Carl Little – Richard Brown Lethem’s Poems and Fragments

In 2020, painter Richard Brown Lethem moved from Bath, Maine, to Claremont, California, to be near his son, writer Jonathan Lethem. “Reaching ninety, it feels like time to kind of wrap things up in a sense, and take care of odds and ends,” Lethem Sr. told a reporter for the Claremont Courier in May 2023, “so, all of those poems and fragments, it was time to give them their life.”

Lethem was referring to his new collection Roots, Stones, and Baggage (Bamboo Dart Press, 2023). These fifty-plus “poems and fragments” dating from the 1950s to 2023 feature the same fearless and thoughtful vision found in the author’s paintings. They encompass place and people, life and living, nature and justice.

In “House Carpenter in April: Letter to Faye Marie Gifford,” Lethem writes tenderly to his mother about renovating a house in a “great month / Always full of thoughts . . . of you.” Here’s the third stanza from the 1975 poem (Faye Marie Gifford Lethem died in 1971):

Yesterday behind the paneling to be rebuilt

I found three pennies, a broken toy pistol, a domino

With three dots . . . there are always rewards working

Where a child has lived.

Another poem, “For Blake,” celebrates the birth of one of Lethem’s sons on 16 August 1967. The arrival is dramatic: “You burst forth / shouting irreverent slogans / sending forceps flying. // Amazing us with the power / poetry and protest / of your lungs.” Blake Lethem would grow up to become a well-known graffiti artist. (I suspect he got his name from one of his father’s favorite artists.)

In “Wait” (2008) the poet yearns for a missing lover. “Kisses darting from your smiling eyes,” Lethem writes, “Span a lifetime to fuel within / The stove of memory, sparks dormant / In the body over years.”

Lethem evokes a sensuous episode of cooking in “Poem: Call It Breakfast” (1985):

I boiled the beets

As we stoked the fire.

With your hunger

And my red stained fingers

Touching like desire still warm

We peeled the earthy skin

From purple flesh

And we ate.

As a painter, Lethem has explored social and political realms, most notably, perhaps, in his Afflictions series. His writing, too, touches on these subjects. “To the Healing Light (for James Baldwin)” (2020) ends with these compelling lines: “Expose the wound. Unseal the tombs,/To count the brothers lost.” Other poems, like “Raising Racist” (2021) and “The Burning of Raymond Gunn” (1980s) address the burden and injustice of racism.

Lethem also turns his eye to nature. He wonders at the “excess bursts of glory” in “Floss Tree Blossoms” (2020); a pair of acrobatic squirrels in “Joy” (2021); and a monarch butterfly landed on impatience in “Breathing Wings” (2010). He devotes lyric lines to the “swell yellow” of eagerly awaited daffodils and a rufous-sided towhee, “a nail given by god/On which to hang my hopes.”

The title of the book comes at the end of the opening poem “In Nebraska” (1970s), an evocation of that midwestern state. Contemplating an arid landscape, the poet asks, “Have you searched under the orange skin/with your witching stick/and a centipede for luck.” If you take your dowsing rod, you might find “Underground like a good cry/a flood complete with roots, / stones and baggage.”

The book is illustrated with a dozen or so of Lethem’s paintings. In a few cases, like “Kansas City Star: A Light Trip” and “Street Glove,” poems and paintings play off each other in a resonant way.

The poet/artist’s son Jonathan Lethem has contributed an affectionate foreword to the collection (the piece also appears in his new book of art-related writings, Celluloid Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture). In addition to memories of growing up with his painter-father, he expresses wonder at the “dailiness of his practice, habituation, addiction” as witnessed in his garage studio in Claremont.

The author himself offers this introductory note: “In the ‘60s Rollo May admonished us to ‘live in all the rooms of our house.’ These poems reflect my attempts to do just that.” Thanks, Brown, for sharing some of your rooms.