Jack Wiler: Divina is Divina

Like many, I look back on the Covid era and think (with a nod to James Wright), “I have wasted my life.” Or more specifically, I have squandered my time. My self-reproach is all the more acute because I have been reading the final, posthumous collection by Jack Wiler, Divina is Divina, a book tinged throughout by the sad transience of life. It’s a remarkable collection by a man whose life all but demanded to be set down in poems.

For starters, Wiler worked for many years as a pest exterminator, and his experience in the field often inspires or informs these poems. He reveals an unexpected sympathy, or at least pity, for the creatures he’s paid to eradicate. They seem to be, in his view, unfairly demonized for trying to eke out a life, which, in their view, has nothing to do with us. In this, they become foils for the humans they plague, people trying to survive while the whole world seems bent on their destruction, people often on the margins, who could easily “fall through the cracks” as we say (a phrase all the more pungent when thinking about roaches, mites, and bedbugs).”Cherish your mice, your rats, your roaches, your bedbugs!” he writes in “Praises for the Insect and Mammalian Dead,” a poem with overtones of the Sermon on the Mount, “They are your poorest children / They have no other home but yours.” In his affinity for the uncouth, and in his sparse deadpan lines, Wiler seems very much like the Bukowski of Jersey City—except that Wiler lacks Bukowski’s overriding misanthropy and fundamental meanness. (I also doubt he ever achieved the celebrity that Bukowski enjoyed before his death).

Another defining trait—which presumably led to Wiler’s relatively early death—was his battle with HIV. His declining health influences many (maybe all?) of the poems in this collection, imbuing them with a mixture of fatalism, sadness, and awe. Many poems chronicle the vicissitudes of the disease, from bleeding gums to low platelet counts to neuropathic pain. Others come face to face with the inevitable: “I’m in a house with five other people, all infected with HIV. / One or the other of us could die, either sooner or later,” he writes in “On Death and Dying.” On the one hand, he expresses an acceptance of death, maybe even a readiness. But this is undercut by poems that convey a desire to keep going, even under miserable conditions. “Why I go to Work” recounts the dreary duties of his job, concluding with his desire

And while many poems do convey a sense of anger and regret, perhaps a hint of self-pity, most seem to arise from a sense of love, the kind that comes from knowing that all desire ends in loss. Even the vermin are beautiful, and largely emblematic of the world itself, in which the collective goes on despite countless individual deaths.

But Wiler’s “love” is not merely an abstract love of the world, but of a particular individual–Johanna, whom he describes as “a gorgeous transsexual from El Salvador.” Johanna appears throughout the book, often providing the prompts that inspire the poems–most notably, “The Love Poem Johanna Asks For,” which again praises the ordinariness of their life together, the appreciation of the simplest moments. It is Johanna who allows him to make peace with the world, and stirs his desire not to leave it. Johanna is not alone—she brings a friend and fellow trans into their lives—Divina, who, in the title poem, dies:

In fact, the preceding poem, “Futbol and Gowns,” is ultimately a eulogy for Divina, portrayed as an exasperating, melancholic, and unforgettable person. It ends with a sentiment that might well describes Wiler’s basic worldview: