Silent Treatment: Poems

by Lisa S. Lewis

Book Overview

In poems at once dauntless and thoughtful, Lisa Lewis reveals the unspoken thoughts, hidden fears, and secret desires of a contemporary woman. She reminisces about the lost joys of childhood ("I was... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140589023
• ISBN13: 9780140589023
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Length: 79 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Write on!

A victim of the "silent treatment" myself, I thank Lisa Lewis for opening her mouth.These strong, utterly believable poems will amaze you with their courage.

Excerpts from a longer review of Lewis's book

Lisa Lewis's second book of poems,_Silent Treatment_, extends the belief-nonbelief conundrum at the heart of her previous collection. It also continues her earlier work of self-conscious and courageous reckoning with experience, body, and language. I've always been engaged by the mixing, in Lewis's poems, of near oracular grace with sometimes ungainly everyday speech; by her peculiar balancing of irony, tenderness, and self-deprecation with fierce. . .well, with fierce *crabbiness*. The speaker in these poems, though thoroughly self-scrutinizing, is also a resister, a veritable warrior. And one of the things she seems intent on battling is silence. By silence I mean an ontological space, free and clear of language and the mind; the infamous "outside" or "center" which we still argue with and about. And I mean also the social silence which protects an abuser, any silence that conceals hypocrisy or harm, and the one so often imposed on those with little power over what gets heard. I've always been struck by how Lewis can just *say* certain things in her work, however tabooed they may be. Nearly every poem, in fact, happily violates some unacknowledged, consensus-enforced gag order. Every piece shakes us awake, sometimes gently, sometimes not.She can say, for instance, that ". . .my students/Are stupid." In one sense, this is an astoundingly rude and crude acknowledgment of what every college teacher in America has surely (in at least one warranted or unwarranted, sacrilegious and punishable-by-death-or-loss-of-tenure moment of weariness and irritation), spoken or thought. "My students," she says, "[a]re stupid." But almost in the same instant in which the statement slams into the reader, it buzzes softly open with all its ironic over- and under-tones. It's an implicit and amusingly deadpan comment, for one thing, on our cherished but mostly unexamined view of teachers as angelic social martyrs. It's also an overtly provocative pronouncement that cannot help but bait someone -no doubt a student or two, no doubt a critic or two to battle, which, for Lewis, seems always preferrable to a life of submission; in this case, the grind of tenure-track teaching. And it's also overt finger-pointing, which, as it typically does in her work, rapidly results in the speaker's awareness of her *own* culpability: "I do what I can butnothing matters..."; "I wanted them to save the world"; "What they don't know is how pissed off I am/I can't just *be* them again,. . ." and so on. Admitting, after all, that one's students are stupid is inherently self-condemning, since it obviously suggests weakness on the part of the teacher. She can identify her strengths as well (she herself was a better student; she "only needed a little help, getting started") but she seems to feel that such strengths are mostly past, unrecoverable ("I can't just *be* them again"), and she is now helpless before the immense power of time, and the

Excerpts from a longer review of Lewis's book

Lisa Lewis\222s second book of poems,_Silent Treatment_,extends the belief-nonbelief conundrum at the heart of her previouscollection. It also continues her earlier work of self-conscious and courageous reckoning with experience, body, and language. I\222ve always been engaged by the mixing, in Lewis\222s poems, of near oracular grace with sometimes ungainly everyday speech; by her peculiar balancing of irony, tenderness, and self-deprecation with fierce. . .well, with fierce *crabbiness*. The speaker in these poems, though thoroughly self-scrutinizing, is also a resister, a veritable warrior. And one of the things she seems intent on battling is silence, especially when it conceals hypocrisy or harm. I\222ve always been struck by how she can just *say* certain things in her work, however tabooed they may be. Nearly every poem, in fact, happily violates some unacknowledged,consensus-enforced gag order. Every piece shakes us awake, sometimes gently, sometimes not.She can say, for instance, that "my students/Are stupid." In one sense,this is an astoundingly rude and crude acknowledgment of what every college teacher in America has surely (in at least one warranted or unwarranted, sacrilegious and punishable-by-death-or-loss-of-tenure moment of weariness and irritation), spoken or thought. "My students," she says, "[a]re stupid." But almost in the same instant in which the statement slams into the reader, it buzzes softly open with all its ironic over-and under-tones. It\222s an implicit and amusingly deadpan comment, for one thing, on our cherished but mostly unexamined view of teachers as angelic social martyrs. It\222s also an overtly provocative pronouncement that cannot help but bait someone\227no doubt a student or two, no doubt a critic or two\227to battle, which, for Lewis, is always preferrable to a life of submission; in this case, the grind of tenure-track teaching. And it\222s also overt finger-pointing, which, as it typically does in her work, rapidly results in the speaker\222s awareness of her *own* culpability: "I do what I can but nothing matters..."; "I wanted them to save the world"; "What they don\222t know is how pissed off I am/I can\222t just *be* them again,. . ." and so on. Admitting, after all, that one\222s students are stupid is inherently self-condemning, since it obviously suggests incompetence on the part of the teacher, whose job it is to make students less stupid. She can identify her strengths as well (she herself was a better student; she "only needed a little help, getting started") but she seems to feel that such strengths are mostly past, unrecoverable ("I can\222t just *be* them again"), and she is now helpless before the immense power of time, the autonomous flow of events in her life, and the insidious glances of students who suspect their teacher is "full of s. . t." This is not a comfortable way to be. Lewis doesn\222t let anyone off the hook, least of all herself. So this is a poet intent on examining a fl

Lisa Lewis's SILENT TREATMENT is a deeply feminist project.

Lisa Lewis's SILENT TREATMENT, chosen by Stanley Plumly aswinner of the National Poetry Series, interrogates and celebrates witha humor so real that it surprises itself: ". . . If I tried to be funny/ I couldn't be drowsy anymore, though sometimes/ I wake myself laughing. A strange laugh . . ." (Morning Snowfall) Hers is a deeply feminist, which is to say human, project, uncertain, self-accusing, ironic, wakeful of Luce Irigaray's sense of "the horror of nothing to see." I am frankly appalled that one online reviewer characterizes her as "spacey" and further advises "those who would study" with her to "take note" In fact, Lewis may be the best medicine for the workshop poem. In "Sexology" she says, "My student asked, How do I say in a poem I cried all night? I said,/ You can't. You have to make the reader cry all night instead. I was wrong." After this typical workshop interaction: " I tell my students, Don't talk about tears in a poem. That's what I was taught,/ I accepted the implicit wisdom. I knew why poems can't talk about tears." Then later: "We talk about poems as an economy. You can't talk about tears as payment./ You can't earn them. You can't talk about what they're worth. They're not" The poem itself does not accept "the implicit wisdom," the very disruptive, converging form. These poems refuse easy pedantry. They are first of all questioning, daringly excessive, ranging from slang to song to vision. They humiliate the drive by review which characterizes their ironies as "runaway," their people as "phony . . . stupid . . . young." They do investigate assumptions, often about women, even by women, such as the character in "The Fine Arts" who is "ashamed/ Of what her body can do . . ." who has "no words . . . even to her husband, even when he's/ Lying beside her in bed, witnessing whatever/ Matters to him." These are poems which matter, which disrupt a particular online sensibility "where people/ Like to have certain things but don't like to go far to get them."