Beautiful, honest and heartbreaking. David Hanlon is here and he has something to say.
★★★★
David Hanlon’s debut chapbook ‘Spectrum of Flight’ is a brutally chilling and confessional book that narrates the absolutely tragic, yet beautiful coming of age story of going from boy to man, of trying to follow the lead, but wanting to set the bar, and of appealing to the norm, but trying to move beyond the expectations of the dominant social structure. David Hanlon’s nuanced approach to his writing provides readers with the insight of someone who has lived in this experience but also of someone who is observing the world around them, and jotting down the beautiful and the damned into one compelling release.
Hanlon’s book ‘Spectrum of Flight’ collects twenty-one stellar poems that manage to weave together the autobiographical and the mystical. However, in order to fully allow justice, and time (and your attention spans, let’s face it) to be given to this body of work, I propose brief analysis of four of his poems; with these four I hope to be able to provide reason enough for one to look at Hanlon’s catalogue. If there are no objections to this, we shall proceed.
Note to readers: Throughout the review I will refer to the presenter of the poems, the man-of-the-hour if you will, as both “David Hanlon” and as “the narrator.” I do this — I wish I had a valid reason, but I do this.
#1 Swimming Lessons
“They say I am ‘Gay’
taunt and bully me
they think they know the damage—
they don’t… “
Swimming Lessons serves as one of the opening poems to the collection, morphing the experiences of being a victim of bullying into a narrative for survival. In the second part of the poem we see the narrative take on a darker narrative as we move from a situation of mental abuse into a more physical endangerment, with the narrator describing as being “thrown/ into the river/behind the schoolyard,” and is one of the several moments throughout the narrative that spans the book where we both wish to know if Hanlon means this literally or figuratively, but altogether wish it were the former.
As stated before, the narrative deals with bullying, but also the trauma that results from it. We clearly see in part one that Hanlon’s perceived homosexuality, at this point in life, is the main catalyst to which he becomes the target of said bullying. “Gay” is the one adjective and the only reason and “validation” these tormentors need in order to excuse them for their actions and the even more horrible part— they think that the only trauma forced on the body in such instances manifests in a corporeal manner. These people do not understand that even more (and sometimes worse) scarring is a cut above what you leave on the surface. When Hanlon states “they think they know the damage/ they don’t,” we are left with the haunting realization that physical scars will heal, that it is often the mental damage that will form the ghost well after adolescence is long gone. What I am not trying to say is that physical trauma is invalid, after all — trauma is trauma— but we fail to understand, as these bullies did, that when we hurt people, healed skin still doesn’t mean you’ve healed. This only trickles over into the rest of the poem when we ponder if the drowning is more physical, or is this drowning a constant state of fear that has manifested from the more physical violence of part one, and luckily, we have the conviction in part three that “…how lucky I feel/that I became/a strong swimmer.”
#2 On Seeing Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane when Coming of Age
On Seeing Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane when Coming of Age is a wonderful recollection of what it’s like to feel liberated upon stumbling on a piece of media that will change you forever, for better or for worse. Now, when I say “wonderful” I do mean the writing is fantastic, with the poem again being split into more than one part that tells a narrative — and this narrative seems to pick up around Hanlon’s younger age, a point in time we were already introduced to in Swimming Lessons. The first part unforgivably tosses the reader back to the cruel narrative of youth (as narratives of youth tend to go) in part one in which Hanlon states,
“The corridors the classrooms
crawl space vents
house on top
boys’ roars
a colosseum crushing
down on me
one by one
each one louder than the next.”
We are once again shown Hanlon’s storytelling skills as the space around him becomes one of suffocation, from the classrooms to the jeering sound of boys. Highlighting the sense of suffocation is the repeated chants and taunts of “Batty boy/ Batty boy!/ BATTY BOY!” which transforms from a name call (batty boys being a pejorative term for effeminate men, with batty being a slang word, referring to buttocks) to a form of violence in and of itself,
“The louder the name call
the one that could break the silence.”
Calling to mind the film Sebastiane, Hanlon is doing a masterful job at continuing his narrative. For background on the film, Sebastiane was one of the first films to feature positive displays on homosexuality, with the film portraying the titular character, Saint Sebastian, in complete homoerotic fashion. There are a few things to unpack here: first of all, the narrator relays discovering the film “in my family home,” therefore concluding that someone must have brought it in. This is not as much a big deal, until we remember that the narrative has thus far demonstrated the bullying endured at the hands of being considered “gay” even when (if we recall Swimming Lessons) the speaker himself was not aware of what such a term symbolized. The discovery of such a film in the home can therefore symbolize the hypocrisy of a home that secretly indulges in such film, but allows for one of their own to feel ostracized and victimized for such feelings. This one (admittedly) is a bit of a stretch, as we are not clear if such anti-gay standards were implemented in the home, so let us move on to the other two points.
Sebastiane is a film that is overall lauded for its portrayal of homosexuality, and therefore is something that a young Hanlon can benefit from and based on a read of the poem,
“the chisel of defined muscle
laid up against jagged rocks
softened into tender-made beds
where any head such as mine scrambled
as a Pollock painting
would be cushioned,”
we can clearly see the ways in which the male physique impacted such an adolescent. The final point is a point in discussion, which I will only bring up briefly, and that is if Sebastiane is truly a film that is a healthy representation of homosexuality. As mentioned, the film is overall lauded by viewers and Saint Sebastian has been accepted as a symbol of homosexuality due to his famous martyrdom by arrows — but that’s almost the point. It is known that a select number of marginalized groups (such as women and homosexuals) do not usually get a “happy ending” in terms of film and literature (Blanche Dubois anyone?) and therefore aren’t a source one should internalize. With such a martyrdom in the film and with Hanlon’s poem ending in
“Today I dive head first into sea stacks
splay my body over arrow-sharp cliffs”
we are left questioning such idols, but then we have to go and question even more the ways in which such film and literature can be changed for a healthier coming of age. Overall, a very nuanced poem.
#3 On Blue
“Who saw the conflict in my colouring book pages?
My chosen crayon fury-scrawled
beyond the lines
I tried to stay inside them
kept weights under my bed
watched too much wrestling
learned all the words to ‘The Real Slim Shady’”
The reason why On Blue is a beautiful and powerful poem has to do with the fact in which it asks the reader to reassess contemporary gender norms. What Hanlon does in this poem is take us back again into his adolescence, and view it from a different perspective. With previous poems that I have brought up we have seen such scrutiny arise in the forms of physical violence, and here we see a younger Hanlon attempting to solve some of that internalization through the physical as well. Throughout the poem we see Hanlon in conflict with himself over his desire to be seen in the heteronormative, dominant culture. What is done so masterfully here is allowing us to question the highly weighted social norms we place on something as trivial as color—how both blue and pink are used as boys and girls are developing in order to direct them into social conformity. If we want to take it a step further (and I do) Hanlon also makes us question of what it means to have a “gender reveal party” and how even before one is born the binary of this or that is already in motion, leaving those who are suffering under its pressure to conform to being “inside the lines” or doing things boys would do, such as remembering all the lyrics to Slim Shady.
Towards the end Hanlon says
“I was a moth fleeing the lightbulb
only to throw myself back into it over and over again”
which summarizes this desire to “pass” into the dominant culture, to be seen and not disturbed. A friend of mine once wrote “When I was young/ I wished so badly/ to be like the trees/ And blend into the forest/ Because/ No one attacks/ What they cannot/ Distinguish from the crowd,” and this conviction has haunted me ever since, and I get that same feeling reading On Blue; knowing that sometimes the tools to survive is in this own “manufactured identity.”
#4 On Calling Ourselves Men
On Calling Ourselves men is, I think, the perfect place to leave this string of mini-reviews for poems from the book. Where bullying left its mark in a poem such as Swimming Lessons to the curiosity to explore sexuality in On Seeing Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane when Coming of Age to almost wishing to either be born different or to fit in with everyone else in On Blue, this poem is a conglomeration of several of these experiences developing as one ages.
For male readers in particular, we have to ask ourselves at some point in our lives, What makes me a man? and wonder it the answer really comes down to our sex. In Hanlon’s take on the subject matter, he begins his poem again with the physical, stating
“Finger joints curling
back into themselves
tucking away vulnerability
knuckles bloodthirsty canines
jagged mountaintops
volcanic uppercuts
we reach
alpha heights”
because if Hanlon has a right to assume anything, it’s that there is a correlation to males and violence — and you don’t even have to wait for a war, you can look down the street into any middle school and see the correlation in action.
This poem acts as a stepping stone for identity, and it feels like a pivotal one in which the speaker attempts to break from the torment of what it is to be a “man” in a heteronormative culture. Instead, it begs the question of how we would view a man who were to let go of the need for violence and aggression as a source of validation, and instead relied on what he had to offer, rather than take. I think this is the ultimate success of the poem: the message poses the question in a world that is currently changing and reevaluating what it is to be a man, a woman, and even somewhere in between. In such a world, knowing the reproductive differences between males and females is not enough, but deciding on the values of what constitutes each of those categories is one very important step. But enough of my call to compassion and morality, I think I’ll leave you with Hanlon.
“What if I
hanging at the bottom
suspended in the air
two feet from the ground
called them over
tapped cushion-soft
all their bone-made cliff edges together
would their fists open
like warbling mouths
unfold
into wing-spread doves?
Delivering seahorses?
Then would we all
applaud
and call ourselves men?”
