Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Lehman’s "A Quick One Before I Go" is a self-reflexive meditation on the nature of thought, originality, and the role of sensory experience in poetry. Written in free verse, the poem has a stream-of-consciousness quality, mirroring the speaker’s attempt to purge his writing of abstraction and grand ideas in favor of immediate, tangible details. It is both a humorous and existential reflection on poetic purpose, self-doubt, and the limits of language.

The poem opens with an assertion that many writers and thinkers might find unsettling: "There comes a time in every man?s life / when he thinks: I have never had a single / original thought in my life / including this one." The paradox here is deliberate—if even the thought of never having an original thought is itself unoriginal, then originality itself becomes an illusion. This declaration introduces the poem’s central conflict: the speaker’s frustration with intellectualized, idea-driven poetry and his yearning for something more direct and concrete.

To address this frustration, the speaker resolves to "eliminate all ideas from my poems" and instead focus on physical, everyday objects: "cats, rice, rain / baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants / red brick houses." These are familiar, tactile images, seemingly mundane but deeply evocative. The shift from abstraction to materiality suggests an attempt to anchor poetry in the tangible world rather than in philosophical musings. This is reminiscent of the Imagist movement’s emphasis on precise imagery over abstract ideas, as well as William Carlos Williams’s dictum, "No ideas but in things."

However, the speaker’s resolution is not merely a stylistic choice but also a personal one. He declares his intent to "give up booze / and organized religion even if it means / despair is a logical possibility that can?t / be disproved." The rejection of both alcohol and religion implies a desire for clarity, for facing life without the numbing effects of either intoxication or faith. Yet, the acknowledgment that "despair is a logical possibility" suggests that abandoning these crutches might leave him vulnerable to existential dread. The phrasing, "that can?t / be disproved," echoes philosophical skepticism—there is no absolute certainty that life has meaning, and this is a possibility the speaker cannot escape.

The poem then shifts its focus to sensory perception: "I shall concentrate on the five / senses and what they half perceive and half / create." This line suggests an awareness of how perception is never entirely objective; our senses shape the world as much as they record it. This is reinforced by the subsequent list of images: "the green street signs with white / letters on them the body next to mine / asleep while I think these thoughts." The juxtaposition of impersonal urban details with an intimate moment (the sleeping body) underscores the tension between external reality and internal contemplation.

The closing lines take a turn toward linguistic play: "O was there ever a man who felt as I do / like a pronoun out of step with all the other / floating signifiers no things but in words / an orange T-shirt a lime green awning." Here, Lehman alludes to poststructuralist theories of language, particularly the idea that words are not stable entities but rather "floating signifiers" whose meanings are shaped by context. The speaker likens himself to a pronoun—an unstable, shifting element in language, further emphasizing his sense of disconnection.

The final images, "an orange T-shirt a lime green awning," return to the poem’s earlier commitment to concrete things. Yet, these are not just objects but symbols of vibrant color and presence, a contrast to the speaker’s earlier concerns with despair and self-doubt. The poem thus ends on a note of ambiguity: are these images a triumph of sensory engagement, or do they merely serve as distractions from deeper existential uncertainties?

Structurally, the poem’s lack of punctuation and enjambment creates a sense of fluidity, mirroring the speaker’s meandering thoughts. This style reflects the natural rhythm of internal monologue, reinforcing the impression that we are witnessing an unfiltered moment of introspection.

In "A Quick One Before I Go," Lehman grapples with the tension between intellectualism and sensory experience, originality and derivation, despair and presence. The poem resists providing a clear resolution, instead embracing the contradictions that define both poetic creation and human existence. Through its interplay of humor, self-doubt, and vivid imagery, the poem captures the struggle of a writer trying to reconcile thought and reality, ultimately leaving the reader suspended in the same liminal space the speaker inhabits.

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