Bill Lavender’s My ID: A Genre Bending Narrative Memoir

Reading poetry can be a radical act of self-reflection. I find myself unpacking my own depths in the presence of a great writer’s fearless journey, whereas maybe I cannot find or accept that moment in other genres or therapies, medicines or practices. Like My Life Lyn Hejinian’s profound imagist memoir, Bill Lavender’s new BlazeVox volume My ID is opening those doors for me.

Lavender’s title poem near the start of the book is a list of firsts that begins with that nearly universal American act of getting a Social Security card as a teenager:

1965, I’m 14, at Evelyn Hills Shopping Center
SS office, where my mother brought me to get
my first card, and next door a wallet to put it in

We hear of the mundane, the triumphant and the embarrassing. We learn who he is by the images of a life fully lived and decades passing by:

VISA, permission to enter, end
of the phone book, second marriage
license, houses VI,VII,VIII, inheritance,
first last will and testament…

A “list of firsts” poem may be a brave and wonderful Proustian exercise but Lavender takes it to master’s level. The yellowed card is “a handsome artifact” and he uses it as the book’s cover. He lets us know he is not going to hide anything in his memoiristic prose poems.

He describes his father’s face in his sister’s portrait one of “primal ambivalence” in the finely tuned poem “Imagework.” “Structures” is a dream poem, both descriptive and analytic and “Grand Isle” takes us on a fishing trip. The ID and the id are both in play. This is the work of a writer in his 12th book. His writing is prone to analysis, sometimes psychoanalysis, and at its best his poetic and genre bending narrative memoir is gripping.

At the book’s center is “Tui: an Elegy.” It is a tryptic, bookends of a mourning process with a travelogue in between. The beginning and end are unpunctuated creating an unnerving staccato, and the travelogue in the middle introduces denser prose text. It is a journey about travel and loss, and the writer’s compulsive urge to document it all. His sure language and process succeeds in bringing the whole to us. “More and more life feels emptied like that” he says in recounting a memory of another travel journey in the midst of the one to Tui, Portugal. He and his partner Nanc have taken many journeys together. She is there in a way that is essential. Their feet land in the familiar place, “The big room where we used to have to ask people to move to make room for a dart game, was empty but for the bartender.”

“Time” is the collection’s most fearless work. Here Lavender recounts clear eyed seeing his oldest friends who’ve scattered and regrouped, the 30 years gone by and how to relate and re-relate to them in the present, again in an unpunctuated flow, a satisfying collision of memory, thought and action on the page.

The book’s final piece is a “magpie scholar’s” history of “La Police” both the origin of the word and the concept of the modern police force. It was originally written as a Locofo Chaps chapbook, sent to the 45th president on his 100th day in office. On first read this writing seemed tacked on to a collection which felt complete. Then I found myself discussing Lavender’s assertions, re-read it, and understood its place in a book about an ID card. “One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.”

In Bill Lavender’s ID, wisdom is the bittersweet prize of a life well lived. So much can change that simple pleasures become unfamiliar. This book is full of timeless empathy: “Poetry that ancient broken/ pottery of sound.” It is a gift to all who strive for sentience.