maintaining World Order,” he writes about Jesse, “If my name stopped appearing on his calendar, I wonder / how long before he’d forget / about me?” “A Place in the World,” explores Jesse’s almost unbridgeable distance and his own attachment even more fully. He tells us:
I am one of those people, the only unpaid
person appearing on his schedule, mom’s
long-time-ago, live-in-ex-boyfriend.
I grew attached and won’t, can’t
let go of Jesse. I know he’s autistic, know
what to expect, except he surprises, fascinates
me regularly and I routinely accept that yes
he comes first, second and all of the time.
Here, in a rare moment, Jesse does surprise him. When a caregiver shows up early to take Jesse to a swimming pool and this conflicts with Jesse and his mother taking Tony to the airport, Jesse asks the caregiver to “wait here please.” Gloeggler tells us, “I felt worth / a little more than I ever thought I was.”
This is also the way readers should come away from a book of poems. It is certainly the way we come away from Here on Earth. We have been privileged to enter Tony Gloeggler’s life, to meet the women he’s loved, his parents, Ted lost to suicide, Jesse, and the disabled men Gloeggler took care of for the better part of a lifetime. Here on Earth makes our own lives feel like they’re worth a little more.
