Another newly found poem which references Louise Brooks

Last week, I came across yet another published poem which references Louise Brooks. The poem, titled "The Time Machine," is by Jon Anderson (1940–2007), a contemporary American poet and educator. Anderson's first book, Looking for Jonathan, was an inaugural selection of the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1967. His second, Death & Friends, was nominated for the National Book Award. Anderson won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1983 for career achievement; and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 1986.

"The Time Machine" was included in the author's 1982 book, The Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982, published by Ecco Press. The poem appears in the section of new work, suggesting it was one of the poet's more recent efforts. I am not sure when exactly the poem dates from, but I did find it appeared in the 1981 winter / spring issue of the literary journal Antaeus.

 

In David Wojahn's review of The Milky Way in Prairie Schooner, a literary journal, Wojahn describes Anderson as a tonal poet, and his selected poems a "satisfactory achievement." Wojahn writes that most poets under 45 years old don't have cause for such a book -- as they have not yet truely found their voice. Wojahn writes, "Most poets find their subjects early in their careers, but arrive at at their voices much later, and this is not surprising; we all know what we would like to write about, but few of us can easily delineate our attitude toward the subjects that obsess us." Anderson, Wojahn writes, is an exception.

Some of the poems in The Milky Way concern other writers, artists and composers. Wojahn writes, "Another new poems, 'The Time Machine,' is an homage to the silent-movie actress Louise Brooks, who becomes another member of the Anderson pantheon. . . . Again and again in Anderson's work we see situations in which the speaker attempts to release himself from solipsism through his homages to his saints...."

To me, Anderson's poem is somewhat oblique, though its indirectness is not so much we don't know which scene in Pandora's Box the poet is meditating on. I wish Anderson were still alive, as I would like to write to him and ask him about his work. And why, and what was he referring to, when he titled this poem  "The Time Machine."