This is Not a Place of Honor

Utopian Poetics # 2

Reading John Leo’s collection This is Not a Place of Honor (Night Gallery 2024), I started wondering how young I was the first time I thought about the apocalypse. I can’t pinpoint any specific memory, but Leo’s poems got me thinking about how long ago my first apocalyptic thoughts probably were. Just how long have I lived with the world’s end as part of my imagination? 

The very first poem in the collection, “The War is Ongoing,” begins:

Don’t ask me the time.
For years it has been 3:42.
I have pulled the page off the calendar.
and every next page says March. 

Between endless March and the next line referencing sourdough starter, it’s easy to connect this poem to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And although the pandemic may have something to do with where Leo’s collection started, I think the poems here are more interested in interrogating the feeling of that time. The world was ending. We spent our long, isolated days making decisions about what to do with our suddenly tiny lives. The end was both painfully present and excruciatingly slow. And that feeling was for those of us lucky enough to be living. But the poems in this collection asked me to zoom out from that feeling, to recognize that what felt so particular and disorienting about that time is in many ways just the normal state of affairs. The world is ending. We’re to blame. We just go on living, making decisions about what to do with our tiny lives. Or as Leo writes:

Every minute is a minute
we are not waltzing through
The Great Collapse

Much of the collection uses history and film as lenses for examining the end times. Early on, God immediately “regrets / sparking the furnace” on the first day of creation. Poems point the reader to the brutal Battle of Cannae, Virgil, the Greek philosopher Chrysippus, the first batch of beer that started civilization—each instance further emphasizing a sense of longness to the end times. Similarly, poems preoccupied with film point to the way apocalypses in big budget movies are so often portrayed as swift and dramatic. Instead, moving from Clark Gable to Tarkovsky, these poems are more interested in how depictions of the end times on film can further reflect the way we’re in the midst of a “slow death.” 

I know all this talk of the apocalypse sounds heavy, but I think one of Leo’s great strengths as a poet is taking a full look at all the darkness, examining every corner for tiny glimpses of light. The “slow death” of the apocalypses in this collection is made up of the mundanities of our entire lives. Every time I thought bleakness would overtake these poems, Leo’s gaze focuses my own attention to another way of looking. These poems don’t turn away from all the bleakness around us—the ways we’re so obviously headed towards the end—but with that same attentiveness to the dark these poems are attuned to the things that make our “slow death” meaningful. So many of these poems seem to be dedicated to friends. In these poems, “the day we expected the apocalypse / you held a party – do you remember?”

My favorite poem in the collection, “Disaster Preparedness,” comes at the beginning of the collection’s fourth and final section. After announcing “I am getting a vasectomy tomorrow,” the poem takes readers into a bomb shelter with the poet and his wife: “I love you / We’re married. We’re ready / for the brimstone.” Later: 

We have not had a drink
in ages and like a couple
good Americans,
we begin to miss
that which intends
to kill us.

This is the work of a poet who interrogates the darkness of the end times in all its fullness. And in all that dark of our “slow death,” this poet sees the people he loves, all the decisions we make to care for ourselves and each other. The poems in this collection don’t turn to fear in the darkness, but look at all the decisions we make—perhaps to stop drinking or to not have children—as vigilance against a slow end that we might be afraid of or, worse, feel complacent about. This might not be a place of honor, but we have a long time to live here, so we ought to be paying close attention, taking care of each other while we’re here.