Hopelessly impaled on beauty: a review of The Ancient Book of Hip, by D.W. Lichtenberg

Like a falling anvil or a stick trap holding up a massive boulder in a Road Runner cartoon, there’s a series of truths masquerading as absurdities in D.W. Lichtenberg’s 2009 book of poetry, The Ancient Book of Hip. As one young man says to another while standing naked in the bottom of a dried up ocean in “Poem for Charles,” Don’t expect any lies. Don’t expect any honesty./ At least in the near to near far future.

Lichtenberg invokes J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield more than once in these poems, revealing or suggesting that the “phenomenon of hip” he refers to is perhaps partly understood in the same way that Caulfield’s seeming flippancy thinly disguises (and barely keeps at bay) an incipient emotional implosion fueled by contradictions everywhere in evidence in a world particularly engrossed in idealizing itself but unwilling to really observe itself. Like Caulfield, Lichtenberg hones in on hypocrisies, both personal and public, writing poems that vacillate wildly between the banal and the poignant: Do you think it,s the world,s collective apathy/ that causes sadness?  ...I wasn't up for one of those two bit lectures, I,d/ rather be eating grapes with pita  and light two/ dollar bills on fire. The result is an illustration of how irony, yes irony, can be a statement of honesty.

How can irony be honest? Isn’t it the ironical, non-committal, indeterminacy that many find infuriating about the hipsterish affect? Yes, and equally frustrating is the Holden Caulfield characteristic of so questioning the idea of answers, (since any answer is only at best, partial), that the only act he can really rely on is the act of reflexive questioning. And maybe that’s what Lichtenberg is pointing out: not the act of being deliberately contrary, but how lost one can become, So outside the something that I can’t even name it in the first place./ So outside the never ever. But whatever it is, I was just in it the other day.

The Ancient Book of Hip really does succeed in doing something eel-like and dexterous: that is, without nailing anything down, it illustrates a kind of coasting, internal space we have all found ourselves lost in, surrounded by others also seemingly at sea, where everywhere, It’s that general sadness/ That doesn’t add up correctly, and one can pretend it doesn’t exist (like a guy in one poem who falls off a bar stool and everyone averts their eyes until he leaves) or one can ask, Well then, what’s/ the point? You can’t just/ drag me out here./ Right into the pit. Rightintothepit of neverneveralways.

The way that irony attains honesty in these poems is when the writer openly includes himself in those brutal confusions: My sentiments are powerful but/ they’re only ammunition for retrospective embarrassment, and, I’m sick of this excessive insistence/ that now is the time./ The time is always./ The time is never. The time is no longer the time.

Even better, that reflexive banter, like Caulfield's, often gives way in Lichtenberg's poems to a more raw statement of trying to answer the call to be human: In Tokyo I saw/ graffiti that said/ dance dance dance! motherfucker/ so that’s what I did/ so that’s what I’ve done/ so that’s what I’m doing right now.

The Ancient Book of Hip is a crucible in which questions, comments, rallying cries, secrets, accusations, dreams, and defeats in the form of poems are allowed to react. The result is something Salinger would have been happy to read: a protestation at the heart of which is a difficult and unstable beauty.

D.W. Lichtenberg is the Managing Editor of Fourteen Hills: the SFSU Review. He currently lives and writes in San Francisco.

The Ancient Book of Hip
Winner of the 2009 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award
by D.W. Lichtenberg (89 pages/ Fourteen Hills Press, 2009)

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail(dot)com