[MacArthur]

Sleeping Out at Easter

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
As my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

The above is the first two stanzas of a poem by James Dickey…and not one of his best. It is conspicuously written in an anapestic trimeter— a meter Dickey employed frequently in his early volumes of poetry which qualified him as a Formalist for a while. The meter loosened as the years passed:

I lay in the country and dreamed
Of the substance and course of the river
While the different colors of fever

Like quilt patches flickered upon me.
At last I arose, with the poison
Gone out of the seam of the scar,

And brought my wife eastward and weeping,
Through the copper fields springing alive
With the promise of harvest for no one.
The Poisoned Man (conclusion)

Eventually Dickey wrote in a kind of free-verse that approximated tetrameter or trimeter, iambic or anapestic, in various combinations— running from about 8 to 12 syllables. It is basically normative of what has become the Mainstream style of post-WWII American poetry. Dickey may not have been the first to craft a style like this, but he’s one of the best, and supplies a clear example.

It all starts with Williams, of course. Williams apprenticed himself in Late-Victorian metered verse…and occasionally wrote nearly-metered pieces as a mature poet— eg. The Yachts and The Kermiss— apparently for fun, and old time’s sake. Meantime, he liberated himself in the Early-Modernist minaturist models…learning to write with terse phrasing, short lines and breathless enjambment.

Not much rhythm inside the line though— the compressed spaces of minaturism simply won’t allow it. When Williams became dissatisfied with these constraints he let his line stretch out a bit— to about 6 to 10 syllables— while keeping the sharp enjambments and rapidly shifting line lengths he’d become accustomed to from his minaturist practice: his line could once again become a convincing vehicle for rhythm and discrete units of sense. Williams’ line could carry 3-4 accents, as well as the 1-2 common in minaturist poetry.

One senses that Williams himself never became entirely comfortable with the new rhythmic space he’d provided for himself. He saw himself as a conscious adversary of the entire metrical Tradition, and so deliberately crafted his lines to make them as little as possible resemble regular trimeters and tetrameters. He also pursued a vague adherence to the same Realist aesthetic as Edgar Lee Masters, which exerted a further constraint against anything that sounded “lyrical” or “musical” in his verse (bad things in a poem?).

A kind of extreme parody of Williams’ evolved-style was faddish in the 80’s, and rightly or wrongly was known as “Iowa School”, after the influential MFA program. The consistently enjambed lines and varied line-lengths, together with the studiedly pedestrian content, defeat any experience of this dull and uninspired “writing” as poetry at all, whether heard or read silently. Most of it’s adherents had to seek some external validation in the swarmy Political Correctness of the period. The “movement” is dead pretty much anywhere outside New York (the great tail-ender of modern American literature). In New York, the tin-earred (indeed, wholly insensible) critic Helen Vendler still promotes this type of life-less verse.

It’s a consistent hypothesis of mine that aspects of metrical tradition that are side-lines within that tradition can be mined to awesome effect when taken just outside the strictures of that tradition. Even a poet of Robert Frost’s promethean abilities could not lift the trimeter or tetrameter line above it’s non-serious connotations…as long as he wrote regular trimeter or tetrameter. But look what happens when you loosen them up.

Departure
(for Tonya)

Because it was a weekend morning,
You lounged awhile in the dustlight
Of your small room on 14th Street,
In that house like an old movie set.

I think maybe you sipped capuccino
And smoked one ginseng cigarette,
Watching the neon of the liquor store
Lose itself under increasing sun

And raising the window to let the reluctant
Spring breeze bother your camisole,
You danced a moment to no apparent
Music--that city already strange.

And already your dozen or so friends
Seemed strangers. In one cruel week
We'd turned away from you, as if
To lose you before you were gone.

Left utterly alone, there is nothing
The heart can invent to numb itself.
All around you on the hardwood floor,
Your old life darkened in cardboard boxes.

I think, now, of those twenty black hats,
Black haloes your face paled under;
Jewelry, photographs, a few precious books;
Little shoes in which to make your exit.

If love is an awkward, scriptless scene
To be played out between two people,
I cannot write it: I am a pattern
Of breath and sleep that city will outlive.

And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.

East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget.

If I could look forward, I could see us
In Houston, in Atlanta--that South
No train will take us to, that South
We lost ourselves in so long ago.

And those cities, so far removed
In distance and time--can our small stars
Survive those bright lights? Our language
Be heard above the din of the million?

Tonight, a hundred miles away,
Our city, made of circles and squares,
Must be much the same as it was:
The bars, the buildings, the streets empty of lovers.

It is a city we can never
Return to--a dream, a green light,
An unfound door closed upon the past.
Our words echo through it and fade.

Joe Bolton

There are a lot of undergraduate features to the Bolton…but, seriously folks!— who wouldn’t rather read this, than say…Jorie Graham?