These Be The Steps

These Be The Steps
The Notebooks of Cal Chilo
In His Fourth Month of Sobriety
Norton, 120 pp., $120

A new book containing unpublished work by one of our finest living poets is a literary event. A new book containing unpublished work by Cal Chilo is something else altogether. But what, exactly?

It might be easier to start by noting what it is not: it is not, or not merely, a collection of new poems by the undeterrable author of Shit-Faced, All I Ever Want To Do (Is Drink), Two For The Road, and the thematically-related, Make That Three. However, Chilo fans shouldn’t struggle with their straitjackets and head for solid walls just yet, because the book does contain a fair amount of new poetry, albeit heavily disguised, in Chilo’s trademark style, as “fragments,” “unresolved vocabulary,” and “words that possibly rhyme.”

But These Be The Steps is bigger than poetry. Indeed, Chilo seems to have set himself a task usually reserved to literary executors with their hands on the udders of that most bovine of cash cows, the dead poet, by publishing every word, down to the last signed receipt, that has been formed by his pen. The result is a remarkable and seemingly random assemblage of verse, non-verse, prose, non-prose, thought and absent-minded doodling culled from what Chilo refers to as “spiral binders.” The witty epigraph sets the tone:

I open the bucket
And shake out the leaves
And then I think, ‘Fuck it!
This might be funny
And I need the money
What rhyme can I find for 'leaves'?

Chilo has been hailed as a universal poet, of sorts, in that his standing among the university elite perfectly reflects his standing in the insatiable mass market for poetry. While an Eliot or Stevens might shiver with distaste at the idea of a poetry deliberately conceived to be intelligible to the masses, and a Frost would evolve a style that would appeal to both the average poetry reader and, through secret equivocations, to the more discerning critic, only Chilo has so effortlessly pulled off the trick of challenging (mentally) both: “Ideally,” he noted in a recent Paris Review interview, “it will leave the former feeling they could use a drink, and transform the latter into chronic alcoholics.”

Chilo is first and foremost a student of our major poets, or, as his critics would have it, “nothing but a plagiarist.” He’s certainly not above frequent borrowing - there’s Stevens (“I placed a jar upon the bar”); Frost (“I took the bar less patronized”); and even Pound (“Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace./ You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to the pub").

But it is evident even here that the obsession is all his own. Liz Rosenberg likens a poem to a baby, because both are “self-absorbed and containing … the universal breath, and needing constant tiny cares and adjustments.” Not surprisingly, Chilo compares it to cheap beer: “Both, at the very least, addle the brain, and, at their best, make you want to throw up.”

There’s plenty on offer here for those Chilo fans, lighters aloft, anxious for a familiar encore. In scattered jottings on drinking, alcohol, and alcoholism - to name just a few of the many topics covered - Chilo drafts poems (“Dear Santa, Bring another drunk for me”), theorizes about poetics (“The poem must have a good point as a [sic] anecdote or joke about drink”); and lists topics for later writings (“the perfect pint of Guinness” and “ale?”). Occasionally, there is a ferocious lament in which his characteristic fixation is mixed with delusions of grandeur – “Beethoven couldn’t hear,” he writes at one point, “and I can’t drink.” More typical is the regretful and regrettable Pub Going:

A drink-drinking house on drink-drinking earth it is
In whose stale air all our desired drinks meet
Are re-ordered, and poured as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone (just not me!) will be surprising
A hunger in himself for much more drink-drinking,
And staggeringly heading to this ground,
Which, he once knew, was proper to grow drunk in,
If only that so many drunks lie round.

The revelation of the Notebooks, however, is that Chilo may be about to break new ground: much diminished is the trademark “desire to drink,” and gone entirely are the famous synonyms for drunkenness (“Paradise,” “Bliss,” and “The Bollocks”) as is the self-pitying brooding on the first step (“Powerless, powerless, the word is powerless/ Sometimes I wish I was drunk still and showerless”). Instead the focus is on “the quality of my sobriety (sucks)” and “How come/ As I change my thinking/ The world and its mum/ Have taken to drinking?”

Through dozens of pages we see Chilo struggle with a recurrent theme: the insanity of the second step. At first he “goes” rather than “comes” to believe that a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity and has to go back to the beginning. Then, once he has mastered the first verb, he becomes despairingly confused about the goal and is restored to vanity before realizing his error. As painful for the reader, perhaps, as for Chilo, he compounds his misery by next being restored to profanity, which he seems to enjoy enormously before it becomes painfully obvious that he has again reached a dead end. The reader will not know whether to laugh or cry as Chilo then attempts to restore his Higher Power to sanity.

The trademark “plagiarism” is here (“I saw the best livers of my generation destroyed …” begins one poem), nowhere more apparent than in the straightforward theft from Larkin with Annus Recoverus:

The second second step began
In twenty-ten A.D.
(It all seemed nuts to me) –
Between the end of the alcohol ban
And the gallons of iced tea.

Larkin is also hidden in plain sight (or plainly not hidden) in the poem that lends its title to the volume:

They fuck you up, steps two and three.
They are not meant to, but they do.

Here, the Notebooks give the reader a clearer indication than mere finished verse of the poet’s struggle: These Be The Steps begins life as Whose Idea Was This? and goes through numerous rewrites – notably as This Is The End and This Be The Pits – in which Chilo painfully considers the relationship between the God of his understanding and the self (which he elsewhere terms “the basket case”).

Chilo fans will delight in his experiments with some of poetry’s more esoteric forms, including the villanelle, sestina, rondeau redoublé, and the limerick:

After the alcohol tasked us,
A number of anonyms asked us
About certain powers
So much higher than ours -
There were some who suggested “Damascus!”

Chilo chooses to end the book on (or runs out of ink at) an optimistic and possibly delusional note:

I’ll be soberly full of surprises.
My steps’ll be all different sizes:
Some incredibly small,
Almost no steps at all,
And others so huge they’ll win prizes.

Few poets are as capable as Cal Chilo in testing Somerset Maugham’s belief that “the mere habit of notebook keeping might make the writer more observant.” Better suited to flipping around in rather than straight reading, perhaps, this is an essential book for the seriously demented poetry lover, who will find it a trove of Chilo’s famously earthy and yet deceptively non-existent wisdom.