Bertolucci called me when I was about to start shooting, and he said, “Have you learned that everything is form and form is emptiness?” No, I’m always the last to know.
Martin Scorsese
I’VE ALWAYS SUSPECTED THERE was an affinity between soccer, mathematics, and poetry. For twenty-five years, I’ve watched soccer whenever I could. I’ve lost two whole summers to the World Cup. I was once a hopeless fan for the hapless Lancers (who were in the same league as the moneyed Cosmos) and now I’m a raging fan of their successors, the Rochester Raging Rhinos (who won the 1999 U.S. Open Cup). In the old days, as we sat on the bleachers, we could hear at least five different languages spoken by our neighbors. Italian, Spanish, Russian, I could recognize. The others were what? Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian? Who knows. The Lancers’ game was not beautiful to watch; they were not good enough for that. But sometimes an individual play would stand out: the ball placed perfectly, the players imagining the ball—no, becoming the ball—in order to let it find its way into the net. The crowd would rise of one accord. That’s how I knew. When the crowd rose to its feet, its many languages were one. What we had simultaneously witnessed could only be called elegance.
I can’t think of anyone who uses the term “elegant” as matter-of-factly as a mathematician. “That’s an elegant proof”—and other mathematicians know exactly what is meant. Mathematical elegance takes many forms. Sometimes the proof is short, moving straight to the point with surprising ease and clarity. Sometimes it meanders, picking up nuance along the way, until the result is a proof that expands and enlarges the original premise. Sometimes it is surprising, coming from an angle so different from what is expected that it demonstrates the versatility—and variety—of logic. Sometimes it is referential, building on the accumulated knowledge of the field. Often it contains a metaphorical aspect, bringing together in a symmetric way ideas that do not appear to be directly connected.
My mathematician friend tells me that elegance is overused as a term, that perhaps it is better to think of proofs as “satisfying.” That word, he contends, allows for a messy or unwieldy proof that has genuine importance, for the hundreds of pages of the proof of Fermat’s last theorem (possibly the Ulysses of mathematics) that demand further scholarly analysis and exegesis. There is even room, he says, for the “outrageous” proof, the one that goes against all intuition.
What might be the definition of elegance in poetry? It’s not merely fastidious adherence to form or high-toned rhetoric or elevated diction or lofty subject matter that makes for elegance. That would be a sociological definition, perhaps. Poems build their own aesthetics, and the standard of elegance varies to fit each one. Like mathematical proofs, poems sometimes move without an extraneous gesture; sometimes they eddy and circle in spirals of sound and accumulated nuance. They can surprise with metaphor that opens up the world. Even with the rise of public readings, there is usually no crowd to rise to the occasion. There is only the lonely reader, caught in his or her own sense of what has happened. So how do we know what we’ve experienced? And yet we know. We know we know. And we know we have no words to describe that deep sense of satisfaction. Others have tried—Dickinson’s taking off the top of your head, Frost’s ice riding on its own melting—but those senses are theirs, and ours resist formulation, though still we strain for it. In the end, we hope to find someone—anyone—to whom we can say “let me read you something,” and then we hope that whatever magic struck us will strike again.
Searching for the nature of elegance in poetry, I turned first to recent works by established masters who have long mattered to me. I quickly realized that Learning Human: Selected Poems by Les Murray would not meet my needs—or certainly not in book form. In collecting “the poems he considers his best,” Murray (a poet I adore) has not included some of what I think are his best, proving again that maybe poets do not know what their best work really is. Yes, this new book contains such memorable poems as “Midsummer Ice,” with its poignant memory (“‘Poor Leslie,’ you would say, / ‘your hands are cold as charity—‘”), and “Dog Fox Field” with its chilling reminder (“Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end, / they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field”). But without “Walking to the Cattle Place” or “Aspects of Language and War on the Gloucester Road” (“I am driving waga, up and west. / Parting cattle, I climb over the crest / out of Bunyah, and skirt Bucca Wauka, / A Man Sitting Up With Knees Against His Chest: / baga waga, knees up, the burial shape of a warrior”), the book fails to encompass the full innovative range of the Australian experience. And without “Ill Music” it loses one of the most technically perfect and heartbreaking poems I know.
Learning Human is too broad a title for this reduced selection. This book cannot be considered definitive. It is a pale, Yankeefied version, fit for the formal confines of its publisher, but without Murray’s customary “quality of sprawl.” Still, a reader new to Murray’s work will find here “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” with its expansive, free-ranging lines, the pure sound-play of poems like “Shoal,” and at least six poems from “The Idyll Wheel,” including the taut metrics that demonstrate Murray’s mastery:
Grief is nothing you can do, but do,
worst work for least reward,
pulling your heart out through your eyes
with tugs of the misery cord.
(“The Misery Cord”)
Likewise, Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, does not reveal what I consider his essential strengths: wit, linguistic surprise, and an unnaturally natural metaphorical way of thinking. In what is hailed on the jacket cover to be his “magnum opus,” Amichai gives us an Israel filled with the glory of living detail, but stripped of what I have always described as awe—that is, his surprise at his own condition. Just when I glimpse one of his characteristic internal landscapes (“Oh, the small interrogatives of my life, / hopping, chirping, flitting about, / eluding me since my childhood”), it is clouded by a more didactic external analysis (“The gap between the names / of streets and the people who live on them is growing / and hope gets more distant from those who are hoping”). Maybe Amichai has become older and somewhat repetitive, but inventive lines like “Sometimes Jerusalem is a city of knives” or “I want my son to be a soldier in the Italian Army” make me suspect that the problem lies somewhere else. Part of it may be that this book takes as its base familiar Jewish verse, but part, I suspect, is due to these particular translations, which lack, in English anyway, Amichai’s usual energy and verve. They have the feel of possibly too much precision, a literalism which fails to liberate in the second language the power of human emotion his poems have always before conveyed.
Author’s note: Since this review was written, Yehuda Amichai has died. My quibble with his most recent book should thus be put in a larger perspective. The world has lost one of its greatest poets—a man of peace, a man of supreme imagination. Amichai raised his glorious, secular voice, filled with religious reference and metaphor, to call on all of us to love one another. We should be grateful to the late Ted Hughes for calling our attention to this unique voice and helping to make it available in translation. Leafing through the pages of Open Closed Open or Love Poems, I sense that almost any poem could serve as elegy. Every line shimmers with meaning. “There are candles that remember,” Amichai says as he recounts his relationship with Israel, the country he loved that was younger than he was. “Late in my life I had a daughter that will be twenty-two / in the year 2000. Her name / is Emanuella, which means ‘May God be with us!’” From The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Block and Stephen Mitchell, I light these candles to pay homage:
My soul is experienced and built like mountain terraces
against erosion. I’m a holdfast,
a go-between, a buckle-man.
(“There Are Candles That Remember”)
He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches already pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
(“A Man Doesn’t Have Time”)
Look, we too are going
in the reverse-flower-way:
to begin with a calyx exulting toward the light,
to descend with the stem growing more and more solemn,
to arrive at the closed earth and to wait there for a while,
and to end as a root, in the darkness, in the deep womb.
(“Look: Thoughts and Dreams”)
Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound is a more interesting and complicated disappointment. Beautifully produced, with twenty-six full color reproductions of Walcott’s paintings to accompany its one long poem (164 pages of couplets), the book lays claim to elegance from the outset. In what Walcott continually admits is a “fiction,” he chronicles the life of the artist Camille Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew born in St. Thomas who left the island to become a painter in Paris. Self-conscious in the extreme, the poet, as narrator, intrudes on his tale with the consciousness of postcolonial theory. The word colonised proliferates, suggesting that Pissarro betrayed his native land in favor of more “artistic” landscapes.
But what is native to one who is already outside, or transplanted? So Walcott, both under the cover of his subject and in the guise of narrator, confronts the issues of Art and origin. He describes the techniques of the various impressionists in such a way as to give a brief art history lesson, invoking Cézanne, van Gogh, Courbet, and Corot, among others, to say nothing of the now-problematic Gauguin. Yet somehow the paintings—and the painters—rarely come alive in the telling: “There is something uxorious in Pissarro’s landscapes, / as if his brush had made a decorous marriage // with earth’s fecundity; her seasons and gates, / the snow-streaked mud of fabrics whose soft cage // held Vuillard and Bonnard in the speckled interiors / of the bourgeois sublime, wine, linen, bread, and flowers . . .” They serve as idea, as painter in the abstract, just as Pissarro serves as concept of exile, as emblematic outsider.
What would have been Pissarro’s fate had he stayed? Would he have become an obscure painter of the Carribbean? His position is not lost on Walcott. Referring over and over to his couplets (which rhyme not in the traditional closed fashion, but ab//ab//cd//cd, etc., employing a dominant iambic beat and enough pentameters to establish a pattern from which to depart), Walcott alerts the reader to his knowledge that as he “mounts the stairs of the couplets” he is using borrowed Western forms with which to examine his nameless origins. Wresting conclusions from the reader, Walcott recounts his struggle to create an art that is not derivative, that is true to his “roots.” But all art is derivative. Nothing comes untainted by the imposed name: not the breadfruit or the frangipani or the poplars shivering in the fields of France. At some time, someone stamped each thing with the thumbprint of its signifier; at some time, someone gave up the essence of simply being to the process we call Time. (Sometime someone invaded France . . .) And Time, as Walcott admits in this poem, “is not narrative”; it “continues its process even for the masters . . .”
The disappointment I feel here is that instead of taking off the top of my head, the poem calls forth my love of argument. It says, in verse, what Walcott has said better in critical prose, in a review of a new anthology of Caribbean writing in The New York Review of Books (15 June 2000): “That was the afflicting torment of successful colonials, that the deeper our education, the more it moved us away from the people. As it divided, though, so it enriched.” I recognize in Tiepolo’s Hound a slick academic version of what I have formerly loved in Walcott. Where is the painterly quality of “Midsummer, Tobago” with its pure imagery that evokes both place and feeling? I find echoes in phrases (“Heat. Scorched boulders.”) that instantly expand into intellectualized description, not evocation (“Dust in the rutted roads, / stumbling to the crunch of gravel, clay shards, and shale, // mica or quartz in the sun, dry, papery reeds / of leaves whose hues vie with autumn’s. I swore: I shall // get their true tints someday. Time, in its teaching, / will provide the bliss of precision . . .”). And where is the energy of the patois that brought to life the island life? Gone, into the realm of analytic statements on the nature of loss. Where is the driven energy of “The Train” or the sustained drama of Omeros? And where is there room for the reader’s participatory insight?
Walcott’s presiding assumption is that there is an equivalency between the blank page and the gessoed canvas. But if a picture says more than a thousand words, then Walcott’s paintings have the last say. They punctuate the difference in the two modes, showing us the color and shape of island life. For all its elegant presentation, Tiepolo’s Hound breaks no new ground—and every soccer player knows that the goal comes from a surprising variation on a set play.
Elegance may not be a property attributable to an entire book of poems—or, if it is, it may occur so rarely that we can think of the consummate examples. Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium for one. But no individual volume by Robert Frost, who included too many stock poems alongside his masterpieces. Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, but none of his other volumes, which do not have the benefit of such thematic continuity. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies—in short, the groundbreaking books that changed our way of reading. Or, conversely, the quiet culminations of a lifetime as in Thomas Hardy’s late poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s collected. So maybe I am looking for something I cannot expect to find with any regularity. Maybe I need to search elsewhere.
An elegant proof is sometimes just one of many perfectly serviceable proofs a mathematician has produced, sometimes the singular inspired product of a lifetime’s cumulative work. Or, as in Fermat, the theorem itself may be evidence of genius. And a goal is hardly the only example of elegance in a soccer game. Good defense has its own aesthetics. A near goal is sometimes far more satisfactory to the aficionado than a mess of bodies in front of the net resulting in an accidental score. Maybe the individual poem is where the quality of elegance will reveal itself.
Jane Cooper’s The Flashboat offers up a rich variety within which to begin my search; its subtitle is “Poems Collected and Reclaimed,” suggesting that the author has had time to rethink earlier choices, to see her work in a larger perspective. The early poems are strangely formal, intricately and delicately complex. They make it easy for Carolyn Heilbrun to call her “an astute, elegant poet” on the jacket cover. “You thought yourself alone,” Cooper says in “For Thomas Hardy,” joining him in the risky venture as she enters the tradition.
Yet the poems here are emphasized by several sections of prose—some in the form of prose poems and autobiographical anecdotes, some by more conventional essays on origin or intent. As the poems change in character, experiment with new and different modes of expression, these prose sections serve as lines of demarcation. Thus Cooper is able to orchestrate her move from formal to free verse, along with a growing social awareness shown in her studies of Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rosa Luxemburg. Some of the later sections (and even individual pieces) combine poetry and prose, as though to chronicle the struggle for articulation. What interests me here, however, is the poet’s understanding and acceptance of her single life—not isolated, but nevertheless single. Poetry is seen as a way of being in the world, a sufficiency. “Each word, each solitude, cracks open.”
So I’m drawn to a specific poem—one from the middle of Cooper’s career, neither as formal as her early work nor as experimental as her later—which shows the quality of attention it is possible to pay:
The River in All Lights, from an Upstairs Window
The river in all lights, from an upstairs window:
The river sometimes like a ribbon of blood.
The river with water hyacinths, blood-brown stems
and lilac heads, iron rusting to blue.
The river blue on blue under the sun.
The river nicked with white as the wind rises.
The river darkened to steel, with copper glints,
or elephant-blue under a thunderous sky.
Now the horizon is lost, the opposite shore
lost as the river roils and mirrors itself.
Now there is only a ribbon of glistening mist
we call the river. Now there is only sky.
I am tempted to talk about alliteration and assonance, about the repetitive accumulation of sound as well as of recognizable “rivers,” but those aspects of the craft are secondary, it seems to me, to the way this poem presents the condition of isolation. The seclusion here is not necessarily reserved for women, though in the book as a whole Cooper certainly gives a balanced and intelligent account of a female response to living alone. Here, though, the upstairs window serves not so much to imprison but as a vantage from which to observe the changing river, the effects of wind and weather.
The river is known yet mysterious, a storm about to boil, a disappearance. As it moves from red to blue to dark to nothingness, it also moves from the life of blood and flowers to the inert elements of rust and steel and copper. Yet the poem, initially devoid of verbs, suddenly glints and roils even as the river loses the colors of life. The “now” of the poem takes over, subsuming all those other remembered “lights” in the moment of erasure. The center of the poem is the absence of the river. Effacement is manifested, here, as a powerful presence. In what this poem says without saying, in what it knows of the world and the human condition, its elegant bursts of color and movement merge into something refined—a perception which itself becomes a structure. Of course the patterns of sound are part of this, but I especially like the way the poem posits one thing and becomes another.
One poem does not make an elegant book, but this poem is representative of the qualities to be found in The Flashboat. Neither strident nor driven by ideology, the book moves from a passionate desire for connection through a personal grief and into a mature acceptance of how the individual life has been lived. It does a genuine service to women as it meticulously examines both the public and the private, the ways in which the ineffable can and cannot be celebrated.
Odd how elegance seems to change its stripes depending on its context. Maybe it’s linked to the contrarian in the reader. In a book of short, simple poems, a sudden expansiveness strikes an appreciative chord; in a book filled with openness, we begin to value restraint. But surely it’s more than obvious contrast that distinguishes one poem from another.
Robert Wrigley’s Reign of Snakes is rhetorically charged, especially so in the five longer poems that are italicized, as though they were giving voice to an inner sensibility expressing itself in its love of language and vocabulary. The opening lines are a good example: “Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone / to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches, / hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed, / alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest.” And that is just revving up for lines like “Plum and umber, dumb phlox spilling” to show Wrigley’s love of vowels and consonants. Such lines strive for something opulent, but they also run the risk of sounding too lush for their own good. So Wrigley has made of contrast a virtue, tempering these inner voices with a more sinewy narrative line in the body of the book. “This wedge of county land shows up / every year on the tax bill”—and we sink back, relieved of the pressure to maintain the intensity.
So I select a poem that seems to hover halfway between the two modes, one foot firmly planted in detail and the other in sound as it winks on and off through the lines. The first half of the poem accumulates specifics: of weather, of nature, of intent and attitude, culminating in the repetition of “snow” to remind us of how it heaps up on itself. Wrigley gives us the visual accumulation of the flakes even as he is talking about their pervasive smell—their overriding, isolating, anticipatory odor.
Prayer for the Winter
I place two pennies, one on either rail:
warm from my pocket they melt the frost there
then harden into place against the coming tremors.
The ties too are tufted white, and fibrous mounds
of coyote scat, and the next occasional spike
worked loose, which I fling like the others in the river.
A crooked volunteer tree offers up its last
or its only apple, hard and thick-skinned,
bitter still but sweetened a bit by the cold.
Along this mile-long arc of track, four springs
and four steep chutes choked with blackberries,
and four cold pools crowded with cress.
It’s a black fly wind, all ice and bite,
and the usual fishermen have all gone home.
Trainmen hate those pennies. I’ll hide
until the engine’s past, hide again
for the obsolete caboose this short-line throwback
still uses. They hate the clunk and jump,
the eighty-ton shudder pummeling their bones.
But I want something to show for this day
other than a mile of awkward walking,
a wind so fierce and relentless the chimney smokes
lie out in rigid lines and vanish and the only smell
is snow, snow, snow, like a fat and generous relative
coming all day but still too far off to see.
And when it arrives, the lead cloud billowy and black,
the first icy spits will sting like little fires.
A succession of sounds catches us almost unawares. The coyote scat and the spike worked loose go almost unnoticed—just more detail in a litany of details—but for the hard k sound that won’t let go. The ear is energized. And so the succession—crooked, thick-skinned, arc, track, choked, blackberries, even cress—make their own clack of wheel on rail. But sound alone is not enough. I like the speaker’s intimate knowledge of this mile-long arc of track, his knowledge that the trainmen hate those pennies, and the knowledge (both his and ours) that he has placed them there against this knowledge. This is not a poem about remembered childhood, but about adult persistence. And we know all this (if we’re old enough) because of that wonderful “obsolete” caboose. We see it there—like a good period at the end of a sentence—because we’ve seen it there.
So far the sounds have been in service of sense, in service of an almost literal evocation. But they have attuned the ear and now they can lend their power to something larger.
Already the downstream train plows from under it
and rounds the corner flocked, a thunderous cake,
a mile of steel, a birth-water umbilicus
harkening storm, and I, who must ply
the deadman roads and walk the skin-tingling
right-of-way corridor, I don’t ever want it to stop.
Not the train, not the snow, not the winterkill wind
that blows and blows. No, let it snow,
let the earth go blind and the highway unlined.
Let it come down like sleep, let the deep drifts
extend their leeward fingers and the springs spill
into long random sculptures of ice.
Wouldn’t it be nice, marooned in a frozen world
for a night one long winter long, home
where the fire burns the years and wind
sings its one note wavery aria over and over,
and we are alive, alive, in a place
where nothing matters but that we are warm
where the children toss their gossamer
untenderable coins against the weather,
and never lose, and never, never lose.
The vocabulary becomes elevated—umbilicus, harkening, winterkill, leeward, aria, gossamer—as though to remind us not of the winter of the title, but of the prayer. This is the interior space of the mind, the place where meaning is made from all those details. The echo of sound builds its own pattern, emerging as an intricate series of internal rhymes that work equally effectively within the line, within the stanza, or spilling over from one stanza to the next (plows/rounds; I/ ply; snow/blows/blows/no/snow/go; blind/unlined; sleep/deep; finger/springs; ice/nice) until the poem is a loose weave of sound. “Over, over, alive, alive, never, never”—the v’s hover over the poem like an incantation, transporting it from the specific time and place into the realm of supplication. Wouldn’t it be nice? To dream the long winter long, to never lose. The poem not only creates its own world, it plays against of what it knows of the world.
If Reign of Snakes is striving for this particular balance between the inner and outer worlds—and I think it is—then Wrigley has found his form in “Prayer for the Winter.” Too much of the overtly lyrical or the assiduously narrative pales in contrast. Elegance, here, is the right mix of impulses, the tipping over and the pulling back.
So now I feel as though I’m on the track of elegance, but its footprints are surprisingly unlike what I had expected to find. I might have said that form had little to do with it, but still, I guess I had half expected to find it in form. Or a variation on form. But Bertolucci was right: form is emptiness—shaped emptiness, waiting for eloquence to fill it, waiting for the moment to rise to its occasion.
So now I’m trailing something else—the shape of thought—and I find it in James Richardson’s How Things Are. I would assert that Richardson is one of the most exciting poets writing today. Still, it’s a quiet excitement, an acquired taste. His poems are intellectual in the best sense of the word: philosophical, contemplative, rational. But their rationality is modestly undercut by a thinking-man’s acceptance of his own irrationalities. In other words, Richardson works out his thinking before us, and we usually concur—understanding, as we do, that some percentage of thought resides in emotion.
So the long title poem in twenty-six sections that Richardson calls “How Things Are: A Suite for Lucretians” takes into account both science and sentiment. In something that mirrors scientific syntax, this poem follows the discourses of logic: because, therefore, thus, similarly, for example, but then, whereas, as if, if then, if, if, if. Syntax is the key to reading Richardson. He surprises you with variations: “I have every disease. / I have heart shutting down. / . . . I have the undone. / I have August, terminally. / I have sleeping on an open magazine. / I have white, chronic dawns.” And more than that—he creates what I can only call syntactical inflection. The periodicity of his sentences, the pacing, the qualifiers, the sudden shifts of attention—all conspire to emphasize his quiet wit, to force the voice to register the weight of a particular word, to give it shape and significance. And so I choose a poem that demonstrates the mind in progress.
A Disquisition upon the Soul
It doesn’t register the kid on rollerblades,
or two on the bench that wind sends lightly together,
or the Times they leave, or who sleeps under it.
No, those are the heart’s. The soul is an old, slow camera
that shows which way the waveless ocean was,
and the day, and darkness, and again the day;
but all things moved or moving, us or ours,
it sees through. Therefore it does not see them.
Is it the restlessness, then, that in the thick of our lives
sends us to windows, wishing for the end
of all that has made us happy? That, sadly,
is also the heart. The soul would not know
which dying friend you thought you could leave for dead,
what shattering love you could leave your daughter for,
or that you stayed, since no one stays long enough,
and, being immortal, hardly knows it was alive
when it is back where it came from after all our years,
as faintly blued as snow is from the height of our skies
and heavier only by the sound of waters.
From its inception, the poem announces its intellectual query, its entry into the realm of thought. But here thought is carefully orchestrated, or else documented (it’s hard to say which), so that the poem proceeds in fits and starts, primed by the commas of old, slow, and and the day, and darkness, and again the day to sense the timeless infinities of the soul. The short, quick sentences belong to the heart. They occur in real time. They know what life is all about. The short e’s of restlessness and then and sends and end are mere diversions, an interval that echoes the soul, but knows nothing of its patience. Life, to the soul, is the blink of an eye, a timelessness where everything is put in perspective, except that the perspective does not take into account mortality. The driving force. The heart. The human heart that leaves, or stays. The heart that is ruled by the period, not the comma. The heart that can stop at any minute. So the poem upends itself, relegates the soul to where it belongs, which is somewhere outside the temporalities of “us or ours.” The soul is useless. Thus (and how can we avoid such constructions in the middle of this book?) Richardson mirrors Frost’s “Earth’s the right place for love,” and this disquisition upon the heart stays long enough to register in human time what it is to be alive.
So what do I mean by syntactical inflection? Take one line: “when it is back where it came from after all our years.” The emphasis (very slight) on the present tense of is and (somewhat more) on our, is determined by the past tense of the preceding line, by the earlier emphasis on the first person plural pronoun, but even more by the falling cadences of being immortal and the stress on hardly. Like T. S. Eliot, Richardson teaches us how to read the poems so that they are easily read out loud, keenly orchestrated by an ear so fine-tuned to the thinking cadence that it produces thought.
And Richardson knows he does this—or voices the hope that he does. In the ending of one of my favorites in the book, “For the Birds” (a long poem, in seventeen fragmented parts, built around the songs of various birds), Richardson illustrates the parenthetical nature of our interior asides, the human tendency to hear speech in the sounds that birds make, the ability of language to capture pure inflection, the way meaning will impose itself on sound:
(As for the secret English on my English:
inaudible, I’ve learned, to anyone else:
let it go? What no one else can tell me
how can I stop whispering to myself?)
*
somewhere in the tuliptree
has been will be has been will be
*
Is this the end the end
one says
one says
No this is this is
There’s wit and insight and sheer love of language (to say nothing of love of punctuation marks) in How Things Are—and best of all there is audible English on his English. But Richardson puts a spin on the human condition as well, and the resulting balance of conjecture and emotion is a true definition of mind and heart in concert.
It’s easy to think about the emptiness of form, harder to think about how everything is form. That would force us to find the underlying form for everything we read and to expand our definitions. Gregory Djanikian’s Years Later acts a bit like a movie, giving us the wider sweep, the multifaceted characters we find in film. The book is not so much governed by a presiding sensibility as by a central notion—that of “two neighboring solitudes” suggested by its epigraph from Rilke. The poems begin in circumstance and move to insight. Djanikian looks at the undersides of unrequited love, the boredom that is in marriage, the unexpressed desires of neighbor, stranger, and self, as well as the odd, crazy, joyous coincidental moments of our lives.
The book’s title implies the long view, and many of its individual titles have the ring of distance: “Good Neighbors,” “Court Scene,” “Tourists of Dolor,” “The Man Who Was Always Sad,” “Histories.” One could think of Years Later as a series of persona poems, but the project is far more subtle than that. The imagination here serves as a kind of postulation. Djanikian’s “camera” pans the crowd, employing every possible pronoun in order to try out various angles of vision. His pronouns do not act as a stand-in or mask for the writer as they do in so many contemporary poems; rather, they attempt genuine exploration of otherness. Although Djanikian may begin with a “character” or a situation, however he frames the scene there is always some part of him inside it. These poems enter not only the lives of others, but the possible lives of the self. If there is a further lesson to be learned, it’s in how completely the persona (whether the generic you, the third-person he or she, the editorial we, or the more conventional I) becomes a part of the reader’s psyche.
Break Up
It’s I AM at the Golden Grill
and he’s looking down at his bourbon
as though he might stick his nose in it,
what the hell, before he gets to the bottom.
From the dark booth in the corner
someone’s yelling, “Where have I put my love?”
and that sounds right to him, this sense
of having misplaced, having lost
the location of: if only he could think back,
gesture by gesture, word by word.
Lorrine and the True Sensations
are about to sing “Barrelin’ Down to Your Heart”
and he’s grateful for something loud and raucous
to keep him together, push
against him on all sides: along the bar,
everyone turning around, giving
his loneliness to Lorrine, all he’s got.
If his wife walked in just now
from wherever she was—Idaho, Wyoming?—
he’d do something extravagant, take
half his clothes off, sing Sweet Wilderness of You
and dedicate it to the one he loves.
He’s been quiet and still so long
he wants to cause a riot, something physical,
maybe meanness sitting on his stool for a change
and having a drink with everybody.
It could go on all night, this feeling
that he’s missed something along the way,
something now the couple getting up to dance
might have, all hands with each other,
all thigh-muscle and crotch, tight with the music.
And when he walks out of anyplace now,
he’ll know if it’s for the last time:
he’s seen that walk,
and the door it passes through.
Love turning away, love running out:
he’ll be here till morning thinking about it.
Rhythm makes this poem easy to read; the muted iambics carry the narrative thread, culminating in their emphatic “he’s seen that walk” (which veers toward spondee)—and you can bet he has. But by then you are already inside his head, inside his “what the hell.” And you’re simultaneously outside, just another customer at the bar, watching him, noting that his loneliness is “all he’s got.” The neighboring solitudes coincide. So the meanness he dredges up reflects both what we know from observation and what we recognize from somewhere deep within.
The dualities are highlighted by the progression from concrete to abstract—Golden Grill to anyplace, someone in the dark booth to everybody—and back again to the reality of “here” where he’ll sit all night thinking. They range from the solid certainty of his glass of bourbon to the imagined riot, from the specificity of what he’d do if his wife walked in to the vagueness about where she even is. We are given some of the “facts” and even more of the “figments,” and this is all we really know of most people—what they choose to show us mixed with what we know of ourselves. This double “take” on life is punctuated by the colon, that visual equal sign that fuses two thoughts around its fragile hinge. The mark is introduced early to show external evidence of interior thoughts, then reappears at the end where it connects the objectified man to the subjective knowledge of the reader.
Years Later is a study in irony—things are never quite what they appear to be. However, the irony is, for want of a term, light-handed. It’s not the objective, but the result. It’s what rises up to greet us at the end. This collection reveals the supreme irony: because it is so clearly about everyone else (including the author), we find ourselves facing the neighboring solitude of the mirror. With its gentle handling of psychology and its playful speculations, Years Later is even more a study in tone. Tone dictates what attitude the reader will take toward content, and Djanikian masterfully modulates tone, playing something in each key in order to give us the full range of experience.
The difference between the elegant and the satisfying may be relevant to poetry. If a mathematical proof can be recognized for what it accomplishes, then some poems might be termed satisfying for their significance, their orchestration of meaning.
In Stephen Dunn’s latest book, several poems fit that description. That is, they manage to become more of an already good thing. Different Hours has a lot of what we’ve come to expect from Dunn: wit and wisdom in equal measure, playful banter between epigraph and poem, serious dialogue between epigraph and poem, serious encounter with idea and concept, love of life. But there’s a newfound sense of mortality that governs its message. On the back cover, Dunn states, “I am interested in exploring the ‘different’ hours, not only of one’s life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal.”
Yet Dunn has made his trademark the idiosyncrasies of the personal. A few years ago, in a review of one of his books (see The Georgia Review, Winter 1996), I said, “My suspicion is that Dunn’s inner landscape is even darker and more honest than his guileless speaker is willing to reveal—an idealess, imageless, almost wordless space in which he knows that the fragile body prays to an absent God and goes unheard.” As if in answer, Different Hours admits some of that terrain—one poem is entitled “The Death of God”—and then explores it.
Dunn’s poems never call attention to their craft, but he combines an ease of grace and wit, a simplicity of diction, and a rhythmical flow so that, neither image-ridden nor highly metaphorical, still his poems manage to mean more than they say. They reverberate with a kind of “aftershock,” the surprise that keeps surprising. This is true for this collection as well, so the difference here is one of degree: the poems have become a fraction more serious, a smidgen more contemplative, a speck more solemn. And there is a slight shift in emphasis—Different Hours is not quite as interested in self, or others, as it is in the realm of ideas. He alerts us to this with certain gestures, as at the end of “Irresistible,” where the simple description of the events in a movie gives way to his own interpretation:
That would have been understandable
and simply moral, and I wouldn’t
have walked out into the welter
of the night, into the fraught air,
so happily implicated and encumbered.
Diction dictates stance, and the elevated language alerts the reader to the fact that something is at stake (although how many times can a word like fraught appear in one book?). The speaker is encumbered—happily so—by the complex, even perverse, ways of the heart. Never willing to settle for the “simply moral,” for what Dunn later calls the “virtue” of the seldom-tempted, he is happy in his implication.
So this time I select a poem that ostensibly conforms to Dunn’s own directive. Certainly its title announces something beyond the personal. In fact, its title raises—before the fact—all the red flags: of exploitation, of the possibilities for expected response or false insight, and of the poet’s appropriation of the subject matter.
Oklahoma City
The accused chose to plead innocent
because he was guilty. We allowed such a thing;
it was one of our greatnesses, nutty, protective.
On the car radio a survivor’s ordeal, her leg
amputated without anesthesia while trapped
under a steel girder. Simply, no big words—
that’s how people tell their horror stories.
I was elsewhere, on my way to a party.
On arrival, everyone was sure to be carrying
a piece of the awful world with him.
Not one of us wouldn’t be smiling.
There’d be drinks, irony, hidden animosities.
Something large would be missing.
But most of us would understand
something large always would be missing.
Oklahoma City was America reduced
to McVeigh’s half-thought-out thoughts.
Did he know anything about suffering?
It’s the naïve among us who are guilty
of wondering if we’re moral agents or madmen
or merely, as one scientist said,
a fortuitous collocation of atoms.
Some mysteries can be solved by ampersands.
Ands not ors; that was my latest answer.
At the party two women were talking
about how strange it is that they still like men.
They were young and unavailable, and their lovely faces
evoked a world not wholly incongruent
with the world I know. I had no illusions, not even hopes,
that their beauty had anything to do with goodness.
Dunn manages to avoid the pitfalls precisely because this poem is personal. The speaker is on his way to a party. Life goes on and, in this case, its banality accentuates the import of the larger issues. So the difference here is in the way Dunn is personal. He has always wryly pointed the finger at himself, but now he seems a bit more willing to implicate others as well. The poem circles and circles, moving from the inconceivable event to the all-too-conceivable self and back, as though trying to find the “something large” that it admits outright will always be missing. And still the poem itself probes for an answer.
At work here is what I would call a deliberate deflation. The event in all its horror is undercut by the fact that it is being reported, then re-reported at the party, reduced to small talk even as it occupies the center of attention. The speaker, rather than imagining the victims, the devastation, the aftermath, simply recounts the words of the one who experienced its reality. “Simply, no big words—” a prescription for poetry, for how to make it real. Poetry, then, might be able to do justice to the rippling implications of Oklahoma City. The echo of Auden in stanza four at least suggests that the masters know more about suffering than does McVeigh; poetry is, after all, thought-out thoughts. But that would be far too obvious for a poem by Stephen Dunn, and so we are forced to turn to the last stanza, to the way “the world I know” occupies the same line as the lack of illusions or hopes. Although the poet describes his own lack of hope, the “I” becomes generic as we face our own dark honesties. Under Dunn’s subtle direction, we implicate ourselves.
How has he accomplished this? With orchestral legerdemain, the poem alternates between the world of the party (which ironically contains the world of ideas) and the world of half-thought thoughts (which overlaps with the physical world of pain). We are never in one place for long. Instead, we are forced to see the event in a context—and it happens to be the context in which most of us find ourselves most of the time: we participate peripherally, as observers, and we try to make sense of it. We want to know why. Rights and wrongs eddy in these stanzas. They mix with each other until they solidify: an alloy of competing loyalties and conflicting ideas. The hole at the center of rationality is set against the very rationalism of the Constitution. Science, religion, politics—nothing will serve up an answer. Nothing is transformed.
We’re happy enough to watch someone implicate himself, but less willing to walk out of a poem fully encumbered. Yet, under the right circumstances, we appreciate the weight of obligation—and that is precisely what gives Dunn’s poems their satisfying quality. The significance here is the mesh in which we see our lives and their often-unacted-upon insights so deftly reproduced.
I think I am still holding in my mind some sense of the form of elegance. The poetry of poetry. On the radio, the sportscaster calls the plays. In my mind’s eye, I see the game unfold. Players I have come to know move on an imaginary plane. The ball laces the field. The team has found its form, the announcer says. For a moment, the game is beautiful.