Patrick Moran. tell a pitiful story. Midwestern Poet's House, 2011.
Reviewed by John R. Beardsley
Patrick Moran’s tell a pitiful story conjures something of a lost world: each of the poems in this, Moran’s first collection, are inspired (and preceded in the text) by symbols from the ideographic system used by American hobos in the early twentieth century. Moran translates these symbols for us, explicating the open and unimaginable path in short lyric bursts that recall both folk song and blues, that travel down the page in clipped lines, channeling the steady, rhythmic clack of train cars in motion. The story that unfurls through the collection is the story of our own meandering, the portents of our future archaic, indecipherable; crude marks scratched in chalk or coal that tell us what lies in wait, where we might find shelter, and at what cost.
In the titles of these poems, we encounter signs that tell us where the ‘owners will give to get rid of you,’ where there is a barking dog, or that ‘police here frown on hobos.’ We find neither safety nor security, however, even when the marks left by others tell us ‘a kind gentleman lives here,” rather, “no matter what he says / even if he begs” we are warned to “leave at first light[.]” When symbols read ‘keep quiet,’ Moran’s speaker warns us to “be like the dead[,]” to “keep everything inside / let it gather / like ice like crows[.]”
Indeed, even when the sign says ‘fresh water safe campsite,’ the speaker tells us “nothing good / can come of this // a man’s safety / is always one step ahead… you carry the danger / you make it possible.” On this journey there are no real stopping points; where an indefinite past portends an equally ambiguous future, our travels continue in a tragic and imaginary line. As Moran suggests in ‘hit the road,’ in the end, “there is only the body attuned / to its own diminishing.”
tell a pitiful story is a complicated book. Its poems speak in a sort of uncanny vernacular that seems particularly suited to their task: both to decode a language of signs, and to tell us where and how to go. The poems here are short, fast, and insistent, and they play against each other such that, once you’ve read the whole collection, it becomes difficult to divorce them from each other—this is one of the book’s greatest strengths.
On an individual level, Moran’s poems conflate and compress the past, future, and present as well as possibility, ultimately arriving at a sort of zero-point. In the poem ‘good road to follow,’ for instance, the speaker issues a series of rhetorical questions in eight staggered couplets to translate the sign (a rough circle struck through with a single diagonal line from left to right):
aren’t they all
haven’t they promised
can’t you see
won’t you look
couldn’t you stop
wouldn’t it matter
isn’t there time
shouldn’t you go
This syntactical arrangement coaxes the reader recursively through the question, back to a negative answer—they are not, have not, we cannot, will not—whereby a good road is any road, where reflection is subordinated to, or perhaps simply less useful than, action.
What Moran accomplishes in terms of voice in this collection is impressive. The speaker seems to come to us from a place before our notions of marked and standard time, from some dusty and desolate past where daylight and darkness are our only markers, and the spare language Moran sticks in one’s mouth like pitch and grit. We are inclined to listen and to believe, even though we know the signs may be false, a misdirect, and that the speaker, like the guide in Frost’s Directive may have “only at heart our getting lost.” When we choose to follow Moran, we must accept that, in this and any pitiful story, “there is no good / there is no ill / there is only the truth // changing from day to day.”
Patrick Moran’s poems, translations and essays have appeared in many journals including The Boston Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner and Crazyhorse. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Tell A Pitiful Story (Midwestern Poet’s House) and Dopplegangster (Main Street Rag). He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
John R. Beardsley is a doctoral student in Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program in poetry, and a contributing writer and reviewer for SEROnline. His work has appeared in 42 Opus and Miracle Monocle.