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Life Near 310 Kelvin

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Poet leaves a legacy of love, death and physics

By Michael J. Vaughn, Staff Writer

Northern California lost a great and provocative voice this summer when Santa Cruz poet Greg Keith succumbed to cancer. And I use "voice" both figuratively and literally; Keith was one of those poets whose words lived behind the microphone as well as on the page (ask anyone who's heard his famed railroad poem, backed by a mesmerizing, rail-clacking vocal inflection).

Keith's farewell gift is "Life Near 310 Kelvin," a collection of poems and essays from Berkeley's SLG Books that comes either alone or with a CD of readings by the poet.

The overwhelming attraction of Keith's work was his great love of science, and his ability to nudge its often-ponderous weight through the revolving door of poetry. Though he spent his last 18 years as a computer programmer, his preoccupation was clearly physics, and he had an incomparable knack for turning the faceless beings of subatomic theory into a vivid cartoon show of characters.

A fine example is "The Age of Light," in which the poet mourns the loss of one of his favorite notions, the nearly unfathomable distances traveled by stellar light before they reach earthling eyes, "...long trains of photons / coming on through the night, the future on its way / like fast freight across an interstellar prairie."

It seems the old theory has been replaced by a new one, "resonant scattering," in which the photons of that original starlight steadily give way to new photons which they meet up with in deep space. "...in the space of two light years these lonesome photons / meet someone, some lone electron in all probability / somewhere specific around a proton. The electron, excited / by a packet in the mail, leaps to embrace / the possibility of light, only to extinguish it / in its own unstable enthusiasm." The embrace produces a new photon, which continues on the old photon's path.

The poet finds this new view depressing, but two friends quickly change his mind, convincing him that the process is actually "the birth of new information." "I like that," says a guy in a bar. "Me too," says the poet. "The eye that big. Light that fresh. News that current."

Keith was certainly not limited to science. He showed the same observational acuity and humor in matters of the heart. "310 Kelvin" contains several tributes to his last love, Susan, whom he married a few months before his departure. Typical among poets, however, I derive more morose pleasure from Keith's more lonesome ventures. A fine example is "SWM," a personal ad ten miles deeper than any you'll read in the paper, a wish-list of amusing second-person generalities regarding the hoped-for companion. "You will have currents of your own," he writes, "nothing to do with me. / You will have spent some non-zero number of Christmases / alone." He concludes with an arresting, hopeful plea: "Meet me in the world. Wear that smile and those eyes."

Then there are poems in which the romantic and cerebral meet, like "Last Words," a trio of seemingly dry multisyllabic words he leaves on his ladylove's cubicle. "Callipygia" describes "...the condition you exhibit when you walk, / the sketch made in space by high tonus and articulate bones." "Gynephanic" is "...conducive to epiphanies of womanshine, / the stark, resonant reflection in the terminal glass / of you going by my door. This is not your fault. These / are my own bells swinging in the little wind of your passage." "Pneumoparoxysmic" means simply "...breathtaking / in its most sudden, poignant sense."

...; a novel from Soho Press (New York 1995>.

Greg Keith, who died this year, tragically, of cancer, is still alive in his poems. When you read them, you think he knew he would be. Life Near 310 Kelvin is a startling book--in its intelligence, its clear, strong sense of life, its sureness of voice. Keith uses the language of science in the service of revelation. He does it with the precision of a thinker and the passion of a lover. It's interesting to see which words a poet comes back to, as small clues to his obsessions. Keith likes words life "specific" and "exact." He likes to invoke the names science has invented for what we know of the world and the forces that energize it. But he also likes "moon" and "woman" and "kiss." He's interested in the way things work, but he's not afraid of his heart.

The power in these poems comes from an understanding both simple and complex: Keith knew that poems ought to be interesting; that they ought to tell us something we don't know or something we didn't know we knew, or both. They surprise and often delight us. We sense that they surprised and delighted him, too.

There's such willingness, an eagerness, to look things in the face. In "radiology," Keith, strapped into poisition for the X-ray machine, waits to find out the verdict. "No other place to go, no other thing to be," he tells himself with heartbreaking bravery.

There are other treasures in this collection--"Radical Equality" (the ending is truly wonderful), "Another Note to the Young," the lyrical "Journalism: Biological Constraints on the Spirit," the quietly humorous "SWM." Actually, I like nearly all of them. I was interested in the stories at the end of the book, but I confess that I left my heart in the poems. I wish there could have been more. --Charlotte Muse, excerpted from THE MONTSERRAT REVIEW, Fall 1998

I had the good fortune to have known Greg for a few years before his death. These poems are truly elegant. He writes in a style that is very accessible to everyone, but with many layers, so that each reading will bring new gifts. He faced his disease and, ultimately, his death, with an almost child-like curiosity. I learned about grace from Greg, I've never known someone to be so gracious and wonderful in the face of such pain. The book deals with the progression of his cancer, but it's also rich with love poems, including ones to his family, that are so lovely, you'll want to go out and fall in love yourself, hug your siblings, kiss your children! You can get the book with a CD-ROM and an audio CD. I love to listen to the "Train Passing" poem, it's so special, Greg made this train sound, soft at first, and woven between the lines of the poem, then louder as a train approaches, then soft again as the train moved to the distance. These poems are for everyone.

Greg Keith didn't live to see his first collection of poems and short prose arrive in the bookstores. Greg died of cancer in June of 1998 after a yearlong struggle during which he completed this extraordinary first book, which is also available with a multimedia CD-ROM that contains stunning recordings of the poet reading his work. The poems in Life Near 310 Kelvin have impressive range. They're honest, earthy, philosophical and erotic. Many contain references to physics, biology, thermodynamics, and neurophysiology--subjects Greg was enthralled with. But the poems are essentially about love. In his last year of life Greg wrote movingly of his own mortality and the cancer that was steadily advancing. If this review sounds biased it's because I'm Greg's widow. I fell in love with him two years ago in '96 when we met on the Internet and he sent me several of his poems, among them "Aftermath of the '92 Elections," about his love and feelings of protectiveness for his lesbian daughter and her lover, and "SWM," the sexiest, wittiest personal ad I'd ever read. In true '90s fashion, I fell for him before I ever laid eyes on him. A year into our relationship Greg was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, and we married after we learned that he only had a few months to live. Our marriage lasted 80 days. Read this book and discover the rich voice of a passionate, tender, brilliant man struck down in the prime of life.