I break lines for no apparent reason
David Grove, suggestion for a bumper sticker on jjgallaher.blogspot.com
I HAVE AN OLD FRIEND who posts bits of poetry on Facebook every day. For the most part, I love this—love the pieces he selects. He reminds me (and all his other friends) that Tennyson, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Levertov—and many others in between, and beyond—have a place in our lives. But even as my heart sometimes swells to see something familiar, or to encounter something new, it also falls when something just doesn’t “work” in this format, the few lines going flat, refusing to take me into them. I find it’s easier to see “flaws” when you only have five or six lines, and these snippets either quickly fire me up or just as quickly dampen any flame.
From this, I make some generalizations. Poets writing in earlier times knew how to engage the ear right from the start. They actually led with the ear, not the eye, but contemporary poets very often engage the eye at the expense of the ear. This may be all well and good when we have the complete poem before us, but when there are only disembodied lines we may find it hard to get a “sense” of the poem. Here’s what I sometimes see in current collections: lines that do absolutely nothing to advance the cause. That is, lines that carry very little weight, maybe offering only a noun or two, possibly an adjective. I see lines that are flaccid, devoid of the energy of cadence or chime. I see lines that, quite frankly, are not lines at all—just words strung out or dropped away from, configured for no apparent reason.
I have no firm theories about the line. I have read—and enjoyed—various symposia on the line, the kind that appeared in Field maybe twenty years ago, the kind I see cropping up in journals again these days. I am fascinated by what practicing poets feel the line can do for them. But, to be honest, sometimes I do not “feel” their lines, do not fall in love with a poem for what its lines might say.
For example, one of my friend’s recent postings contained what clearly could be described as “chopped-up prose”:
Walking through the field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
It may not be fair to judge only four lines of a poem—but that was all I had, and I did not find myself wanting to search out the rest. This excerpt suffers, I think, from what Marvin Bell, in his essay “On the Practice of Free Verse,” would call a lack of interesting “syntax”:
Talk about “the line” by itself is never sufficient because lines hold hands with syntax. . . . Syntax provides the occasions for enjambments and end-stops, as well as for caesuras within lines. Syntax distributes the syllables and, in English, the stresses. Thus, the key to free verse may be the sentence.1
In recent years, Bell has conducted his own complex experimentation with syntax, and his now-several volumes of “Dead Man” poems dispense with the line almost entirely, using the sentence as their basic unit. Still, I contend that the line can give some indication of how a poem should be read. For instance, in a symposium in Center: A Journal for the Literary Arts (vol. 7, 2008), Marianne Boruch muses on the “interiority” that the line reveals:
That interiority works directly against the bright light, rational feel of the sentence—the very public sentence threaded down the page to make those lines. . . . Because the line against the larger wealth of the sentence is a rebel thing which undercuts order. With it comes all that can’t be fully controlled: the irrational, the near-deranged, the deeply personal and individual utterance.
That is one of the line’s dimensions—it can act as an agent of freedom. Simultaneously, however, it can be a form of restraint. Bell’s piece enumerates various ways to take its measure: “A line might be a unit of rhythm, syntax, or breath (Allen Ginsberg claimed to have written ‘Howl’ one breath to a line), or it might be a unit of thought, or time, or even a visual unit. One could assume only that, whatever else, a line was always a unit of attention.”
So now, as I worry my way around the edges of lineation, I’d like to pay attention to the ways a line can be a “unit of attention” and what happens when we pay meticulous attention to it. Possibly the best way to begin such a project is to think about what an opening line can do to establish expectations, to create what I’ll call the poem’s “ambience.”
Take the first line of William Stafford’s “Ask Me”—“Some time when the river is ice ask me”—whose last two words open up the poem, hovering on the brink of a question that has yet to be voiced. We wonder what the question will be and why it is to be asked only when the river is ice. Even before we know what it is, the question is fraught with questions. The ten-syllable line is not iambic, yet its “duration” is familiar, as though the human ear now has a built-in timer for pentameter that recognizes it even in disguise. These rhythmic expectations keep the reader alert to the way Stafford employs subtle (and deliberately unsettling) variations, and his last line—“What the river says, that is what I say”—remains stubbornly enigmatic. Those final ten syllables continue to fend off the iambic as they emphasize the muted spondee at their center, bringing a sense of completion in the sound patterns as well as the sense of the poem. The first and last lines complement each other in tone and weight. Somehow I do not believe that Stafford could have reached his conclusion (in rhythm and in content) if he had not established a unit of thought, with its truncated expectancy, in his opening line.
In a different vein, the opening of Les Murray’s “Ill Music”—“My cousin loved the violin”—is so solidly iambic tetrameter that it can’t help but establish a meter around and through and against which the rest of the lines must play. No one reading that first line, informal as it is, would fail to note the way it quickens the ear, as though to prefigure the poem’s subject. The poem’s last line, which repeats an earlier one, is “But these are words.” The finality with which the two iambs sum up the poignant inability of the poet to reproduce the physical effects of his cousin’s seizures is an aural echo of the opening line; its four syllables take on the same duration as the opening eight, thus giving each of the last words added import. But these are words—and the poem ends knowing what it cannot communicate.
Consider the beginning of Sylvia Plath’s “Berck-Plage”—“This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.” Ten syllables again, but how differently they sound with the shift, dead center, that leads from the concrete to the abstract. This will be a poem of ideas, the line announces, as it moves from the physical world into the poet’s head, into her way of seeing. Plath’s ending, 125 lines and seven sections later, does not seem to derive from its opening: “There is no hope, it is given up” can only make sense in the context of the poem as it culminates with the speaker standing at a funeral scene. And yet, there is a continuity in tone from opening line to ending as the speaker allows herself to give her friend’s physical body over to that “great abeyance” found in nature. And on a rhythmical level, the pause after the comma seems almost to add a tenth syllable as the line is orchestrated like a bar of music, incorporating its “rest” to put her friend to rest.
In a very recent book by Kelli Russell Agodon (Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, White Pine Press, 2010), first lines reveal some of the reason Carl Dennis selected this work. “Believing Anagrams” opens with “There’s real fun in funeral,” and such a line immediately announces that we will be watching the poet at play, that the italicized words are there to help us see not only the anagram but her turn of mind as well. The poem’s magic works all the way through to its ending:
because I want the world
to pray for poets as we are only a story of paper.
The anagram is clearly more complicated here, as though the poem has taught the reader how to play the game. Although the anagrams are fun, the penultimate line is what intrigues me—the way it functions alone so differently from the way it moves into the last line. Who doesn’t want the world, I think—and, briefly, the poem has opened other, larger doors. Suddenly poets are more than “only” a story of paper.
Some poets experiment with lines throughout their careers, while others establish a kind of “signature” line by which we come to know them. If you are a reader of contemporary poetry, you can’t hear the name C. K. Williams without instantly conjuring that long line ambling toward the right margin on the page, or read the name Robert Creeley without almost hearing the staccato near-jazz he could make of his short lines. For formalists the line is determined, in large part, metrically, but I would need more than a short review space to discover all the ways that lines do—and do not—serve the poet who writes in free verse. My intention here is to consider the line as one key element in understanding the work from a few recent collections. I’ll look first at two poets with whose work I am quite familiar in order to further understand why I am attracted to it, then branch out to examine two others I’ve read less often, hoping that I will be able to open and comprehend their work through this (albeit narrow) device.
James Richardson’s latest book, By the Numbers, announces itself at the bottom of its cover as “Poems and Aphorisms.” Whether comprising a single sentence or a whole paragraph, the aphorisms and ten-second essays for which Richardson is becoming increasingly well known speak for themselves; their unit is the sentence, and their method is the pithy observation that serves as adage or axiom. Aphorisms are often characterized by wit or wisdom—or both. For years, I’ve quoted something I know was coined in the early 1960s—“Wool grows just as fast on a lazy sheep”—and Richardson is fast rivaling that favorite with such one-liners as these:
The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.
Sophistication is upscale conformity.
You have the right to lie when they have no right to ask.
Nothing dirtier than old soap.
Snakes cannot back up.
When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks.
And—my favorite—
Faith is broad. It’s Doubt that’s deep.
Until recently, James Richardson may have been poetry’s best-kept secret; his work deserves to be much better known, and I was heartened to see By the Numbers become a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. The range of poems in this collection is impressive, extending from retold myths to contemporary ones, but I’d like to examine a single long poem to notice how the sensibility that creates the aphorisms is manifested in Richardson’s more extended work as well.
Placed at the center of the book, “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home” addresses some popular science speculations in the field of physics. It begins with two substantial epigraphs—one about a prediction that each of us has a “twin” in a distant galaxy, the other noting a growing worry of many scientists that, despite monumental efforts, no radio signals from other worlds have yet been heard. The poem’s opening line is “The momentary tightening of your voice,” and the first thing I notice is that charged word your forcing the question as to whether the poem is addressed to an “other” or is simply referring to the speaker in the second person. The next line, “over your cheerfully expiring cup of steam, maybe it’s nothing—,” does little to clarify the situation. So this reader lights on momentary, which indicates so fleeting a sound (a sigh? a word?) that really only the change in tone can be noted as the voice tightens. Only later does one realize that the first line is also the poem’s shortest. From this point forward, the lines grow ever longer, loping across the page in forty-two three-line stanzas, building momentum as the sentences they contain get longer and longer, until we’re pretty sure the speaker is desperately trying to reach his impossible probable twin before the latter disappears, hurrying before the sound is lost in that wider universe of sound from which there hasn’t been, as yet, any communication. Probability says the galaxy containing the twin will be 10 to the 1028 meters away: so little chance to meet the one who knows you better than you know yourself—no, who understands you better than you understand yourself; so little time in this intergalactic (now inter-universal) speculative world. As the speaker reels out the endless distances, he brings the point home in images or ideas (or humanly recognizable moments of incomprehension) that we can absorb:
Yes, since 1998 it has been known that gravity is failing us
and the expansion of the universe, governed by a principle of distraction
called Dark Energy,
which constitutes 72% of everything, though like Dark Matter it is so far
undetected,
is accelerating, proving . . . what escapes me . . . and this sense of things
going downhill
faster than expected is the cause for what we previously thought was our
baseless worry
and the true answer to the formerly soothing question What’s the worst
that could happen?
The poem itself is going downhill, its wild unwieldy lines held captive to the established stanzaic structure. The basic “unit of attention” is a technically complicated partial sentence, holding just about as much information as any mind can handle without pause. As the speaker, thinking about other life forms, moves into ever more relativistic realms, he translates the technical into the simple realization that “if we find them they’ll be gone, and when they find us we’ll be gone.” Returning to the moment of the first line—a time when the speaker is sitting watching the snow and thinking of that other “you”—he says:
and yes, at the moment, the world in which I began this sentence
is impossibly distant, and the world in which I have finished
and am condemned to what I have said, which is why it is called a sentence,
is impossibly distant but approaching, if that is not a metaphor, faster than
light,
and here it is right now.
Even as the poem’s improbabilities build, the act of writing becomes a kind of subatomic enactment of its subject. The pen marks its cursive “you,” and the poem speaks across time and space. The universe begins to contract; redshift turns to blue. The long lines begin to slow, partially because the poet is no longer using multisyllabic technical words and is, instead, winding down in order to “begin again.” After seven pages the poem seems about to return to its opening line, asking the most normal of questions, as though the speaker and his twin are at long last one: “Well, is that coffee you’ve got there, steaming, or the hell of fusion / in the star-tight grip, in the tokamak of your cupped hands?” Finding the perfect technical word for the natural shape of the hands around the cup, Richardson has returned to the “momentary,” demonstrating not only the physics but also the intensity of the human desire for connection.
“Are We Alone . . .” is itself a dizzy whirl of speculation, and the long lines allow for variation in pace as well as complicated syntax. The reader is forced, in part through timing, to discern the poem’s sometimes-teasing tone—assisted by Richardson’s note at the back of the book in which he claims to have a valid “poetic license from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.” This same lighthearted spirit can be found in the collection’s two other long poems, “The Stars in Order Of” and “Songs for Senility.” Their shorter (two-word and three-word) lines create opportunities for the visual puns, suspended jokes, and surprise connections that make for almost-aphorism, so the reader can delight in the quick pace—the enjambment of ideas, if you will. And the occasional stanza, as in this one from “Songs for Senility,” reiterates the wish to recover the self who recognizes the self—the fragile human wish to be wholly aware and aware of oneself as whole:
But that’s the trick.
There was a universe
where my shoulder brushed the jamb
of a small child’s room
but I can’t get back.
Just as one line does not a poem make, one or two poems do not a book describe. But, buried in James Richardson’s riffs on mythology and history, and in his plentiful succinct one-stanza poems, there are many other thematic links to the longer, central poem. In the end, By the Numbers wants to play its way into the more serious thoughts of serious readers. Even as the speaker in “Postmortem Georgic” ponders the various possible times of year in which to die, he lists the innumerable (and absolutely identifiable) unfinished chores someone will have to complete in each scenario. Just as death divides spouse from spouse, it also divides the conscious self from the body that contains it, and the poem’s final lines—somehow stately in their drawn-out single syllables—reinforce the book’s underlying truths:
There is only where you are going, though you seem so still,
there is only that somehow we see each other
from two trains in the station, parting so slowly
we can’t for the life of us say which of us is moving.
Robert Wrigley’s Beautiful Country is a collection in search of consequence—but to give Wrigley credit, he knows that. In the face of what can be seen as today’s shallow materialism, his is a quest for substance. But it’s also a search for poetry, or for a place where a poem can matter.
One poem stands out, for me, as an almost-perfect answer to the poet’s quandary. The first line of “Wait” strikes a somewhat inscrutable note, “He also finds the wood and steel beautiful,” with the ending comma announcing to the reader that some kind of clarification will surely follow. But for the moment there’s that “also” to contend with. As in, along with what other things? As in, along with who else? Or as in, remember that poem about war, the one called . . . I think it was . . . “Naming of Parts,” with its contrasting images: “Japonica / Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens”? Yes, Henry Reed. Only one line, and I’m already ahead of myself, to say nothing of the poem. But clearly that’s where Wrigley wants me to be because his second line catches me up—“and the slickness with which all the moving parts”—and there they are, those parts, as yet unnamed. The sentence completes itself in six more lines that both advance the facts and hold back the denouement—serving to postpone any focus on the protagonist for as long as possible:
He also finds the wood and steel beautiful,
and the slickness with which all the moving parts
slide open and shut, lifting and lodging
into place the sleek, copper-clad,
steel-jacketed projectile, which, weighing less
than half an ounce, will cover, once
the trigger is pulled, the eighty yards to the doe
in the time it would take him to blink.
“He” has now become the speaker of the poem, using third person to distance himself from himself, from the act he is about to commit. And yet he finds the wood and steel beautiful, finds the neat mechanism and the language used to describe it beautiful—as surely beautiful as the light snow that has been falling. And beautiful, too, is the knowledge he carries, not only of how the gun works, but also of the “machinery / of her living”—the bladder, liver, and entrails he knows, in prospect, he will leave on the forest floor. Beautiful, too, the coyotes and birds that will pick his leavings clean, and the mountain fescue that has attracted the doe and that he has staked out for just this purpose. The seven six-line stanzas seem to wait (remember that title?) with him as he aligns the crosshairs and hopes for an easy kill. Time slows; the snow on the rifle barrel will (in future tense) fall away when the trigger is pulled, or melt and freeze again along the metal. The final line further fends off time, even as it acknowledges the future that is coming: “he knew all he’d have to do was wait long enough, as he has.”
This moment was inevitable not only on the day in question but on the day “he” found the spot from which he would shoot. And probably on the many days before that, when experience gave him the knowledge he now brings to bear on this moment. Take one line as a unit of attention: “should such a clean kill be accomplished, still . . .” Here, the subjunctive thrusts the entire poem into the realm of the imagined future, while its internal rhyme and near iambic pentameter tug it back into the past and the traditional. The suspended adverb “still” almost acts as an adjective, incipient movement that gives way to stasis. In fact, after that one word, “still,” a series of internal and slant rhymes carry the trajectory of emotions: still/will/will/stilled/full/all:
he will mourn and be glad simultaneously and will
for the next hour or more be bathed in her blood
and intimate with the then-stilled machinery
of her living—the yards of guts, the probably full
bladder, the buttery liver, and more—nearly all
of which he will leave on the forest floor . . .
These, in turn, give way to the low rumble of mourning—hour/more/more/ floor—before they resume their fatalistic arc in the next stanzas: still/falling/fall away . . . day . . . day.
Time elongates, along with the hunter’s breathing, which (he is aware) is synchronized with the breathing of the doe, whose mountain air “he also breathes.” There it is again, that “also” of shared experience, though surely the deer does not love the wood and steel, so the circle of involvement is wider, more comprehensive, than the simple pairing of predator and prey. Without any overt statement, the nation’s history is evoked and we are implicated. Wrigley completes the poem with the gun poised, breath held. There is no ambiguity. The shot will ring out; the doe will die; but the moment of the poem is the moment of waiting.
“Wait” in many ways feels like a flawless free-verse poem. Its stanzaic structure provides a kind of stave on which its music is orchestrated; the forward movement of its (non)action accelerates even as multiple commas hold the poem in check, imitating the fits and starts of a mind reeling with anticipated action, intimate knowledge, remembered specifics. Syntax is all. This is no simple noun/ verb/object construction but a complex of mixed emotion and determined deliberation. The repeated “also” enlarges the arena. This poem faces itself squarely in the mirror. Its first line leads inevitably to its last, and still—yes, still—it subtly asks that we participate.
“Wait” is followed by three moose poems, each progressively more fanciful. In an odd way, they undermine Wrigley’s achievement by going suddenly playful—and perhaps that was the intention. But why not own the mastery, and the depth of the moment?
Beautiful Country thrives on contradictions—love of country and despair for it, desire to praise and impulse to condemn. Wrigley examines contemporary American society and finds it sadly devoid of what you might call “character” even as it is full of “characters.” Here you can find (however oblique the method) poems against war, poems against big oil companies, poems against mindless fear, poems against mindlessness. Although Wrigley does celebrate individual moments of love, compassion, generosity, and bravery, he sometimes chips away at these with his sense of irony, as in the title poem, where drugs and politics deliberately mix in a mash of stoned perceptions:
. . . and before the rest of them
pleaded not merely ordinary fear
but conscientious objection. They said they meant it, in other words,
even as they wondered how killing Nixon could be anything but right.
When they could talk at all they had those kinds of conversations.
They thought about what was wrong and more wrong.
Overall, Wrigley does not resolve his oppositions, but he does formulate a way to enact them. The poems to which I respond best turn out to be ones in which the persona (like the speaker of “Wait”) seems closest to representing real, examined experience. For example, the opening of “I Like the Wind” sounds as though someone is speaking directly from the “here” it mentions:
We are at or near that approximate line
where a stiff breeze becomes
or lapses from a considerable wind,
and I like it here, the chimney-smokes
right-angled from west to east but still
for those brief intact stretches
the plush animal tails of fires.
I like how the stiffness rouses the birds
right up until what’s considerable sends them
to shelter.
The “I” here has been there, done that. And the second use of the word “considerable” gives a sense of wry self-awareness, a desire to play around with language just to see what it will offer up. On the other hand, “Memoir” is perhaps too lighthearted:
Then I came to a fork,
one of those top-end knockoff
stainless steel three-tine jobs,
a little meat-gaff bean shanking mashed potato trowel.
The duchess fed me with it, marshmallows
warmed in her décolletage. Therefore I volunteered.
You get the point. I got the point. But the point wears thin and the “fun” seems just a little too familiar.
In many ways, I think Robert Wrigley may have produced this new book too quickly, writing poems he felt needed to be written instead of waiting the requisite time it takes for new material to make itself known. A few poems remind me of the earlier, tougher-minded poet, who allowed his material to offer up its own incontrovertible meanings. The tensions generated by his restless lines give this new book its nervous energy, yet the collection does not quite cohere; it seems to be on the verge of something larger, waiting with held breath for the poet to find himself truly out far, and in deep.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s second book, Approaching Ice, chronicles the history of, and the impulse toward, polar exploration. In a sequence of third-person “portraits,” Bradfield manages not only to give an account of the well-known adventures of Robert Scott, Richard Byrd, Ernest Shackleton, and Admiral Peary, but also to probe the sensibilities of these men, searching out mindset and motivation, the human choices that led to ruin or to glory. In addition, she approaches such ice-bound history through the eyes of lesser-known explorers—who has heard of Carsten Borchgrevink, Jules d’Urville, Adrien de Gerlache, Louise Boyd?—and from the perspective of crew members, photographers, and the many spouses who waited at home (among whom she surreptitiously inserts her own name). These not-quite-narratives are offset and underscored by the poet’s own familiarity with the polar tundra.
Bradford, always aware that her poems are speculative and that she knows she doesn’t know, is amazed at the very act of setting off into the unknown. Along the way, the reader learns some little-known history and many fresh aspects of science, geography, and meteorology. Almost any first line in this collection could be chosen to give a sense of the wide white expanse of ice and of the precariousness of the venture. For example, “Why They Went” opens with “Frost bitten. Snow blind. Hungry. Craving”—and the three caesuras feel for all the world like solid footprints in the snow, while the last word in the line tilts toward uncertainty. Thus the reader is not surprised when the poem ends with “And they came home and longed again,” turning the “craving” of its inception into the answer to the title’s implicit question.
I’d like to inspect a more complex poem in order to note the similar implications of its opening line. “The Third Reich Claims Neu Schwabenland” describes how, in 1939, Germany determined to lay claim to Antarctica by sending airplanes to photograph its vast regions and drop huge swastika-marked darts onto the frozen expanse. The whole first section describes the details of the mission. It begins “Ice is not land, so how to claim it? How to mark it owned”; again, the line hovers on the brink of something unknown and, again, there is a characteristic caesura, a pause to contemplate, then enter into the interrogation. The second section makes a surprising departure into an italicized reverie as the poet (here dissolving into first person and speaking for herself) thinks of the various elusive claims she has made: mementos brought home from travels; a star she “bought” on the Internet and named Incognita; a dog; the lips of a potential lover before she knew the woman was married. How, she almost seems to be asking by implication, was the German project any different except in scale, and hubris? The poem’s third section appears, at first, to act as a refrain—“Ice is not land. Is restless. And what was claimed”—but then the poet departs from description in favor of conjecture, and “what was claimed”
has moved, is inching toward the sea,
has maybe broken off,
calved from the frozen edge, and now trails
its dust and shit and egg shards and abandoned fuel tins,
trails what stories it held
through the ocean’s haloclines
and thermoclines, its pelagic and benthic layers,
scattering them across its sea floor.
With the inevitable drifting of the ice, the speaker moves to speculation; “maybe,” she repeats, as she imagines those darts—stripped of their markings—sliding beneath miles of water, “declarative not of claim, but of time.” The poem has made its own incremental shifts to demonstrate the tenuous relationship between claim and ownership, the force of time that frees the ice to its own silent devices. And I would go so far as to say there is a hint of that cold drifting in the white space surrounding those lines that stop midway before they move on into new territory.
The ice’s very imperturbability becomes part of a history that encompasses bush pilot and umiak and the timelessness of “whalecall” or the “cries of flightless birds.” The impact of this endless region, not exactly indifferent but nevertheless impassive, is echoed again and again in Bradfield’s endings. A poem about Richard Byrd concludes with “not one green flicker in the emotive sky cared,” and John Forbes Nash Jr., the self-declared Emperor of Antarctica, finds “a land to quiet his mind’s static” while his brief forays to the region end in the visual spaces of a line without punctuation:
open wild white
The poems of Approaching Ice are meticulously researched, and as a result the book is filled with fascinating details, eerily precise descriptions, and captivating speculations. But none of these makes a poem on its own, so Elizabeth Bradfield has fashioned her lines to reinforce the more mysterious areas where there are gaps in knowledge. Her fitful unit of attention is focused on connective tissue (or its lack). She makes a poetry of not-knowing, “marrying what you know to what you see / and all it tells of knowing’s impossibility,” as she writes in “Vicarious.” Articulating the powerful urge that drove these (mostly) men to negotiate uncharted terrain, she has found a way to contain their stories without appropriating them. Always careful to distinguish between her own experience and that of others, this poet is not afraid to ask the hard questions that help her perceive where and when and how event and understanding coincide.
Also, Bradfield has produced an effective mix of the scientific and the personal. This can best be seen in the scattering of seven separate pieces, each titled “Notes on Ice in Bowditch,” in which she takes terms from the glossary in The American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch and follows them with private commentary. In all, there are thirty such entries, and here are three:
ice edge. The demarcation at any given time between open sea and sea ice of any kind, whether fast or drifting.
This is where you jump. This is the map-edge that can’t be drawn or that must never cease being drawn, the edge that crumbles or that grows new boundaries. This is the demarcation of lovers.
ice jam. An accumulation of broken river ice or sea ice caught in a narrow channel.
Is that what you call the creaking, popping mass stuck in the thin throat of an argument? Hissing streams rapid around it? Slurry of dislodged bits thick along the banks, rounding sharp corners to rush out and be absorbed?
ice stream. The part of an inland ice sheet in which the ice flows more rapidly and not necessarily in the same direction as the surrounding ice. The margins are sometimes clearly marked by a change in direction of the surface slope, but may be indistinct.
Are you so sure of the difference between freeze and thaw? One is not necessarily moving toward the other. Always a place between that is flowing and hard to define. This is why apologies are difficult.
Interestingly, the “individual utterance” here comes not in the line but in these unlineated rejoinders. Call and response—the answering voice is intimate, providing a hint of the person who is navigating her own unmarked channels. This is a thought- provoking second book, and I look forward to seeing where this poet will take us next.
I always feel regret when I “discover” a poet whose work I should have read much earlier. Walking with Ruskin is Robert Cording’s sixth collection, but I confess it is the first complete book I’ve read by this poet I’ve known only piecemeal in the pages of literary journals. I think of Cording as “the poet of birds,” and there are a slew of birds in this gathering—but now I see how they serve as markers for one man’s walking (waking) life. Oh, how those ubiquitous sparrows, “generic for any of the small brown birds / We find everywhere,” suddenly become a religious reminder that we have the poor and needy among us. Or, comparing notes with an imagined Ruskin about the shades of blue on a kingfisher’s back, the poet is reminded of the kind of attention that one must pay in order to love fact. And those flaring swallows, with their sprung syllables, demonstrate over and over in “Swallow Syllabics” one of nature’s harder lessons, “undoing any thought / that they could be settled onto lines.”
Walking with Ruskin pays religious attention to the world and, in doing so, becomes a form of religious experience all its own. Invoking the tenets of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and others of the numerous ways humans have found to contemplate the meanings of existence, Cording takes us into the one lived life of a self-described ordinary family man. The poems chronicle days of tedious work, sunlit vacations, parties and meals and walks in all seasons—nothing monumental, yet everything immense.
Cording’s lines vary more in length and intention than those of the other poets discussed in this review. This is partly because he works fluently both within and without form. Even if a poem is not traditionally formal, he sometimes imposes his own rhyme scheme or metric upon it, as in the short opening lines of “Rain, Snow, Rain”:
Without plot
the day out-
side my window
slips from snow
to rain, slips
from little drips
of water to silence—
the rain’s presence
within the snow,
and again the snow.
“Rain, snow, rain, / and, within, // without relief, / anger and grief”—but the tight rhymes cannot contain the enormity (“I can’t sort / the sordid facts”) of a neighbor’s murder, so the sounds become a bit unruly, turning into disquieting pairs of near-rhymes: water/hour, up/stop, outruns/stubborn. The poem ends on the mind’s stubborn “need to make sense / where no sense is.”
In “Dangling,” Cording skillfully uses enjambment to let his own lines, along with the monk on Mt. Athos, remind him to take stock:
I suppose it’s a way of restoring the grace
of insignificance, hanging like that
between the sky and the sea. I like to think
my thinking is a form of spiritual exercise . . .
And Cording does like to think, and we like to think along with him—whether it’s contemplating Czesław Miłosz’s reading glasses, or George Herbert’s God or Mozart’s starling, or a single drop of rain, or three cows in a field, or the mortgaged life of a husband and father. All of these, it seems, are fodder for learning to read the “Book of Concealment.” And none of these, it seems, prepares the poet for the thoughts he will have as he struggles with the import of this book’s middle section, “Backward.”
This central section of Walking with Ruskin comprises four poems that could not have been written without Cording’s ongoing celebration of life—nor without his fertile imagination, his protective fear for his own children, his memory of a frantic search for a young Hasidic girl lost for two days in the woods, his sense of needing to make sense where no sense is. The thirteen-year-old son of friends has been killed in an accident. The mother mourns, and the four poems mourn with her; they are, perhaps, a definition of empathy, of the humble and inadequate attempt to inhabit another’s grief, and of how words cannot do full justice to emotion. In these poems Cording most exemplifies Marvin Bell’s observations about the complexity of syntax and Marianne Boruch’s perceptions of the rebelliousness inherent to lineation choices.
Here is a sentence: Now December is dying once again into the roosting dark: cold air, cold flame, the sky burning itself clean. There are myriad possible ways to break this into lines, but see how Robert Cording, working within the syntax, orchestrates its nuances in the middle of “December Prayer,” the fourth section of “Four Prayers”:
Now December is dying once again
into the roosting dark: cold air, cold
flame, the sky burning itself clean.
The slant rhymes of again and clean contain the cold—the doubled cold—the mother must bear. We cannot distinguish the trajectory here—does it veer toward now/into/flame or again/cold/clean?—but the lines that follow move deeper into this December knowledge:
Lord I ask this much for her,
who knows too well she will go on
missing him until she dies: let rooms
made small by the violence of grief
be amplified by the wan light
the sun hoists up over the inch
of new winter snow.
Hardly a large word, except for “amplified,” and yet the syntax provides a way to amplify the grief through the orchestration of the lines. Boruch’s “rebel thing,” the line that contains the “deeply personal,” announces itself in “who knows too well she will go on,” which on its own almost asks a question. But the speaker of the poem, in his incantation, is also one who knows too well, knows that the mother is the one who must go on while his words can only call down their sympathetic prayer.
Watch the way the lines highlight syntax in the second and third stanzas of “Kin”:
And if, despite all our prayers to Help her,
O Lord, to lay down her burden, she lifts up
her bundle of sadness and sorrow each day,
then let her be comforted by its weight
and the task of carrying it; and if one day,
nearly a year after her son has died,
there’s another occasion for bells,
though this time they chime for a wedding,
and the day, though rain was predicted,
has opened out into yellow and green dresses
winking in the sun and a whirling breeze
that blows open the blues and whites
of suits and shirts and makes kites of ties,
then let the day be joyous even for her.
The opening words generate the mind’s movement with And/then/there’s/though/that/then, while the line ends create their own hint of story: lifts up/each day/weight; one day/bells/wedding; dresses/breeze/kites/joyous. Even for her.
“Kin” contains the insight of a man who knows what it is to suffer loss, confirmed by two poems in the collection about a friend who has recently died of cancer. “The Chair” ends with the image of an empty one filling with snow: “Then my waking sense / of everything missed, and missing again.” The book’s final poem, “Gift,” recounts this same friend’s fierce hold on ordinary things, such as the odor of lilac or the cold of the window glass: “To all of it he said yes.”
Walking with Ruskin also says “yes” to life’s odd synchronicities and pervasive doubts. To walk with Ruskin is to walk the (figurative) line, embracing the details of the world with the hope that they might, in some sense, suffice. Ultimately, the affirmation comes from knowing that the poems, too, are “part of a world so hard to finish loving.” The book’s signature line may be the first of “Why I Live Here”: “Because the view is always partial.” Understanding that nothing reveals itself in all its facets, this poet lives to see through, and around, and within. The view may indeed be “partial,” but Robert Cording’s sure ear and eye let us appreciate the line at work, shaping a sensibility that can begin with “because” and, thirty-one lines later, end with “still surpasses understanding.”