I recently had a chance to sit down and talk to Dr. Steve Kistulentz, a local writer, about his new book of poems entitled The Luckless Age.
If you skim through the titles of the poems, you may find yourself laughing. Only a child of the 1980s with a PhD in English could write a poem called, “The Rick Springfield Sonnet.”
“The persona in the song Jesse’s Girl is really just a jerk,” Kistulentz explains to me. “I mean you tell me who screws who in that situation? In the poem I ask, ‘Is Jesse really your friend?'”
Kistulentz doesn’t stop with Rick Springfield; many elements of his youth are referenced throughout these poems. Evel Knievel, Hank Williams Sr, and Frank Sinatra are among the many cultural icons who receive a shout-out. For example, he adopts the narrative voice of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island in “The Skipper Talks to His Therapist.”
By the time I’d been on the island
A year, I’d wasted maybe three months
Of it beating off to a torn magazine pages
Of an unattainable beauty, a redhead
Who was fading before my eyes, going soft
Like the bananas I ate every damn day.
But this book is not all throwback jokes about popular culture. In his first poem, “World’s Forgotten Twentieth Century Boy,” he opens, “Here is my century, as it actually was.” I’m going to pay him the highest compliment I can and describe some of his language as distinctly Joan Didion-esque. There is a sense of foreboding in the poems , a grisly fear of the overly-genial Reagan era and a distinct feeling that perhaps this is it, perhaps life can fizzle away at any moment. This is a book of poems with the fullness and scope of a novel.
Like everyone else, I wondered about the title of this collection. What is this so-called “luckless age?”
“The best answer that I can give is that it is the period of time bookended by the end of the Second World War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent anti-communist revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe,” Kistulentz says on his Web site.”I was looking for a title that could at least make the honest attempt to encompass both what the novelist and short story writer Richard Yates called the Age of Anxiety (he was referring to the post-hydrogen bomb and Sputnik escalation of the Cold War) and what I saw as the false optimism of the Reagan era. It’s a landscape populated by the forgotten and marginalized, reported from the mosh pit and the boardroom, the bedroom and the bar. Its voice emerges above the white noise of modern broadcasting to paint a portrait of America at once brutal, honest, and yet hopeful at its core.”
The book is split into three sections, but Kistulentz encourages readers to tackle the 80 pages of poems from start to finish. My personal favorite poem has changed multiple times, but I can’t stop reading “Wild Gift” and “Bargain.” I don’t want to try to explain what the poems are about because I’m still discovering new phrases throughout the collection that blow my mind. It takes a real gift to tell sardonic tales of teenage romance alongside stories of addiction and death. His voice is self-aware, connecting tales of adolescent floundering with a real grip on the rawness of loss. These poems express a complex longing for a era much deserving of such eloquent reminiscence. -Nell
Steve Kistulentz was at Lemuria Thursday, February 10, 2011.
The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz (Red Hen Press, 2011)
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