"This Wild Joy': Bill Van Buskirk's poetry

Some poets wrestle with the world and some poets wrestle with themselves. And occasionally you find a poet for whom the world is what one is able to make of oneself. Bill Van Buskirk, who lives in Allentown and teaches business management at LaSalle, falls in this third class.

Buskirk's poetry is a series of sustained collisions with reality in which he finds both his own shape and the world's hard contour. You can rarely tell how this poet, entering his poem, will come out of it; and the same risk— and opportunity— applies for the reader who's willing to put some of his own skin in the game.

In Man Made Out of Words, one of the poems in Van Buskirk's collection, This Wild Joy That Thrills Outside the Law, he imagines the Adam who might be himself:

He is tugged from everywhere
by gravities in common things,
puzzles over what to call
densities thickening in his flesh,
rides the gift-horse like a madman
all over the place, chases
trajectories of weather
from nowhere to nowhere . . .
I could go on forever,
he thinks. If I am made of words,
then words can save me.

The Adamic element in the poem's subject is the man who is both "made of words" and the maker of them, tasked like the first man with naming things and thus conferring final reality on them.

Naked and imperial

This is not, however, the Adam of Eden but the exiled wanderer, "tugged from everywhere," cast about by "trajectories of weather," and unable to find the word for the changes in his own flesh— the first intimations of his new condition as a mortal being. He's left only with the faculty of naming that remains the poet's task, and which offers the ambiguous gift of enabling him to "go on forever."

It is as Adam, Van Buskirk suggests, that each of us goes forth. But Adam, you will recall, was driven naked with Eve from the Garden, with only the leaves to cover the shame of their loins.

We too then must symbolically divest ourselves of covering, as in The Guardian Angel of Manayunk, where the poet discovers "how to wait till every place fell dark,/ to shuck off my clothes and stride/ imperial, naked and unseen." This is the condition in which poetry must be written, when (as Van Buskirk describes it in Poetry in the Nude) the word appears "like flame/ bending down/ to touch its toes,/ exploding skyward / with a snap."

The body as road map

A quite different experience awaits the poet, however, in Nude Beach, when he finds himself confronted by the reality of bodies buffeted by mortality, and finds himself momentarily speechless:

I knew no language
as physical as they were— nothing but body
and the beating that it takes— each a map
of suffering and innocence.

By the poem's end, though, the poet recovers his voice, and, in the shared humility of the flesh, something of himself as well, slipping away from "the hard island/ I'd been starving on" and "tasting" himself in "sea, sweat, tears, salt."

Van Buskirk's Adam is, in short, committed to the world; there is no longer an Eden behind or a heaven ahead, but only the experience of the here and now. In this world, "everything that's fragile is important" (as Van Buskirk puts it in Gratitude), but, at the same time, there is exaltation and ecstasy too: "This wild joy that thrills outside the law."

Stealing apples

This phrase is both the title and key to the book, for only in transgression, Van Buskirk suggests, does man find his freedom. The poem in which the title line appears— Lineage— invokes Van Buskirk's great-grandfather, falling back in his last memory on the boyhood pleasure of stealing apples— the sin not only of Adam, but of St. Augustine, the great poet of concupiscence.

Family, indeed, is central to the consciousness of these poems, many of which suggest Van Buskirk's difficult and unresolved relationship with his father. If the God of the Hebrew Testament is Adam's creator, then the poet's father stands in similar relation to him: "Like a god you fashioned me,/ a homunculus holding his breath/ inside a block of marble" waiting to be set free (from Gentleman's Agreement).

But as with God the father, the mortal father can only confer the possibility of freedom, and each son must win it for himself by whatever rebellion will define him.

Fathers and sons

Having a father— a history that precedes one and from whose shadow one never wholly escapes— is only the beginning, however, for life itself is the great antagonist. Van Buskirk reaches back again to Biblical imagery to describe this in Some Advice for Wrestling With an Angel:

Some days he is an angel or a Roman athlete—
tight curls, great torso, suffused with blinding light.
bodiless and swift he wins every battle—so beautiful
you can't tell if he's the stolen treasure or the thief.
Other days he's not much more
than a snarl in the dark, a ravenous
nothing that breaks your bones
and crushes them to powder.

The "angel" is, evidently, the shape-shifting demon within, who like Lucifer is sometimes garbed with great light, and at others is simply one's own darkest impulse— in short, the self in all its terror, glory and possibility. These, finally, are for Van Buskirk the terms on which we must live, "a place to breathe/ even as the body/ slows and cools—/ spirit going up in smoke/ flesh collapsing into ash" (from My Father and Jesus).

The hard pains and joys of living are penetratingly realized in Van Buskirk's poems. His book is indeed an angel to wrestle with.