Liam Strong on Tamas Panitz’s “My Favorite Things” and “Sonnet”

In the film Antichrist, directed by Lars von Trier, the unnamed spouses fuck standing on their apartment wall in grayscale. It’s a dream, it’s dream-like–something we only see in cinema or porn. Because it has no handles, because the handles are exposed skin and nothing else. Because if they weren’t grounded to something, anything, they’d be lost. 

Tamas Panitz reaches for handles in his poetry because what we hold, the physical and figurative, gives us back more than we give. In “My Favorite Things,” the speaker ripples with an anxiety qualmed by handles, as narratives unfold backward through objects suspended in time and space through the room. Or many rooms. Or what we call a room is not so easily defined. 

Panitz sharpens a missing tool: “What cuts also knits and so on.” 

The speaker panics and needs lunch and possibly enjoys EVA foam grips on fishing poles: “I beg Haley to find the light switches or turn on the fan.” The dining room, as Panitz meanders through it, could be any room. Functionally, we could fuck on any wall as long as we have something to cling to. 

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My favorite things are usually the timeless ones but sometimes aren’t. I know everything I need to know about the Hudson half-dollar–it’s nowhere anyway. Panitz has detail and he has poise. He knows where the dining room once was, sure, but he really remembers the spots where he ate snails and deviled eggs. The best spots. With the best details. The ones where we don’t have to remember the contents exactly as they once were, drawers like time capsules, “barely discernible behind the dark green glass of the cabinet handles that hide the past from the present.” 

My favorites, the details of things and not the things themselves. If we could have a handle on anything, Panitz suggests we look around. It’s very much like Spencer Reece or Pablo Neruda, the recollection of the littlest pieces of note, the efforts we make just to forget, or not at all. 

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The point is–I once gave a pretty good Mary Oliver impression to a classical cellist and they knew exactly who I was imitating. I do bad at it sometimes, though. I fantasize being Oliver, mainly, someone who could really make love, as some people say, which is to actually say I want to fuck and be erotic and do this loving thing all at once. But the giggles pointed at me are enough.

Panitz explores further in “Sonnet” how we have to learn from the gory viscera of what human connection often tries so hard to avoid becoming. Like living the scenery of a Henri Cole poem, Panitz catalogs his speaker’s passive aggression, his discomfort in not having any answers: 

“you bald ogre lit by flashing mob-lights, as trite as home décor, //

maybe you could tell me what silence and its capri pants can do for you”. 

There’s a lesson to this loudness. There’s a critique of consumption, there’s a critique of critique, there’s detriment in certain kinds of change. Whether we trust the speakers of Panitz’s poems is to quarrel with what trust really means. The speaker of “Sonnet” seems to be the one giving advice rather than questioning it: 

“I’m in heaven giving out one big example of eating this bologna. //

It’s okay to suffocate erotic fancies with their own smoke signals
and that’s good news but I didn’t read further.”

It’s okay that I fail at my Mary Oliver impression. I keep reading though, because there’s so much to read. A fantasy never ends, and memories are always going to change their clothes. 

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I live for the multiplicity and eidetic foray with which Tamas Panitz carries us down the regal hall. His words don’t hit heavy until they build up and construct a house having lived decades in just a few lines. Prosal and florid, Panitz’ verse wanders through seasons of memory and interaction, the mental decay that follows within sight behind, like a mother there and not. It feels forbidden to call poems beautiful because poets like Panitz make it just so. There’s lunch somewhere for us to lose a few hours, the kettle doesn’t whistle as harsh anymore, and I’m telling myself it’s a beautiful memory I’ve remembered. I’ve remembered it, the misery and the joy, I’m eating them both, and it tastes exactly like it used to.