I Am Your Lifeguard
Poems by Charlie Smith
W.W. Norton
How do you reflect on a life’s work? How do you sum up all the triumphs and accolades, all the frustrations and rejections and pack them into one slim volume? If you’re Charlie Smith, Guggenheim Fellow and author of nine previous poetry collections, you do it with humor. You don’t take yourself too seriously.
Smith’s breezy collection starts with 67 pages of new poems that consider the odd position of the poet, who can be an apex star in their field and yet remain an unknown to the public at large. Throughout this section of the book—and much of the remainder—Smith maintains an endearing attitude of shy self-acceptance. It’s a feeling that’s familiar to anyone who dreamed big, swung for the fences, and ended up hitting a double. (Not bad, but no one’s going to carve a statue of you anytime soon.)
The new and collected poems are united by a love for life’s losers. Whether it’s due to money problems, romance problems, or both, Smith’s poems are populated with screw-ups you root for. He uses wry humor to explain their predicaments. Take this section from “Story of the Hero:”
Story of the hero who made his money by
knocking himself out. A fine novelist
told himself that one. You start off welcome everywhere
and it narrows down. Sometimes you wind up in a small room in Chicago
unraveling hiss of string. Calling
to empty buildings and running after the donut truck.
Reading this poem, I thought of Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” an American standard about picking yourself up once life knocks you down. It fits Smith’s world: a turbulent mess of missed chances and miscommunications that still manages to be warm, with an air of bemusement about life’s vagaries.
I’m always hard on title poems. If you name your book after a poem, it better be a good one. Fortunately, Smith delivers: “I Am Your Lifeguard” is my favorite in the entire collection. It starts:
I am your lifeguard, remote
and mindful, a wind that throws itself from tree to tree
who catches the constellations facing the other way
before they trip
in this present they call the future
this mixed, pollinated sea they call a prison
I consider all the apple trees that died during my lifetime.
This is poet as observer, fighting for beauty in this “pollinated sea they call a prison.” The speaker considers an apple tree, which poets have waxed poetically over for thousands of years, but which has taken on new meaning in this era of eco-collapse. A vague sense of doom reigns over the poem, yet there is comfort in knowing the poet-speaker will do his damnedest to guide you through it. He is, after all, your lifeguard.
After 67 pages of new poems, the book switches to excerpts from Smith’s previously published collections. They’re not represented equally: Only two poems from Red Roads (1987) made the cut, while most poems from Word Comix (2009) were included. In part, this may be because this isn’t the first time Smith has combined new and collected poems into a single volume. His 2014 book Jump Soul was similarly organized.
Like any collection, I Am Your Lifeguard has its ups and downs. I suspect the excerpts from his 2020 collection, Demo, are shoved at the end of the book because they’re some of Smith’s weaker works. The Demo poems lean toward abstraction, with purposefully stilted meters. Some venture into Language poetry territory. I like Language poetry, but this approach doesn’t give Smith much ability to flex his strengths, which are narrative and lyricism. You can see how the language in Counting on My Fingers differs from the other poems I’ve excerpted so far:
snow day for the soul she says
and pulls out her list of plants that thrive in winter
hemlock pines first
shimmying in sunlight evergreen
live oaks ilex
laurel and camellias boxwood holly
the stiff drapes
of mahonia represented
The verse here is quite stiff and human relations are minimized, unlike in most of Smith’s poems. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that approach, but Smith is playing against what makes his best poems shine.
Occasional bumps in the road aside, I found I Am Your Lifeguard an enjoyable volume, populated with memorable characters. This would be an excellent book to read during any sort of life transition, or when you find yourself waxing a little too nostalgic about the past.
