A POET’S SURVIVAL GUIDE
Bars, concerts, readings and other places we meet
The poems in Scott Silsbe’s latest book, “Meet Me Where We Survive,” run on the engine of rituals writers have followed for decades — public readings, storytelling, letter-writing. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank O’Hara and others before him, Silsbe writes about the very literary community in which he thrives.
The local poet brings the reader into raucous times at bars. In “One Night at Mariana’s Pleasure Bar with Bart Solarczyk,” Silsbe recounts a time when a friend “snuck a nitrous tank / into Hemingway’s bar / for the reading in the back room.” Throughout the book, as Silsbe and other Pittsburgh poets gather, they share stories and exchange ideas. These stories become local legend and fodder for conversation.
Early in “Meet Me Where We Survive,” Silsbe’s writer-friend recites a poem about Waffle House in the parking lot of a Waffle House. In “One Night at the Eclipse (Why Are You So Angry?),” Silsbe relishes the dialogue of strangers who walk in and out of his life: “Another girl floated down the staircase and over / to our table… / …she slurred, ‘What even are you / doing down here?’ Who are you guys anyway?’”
Silsbe plays in a band, and his love of music runs — like his love of words — through the veins of these poems. In “To Be Simple Again,” he writes, “And then I didn’t want more than [Jason] Molina’s voice / on my basement stereo, singing how this whole life has / been about trying to be simple again.” At the end of this same poem — a poem about the grief of losing one’s idol – Silsbe ends up putting his fingers to a guitar “to learn [Molina’s] song, / knowing [he] could never sing it like [Molina], but not caring.”
The poet’s previous book, “Muskrat Friday Dinner,” also exalted literary life. Unlike this previous collection, Silsbe wrote “Meet Me Where We Survive” during a global pandemic. It is not just that going to bars with friends, reading and reciting famous poems; now these same rituals are necessary for survival.
Silsbe presses the importance of poetry, music and community to maintain sanity in a difficult world. “Just As Long As I’m In This World” starts with him trying to unknot a sense of existential dread he describes as “regret / mixed with a touch of fear for the unknown future.”
The poem’s title and last line (“I am the light of this world”) are references to a blues song written by Rev. Gary Davis. By the last two lines, he realizes instead of feeling down, he could just “listen to more blues records.”
In another poem, Silsbe writes, “I put on John Coltrane records until I’ve run through / all my John Coltrane records. / … It seems to tame the beast / a little.” The beast he is referring to is, again, the anxiety
many readers will identify as they turn on the news and face the uncertainty of rising gas prices, stalled supply chains and new variants of COVID-19.
Silsbe’s poems are never maudlin, though they acknowledge this difficult moment humans face. His sense of humor and honesty buoy the poems above the gravity of their sometimesheavy subject matter. The title poem of “Meet Me Where We Survive” is a great example. Though the poem references climate change, it also includes the surreal imagery of two polar bears in a restroom.
He continues to write letters, to tell stories, to create music — the contents of his life. Readers will appreciate that, in this latest volume, the poet does not ignore the bigger societal problems knocking on all our doors. He offers no easy answers, except to find the inner will to keep moving. As he writes in “The Nature of Things,” “From here on out, I guess that I’ll just dream dreams.”