Jason Gray A Preface by Way of Two Brief Reviews Red Rover
By Susan Stewart.
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008.A Treatise of Civil Power
By Geoffrey Hill.
Yale Univ. Press, 2007.
What appeals to me, more and more, are those poets who do not saddle themselves with any one particular style of writing. Especially since we are still suffering from pundits who claim one kind of writing is either antiquated or silly, which is something I find hard to understand. Whatever is useful to the idea meant to be carried across, I'd say is what matters.
Here's an example: Susan Stewart in her new book, Red Rover, ranges in her techniques. Mostly she uses a variety of free verse methodologies (the most dominant, and perhaps best-used, of which is anaphora), but her book does open with a blank verse poem, "The Owl."
I thought somehow a piece of cloth was tossed
into the night, a piece of cloth that flewup, then across, beyond the window.
A tablecloth or handkerchief, a knotsomehow unfolding, folded, pushing through
the thickness of the dark. I thought somehowa piece of cloth was lost beyond the line—
released, although it seemed as if a knotstill hung, unfolding. Some human hand could not
have thrown that high, or lent such force to cloth,and yet I knew no god would mind a square
of air so small. And still it moved and stillit swooped and disappeared beyond the pane.
.............
Stewart handles her meter well (one might kvetch about the missing last stress in line 3, but I suspect Stewart does not intend to keep it exact), and blends the repetition across the breaks. A little further in the poem she marks a shift in the narrative with a shift in the line:
So look it up: you'll find that you could lose
your sense of depth,a leaf, a sheaf
of paper, pillow-case, or heart-
shaped face,a shrieking hiss,
like winds, likedeath, all tangled
there in branches.I called this poem "the owl,"
The name that, like a key, locked out the dark[.]
As the poem loses its depth, so does the line, into a dreamy bit of singsong, the rhymes of leaf and sheaf, the consonance of paper and pillow. She steps back into the blank verse when she returns to discussing this poem, and then, like her line, locks it back into place, into a balanced line of iamb/trochee/spondee/trochee/iamb.
As I mentioned, the book is more indebted to free verse techniques, so I won't spend too much time on it here (though it is a wonderful book throughout), but I would like to pause at another of her formal gifts, her use of repetition. In a ghazal-like poem, "The Cool of the Evening," part of a sequence, "Songs for Adam," she repeats the paraphrased Biblical verse of the title.
Do you know every herb and seed?
he asked as he walked in the cool of the evening(This god has intent and direction,
he knows where he's going in the cool of the evening)Would you like to stay in the garden?
he asked as he walked in the cool of the evening(This god has the leisure and means
to walk in the cool of the evening)
The poem breaks here, into the middle 8 as it were, describing the singular tree in this garden, and then returns for two more couplets before the last:
Cover your face with your hands and run,
cover yourselves and run.
The poem loses its refrain but retains its direct address by God to Adam and Eve, who are told to run, as they will never walk with the leisure of the garden again.
Much has already been made of Geoffrey Hill's difficulty, but not much of his beauty. A Treatise of Civil Power, his most recent of a spate of recent books (and God bless Yale University Press for realizing the gaping hole left when Hill lost his American publisher). The book dwells often with Milton, Cromwell, and the seventeenth-century British power struggle, and it is not an easy task to keep up with Hill's depth of historical and linguistical knowledge. But that's also part of the fun.
Roughly speaking, Hill was a strict metrist in his earliest work (with the exception of the prose poems of Mercian Hymns), moving into a free, though heavily stressed (to the point of adding stress marks for the reader) in his trilogy, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, and The Orchards of Syon. He came back to a more flexible and personalized meter in his latest books (moving from it to various free verse lines). In "To the Lord Protector Cromwell," Hill combines blank verse lines with an extremely fracturing technique of assigning each line to a section. Here is the first part of in a sequence of four.
1
Cut our loss. Make Prognosticks a back-list.2
For labour of petty conundrums use3
any commonplace book as model: strings4
of synonyms, cramped maxims, anecdotes5
nine-tenths botched in conveyance. Turtle is first6
found in the Protectorate, meaning of course7
the sea-tortoise; something having to do8
with English sailors. England went maritime9
and imperial; stared the world down;10
rousing her own ire. Keep to this strong voice11
like Milton's sonnet with its single purpose;12
your known affect for Jewry and for music;13
far-sighted blindness as the reach of vision;14
like Burford's Levellers raked into their mounds.
Hard not to notice the poem is fourteen lines—the length of the sonnet, the single most exemplary poetic template in English (and referenced here as well), broken into its basic units. The disjointed nature of the two styles increases the tension and ambivalence over the work of the English civil war.
But to get to the beauty I mentioned. See "G. F. Handel, Opus 6," a brief musical ekphrastic on Handel's Concerti Grossi, taken in part from his opera Imeneo:
Monumentality and bidding: words
neither yours nor mine, but like his music.
Stalwart and tender by turns, the fugues
and larghettos, staid, bürgerlich,
up to the wide gaunt leaps of invention.
.............
Hill works his meter across technical terms, foreign words, into the beautiful work of that fifth line, which sweeps along in those first three syllables, only to jump from each of the next three, to land into the delicate, yet twisted, pyrrhic-trochee of "of invention." Beautiful, but not simply so.
"Stalwart and tender"—much like Hill himself. His poems are hard-edged, a massive bulk against the push of history, and yet still delight and engage.All this to get to our poems here, in issue three of volume two of Unsplendid, closing out year two of our venture. We have poets here making use of of meter and other formal techniques in their individual ways, like Caitlin Doyle's meditation on turning "Thirteen":
There were twelve branches in your father's book,
twelve kinds of precious stone; there were twelve loaves
and twelve bright springs but now there's a month
no calendar brings and now there's an hour no church-bell rings.
There were twelve gates and twelve golden cups
and twelve fruits in the tree twelve white pillars
and twelve tall sons but now there's a gate where no boy swings.
There are as many years in you as petals on a black-eyed sue,
seats at the last supper, spades in a deck; no sense to hang
a cross around your neck or throw salt over your shoulder.
Your mother stiffens when you hold her.
Your mother pulls away and you remain on the steps
of the school. She won't come again before the fall
begins to turn; it may be too late then for all but snow and nests below the leaves
and trees whose shaking is uncontrollable
The expansive heterometric lines, 5, 6, 7 feet, the gaps, all working towards the idea of leaving "twelve," a perfect number, into the uncharted realms of "thirteen," that awkward prime of a number.
Or take a look at Stefi Weisburd's syllabic rewrite of The Lord's Prayer:
ado rat ion
Our one our
all who art
the sky God
thy dub Thy
lay did hap
Thy bid was
due for the
sea and the
air Lot out
per day our
rye and nan
Rub out our
sin yet the
kin sin too
Rev not our
yen Nix out
ill hex For
the cog the
vim and the
awe are you
Now and for
the end day
All say yea
Weisburd's compacting of the language of the central Christian prayer, while retaining the use of cetain old word forms ("art," "thy," "yea") mixed with more contemporary diction ("nix," "cog," and the inclusion of a non-Western "nan" bread), keeps the poem reverant without falling into saccharine praise, skeptical without being bombastic.
I am glad to see so many poets make use of these traditional techniques in ways that can handle twenty-first century language and ideas. I hope you enjoy this issue's offerings.
Columbus, OH
August 30, 2009