reviewed by Adam Palumbo
The latter half of the twentieth century saw television and film arise as the dominant media vehicles in American culture, and Patrick Ryan Frank’s poetry collection The Opposite of People seeks to interrogate the way these performance media are reflected in the modern consciousness. With the re-casting of typical television and film tropes (commercials, recognizable personalities, and genres-in-caricature), The Opposite of People is as enlightened and poignant to the media-saturated mind as it is relevant to the digital age.
Beginning with the poem “Silent Film,” the book is divided into three sections, reflecting the television time slots—“Day Time,” “Prime Time,” and “Late Night”—a construct that does well to gird the conceit of the entire book. Frank enlivens characters, actors, and genres from throughout the world of film and television, including Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, the Marlboro Man, and Frank Sinatra, to explore the ideals and sins of the past.
Frank also constructs stories-within-stories, like in the poem “Action/Adventure,” which is actually about an insurance adjuster’s fantasies upon seeing his office building blown up by a villain, his henchmen, and “one unkillable cop.” In “Midnight Cowboy,” the poet re-imagines a scene from the eponymous 1969 movie:
The two men sitting in the coppered dark
of the skin-flick theater know their knees will touch.
And then? An empty wallet at your hip
will only buy a lonely night. And this
is the awkward, desperate truth of sex and cash:
without some, you can’t get some; without any,
you die. . . .
This framing device of film and television means that the book is not as autobiographical as many typical contemporary lyric collections, but there are brief admittances of a personal past or a real self lurking backstage. Frank uses himself as the subject of several poems to study stereotypical roles that might be found in various plots: “Patrick Ryan Frank as the Detective,” “Patrick Ryan Frank as the Other Woman,” or “Patrick Ryan Frank as the Russian.” The reader can’t help but think the obsession with television and the movies must have come from somewhere—as the author bio at the end of the book states, the poet “grew up in front of a television set in rural Michigan.”
Besides the characters he revives and the plots he constructs, Frank’s poetry is marvelous with a turn of phrase and it is, in fact, technically rigorous. Like in the poem “This Must Be The Place,” where he says, “It eats at you, the fact that you’ve been fooled / into believing what you have is real / quietly asking the movies how to feel.” Frank’s poetry makes use of a wide range of half-rhyme and slant rhyme, consonance, and delightful wordplay. His line breaks are crisp and controlled, but he employs enjambments and caesurae with as equal power as end-stopped lines. In “Miss Cleo Can Help,” the poet says,
Bad times. A birthmarked man. A broke-down car.
I see it all: the cards laid out, the stars
laid out in lines. I’ll tell you what they mean
while the TV frame gets smaller and my face,
resigned like someone’s mother, fills the screen
as if you, with every word that I say,
were coming closer. What do you want to hear?
The money’s coming, the baby’s daddy’s gone.
You’ll be alright if you just get over that fear
. . . .
In this poem, Frank reimagines the infamous psychic interacting with a caller on her pay-per-call psychic service program, popular in the late 1990s. While several of the poem’s lines are end rhymed (“mean”/”screen” and “hear”/”fear”), Frank also employs internal rhymes and consonance (as with “lines”/”resigned,” “cars”/”cards,” and “coming closer”). There are also several poems that could fall into the broad categorization of “fourteeners,” with just as many lines but none of the rhyme scheme of the sonnet. These technical constructions do exactly what they should: provide the language of the poetry a structure from which to reach out to the reader.
Netflix, HBO, and the specter of Hollywood as presented in The Opposite of People make for a very pressing examination of American culture and life. By way of screens silver and golden, Patrick Ryan Frank makes his readers confront the way in which these cultural touchstones have been threaded into their lives. In these powerful and precious poems, the accumulated influence of performance media are put on show until the curtain closes once more.