Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "When a Woman Loves a Man"

David Lehman is the author of several collections of poems, including When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins, 2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), Valentine Place (1996), Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986).

I asked him to apply the "page 69 test" to his latest collection. Here is what he reported:

The poem "SF" appears on page 69 of my book, When a Woman Loves a Man.

I secretly hold the belief that, in a universe in which the circumference is as infinite as Jorge Luis Borges's inner vision, every page of any book has intimations of the whole book, as a grain of sand contains the world. This is no exception.

There are fortuitous connections between "SF" and other poems in the volume. "SF" alliterates heavily on the two letters in the title, just as "PC" does with the two letters in its title. And "SF" names Sigmund Freud in its opening phrase -- "SF stood for Sigmund Freud" -- and one of the three biographical poems in "When a Woman Loves a Man" centers on the life of Freud.

But I would also point out that "SF" is not merely a virtuoso exercise but an attempt to name the subjects of the book and that it is not simply the product of one method (the double alliteration) but crosses that formal decision with the pattern known as "word golf," which you'll see if you examine the end words of the poem's last six lines: "face," "fate," "fare," "fade," "fame," "frame." Each differs from its predecessor by one letter. It is an alternative to rhyme that's not incompatible with rhyme, as the last two lines prove.

There may be, as one reader suggests, a coded message in the two curt sentences in lines three and four: "The system failed. / The siblings fought." But I won't ruin the reader's fun by giving it away here.

Many thanks to David for the input.

Read "SF" -- the poem mentioned above.

Read three more poems -- "When a Woman Loves a Man," "The Gift,""Who He Was" -- from When a Woman Loves a Man, and a few poems from earlier collections.

Among the praise for When a Woman Loves a Man:

"Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer. His poetry rides the currents of the zeitgeist in ways that are deeply influential. And if you let him alter you, he confers something like peace upon you, for in Lehman the darkest moments are always a beat away from laughter and the lightest things are always going dark around the edges. What strange and profound comfort that is. When a Woman Loves a Man is a truly important collection."
-- Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"In David Lehman's poem 'A History of Modern Poetry,' he writes, 'the idea was to have a voice of your own, / distinctive, sounding like nobody else's / The result was that everybody sounded alike.' This may well be true, but Lehman's 'everybody' voice still sounds uniquely his: wisecracking but resonant with the pleasures of poetry."
-- John Ashbery

David's study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

His books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library; The Big Question (1995); The Line Forms Here (1992); and Signs of the Times: