only this:
to fall
is the closest we may ever come
to flying
--Eli Coppola, from “flying”
Some Angels Wear Black: selected poems
by Eli Coppola
Edited by David West
Introduction by Michelle Tea
Manic D Press (San Francisco), 2005
list price $13.95 (free shipping when purchased directly from the publisher)
Eli Coppola held contradictory extremes together in her self the way a good poem can contain opposites linked in the tension of metaphor, antithetical ideas melded together in a single image. She was physically vulnerable, struggling with muscular dystrophy, but she was also fierce, a person of backbone & fortitude. She could be slyly funny, sweetly flirty, but also full of fiery anger and sarcastic indignation. When she died suddenly in the spring of 2000, she was only 38, and the San Francisco poetry community lost one of its most gifted lyric voices. Although she travelled widely and gave readings often during the last 15 years of her life, and her poems found permanent homes in the hearts of many who heard her, her work didn’t reach the larger audience it deserved. Now, five years after her death, editor David West and publisher Jenny Joseph have gathered a selection from the five out-of-print small press chapbooks published during her lifetime, added a sequence of unpublished poems culled from manuscripts, letters & friends, and made a gift to the world of Some Angels Wear Black on Manic D Press. Brava!
I heard Eli read “flying” at Cafe Babar in San Francisco’s Mission District one Thursday night (or perhaps it was a Sunday night at Poetry Above Paradise south of Market) in the late 1980s. I adored her poignant embodiment of life’s precarious struggle in an extended metaphor of rock-climbing, and couldn’t get her lines out of my head:
and all we can do
is defy gravity and sense and
climb the sheer face of it all
speaking what we can
even as the air thins
fitting flesh to stone
...
there’s always a moment when faith asks more
than physics has promised
a synapse you lean your whole life on...
...
if you look you’ll see
i’m strung to some other cliff
latitudinally your bride
only this:
to fall
is the closest we may ever come
to flying
The simplest of rhythms, concrete words enlarged by metaphor, plain speech (“i”m strung to some other cliff”) running right into a climax of delicious multisyllabics (“latitudinally your bride”) and on to the closure of aphorism (“to fall / is the closest we may ever come / to flying”) -- this poem has the lyric intensity you may expect from a poet in her 20s, but its simple-seeming loveliness is the work of an old soul. Many of Eli’s poems are, like this one, common-language narrative, often written in the first person & addressed to a live someone, the phrasing conversational, the attitude direct, nothing oblique or obscure, emotions carried in the living body, resonant & full of poignant fatalism, always conscious of death & difficulty, every epiphany earned & so trusted by her reader.
Some of the poems in Some Angels Wear Black were clearly written for oral performance (e.g., “The Suicide Note”), using the refrains, crescendos and repeated parallel lines that so often mark performance or slam pieces. Others (“Eyes for Eyes”) are spread out across the page in a net of words where the white spaces are as much part of the visual structure of the poem as they are notations of silence or hesitation.
