A review of Timothy Liu’s Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues
Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues, Timothy Liu. Barrow Street Press, 2023. 88 pages. $18.00
by Charles Kell
“Snatch it back and hold it”: the Blues, the Body, and Time in Timothy Liu’s Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues
I’ve been thinking about and listening to a great deal of jazz and blues of late. I think often about how quintessentially American both forms are, how they reflect, reveal, and engage with life on multiple levels. I’m also thinking about Amiri Baraka’s (then writing as Leroi Jones) liner notes to John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland (1964), and his famous, oft-quoted statement: “One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.” I’ve also been revisiting and thinking a great deal about Junior Wells’s groundbreaking album, Hoodoo Man Blues (1965), the raw, smoky ambiance; the visceral immediacy of Wells’s vocals, his harmonica, intertwined with Buddy Guy’s lightning guitar. The blues captures the pain, heartache, the mix of longing—physical, emotional, philosophical; its attention is on the corporal, yet its wending patterns and eternal subject matters work its way into our collective intellectual and psychological subconscious. The blues balances despair and hope; it can be equally mournful and celebratory. It is within these frames that Timothy Liu’s stunning, latest poetry collection, Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Press, 2023), lives.
It’s long known that Liu is a poet of the body, the sensually ecstatic and chaotic. In the same vein, Liu’s oeuvre has intricately engaged in a dazzling ekphrasis, closely interweaving a variety of disparate artists across time and space. An essential poem that engages with the blues is “Blind Willie,” from Let it Ride (Saturnalia, 2019) .
Blind Willie
For a beating that he gave
his woman for cheating
on him, she in turn threw
lye into his son’s face
who’d just begun playing
a cigar-box guitar at the age
of seven—a tin cup strung
around his neck as he
learned to master regular
chords and open D for slide—
his future as a preacher
preserved in a gruff voice
shaking with fierce vibrato
pressed into a stack of
78s—a race-records
artist on the Columbia label
whose second release
was “Dark Was the Night”
and “It’s Nobody’s Fault
But Mine.” Forget the father:
it’s all about abysmal shouts
and groans that only a son
could make—an unidentified
female singer joining him
at a session in New Orleans—
his house later gutted by fire
as he slept in the charred
dampness of old newspapers,
never again to sing “Jesus
Make Up My Dying Bed”—
Chuck Berry, Beethoven
and Willie aboard the Voyager
sailing through outer space.
With taut tercets and close attention to syllabics, “Blind Willie” brings together the pathos of the blues legend’s origin, his singular style, his “knife” songs—the “abysmal shouts / and groans”—his life and struggles, before his music is launched into space, alongside Chuck Berry and Beethoven.
In Down Low and Lowdown the blues manifests in multiple ways: as lament, as prelude to creativity, taking stock of one’s surroundings, as mourning, as ennui and weariness with life and time. In the opening poem, slyly titled “American Poetry,” a sense of isolation mixes with contemplation. Here is the poem in full:
American Poetry
No voices for miles around.
A glint caught my eye nonetheless.
A pair of child’s sandals.
Left at the foot of an abandoned well.
A rope thrown down.
Any tug at all comes as a surprise.
There is an insouciant gravity to the opening that also works as a precursor to the book. The speaker is seemingly alone, wandering, stumbling upon “an abandoned well.” I’m curious as to who this speaker is. One thinks of the isolation, the solitary endeavors in creating, in the practice of art and poetry in the so-called “contemporary poetry scene” alongside the cacophony of voices, social media, “po-biz,” and the careful cultivation of one’s image, that begs the question: if the contemporary poet doesn’t “play the game,” does he/she/they exist? The “glint” that catches the wanderer’s eye is striking: this small flash, this ephemeral light, these “child’s sandals” conjure a further absence, loss and also a reaching out—“A rope thrown down.” The final line: “Any tug at all comes as a surprise” also works on many levels. One thinks of the contemporary poetry moment (again), the positioning of voices, of saying something and having something to say. The “surprise” might be any response. However, in the actual world of the poem, a person is holding one end of the rope at the mouth of the well, wondering if a living child is down low, and might “tug” back. The tug back, though, is unexpected. While the nod at the outside poetry world is my purely subjective grasp, I also firmly believe that these poems and this poet is concerned only with the making, the practice of the craft of poetry. The compression of this opening lyric situates this fascinating book in a powerful, strange relationship with time. It is both wholly of the present, specifically regarding COVID, while also subsuming and interacting with the history of poetry, as illustrated in the many elegies, odes, haiku and intertextual engagements and allusions throughout.
Liu’s style, encapsulated in Down Low and Lowdown, is rare and significant in contemporary poetry. Liu’s varied range in form and practice and his ability to weave several themes attests to his singular voice. I think and proclaim Liu as the quintessential American Poet writing today. He is a “trickster” poet. By “trickster” I’m recalling Henry Lous Gates Jr., and his groundbreaking work, The Signifying Monkey (1988), where the characteristics of the trickster include “individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture” (6). Gates warns that it “is a mistake to focus on one of these qualities as predominant” (6). Instead, these many actions are always at play at once.
The COVID poems in Down Low and Lowdown attest to the play of the trickster. Whereas a good deal of initial pandemic poetry offers maudlin, Hallmark card platitudes, Liu’s take vastly differs in both tone and style. Liu’s COVID poems are playful, devastating in attempting to love, attempting hook-ups, while simultaneously suffering and elegizing. In “Covid Ode” the speaker laments the burden of mask wearing while in a tryst: “Now I can’t leave home / without one. Can’t // hook up in the woods / behind my house / without one on. It’s // safe and fun to watch / someone jerk off / more than six feet // away.” These audacious lyrics are juxtaposed with somber remembrances, political barbs, as well as a poem from the eponymous object’s point of view, “Self-portrait as Surgical Mask on Rearview Mirror,” where the mask opens: “The last person / to put me on // is dead. Come // closer. You can / still smell his // breath on me.” Liu’s blues, his new pandemic poetry is the extreme opposite of most “Covid Poetry”; it stands alone as a clear-eyed, head-on look at the fear, boredom, waning and sustained passions that were in place during this strange time. What also separates Liu’s COVID poems as different from most are their minute attentions to the body in the present moment and the simultaneous passing of time, alongside situating the physical, psychological, and philosophical amidst a global disaster. These engagements with artistic creation in the face of disaster coalesces in the paradox—and I’m not sure if one ever reconciles this—of complete artistic practice, of the will and desire to make in the middle of personal and societal sickness. I’m thinking of the interstice, in-between space; I’m thinking, as well, of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980; trans. Ann Smock, 1995), and how Blanchot views the “disaster” as “the limit of writing…[how]…the disaster de-scribes” (70). How, further, Blanchot’s view of the fragmentary, and how the fragmentary can lead to a “silent murmuring” (19). Some of these “murmurings” are evident in the cinematic “Safe Space,” toward the end of the book. Here, the title confronts and upends both the placid, catchphrase of college classrooms, and the idea that there are any spaces in the world to turn to, that one can, in fact, not run and hide, as is evident in the beginning:
You can forget about moving to Toronto.
Or disappearing into the Amazon.
Poisoned by mercury as you sift through heaps of discarded
phones.
Not a cell tower in sight.
Nor messages on Grindr or Scruff.
In the opening any reprieve either by physical flight or technological distraction is gone. There is silence, no connections. There is also the attention, again, on climate disaster, the wish to flee both sickness and noise. Also, there is a fascinating moment that echoes the first poem: a lost child, a falling boy:
A lone child bathing among caimans, piranhas, electric eels
While the elders gather in their ceremonial huts.
Plantains, yucca root, boiled eggs.
The dogs and wolves in neighboring villages howling
As soon as the sun goes down.
The child goes down too
In a river so dark only those who have not been called
By absentee vote can actually see
Getting struck by a lightning bolt to the head
Is the only way out
The echo of a vanishing child, a lost boy, reverberates through the collection. In “The Ecstasy,” a body falls through black ice and must claw out, “when no one’s coming”; there are no “safe spaces,” even a world seemingly untouched by technology is not safe; however, in the meditation and creation of the poem, a different type of space is carved out. This space relates to “The Getaway,” appearing halfway through the book, and working as a multilayered ars poetica, a communication breakdown, and someone struggling with a back to the wall:
I was hundreds
of miles from any coast
but could hear the bilge
of what I was pushing through
the storm right up to my
inner left ear—waxy build up
only a child knows when parents
are sound asleep and has
no choice but to start digging—
At the beginning of the aptly titled “The Getaway,” the speaker notes, “When I left your place, / I tired to make my way inside / a tree.” A strange statement of escape: how does one “get inside a tree” and why? There’s, again, the wish for escape, to “get away”; here, though, the wish isn’t a geographical location or some mediated technological escape, but literally inside nature. I immediately think of Monsieur Meursault and his thought: “if I had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it” (77). The em dash at the end is striking and important; it works, too, as middle, interstice, not a full punctuation, but as an intellectual in-between space, a suspension. These thoughts of burrowing into nature are juxtaposed throughout by Liu in the attention on ecological catastrophe. The end of the poem with its focus on the individual’s directive to the self: “no choice but to start digging—” focuses back on action, that despite a type of existential malaise, a “way out” must still be sought. The blues, if anything, are existential, subtly and deftly philosophical and sneakily intellectual. The blues (and these poems) simultaneously question our existence, our struggles, and any potential way out, specifically through song, poetry, and art.
These murmurings of loss, space, and sickness are firmly rooted in one’s tangled relationships to multiple bodies, including one’s own. In “Intimacy,” the speaker imagines his dead mother, alive, wondering about his love life, asking specific questions, in the opening of the poem:
If my mother were
alive, she’d want to
know how it was
my husband and I
met, would want to
know what it meant
to hookup on
dating sites, what
exactly an “ass-
hungry power top
with a dick that won’t
quit” looks like, and I
would have to do
my best to tell her
exactly what I was
looking for because
that’s what intimacy
is all about
“Intimacy” is paradigmatic of the poems in Down Low and Lowdown, working on multiple temporal levels. There is a tongue-in-cheek wink at the comedic questioning, leveled with a deep pathos and sense of loss. Time is omnipresent, particularly the passing of time, and also the legerdemain of how one can—through the world of the poem—inhabit the past and present at once. “Intimacy” practices a “totality of intensity,” and I think of Roland Barthes’s meditations on his mother in Mourning Diary (2009; trans. Richard Howard, 2010), and the entries from November 30, 1977:
Vita nova, as radical gesture: (discontinuous—necessity of discontinuing what previously continued on its own momentum).
Two contradictory paths are possible:
1) Liberty, Hardness, Truth
(To reverse what I had been)
2)Laxness, Charity
(To stress what I had been)
At each “moment” of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning. In other words: totality of intensity. (74)
Whereas there are multiple layers of time, here—as in the book as a whole—there are multiple layers of mourning: mourning for lovers, family, friends, the world, and one’s previous selves.
This mourning is specifically heightened by the many elegies throughout Down Low and Lowdown. One poem, “Elegy,” consisting of five pages of imagistic intensity and taut quatrains, looks at a recently deceased poet through dazzling emotional swerves: self-recrimination, anger, and forgiveness. In the fifth stanza there’s a turn to the dead poet’s animals:
She too had retrievers
racing alongside horses
and other four-leggeds
before they burned
alive inside her barn
struck by wildfires
while she slept—
The elegiac changes in the attention on the horrific deaths of the horses. There is a deeper layer where the speaker thinks of the poet “Hearing horses / scream like that, horses / she rode high along ridges” and how she “never really recovered / from that kind of shock”; “Elegy” is one of the most transfixing elegies I have read. It’s layered meditations transcend traditional and solitary remembrances of a person’s life. Here, the eye is simultaneously on the dead and also on one’s self—the work of mourning that includes guilt, “envy,” resentment, sadness, and other emotions: “I remember / the envy I felt when she got // her teaching post, feeling it / again when she gave it up,”; “Jealous when a book of hers / came out—she had it / so easy—barely making it // past her sixtieth birthday. / No chance to patch things up / when the cancer did her in.”; ultimately, what makes “Elegy” so powerful is in its refusal of staid consolation, its imagistic expressions, and its relationship with time, particularly how it conveys multiple lives. The end, after being informed of the fire, illustrates this:
Heard about it
through hearsay. Her horses
haunting me still, the way
their deaths had managed
to finish her off. Nor is there
anything I can do about
those wildfires burning now,
my brother posting pics—
an orange noon-day eclipse
threaded through the Golden
Gate as he tries to walk
his dogs—ashes collecting
in a garden spider’s web.
The mourning, the “haunting” felt is brought about by the thoughts of the horses’ horrific deaths. Feelings and thoughts then swerve to encompass a vast range of emotions. The poet, the self, time, and incidents: specters, in many ways, who are not here but also, strangely, present.
Late in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), the speaker, witnessing Sonny’s dazzling crescendos on the piano, remarks:
Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in the darkness (141).
And of late, thinking about this unique book has taken on new, deeper resonances. I have the blues, now, in a different way than in a long time. I think of another famous Baldwin quote: “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”
All of these simultaneities are what makes Down Low and Lowdown such a captivating book. Liu, the magician-trickster is able to snatch back time, lives, fleeting moments and thoughts, hold them on the page in crystalline lines and images. The table of contents in Down Low follows an abecedarian format, each singular and coalescing poem works as an ouroboros, a Finnegans Wake-like book, where when one is finished, one feels compelled to begin again. This is a stand out and stand alone book; Liu is at the height of his powers, lyrically, physically, and philosophically. The lives, emotions, images, thoughts are never ending, continuous. This feeling is the truest essence of the blues in practice, the truest essence of art and life.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Going to Meet the Man. Michael Joseph, 1965.
Barthes, Roland. Mourning Diary. Translated by Richard Howard, Farrar , Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. 1980. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1995.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Translated by Matthew Ward, Vintage International, 1989.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988.
Liu, Timothy. Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder’s Blues. Barrow Street Press, 2023.
Charles Kell is the author of Ishmael Mask, (Autumn House Press, 2023.) His first collection, Cage of Lit Glass, (Autumn House Press, 2019) was chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize