When I finished reading The Screw City Poems by Richard Vargas, all I wanted to do was go have a beer and a long chat about life with the author at one of his favorite spots. I’ve seen the inside of the kind of places he writes about. He is convincing, even cinematic, in his depictions of them and the “angels and demons” (as he calls them in his introduction) he finds there.
If you haven’t been reading Vargas for the past twenty years, this new publication is a great place to start. It presents works from his previous five books along with a fiction excerpt. More than just a “best of,” this curation also offers the reader the view of a life over a long period of time, and a life with a unique connection to a place, Rockford, IL.
The word “screw” in the title evokes many of the meanings you can associate with the word throughout these poems. Rockford got the nickname “Screw City” because they manufactured industrial screws and fasteners. In other words, they made small items that held larger important things together, not unlike what Vargas does with his poems—the details of the stories connect to a bigger picture of this town and what it meant to him.
Ultimately this city allowed him to connect to himself and his writing. When Vargas and his Rockford-born wife arrived in the mid ‘90s from Southern California, he found it a depressed area, already part of the Rust Belt. But it became the unlikely birthplace of his poetic voice. As he says in the introduction, “No one knew me. I could reinvent myself…I could be anyone… Instead, I returned to my true self. I started to write poetry.”
Vargas’s lineage goes back to Charles Bukowski, (“Buk”) who was a friend of Gerald Locklin, Vargas’s teacher and inspiration at California State University Long Beach. These poems capture the direct, common man language and gritty subject matter for which Bukowski is famous. Vargas rarely capitalizes or uses punctuation which make the poems an accessible and engaging flow.
We meet a cast of characters but they are never reduced to just that; they are human beings who had an impact on him. These are people who inspired poems, his muses. And he is never better than any of them. We meet in “for Emily, my waitress at the Irish Rose” a woman who “floats through the room / soft as a cloud of smoke” and for whom he is a “ruined man / as [his] wallet / spreads open / quicker and wider / than the parting / of the Red Sea.”
In “waiting in line at Logli’s…Rockford, IL.” he describes the grocery store’s “check out stands manned by the brides / of blue-collar workers.” He ends with this passage:
as her Logli breasts sigh
rise and fall like soft loaves of
fresh baked sourdough
i smother myself in dreams of
tractor pulls and this
slow-so-slow pace
here in this Midwest
this holy place
this life
this Logli
We meet his hairdresser who he realizes is the only steady woman in his life. We see coworkers just laid off, a hooker who lives in his apartment building and loses her keys late at night, the women he regrets hurting, the women he mourns losing, and the wife he divorced. In ‘divorce me,” he writes “while in the corner of the room / the Christmas decorations / wait to be unpacked / little booby traps / set to explode / in our hands.”
Vargas’s narrator is a man who wants to connect, desperately wants love, but is conflicted. He battles great loneliness and some of his women save him for a time. He eventually leaves, or they leave because he doesn’t beg them not to. He becomes unreliable perhaps, or bored. Goes back to bars and going home alone until he can’t stand it anymore.
He writes in “going solo,” these lines: “I…wrap my arms around / stale air and nothing else / while the loneliness of the / times I live in cut my insides / like a dull knife.”
He shares heartbreak in “altar…for Kathy” as he describes the memories associated with different colored candles in his room. He writes, “and…this candle is the day I walked out your door / it was November then / it has been November ever since.”
Later by contrast, in “what would Buk do?” he writes in a different tone about a woman he lost:
in bed she says she’s going to leave
wishes she hadn’t come over
feels unwanted
and then later:
…watching her load
the car and slamming
the door as she gets in
…
i go back to bed
a night breeze comes
thru the open window
i hang a leg out from
under the sheet
it is cool and
feels good
Almost half of the book is from his first collection, titled McLife. Like its inspiration, these works are about fast living, hungrily consumed but often leaving emptiness later. There is urgency and unabashed lust for life. The second half brings a deepening perspective, moments of grace, and even hope. In “wedding poem for Lily and Charles,” he writes “today is for being happy / …with the hope that / …there is enough love / left in this whirling / ball of destruction / to go around / for the rest of us.”
There is a progression in his view of himself. In “survival,” these words echo his pain:
my California friends send me pictures
of their new homes in the republican hills
of Orange County
…
i want to send them pictures of my new place
poetry books stacked around an army
sleeping bag on the floor
in a room a little larger than O.J.s jail cell
…
i want to cry out
i’m so cold
so alone
…
but the miles between us
have changed the view
from here
my friends look like lemmings
little fucking lemmings
…
who never see the approaching fall
Contrast that with the wisdom and self-acceptance in “On the Outside” later in the book:
it’s a mystery to me
how I have so little
in common with my generation
…
watching them become their parents
i can’t help but think I screwed up
…
but nights when I’m up ‘til the wee
hours chasing the perfect poem
….
or when I wake up beside a beautiful woman
…
i give praise to the gods
who…pointed me in the direction
i was meant to take
This poet has lived passionately. He has had losses and struggles, and deep pleasures. One of those pleasures is his poetry and the satisfaction of capturing life on the page. As he ends his introduction, “After all is said and done, ‘it’s all about the poem.’” Lucky for us, we can share this pleasure simply by reading his well-documented journey through a free-spirited life.
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