Lehman - The evening sun: a journal in poetry

To write a journal in verse, not only for personal pleasure but for public consumption, is to turn a journalistic formthe daily dispatch from the frontinto a poetic one. Writing The Evening Sun I sometimes felt as if I were creating a poetry newspaper that my father could read on the subway ride home from the office if my father were still alive and people still depended on the afternoon paper for late scores and early market returns. I was (and still am) inspired by the idea of journalism in this double sense. On the one hand, I could keep in mind models of poetry journals on the order of A. R. Ammonss Tape for the Turn of the Year . On the other hand, I had worked in journalism for a period of years, and though I could never quite overcome the feeling that I was impersonating a journalist, something must have rubbed off, because there is an element of reportage in at least some of these poems and the emphasis is very deliberately on communication.

Like The Daily Mirror, its predecessor, The Evening Sun consists of 150 of the poems I wrote after embarking on the project of writing a poem a day. Id had so much fun with The Daily Mirror that I didnt want to give up the habit when I turned in the manuscript in January 1999. The new poems I was writing quickly persuaded me that a sequel covering the turn of the century was under way. The image of the evening sun recurred before I realized how apt a title it made, completing a night-and-day symmetry and evoking (as The Daily Mirror had done) a defunct New York newspaper, in this case the New York Sun . As a result of mergers the Sun survived in my childhood as the New York World Telegram & Sun , which was in fact my fathers afternoon paper until it died, a casualty of either a calamitous newspaper strike or the hegemony of the new media as Marshall McLuhan understood it.

I am aware of raising several other echoes with my title. A James Schuyler poem called Song in his book The Morning of the Poem begins with these evocative lines: The light lies layered in the leaves. / Trees, and trees, more trees. / A cloud boy brings the evening paper: / The Evening Sun . It sets. As I type these words Jo Stafford is singing St. Louis Blues, which protests the setting of the sun. If a melancholy note creeps into these pages its because I, too, hate to see that evening sun go down.

There is nothing random about the selection of poems. I chose these 150 because I felt they were the best poems in the best order and formed a unity greater than the sum of its parts. The chief conceit is that the twelve months of the year correspond to the twelve chapters of a book. Accordingly we move with the circular logic of the seasons from New Years Day to the day presidents are inaugurated, from St. Valentines Day to the opening day of baseball season, from Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 to an October 2000 presidential debate between two candidates here identified as Gush and Bore and from Halloween and the changing of the clocks back to New Years Eve. There is plenty of time for personal obsessions to emerge along the way, and the recurrent subjects here include the movies in general, Hitchcock in particular, the style and implications of noir, the fortunes of the New York Mets and Knicks, love, sex, jazz, art, the stock market, the twentieth century, World War II, the 1960s, my son Joe, Hamlet, Wallace Stevens, and the city of New York. Most of these poems were written in New York, some in Ithaca, New York, some in Bennington, Vermont, and some on the road in hotel rooms or friends houses in Houston, Tulsa, Savannah, Chicago, Boston, the Napa Valley, Vienna, Los Angeles, Paris, Miami, and Paterson, New Jersey.