Reflexive Poetics · 2020. 1. 17. · Reflexive Poetics: A Critical Anthology ix Sounds [of] sudden...

Reflexive Poetics

Reflexive Poetics: A Critical Anthology

By

Ethan Lewis

Reflexive Poetics: A Critical Anthology, by Ethan Lewis

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Ethan Lewis

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3998-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3998-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Frank Stokes among the Masters

Epilogue............................................................................................... 10 Stokes among the Pig Poets

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 The Sound Poetographer

Epilogue............................................................................................... 27 Reflections on Masasam

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 38 The Sophypoetics of Blake Scranton

Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 58 Illinois Prosodies of John Knoepfle and Carolyn Rodgers

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 78 Precipitation—The Poetry of Corrine Frisch

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 91 Under the Light of the Moon: “Impressions,” “Words,” Revelation

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 110 “We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms”

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 123 Daze Dawn

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 139 A Certain Dignity

Table of Contents vi

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 151 Inside The Outsider

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 161 Blackston's “rainbow / of iron”

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 175 Under Western Eyes

Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 192 Considered Space

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 204 Her Studied Gandering

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 215 Aaron Wayne’s World

Index of Names........................................................................................ 219

PREFACE

Passion for this project stems from my belief in the quality of the subjects’ work, and from sensitivity to chance—or to what Jorge Luis Borges calls “Fate[:] the name that we give the infinite and unceasing operation of thousands of intertwined causes.”1 “It is tremendously important that great poetry be written,” notes Ezra Pound. “It makes no jot of difference who writes it.”2 This comment makes some polemic, but still more prescriptive sense, as evaluative of our present situation. Some great poetry (never mind the far larger quantity of trash) is emerging—from who knows how many circles of devoted craftfolk. Regularly, one circle, or a figure therein, is justifiably discovered and celebrated; and consequently, influences several later coteries—the few of whom that happen to be recognized in turn exerting sway on the generation following. Hence, literary history proceeds. Yet that other exemplary artists might have set the trend I do not doubt. Thomas Gray laments “Some mute inglorious Milton,” in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.3 These days our comparably unheralded Jory Grahams, Charles Simics, Billy Collinses, and Robert Blys might prove “inglorious” simply; hardly “mute,” or only relatively so, in proportion to their number of fortunate, albeit few, readers.

For the poets themselves, then, who writes acknowledgeably great poetry makes all the difference, for reasons of prosperity and impact. Likewise, to a lesser extent, the nation’s poetry lovers have a stake in who garners renown. Only friends and fellows attuned to the local lyric scene will own access to area gems. Yet the wider public interested in verse will know solely the (deservedly) acclaimed bards—to that clientele’s enjoyment, true enough. But who can say they might not have garnered more, for instance, from Corrine Frisch than from Frank Bidart; or in fairness, more in Bidart via Frisch and vice-versa. The central tenet of this text holds, with Eliot and Frost—a not so unlikely coupling as might be thought, hence a perfect pair to introduce my modus operandi—that we read relationally. “No artist…has his meaning alone.” “We read…C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation.”4 (This contention, in conjunctionwith Frost’s commonsensical fiat to “start somewhere,” i.e., upon

Preface viii

particular text A, is amplified in Chapter 5, concerning Carolyn Rodgersand John Knoepfle, together and separately.)

“We read,” in part, concedes Harold Bloom, “because we cannot know enough people.”5 With pleasure, then, let me acquaint you with Ms.Frisch’s elegant wordplay; Blake Scranton’s wit; Kit Stokes’ mastery of craft; Siobhan and David Pitchford’s moving sonnet dialogue; with the humor and uncanny aptitude for rhyme brandished by Sam B. Davis; the intensity of Mike Mikus, and pyrotechnics of Daniel Blackston; with the quiet transcendence in Kenneth Sibley and Martha Whitaker-McGill,the education in silence through which transcendence speaks as taught by Ryan Reeves, and of the searching bestowal of voice by Aaron Wayneupon those silenced. Close analyses of these poets, and of the more noted, though not nearly enough read Rodgers, Knoepfle, Rosina Neginsky, and Lee Gurga accompany selections from their work. The anthologized portions of this text are dictated by representational exigency. To varying degrees my essays incorporate the poets’ works. When information as to purchase of their chap-books exists, I’ve included it. Yet though explicitly endorsing reading them, I advance a larger argument about poets in all our respective midst, and about the boon of critical reflection on good poems, however well- or un-known, in relation to each other. The methodology is universally applicable.

For of other poets in our circle I might well have written, and may someday if opportunity allows. The coincidental moment of releasing the particular chapbooks treated here, with my ‘sabbaticals’ from writing about Shakespeare, and Eliot and Pound, dictated this congeries. Indeed, this text might have comprised an entirely different array of poets—just as I could have spent the bulk of my scholarly time on Jonson instead of Shakespeare, Williams and Stevens rather than Eliot and Pound. Authors worth writing about will always outnumber literary critics. No doubt we in this valley (why, I’ve oft wondered, is our swathe of plain called a valley) live in lyric-rich soil (—and in this case, semantics proves fortuitous for verse derives “from the Latin versus, a turning round as of a plough at the end of a furrow”6). Still more untapped resources, pockets of poets perhaps solely familiar with one another, subsist throughout this country, throughout this world. “Beautiful thing,” Williams’ refrain for so much beheld in his native Paterson, New Jersey,7 I would here apply to two phenomena:

“Beautiful thing,” the human mind; “Beautiful thing,” language, when cared for by a human mind answering in turn, through

Reflexive Poetics: A Critical Anthology ix

Sounds [of] sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise.8

To return to Pound’s imperative, and meld it with Borges’ belief that a masterwork might be composed by most anyone.9 Might “must be written” remark a matter of fact? Is it not likely that our human condition, conditioned by our verbal medium, necessitates creation of great poetry? Consider our outrage at the strictures on expression in so many nations. We react as though what’s natural as breathing were proscribed; that reaction may disclose a truth.

We oughtn’t designate a poet brilliant by virtue of a single extraordinary piece, or even three, or ten. Yet the specific poem that does so shine is informed by, and informs through comparison with works of like caliber, to distinguish both works’ strengths, dominant and nuanced. That critical premise dictates this volume’s numerous settings of proven authors side by side those who have proved themselves in our small sphere. To reiterate, the similitudes and contrasts enhance appreciation mutually: enable reading Simic more enjoyably in Scranton’s light; so, too, Crane in context with Blackston; as Davis within Kooser’s radius, Stokes Robinson’s, etc. Relations never run one-way. In each personal, timeless canon, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present by the past.” Eliot likewise observes “the existing order complete before the new work arrives”;10 and yet we can never garner quality enough, of poems or people—not simply to extend our knowledge but to enrich what we already possess.

In same spirit of augmentation, my “End Notes” to each piece form an intrinsic part of the interpretive apparatus.11 Constant interruption of the essays for recourse to detailed digressions I thoroughly discourage—one would no more frequently refer to the essays, having plunged into the poems. The supplemental matter is purposely not placed beneath the large print text, which the small might fancifully overwhelm in a turf battle for dominion of the page. But neither are all notes clumped at the close, in essence as an ancillary appendix. Rather, the corresponding comments appear at each chapter’s end, to be brooded on at one’s leisure; but still I urge the reading of these. For to ply Joseph Frank’s terms, the criticism conveys spatially, not to the extent of some Modernist texts, which “sacrifice syntactic[] sequence…for a structure depending on… disconnected word-groups.”12 Instead, the sense sounds, as with constellated poems mutually reflecting, by means of “The complete consort dancing together”; or by what Knoepfle, who belongs in Eliot’s company, states more simply and as poetically: “confluence.”13 The Notes

Preface x

also exhibit, or suggest, still further relational possibilities between poets toward reading each more productively in others’ light. The chief premise of this text concerns lighting. To return to Frost’s “Prerequisites”: “The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.”

Notes1 Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Iniquity [1935], Collected Fictions,trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998) 16. Of the “intertwined causes” catalyzing this anthology, two merit special mention: Yvor Winters’ Poets of thePacific series (1937, 1949), through which Winters, Janet Lewis Winters, Edgar Bowers, and especially J.V. Cunningham first received national exposure; and the mode (including placement) of critical notes introduced to me by F.O. Mathiessen. (Vide infra.)2 “A Retrospect” [1918], Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 10. 3 Full many a purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. (ll. 53-60 [1751])

Gray’s lines companioning my contention are again remarked in the first of this text’s critiques, on Frank Stokes. 4 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1917], Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932) 4; Robert Frost, “The Prerequisites” [1954]; rpt. in Elaine Barry, Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1973) 139. Rodgers, Reeves, Mikus, Davis all lead us to comparative scrutiny of Eliot. Sibley, Stokes do that office for Frost. 5 Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) 19, 29. With this comment, like so many proffered by that critical titan, I wholeheartedly concur—as much as fundamentally reject his recent calculation of but “20 or so good [American] poets.” As quoted in The Boston Globe 8 January 2006 (Wesley Yang, “Poets, Inc.”) 6 John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) 4. 7 Including, significantly, an anthology, “suppressed” in the quotidian yet “revived even by the dead” through the purging fire (also a “Beautiful thing”) that immolates the town library (Paterson III.ii). “In the local inheres the universal”

Reflexive Poetics: A Critical Anthology xi

trumpets as a battle-cry throughout Williams’ oeuvre. His poetics are examined in the chapter on Ryan Reeves. 8 Cf. “Of Modern Poetry,” ll.21-23, Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose(New York: ALP, 1997) 219. Stevens’ presence in our anthology rivals Eliot’s and Pound’s; yet discussion of poems by the Modern Weatherman occurs mainly in the preface about Ms. Frisch. 9 Cf. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain.” “’Thinking, meditating, imagining, are not anomalous acts—they are the normal respiration of the intelligence.’” That “‘great literature’ is the commonest thing in the world” grossly overstates; but supposing “no man or woman…not a writer, potentially or in fact” brooks considerable validity. (Borges, Collected Fictions, 95, 107-8, 111) 10 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 5. Let me underscore the comparisons undertaken as principally, the with type (“between objects regarded as essentially of the same order”), vis-à-vis the to (“between objects regarded as of essentially a different order.”) That is to state again, the poems herein held to the light of their illustrious predecessors merit the collation, to as much “point out or imply [informing] resemblances” as “differences.” Commendably, Strunk and White limn this distinction, but not thoroughly enough, linking “resemblance” to to, “difference” with with. (The Elements of Style [Macmillan, 1959] 43.) Clearly, in relating texts of (at least) comparable quality, similitude and variance, similitude in variance, and variance in similitude, are all potentially operative. 11 These prefatory end notes superficially display the myriad tasks their subsequent brethren undertake. Of course, as here, citations and elaborations occur throughout the addenda. But so also in them are contained other close readings, often cast asdetailed comparisons; discussions of poetics (e.g., of gradations in diction, prosodic rationale, unconventional representational modes); and a reiterated hermeneutic—for a method of reading predicated on response to, and awareness of, how words convey what they do. Even metaphysical speculations broaching ethics (—on, for instance, relational identity; or concerning the limitation of knowledge as among the things we learn—) are lent scope in these sometimes not so tiny pensees. Never, though, do I take liberties with the reader, in the manner of Professor Kinbote: Nabokov’s ingenious alter ego who displays how annotation can run awry. My remarks are always founded in textual interpretation. Admittedly, this note itself attests to its author’s passion for the mini-genre; and contends for (what he hopes you find) beneficial provisions of verbal off-ramps, toward productively harnessing energies. Counterpointing the many graceful lines of the poets, the commentary is, admittedly, and necessarily, dense (in the positive sense of that term). Those familiar with F.O. Mathiessen and Stephen Booth shall already be accustomed to my method. Of others I ask your patience. No criticism satisfies in the same way as does reading a poem; still, an interpretive approach should be enjoyed, even if (sometimes, especially in)precluding satisfaction with the poem by prompting more questions about it. I would informatively entertain by virtue of extensive scrutiny. 12 Cf. the seminal essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which premiered in Sewannee Review 53 (1945); rpt. in Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis

Preface xii

and Mastery in Modern Literature (Rutgers, 1963). 13 Cf. Little Gidding, V.225, last of the Four Quartets (Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 144); and the discussion of Knoepfle’s signature term in Chapters 5, 14 following. As has already been instanced with Gray, Williams (herald of “the news” in poems [Asphodel II]) and Stevens (“The theory of poetry is the life of poetry” [Adagia]), we shall oft apply lyric lines as critique. By like token, prose from leaders of double-lives as poets and critics services this book as an analytic reservoir.

The principal texts anthologized

Stokes, Frank. Bethel Grove: Sonnets from “The Village Daybook.” Springfield, IL: Golden Belle Press. 2002.

Davis, Sam B. Poetographs: Selected Poems. Dawson, IL: d[avis] I[ndependent] P[rojects]. 2005.

Scranton, Blake T. Gray Matters. Springfield, IL: Gray Matter Press. 2003.

Knoepfle, John. poems from the sangamon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1985.

Rodgers, Carolyn M. The Heart as Ever Green. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978.

Frisch, Corrine. Seasonal Affections. Springfield, IL: Black Crow Press. 2003.

Nezhinskaya, Rosina. Under the Light of the Moon. New York: Slovo-Word. 2002. Dancing Over the Precipice. Slovo-Word. 2005.

Pitchford, Siobhan and David. Dialogue: An Intimate Conversation in Sonnets. Springfield, IL: Daybreak Press. 2004.

Pitchford, Siobhan. Through the Longing Daze. Springfield, IL: Daybreak Press. 2004.

Sibley, Ken. A Certain Dignity. Rochester, IL: Sibley-Gray Press. 1997. 2002.

Mikus, Michael. The Outsider. Blackston, Daniel. Shaman Flowers. Springfield, IL: Pitch-Black Press.

2006. Gurga, Lee. The Measure of Emptiness. Foster City, CA: Press Here.

1991. Reeves, Ryan. ár-wéla. Springfield, IL: Hull Press. 2005. Whitaker-McGill, Martha. Goose Ganders at Washington Park. Dawson,

IL: dIP. 2006. Wayne, Aaron. Ford Heights: A Long Poem.

CHAPTER ONE

FRANK STOKES AMONG THE MASTERS

If verse can liven worlds that truth disowns, No epitaph need grace the poet’s bones.

Stokes' mentor, Frost, insisted on form as a constant for "going on with."1

Hence, as Stokes returned to Springfield to compose poetry after experiments in living out west and writing fiction; so the plots of Bethel Grove needed native "soil," as it were, the sonnet genre so congenial to Stokes, that they might flourish. Structurally, the whole of Grove owns sonnet-like intricacies. It purports to represent one fifth of "an imaginary township" via sonnets mailed to the daily paper "throughout the thirties, as few as seven in some years and as many as twenty in others."2 But these texts were suppressed for sixty years, until a later editor of the Sentinelculled them from the archives. It is not precisely true, then, that "these voices do not speak from the graveyard"3 as do Masters' Spoon River denizens. The former are further distanced through distillation of (primarily) a single point of view (whereas, the shades in the Anthologysupposedly speak for themselves); and through the prism of a complex form (—Spoon River is related in free verse). But voice is still moreproblematized. Most of the poems make a pretense of narrating in first person; the acknowledged ventriloquist, one “Arnold Sasser,” no village rolls record; and that author in turn attributes the design (and a baker's dozen of the sonnets) to another resident, young, doomed Christopher Baines—verifiable, though silenced by a hit-and run. "Beside the bed I sensed a mind in chains," records the nominal sonneteer about the invalid:

By winking as I traced the alphabet, He spelled out poems—and this world awoke!

(“Arnold Sasser,” 4.9-10)

One might begin to suspect that Gary Bullock—the paper’s editor presumably entrusted with what Sasser supposedly expanded from Baines—himself concocted The Daybook and the attendant machinery. That is,

Chapter One 2

until the reader recalls that all these names serve as sobriquets for a poet presiding in Springfield, Illinois.

Why this matrix of Chinese boxes, not so much recalling Frost (content enough with rhyme and meter) as Borges? Because Stokes not only requires forms within which he creates; he also loves to create forms, be they sonnets or larger, more singular, structures. The architectonics of Bethel Grove are analogous to those of a novel or symphony—or yes, of a contemporary lyric epic (q.v. Paterson, The Bridge, Spoon River Anthology): open in design yet still subject to rigorous logic; for, saith TheWaste Land poet, "freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation."4

I would surmise another reason for the plan, incidentally consistent (for he harbors little ambition) with mentioning Stokes alongside recognized artists; more consciously on Stokes' part, in complement to a couplet resonant throughout the text:

If verse can liven worlds that truth disowns, No epitaph need grace the poet's bones.

(“Arthur Cowan, D.Litt.,” 13-14)

To quote another poet from the pantheon, Bethel Grove "is [Frank Stokes'] letter to the world," committed to whose "hands [he] cannot see";5 the volume and quality of whose response, save for simply reading, matters not a wit. Because fame is happenstance, the wit must matter (as must the occasional transcendent glimpse6) first to the poet—and then to that audience fortunate enough to encounter him.

In this vein, Stokes recommends (aptly via the village sexton)Thomas Gray "To blunt the anguish of that coming day."7 Gray's fame rests largely on his Elegy about the country churchyard where, but for connections ensuring a public, he'd have been buried. Instead he lies in Poet's Corner, Westminster, and deservedly so. For every lauded one, the elegist opines, there might exist who knows how many "mute inglorious Milton[s]"8. One of these could turn up anywhere—say, in Springfield, such that his muteness becomes relative. The test inheres in his talent for "liven[ing] worlds that truth disowns."

The specter of Percival Sharp, thought by some his author's double, issues a similar envoi:

It is all very well, but for myself I know I stirred certain vibrations in Spoon River Which are my true epitaph, more lasting than stone.9

Frank Stokes among the Masters 3

Stokes duly redeems his noted indebtedness to Edgar Lee Masters. The technique of interlocked narratives, comprising "panels" or "tryptichs" to tell a tale or limn a theme,10 Stokes has mimed, even to the point of adapting the masterplot that loosely synthesizes the Anthology. Of course, a tyrant’s immoral mortgage over a town rings familiarly in any era—though his subsequent comeuppance is rarely sounded, as it is in both texts. (And in neither Spoon River nor Bethel Grove have the villains the undeserved dignity of closure: Ralph Rhodes' legacy is quashed by his dipsomaniac son; all that attests to the Tarr family name is a park "catty-corner from the Dairy Queen."11) Stokes' telling names, far less loaded than Masters', wear better. Instead of Margaret Fuller Slack, Jonathan Swift Somers, and their overdetermined ilk, Arnold (namesake of another moralizing pedagogue) Sasser teases the town folk—notably Arthur Cowan (not Conan), D. Litt. (not Doyle; and Dr., not Sir), who is asked to unmask Bethel's bard. Cowan characteristically clues us in as he declines surmise:

The Sasser nom de plume may cloak a crank Whose idiot savant's a fiction too. Rather than spend our time wondering who Composed this quasi-literary prank, Take it for what it seems, the poet's frank Yet timeless sketch—his prairie Xanadu.

(Arthur Cowan, D. Litt., 3-8)

Yet this subtler playing (I took the liberty to italicize) points again to Frank Stokes' craft. Even his hokey names have melodious torque, compared with which "Hod Putt," "Ida Chicken," "Judge Selah Lively," etc. betray the stand-up comic in Masters. Indeed, "Tolliver Brink, the Brakeman" of Stokesville recalls, in rhyme and clinking syllables, E.A. Robinson's poemscape: Tilbury, home to Reuben Bright and Miniver Cheevy.

The similar approach along with like prosodic concerns make comparison with Robinson (usually the more cryptic, though not so in this sonnet) inevitable:

Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night,

Chapter One 4

And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

Better than most, old Walt could read the skies And sense what coming season's storms would bring— The wood he cut each fall sufficed till spring And never did a flood evoke surprise. He'd hold back planting at an east wind's rise And speed his harvest if the ducks took wing Beneath a moon that wore a ghostly ring— Tomorrow's world alive before his eyes.

So when senility struck down his wife, He left the fields and tended Rose until He was himself a stranger to her sight. Then Walt, who'd learned from farming all his life To gauge a winter by the darkened chill, Took leave with Rose through Smith and Wesson's light.12

Each piece yields a catalogue of little excellences. To name a few: their initial complexity (ought one to think Bright not a brute because a butcher? Is Walt better than most generally?); foreshadowing (more concentrated in Stokes: "what coming season's storms would bring"); irony (again with Stokes, not only via the whole but compressed within a single line: "Tomorrow's world alive before his eyes"); the needed narrative compression offset neatly by casual tone ("For when they told him that his wife must die"; "So when senility struck down his wife"); arresting imagery(more concrete in Stokes: contrast "cried like a great baby, And made the women cry to see him cry," to "speed his harvest if the ducks took wing Beneath a moon that wore a ghostly ring"); felicitous phrasing (Robinson's syncopated last four lines; Stokes' suggestive final pair). And as our subject adds an extra layer of meaning through allusion to "Mr. Flood's Party,"13

another piece by Robinson is retrospectively enriched. Superimpose "Took leave with Rose through Smith and Wesson's light" upon:

So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.14


Eliot found it "not preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." According to Eliot, too, "there is no competition—There is only the fight to recover what has been lost."15 This comparative exercise aimed simply to reiterate that Frank Stokes, however unrecognized he remains, belongs with E.A. Robinson among poetry's elite.

Stokes consolidates that membership by recovering the lost art of the couplet. Given the sonnet type he prefers—a traditional Petrarchan, where the quatrains within the octave (abba/abba), and sometimes 'twixt octave and sestet (abbaabba/acca), link; yet compassing within the Italianate pattern an English close (dd):—given this hybrid form (likewise favored by Donne), more coupletings accrue than would normally in sonnets.16

The rhymes connecting sections also facilitate furthering thought beyond artificial quatrain bounds. Hence, Stokes operates paradoxically—though additional couplets increase chances for 'poetic effects,' the compounded semantic units approximate conversation:

The first tornado or the last hard freeze— I mark the dates in records that I keep, No wind too cold, no snow too deep To calculate in inches or degrees. I'm partial to a good storm, one where trees Are tossed and barns leveled by winds that sweep The prairie clean, howling while churchmen sleep—Better the Real than dreams that slyly tease. (“Phineas Fletcher,” 1-8)

We can read the last line as Stokes' prosodic credo. Heeding what Wordsworth decreed, but confessed could not always follow,17 he elicits lyricism intrinsic to common language.

That effect is rendered metrically as well. The iambic pattern is modeled on actual speech.18 Just occasionally alter the foot—substitute two spondees and two trochees, in this passage ("good storm"; "barns leveled"; "howling"; "Better")—and the poetry becomes apparent.

Yet familiar diction and rhythm notwithstanding, a couplet, especially the final one, often sounds sententious. Stokes unabashedly turns this to advantage, enhancing his idiom—most notably, when descanting on art:

Here are the lives whose patterns Sasser rhymed ... Wandering shadows of another day, Untangled strands that once were macramé.

(“Prologue: Gary Bullock, 9.13-14)

Chapter One 6

—or (as witnessed):

If verse can liven worlds that truth disowns, No epitaph need grace the poet's bones.

Even there, however, the "If...[then]" rhetorical paradigm intimates plain-spokenness. And of course macramé is plied by grandmothers.

Two members of that citizenry (one a would-be grandmother—"How sacred should a barren union be?"—) summarize in their last couplets Frank Stokes' situation:

If luck is all, then God's a metaphor Who rolls the dice and lets the cash keep score. (Madge Puckett)

Our shaky hopes contend with brutal fact. What good's a new deal if the deck is stacked? (Isabelle Brach)19

Dropping names as Stokes does rhymes, this essay maintains that the (actual) author of The Village Daybook could just as well be well-known. Chance or fate might continue to dictate otherwise; but like fictive towns, aesthetic economies own the advantage of profiting anyone engaged therein. "Wayfarers" will find a "good...deal" to celebrate in Bethel Grove.20

Notes1 Letter to The Amherst Student, printed in the issue of 25 March 1935. Reprinted in Elaine Barry, Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1973) 113. The import of Frost's particular locution, vis-a-vis "falling back upon," cannot be overemphasized regarding either his work or Stokes'. For both poets, form functions first as impetus, then contains; among form's contents: forms. Contrast the postmodern stance expressed by Creeley (quoted by Olson): "Form is never more than an extension of content" ("Projective Verse" [1950] Postmodern American Poetry: The Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover [1994] 614) 2 Frank Stokes, Bethel Grove: Sonnets from "The Village Daybook" (Springfield, IL: Golden Bell, 2002) 1. 3 Stokes, "Prefatory Note" to Bethel Grove. There, and in a fine piece by Corrine Frisch, which initiated more recognition, he acknowledges Masters' influence. (See Frisch, "Fellow Traveler: Poet Frank Stokes breathes life into an imaginary town," Illinois Times, 28.39 [2003]: 6-7.) 4 T.S. Eliot, "Reflections on 'Vers Libre'" (1917), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Orlando: Harcourt, 1975) 35.


5 Cf. Emily Dickinson, Poem No. 441, 1-2, 5-6, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961) 211. 6 Caught, e.g., in "Hilda Tanner"—

The leaves desert the purple ash once more, To ride the west wind east and disappear (1-2)

—or by the prayer for "the pilgrim soul to climb To where the thunderheads blot out the skies" ("George Tansy," 7-8). [64, 117]

7 "Arlen Crawford, Undertaker," 6-7 (68). 8 Thomas Gray (1716-1771), Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 59 (The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950, chosen by Helen Gardner [1972] 444.)9 Edgar Lee Masters, "Percival Sharp," 25-27, Spoon River Anthology [1915] (New York: Signet, 1992) 155. May Swenson first identified Sharp's as Masters' epitaph, and in his foreword to Spoon River John Hollander concurs (xxiii). 10 Hollander, "Introduction," xvii-xviii. 11 Cf. Masters, "Ralph Rhodes,” 132; Stokes' "Note" to "Agatha Tarr," 114. 12 Tilbury Town: Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Macmillan, 1953) 48; Stokes, "Walt Jasonby," Bethel Grove, 69. To reiterate, all sonnets voiced in third person are attributed to Christopher Baines, the young man "primed to write the songs of Bethel, set in epic strains" ("Arnold Sasser," 3-4)— until run down, apparently, by the suitably surnamed banker Ezra Tarr. Only Baines' supposed amanuensis, Sasser; and Tarr's alleged mistress, Dodie Breckenridge (Baines' aunt), apparently share with Tarr the knowledge of his guilt, for which the banker seemingly feels no compunction. That these references are of necessity couched with qualifiers underscores the refractions Stokes engenders. He built a marvelous instrument to satisfy his prose desires. 13 “Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon Again, and we may not have many more; The bird is on the wing, the poet says. The resonant imagery underscores transience—more overtly, in Robinson, as a foreshadowing in Stokes. Perhaps illusion of a pair implicit in the “moon[’s] ghostly ring” owes something to the “two moons listening” in “Flood,” during the most poignant passage in Robinson’s poem, reprising “silver loneliness” (ll. 47,45; Tilbury Town, 102) 14 "Richard Cory," Tilbury Town, 38,102. 15 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), in Eliot's SelectedEssays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932) 5; "East Coker," second of Eliot's Four Quartets (V.186), The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980) 128. 16 In the most recent version (one hopes more shall come a la Whitman’s Leaves)115 of the 121 'Italian' sonnets feature three quatrains and a couplet. Hence, though only five of the 126 (coincidentally the number comprising the Bard’s first sequence) are set in Shakespearean mode (abab cdcd efefgg), a pronounced

Chapter One 8

'British' structure is ghosted into the sequence. Like any aficionado, Stokes capitalizes on the varied rhetorical options posited by the explicit and implicit structuring. As the sonnets are supposedly selected from The Daybook, we might surmise behind the Sasser ruse a larger pool of pieces actually withheld from the anthology. These would warrant study for, among other reasons, gauging Stokes' rationale behind including a predominant model. Absent knowledge about a larger oeuvre, I would venture that the greater rhyming opportunities influenced his decision. 17 It is too oft ignored that Wordsworth conceded thus in his famed "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800). Though the poet "aspires to adopt the very language of men," his idiom "must in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered...in real life, under the actual pressure of...passions" (The Oxford Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill [1984] 600, 604). Wordsworth recognized tonal modulation as essential:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; (207)

Lines 5-7 transcend the prior homely utterance that stays "too much with" the world wherein common discourse functions. Even so, the inversion and archaism in the first quatrain challenge the notion that "verse...that can say anything...will not be 'poetry' all the time. It will only be 'poetry,'" Eliot continues, "when the dramatic situation has reached such a point of intensity that poetry becomes the natural utterance" ("Poetry and Drama," On Poetry and Poets [London: Faber and Faber, 1957] 74). Wordsworth's verses demonstrate gradations between the "intensely," and more mildly, poetic. Yet his prosodic ideal is shared by Stokes, who intended Bethel Grove as "a book of poetry for people who do not ordinarily read poetry at all" (quoted by Frisch [7]). His lyric idiom is always manifest though often self-effacing: analogous to guest-rooms primped with "feed-sack curtains for the homey touch." Yet Stokes need but slightly intensify his lighting to elevate the text:

Add some paint, a new linoleum floor, Some feed-sack curtains for the homey touch— Don't have to make it seem a fine hotel. Wayfarers in a strange land don't need much. "Martha Bateman," 11-14; e.a.) 18 Argued by John Thompson, drawing on the study of linguists G.L. Trager and H.L. Smith, in Thompson's Founding of English Metre (London: Routledge and


Kegan Paul, 1966) 1-14. This is not the space, nor does a Note provide enough space, to synopsize Thompson's "Introduction," the most helpful piece on prosody I've encountered. Suffice to say that the "severe[ly] or mild[ly] strained state of mutual relations between metrical pattern and language" (13) does indeed appear the lynchpin of verse, once Thompson has cogently explicated that tension. 19 Both surnames Brach and Puckett instance Stokes' penchant for apt yet subtle punning.20 What Martha Bateman calls her tenants. As she runs a guest-house; as her sonnet follows the four-piece prologue; and as Stokes always writes purposefully, readers can identify themselves as "Wayfarers" in Bethel Grove. One's genuine sojourn there recalls the aim of "Poetry" expressed by Marianne Moore, in terms of "real toads" in "imaginary gardens" (The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair [1980], 422).

EPILOGUE

STOKES AMONG THE PIG POETS

Those who know Kit Stokes usually appreciate, even when slightly rankled by, his dry, downright crotchety at times, candor. Granting that temperament, and lest I be derided for bardolatry in titling this essay "Stokes among the Masters," I add the following—which actually continues lauding the poet. This extra piece of text allows room for mentioning his name once more among notables, two who penned extraordinary lines concerning pigs. In The Norton Anthology of Pig Poetry, with Plath ("Sow"1) and David Lee (The Porcine Canticles)2,include four sonnets from Bethel Grove.

Very early on, "Floyd Henry" starkly sets the tone for town folk enduring the 1930's:

I never held my hand out on the street Or begged for scraps down at the butcher's shop. And though we never had to taste the slop, There's nothing on a hog we didn't eat. (4-8)

The macabre wit grafted upon homespun cadence in lines 7-8 almost overshadows the horrific implication of the comments juxtaposed. Though Stokes, via the first half of the quatrain, won't let pass the comparison of pig to man dehumanized—maybe even "butcher"ed, a phantom metaphor suggests. That last impression is soon realized:

"Although I counseled her," the pastor said, "My vows forbid that I betray a trust." Then he in God's house knelt and bowed his head, Praying at length for those consumed by lust. That night, despite such holy monologues, Tim slew them both and fed them to the hogs. (9-14)

The Marcus murders counterpoint the exploits of Ezra Tarr (who, in addition to [plausibly] crushing Christopher Baines, may have set his mill


on fire to collect the insurance). Yet the plots coincide less because of Tim Marcus, maddened by cuckoldry, than due to Pastor Ullsvik, Tarr's pious doppelganger, the seducer of

Mrs. Marcus. Ullsvik’s hypocrisy is betrayed in the brutal couplet; and also by the couplet's caustic rhyming of events.3

On a lighter note, where the humor keeps the moral from sounding heavy-handed, the Countess LeBlanc of all people alludes thus:

I first met Fran at Blair Academy, Where we were "flaming youth" personified. Seeking what bourgeois dreams seldom supplied, We swore we'd live in France, where souls are free. Pierre was sweet but soon walked out on me, Leaving me wealthy—but unsatisfied. I wed a count in Monaco who died, His title now my social pedigree.

Traveling to the coast, I stopped to see How Fran had fared in Bethel with her Link. O, ignorant contentment! They must think My days a round of empty repartee. And yet no chef in Paris or New York Could match her feast of roasting ears and pork.

Fran Mason is, twice over, unwittingly triumphant with the help of hog: her cuisine trumps dishes served in capitals of the world—and she lives "content"ed with "her Link" while the Countess blankly languishes.

"Luke Hoggett" challenges the claim that Stokes subtly name-plays. Yet one hesitates to fault the poet, who would rather not poke fun at Luke, just simply use him as a naive spokesman:

Take Whitcomb Riley, yes, and Eddie Guest, Their poetry's the kind you can't forget. (10)

Indeed, neither can Stokes be forgotten—by those who never read him.

Chapter One 12

Notes1 The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992) 60-61. 2 Lee resembles Stokes in lyrically chronicling rural life, and in relative anonymity. Lee is, however, published by Copper Canyon Press. A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems ([1999] which includes the Canticles) was followed by The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (2000), a poem with novelistic scope that those who enjoy Bethel Grove would also like. 3 Pastor and banker graphically square off on facing pages (16-17). In his sestet, Tarr derides Ullsvik. Though ascribable to turning the other cheek, the absence of like reproach on Ullsvik's part heightens disappointment in the minister—especially when one learns he harangues young Baines' father, the village atheist. The impression of weak teaming with strong to bully the unfortunate tempers any sympathy we harbor toward Ullsvik who, unlike Tarr, is consumed by guilt. Narrative dynamics such as those marked here rifle throughout Bethel Grove, as through Spoon River.


Stokes, Frank. Bethel Grove: Sonnets from “The Village Daybook.” Springfield, IL: Golden Belle Press. 2002.

Gary Bullock, Ed., The Bethel Grove Weekly Sentinel

These unsigned sonnets blushed unseen for years, Hidden among the curiosities The Weekly Sentinel suppressed on pleas That privacy outvalued needless jeers. But three score years have passed, and ancient fears Seem petty now, for satellite TVs Air scandals of the world’s celebrities In Bethel’s living rooms – with comic sneers.

The author of these poems, courting fame, Used every stratagem in Master’s plot. The book claims “Arnold Sasser” wrote the lot, But village rolls show no one by that name. Plainly, the times today are less restrained – Those families omitted have complained.

— 1998

***

The sonnets which make up The Village Daybook were mailed to the Sentinel throughout the 1930’s, as few as seven in some years and as many as twenty in others. The submissions seem to have dried up in the summer of 1941. – G.B.

Chapter One 14

Arnold Sasser

When Christopher, the son of Martha Baines, Was struck and left for dead that snowy night, We lost the poet who was primed to write The songs of Bethel, set in epic strains. Beside his bed I sensed a mind in chains And read to him from Keats and Frost— despite The empty stare, the absence of delight, One day a random spark repaid my pains.

By winking as I traced the alphabet, He spelled out poems— and this world awoke! An idiot savant who never "spoke" Except in sonnets, fully formed and set, He sketched a phantom village in his mind. Inspired, I voiced the rest as I divined.

***

The few sonnets attributed to Christopher Baines were all written in the third person. If we are to credit the last line above, the bulk of the poems —those written as first person testimonials—are the work of Sasser. Neither Martha Baines, who died in 1972, nor anyone else in Bethel ever mentioned her son’s purported abilities in composition. – G.B.


Arthur Cowan, D. Litt.

When Gary Bullock pressed me for my view Of Bethel’s Sonneteer, I drew a blank. The Sasser nom de plume may cloak a crank Whose idiot savant's a fiction too. Rather than spend our time wondering who Composed this quasi-literary prank, Take it for what it seems, the poet's frank Yet timeless sketch—his prairie Xanadu.

He married happily and then got old- That’s all that Sasser tells us of himself. As well pretend some grim shoemaker's elf Or rumpled gnome spun gossip into gold. If verse can liven worlds that truth disowns, No epitaph need grace the poet's bones.

Prologue: Gary Bullock, 1998

By nineteen forty-one the village thought The times had eased. But when the draft board sent The young men overseas, the people spent Their days lamenting changes time had wrought. Traditions disappeared, and all were caught Up by the new. The young came to resent The rigid rules, and in their discontent They would not keep their place as they were taught.

Here are the lives whose patterns Sasser rhymed In simpler days, a timeless tangled lot That but for art displays no single plot Beyond the petty spats here pantomimed— Wandering shadows of another day, Untangled strands that once were macramé.

***

Chapter One 16

The Village Daybook begins with the next entry. I have appended a C.B. to those sonnets which Sasser attributes to Christopher Baines. Because Franklin Tarr, the editor to whom the poems were originally sent, discarded the post-marked envelopes, I have had to make my own arrangement of the texts that follow. — G.B.

Chandler Fox, Minister

If handsome is as handsome does, then I— Who always served the Lord—have done my best To let humility be manifest In me, for God— not Man— I glorify. When He saw fit to let my Sharon die, I came to Bethel on a sacred quest And vowed to live alone, my soul half-blessed By joys no lissome woman could supply.

With pies and smiles the single women flock To hear me preach, drawn by a pretty face And not by love of God— or of His grace— Until I've half become a laughing stock. Although we must to God our lives defer, I could have served Him better uglier.

Pastor Ullsvik

I passed the Marcus place for the last time One moondark August night after the trial, And swear I felt her watching me, though I'm A minister of God and lack the guile To lie. Although she'd packed her bags, somehow He knew. Domestic violence, they said. Though whispers reached him, she had kept our vow Of silence. Still, he killed them both and fled.

My headlights brushed the porch swing that we knew- O sudden light! Can deep night ever hide That lengthened shadow of our dead child's shoe, That open door, that chilling dark inside? Although it burned last night, the tale's not done. Their pain has ended. Mine has just begun.


Ezra Tarr, the Banker

Take one look at Bethel. What do you see? This town would blow away but for my bank. As for the ministers, I ask pointblank: “If someone has to lead, then why not me?" Cut out the crap of civic sanctity! The sewer fund is sound. And, to be frank, It wasn't Hoover's fault the markets sank While Al Smith's Democrats got off scotfree.

The folks who want to fund a village dole Elected Parson Ullsvik to the board That's set to raise the taxes on my stock. Ullsvik, that hypocrite who talks of soul! They say Sue Marcus, when they cut the cord, Called loudest for the parson— not the Doc!

Dodie Breckenridge

They found young Baines half-buried in the snow Out front, the car that struck him nowhere round. He never walked again or made a sound, And yet his stare rebukes the world I know. For Ezra left my bed that night aglow With gin to race the blizzard, homeward-bound. I thought it strange a banker so renowned For thrift would trade his car that week below The market price.

But poor girls have to live. We chatted at the bank, for auld lang syne,About discretion— and the need to give: He signed the deed and, lo, this house was mine! In joy my newborn soul last fall arose. Glory to God, from whom forgiveness flows!

Chapter One 18

Joe Baines

Ullsvik, I said, when you explain the soul, A wispy cloud is all that meets the eye To represent the thing that cannot die- That through eternal phlogiston must roll. My son's a broken thing that once was whole: He sits in silence, stares and drools. What lie Of heavenly desserts dare codify As fact that stuff which Hebrew myths extol?

One world at a time is enough for me. That mystery's no mystery at all Whose easy answer walks on Galilee Unthreatened by the depths toward which we fall, Though my son lives, he's cousin to the dead: Whatever I'd call soul has long since fled.

Ruth Baines

I married Joe, the village atheist Whose gentle heart had never learned to hate. And when our only son was struck by fate And left a broken wretch, we both dismissed The judgment of my sisters, who insist That his persistent vegetative state Was caused by sins we must repudiate. How fools do prate and play the catechist!

I was the Breckenridge who loved one man. My sister Nancy croons that God is fair And won't inflict more grief than you can bear, While wanton Dodie, reborn, mocks God's plan. Joe thinks if Chris once had a soul, it's free. I know it's trapped inside— and cannot fle

CHAPTER TWO

THE SOUND POETOGRAPHER1

knowing no resolution ...yet there’s comfort in converting internal worry to aerial airs.

Sam B. Davis initially genuinely enchants; his mastery of sound draws both readers and often (as through a camera lens) material:

She sings low in the morning, her notes slowly floating, miseries siphoned into sounds designed to carry the world’s worst weight away.

The alliterative s, l, and assonantal o eponymously fuse to form “slowly’—then disperse, with vowels flattening and consonants displaced by the dominant w. How neatly modulates the cadence within loose tetrameter, such that

Each do, re, mi, or fa [he] sows with real or fabricated woes, … resound from such soundings,

The pronoun is substituted of necessity, but why elide the seventh line? Because “knowing no resolutions” is challenged by the envoi, as sonorous as what precedes:

and yet there’s comfort in converting internal worry to aerial airs,2

simple suites for her sweet melancholies she sings.

Chapter Two 20

Challenged, though not refuted in the close. Song offers but qualified comfort, in this explicit musical study, though also throughout Davis’ composings. To whatever of him we listen, the audile accentuates burden (“low…slowly floating [] miseries…world’s worst weight”); and the more troubling absence of any load (“knowing no resolutions”).

To begin with “She sings low” threatens to mislead; and perhaps Davis disserved himself by placing it as the second piece in Poetographs. Most of the characters following haven’t the implied self-consciousness of this singer—or of the singer about the singer—which hints at sentimentality. Usually, Davis’ subject (and in fairness, the lyric read in context erases the charge of affectation) evinces unpretentious sad or (again, still meaner3)empty –ness. Always, however, emotions are cast in the relief of sound, wound tightly round the keenest wit:

…he had a nose for knowing when to lunge for loving jugular, and then the balls to leave and let her fall apart, like mutinous crutches to wounded knees. And in the fall she faces she’s nothing but a numb-skulled lass who learned too late she loved an ass. (“A Gray Anatomy”)

Our samples thus far show an exemplary blend of what Ezra Pound called melopoeia with (dubbed by same bard) logopoeia. Not that Davis lacks Pound’s third mode of “charging words”—phanopoeia, visual imagery, to accompany “musical meaning” and “the dance of the intellect among words.”4 An accomplished photographer, a better painter perhaps (witness, if you’ve opportunity, the Blakean murals on the walls of Sam’s rural residence or his Washington Park sequence), our poet even lends his scenery perspective:

Drove till a hole in the oaks framed a stream composing art from mulch fumes and evening. In the far yonder a bridge seems erected by Dutch painters, moodily hazed by lazy light and smoke from a camp; the bottoms smudge their defined twiggy shapes to dull nests of nappy and purpling shades.

Yet if any art yields something no other art can, poetography definitively(q.v. the volume’s epigram) captures another than (mere) visual impression. Image, rightly understood, “signif[ies] all the objects and qualities of sense

The Sound Poetographer 21

perception referred to in a poem.”5 Imagery, then, in its “primary pigment,” “belongs to the art of poetry.”6

With Davis’ bridge we might pair Wordsworth’s Westminster, or better—since the Romantics are lauded for scene painting—“The Iron Bridge” by Billy Collins: another poet whose considerable ‘imagery’ (reductively construed) may be obscured through no fault of his own save a superfluity of talents.7 In Collins’ case the wit and whimsy can overshadow what we see; in Davis’ (no stranger to waxing bemused) word-play and music can camouflage the deftly drawn. (Perhaps, then, Sam’s choice of title, to underscore the ocular.) No less effectively than Wordsworth, though, these contemporary artists coordinate the visible with “what descriptive words do best[:] convey an attitude or feeling through the objects they describe.”8

To readers irked by comparisons posed in this preface of Sam to renowned Masters, I can best defend these similitudes by advising you to test their validity. You won’t have wasted time.

Davis, then, has an eye for nature. Still, he specializes in portraiture; and sometimes, through humor and harmonics, and the model’s spirit, come small victories. Consider Jim Porter, a lonely soul immortalized by the sandwich of pimento cheese he ordered daily at his diner; or the aged “boxer” who now “likes to use his fists” pounding hymns on the carillon in the park9; or the “knotty old ladies,” for whom “life laid itself out / in intricate patterns of lace”10; or Davis himself, bequeathed another “middle aged man[,] pass[ing] on a bike.” Out of which percept “unknown, I / presume him another life,” related for thirty-five lines, or until the fellow surpasses Sam’s ‘field of vision.’ The moral: “out of sight, you [do] see” how truly fictions fill our own and others’ lives.

This triumphant foresaid quartet anthologized herein, nevertheless elegize, as do most of his poems. But that Davis’ outlook won’t otherwise permit points up his virtues—Godsent, however much that modifier rankles Sam11—of wit, wisdom, and especially, verbal music brought to bear in spite of all. Moreover, “comfort in converting…worry to aerial airs” may prove more than merely consolatory. (“She sings low,” to reiterate, logically belongs at the start of this collection.) “At various times, the present object (or its absence) suggests a more perfect present that the past has not allowed.”12 Grant that, and Sam’s “Bio” of the biker—an imagined “medium / level executive at Horace / Mann”—affords a muted glimmer of an ideal “beyond an anonymous bend.”

Conversely, Ted Kooser’s comparable critiques, where clerks “drift back to their desks” as dead fish to the tops of their bowls; or have their faces “torn off…at the office,” posit nightmares no worse than reality.13

Chapter Two 22

On the other hand, the waitress at a Kooser lunch-counter, donning hairnet with “pale blue stars / over the white clouds / of her hair,” carves a perfect moment from the mundane. Whereas neither the “patient”—in demeanor, but also ailing; and an inmate more than patient—“waitress”; nor her old patron—whose order resembles “a question…he could once answer / before sides were issues”—find relief in the Davis lyric where they star. Still, that piece is aptly titled “Sonorous Supper,”14 as the figures partake unwittingly in a sacrament we can espy—or to which we can listen. More melodically, slightly less vernacularly than the Laureate, Davis plays on Midwest idioms as on a keyboard. Again, like Kooser, Davis would confirm what Hardy wrote, that “If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”15

The last, and most informative coupling in this introduction matches Davis with Thomas Hardy, in craft as much as temperament. The recent Penguin preface to Hardy by Robert Mezey proffers four points so salient to “our man” as well, that I must practically transcribe them: (1) though “never far from song,” (2) his occasional awkwardness is planned, and constitutes “a warrant for sincerity”; hence, (3) his prosody may well appear “strange at first, for he sounds like no one else…and the variety of sounds is seemingly endless.” As for praxis, (4) Sam “ma[kes] poems continually out of whatever material c[omes] to hand or mind. Making them [is] simply his way of being in the world, and anything he [sees], hear[s], fe[els], th[inks], read[s] about, [is] grist for his mill.”16 Last year, Davis wrote his thousandth poem—at which number, surpassing, by fifty-three pieces, a mentor he acknowledges.17 But then, another, grudgingly recognized mentor might opine:

there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps, neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying.18

Such prolificacy (and one hopes he has another thirty years at least), can’t but result in profligacy, a few or even few hundred times. But to have written these hundred-odd poems (exact tally depending on how one counts works in a series) leaves an exemplary legacy. Consider also that perhaps four more collections of comparable length and quality could appear—though frankly I doubt they will. Davis self-edits rigorously, which explains the belatedness of this compilation.

We first met a decade past, via prose, in his essay on Hardy’s satire of circumstance, “She at His Funeral”:


They bear him to his resting-place – In slow procession sweeping by; I follow at a stranger’s space; His kindred they, his sweetheart I.

Unchanged my gown of garish dye, Though sable-sad is their attire; But they stand round with griefless eye, Whilst my regret consumes like fire!

That crusty pathos Sam transposes to “Self serving buffet,” where a “few tears…

gather as mourners in meager corners of cheer-less pain-jaded eyes

—the weeper’s own, witnessing her living burial. The Hardy irony implicit in “consumes like fire!” is resurrected with the subject. (She is risen two-fold, really, from both the early lyric and first stanza of the later verse). Hardyesque nasty rhyme enjoys a second coming as well:

Soon she will return to him from fear that survival alone is slim and a sense that fractures in pride mend less than a simple break in a feminine wrist.

She’ll go back then not from love but for lack of a shack and face a future bruise or crack within a few weeks’ span.

The buffet-maid keeps coming back for more, whereas “His Funeral” “She” attends just once—though the burning in the soul and loins may linger. Hardly pretty poems these, but beautiful; sober for all their song.

Notes 1 As epigraph to his volume, Mr. Davis offers the following definition:

Poetography / n. / poe’• e’• taw’•graff • ee/

1 The art of creating poetographs (pronounced poe • et’• a h• graffs), a poem which leaves a lasting impression on its reader in the same manner as light affects the sensitized materials it touches; any phrase or image in said poem which has the same reaction on the reader.

Chapter Two 24

2 Poetic language which creates an emotional response beyond what is present in its words, as when holiday snapshots bring back memories of a place even though those events are not present in the actual photograph. Davis excels at pastiche—hence, the invented term found neither in the latest addendum to the OED nor in Webster’s, nor The American Heritage. (The coiner confirmed the fruitlessness of the search, though felt gratified that it was undertaken.) The aptness, however (especially sense 2, though 1, too, impresses by its careful analogy) suits so many artists and particular texts. (I propose a campaign for lexical adoption.) In prosody and perspective, our man recalls Philip Larkin, whose ode on camera-work resonates with the title of the volume [The Less Deceived] wherein these “Lines” appear:

But o, photography! As no art is, Faithful and disappointing! that records Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds, And will not censor blemishes Like washing-lines, and Hall’s-Distemper boards. —Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” (16-20)

Davis, Larkin, and the Kodak will not flinch. Still (despite what they might say) they retain faith proportionate to disappointment. (And a poetograph does not initself disappoint.) 2 Though melodic in either rendering, in light of Sam’s familiarity with Milton, I can’t but hear the “ae” here as a diphthong counterpointing “airs,” a la Comus(“bright aerial spirits live insphered” [l.3]). 3 Joyce remarked that he’d written Dubliners in a spirit of “scrupulous meanness” to objectify his citizens’ impoverished souls. Davis similarly pulls no punches. 4 Cf. Pound, ABC of Reading ([1934] New York: New Directions, 1960) 63; Literary Essays (1968) 25ff. See also, if ever published, the compilation, edited by Davis, of Cann’d Toes, pastiches authored by participants in a 1995 summer seminar on Pound. True, our poet never passes up an opportunity to malign Modernist obscurity. Even so, as a technician Sam owes more to Pound than he shall ever admit. Davis’ highly atypical churlishness in not conceding that debt cannot be ascribed to ignorance of the anxiety of influence: a phenomenon he comprehends in a brilliant essay lampooning yet another Modernist, “My Problem with Bloom’s Problem with Eliot’s Problem in ‘Hamlet and His Problems’” (1998).5 M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1999) 121. 6 Pound weighs in again; cf. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir ([1916] New York: New Directions, 1970) 81. 7 Cf. The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George, Cambridge Ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932) 284; Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001) 169-70.8 Robert Scholes, et al., Elements of Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1991) 535.


9 Davis’ “Boxer” warrants comparison with, and accompaniment by, Simon and Garfunkel’s, just as Robinson’s lyric is harmonized by that duet’s “Richard Cory.” Notable too: the pun on carillon/carry on.10 Sam’s audile precocity typically brooks no betterment. Still, “Knotty Old Ladies” apotheosizes that perfection:

marveled at how their arthritic digits flittered, fingertips stickened by decades of doily duty, as the artists recast simple thread into complex art off cotton frost.

11 The distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” so pertains here as to, momentarily, breathe life into that hackneyed comparison. In fairness, the poet would likely affirm his belief in a divinity (or more likely, in divinities). Yet much as Sam would like to cut his bible-belt bonds, his intensely verbal imagination cannot separate the Word from—or perhaps imposes the Word on—its perverters. In any case, “God” and its variants would take up small space in the multitudinous Davis Concordance. 12 William J. Higginson, “A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku 35:2 (2004) 49. Similarly to Muldoon, Davis delights in cracking his idiom over any convention, to hatch what the alliance will. The few haiku he includes compass more affiliations, cast “Had Neruda preferred” the form. One piece, especially, presents the empathy with objects (and of objects with us) evident throughout Odas Elementales:

The house heard you leave In leafless rain. I’ll wait and See—my windows ache.

But in fact the haiku darkly reconfigures number 8 of Neruda’s Cien sonetos de amor(trans. Stephen Tapscott [Austin, 1996]); and broaches the surrealism we are more apt to find in sonetos and Residencia en la tierra than in Odas. So, Sam has multiply metamorphosed upon reading Neruda. 13 See “The Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life” and “They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office,” Ted Kooser, Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburgh, 1980) 86-87. One cannot in a few words adequately analyze the triptych of corporate despair when those poems are linked with “Biker’s Bio.” Permit, please, these observations: 1.) the bicyclist attains a wholeness that the cited lines couldsever via enjambment—rendering the subject in turn “medium”; an oxymoronic “level executive”; and merely half a (Horace /) Man(n) who, even restored would lack his own name much less species attribution. Again, in the poem these threatened dislocations fuse. 2.) the contrast of “anonymous” to “speechless” highlights promise in Davis—how many poems are authored by Anon—and its absence in Kooser. 3.) the biker has temporarily cycled out and “beyond” his business routine; his counterparts, trapped in the office, sustain work-related

Chapter Two 26

injuries. In Davis, Dickinson’s “thing with feathers” (254) is never entirely vanquished.14 Compare this verse to Kooser’s “Hairnet with Stars,” 85. 15 “In Tenebris II”; later quoted by the poet in his “Apology” to Late Lyrics andEarlier. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976) 168, 557. 16 Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems, ed. Robert Mezey (New York: Penguin, 1998), xxviii ff. 17 In Gibson are published 947 poems. Davis has in fact exceeded Dickinson’s “official” harvest of 1775, though her tabulator (Thomas Johnson) acknowledges numerous other verses nestled in ED’s letters. One epistolary lyric ostensibly confesses to Colonel Higginson, that publishing be “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” Still the syntax in the prior sentence (—not to mention the possibly miniscule distance, on a clear day at low tide, ‘twixt “Firmament and Fin”—) invites speculation. Might she have objected that “I delay ‘to publish’”? Dickinson’s often near hermetic ambiguity hardly affects the famous poem rejecting Fame, “Publication—is the Auction” (709); but even in “Some—Work for Immortality—/ The Chiefer part, for Time” (406), the preference for the latter is multiply subverted (e.g., can we really tell which “One’s—Money,” which “One’s—the Mine”? And one might well—even be expected to—covet the latter, in any case—never mind the pronominal pun (“One’s[—the] Mine [Mind?])—So it goes, and we are here interrogating mainly only the last line. The envoi to the aforementioned ‘Letter’ claims, “The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can”: faith chiming with the fortune of “my letter to the World…committed / To Hands I cannot see” (441). Redirecting this digression to Davis—an author of so many poems as he or Dickinson might make peace with anonymity, as Johnson suggests (“Introduction” to The Complete Poems); but (as that editor avers), possibly only for their lifetime. Davis’ Caught a Good Cold (1998) sports several back cover blurbs of “What the Dead would be saying about this Book.” Beneath Hardy (“best misery since me”) and de Sade (“I love Sam’s perceptions of love”), this from Dickinson: “Mr. Davis needs to get out more.” 18 Cf. East Coker, second of the Four Quartets. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1963) 128.

EPILOGUE

REFLECTIONS ON MASASAM1

The title, one will notice, forms a palindrome; spelled back- and forward, Masasam mirrors itself. Two-as-one, two-in-one, resonate throughout this play, which discloses the basic unity binding different, even opposed, parties:

Blue and Grey soldiers waging "brothers' blusters"; master and slave growing up side-by-side; namesake and poet piecing out the former's legend.

Remarkably, Masasam maps these onenesses through its puns, lineations, slant rhymes, and other modes of doubling meaning. The italics and bold type added for this preface do injustice to the work's subtleties—as when Sam is visited by "Union boys" and finds

them the same as Rebs—both yanked in by supposed glories of war's honors, all sobered by the truths of its horrors.

—or when his letters home encode Sam's closeness to his body slave, Coleman:

Tell Coleman's folks he is well. He looks good in good clothes an' they'd be real proud of him. I know I am of him. Sam.

—or in the missive "spanning seven / scores" to Sam Davis poet, from Sam Davis antihero, promising a postulate:

I'm here for you, ... to meet and merge your re-birth with my re-creation, creating

Chapter Two 28

a third Sam, a syn- thesis son of us,

More's at stake than word-play. For though like both Sams, we often "feel...less man than animal” (—hence, “syn-“ as “sin” reverves, even in the misspelling); language, dividing us from animals, recalls our shared humanity (—inclusive of verbal “syns,” though intentions might to some degree pardon our mistakes). Thus, idiomatic play foregrounds kinship.

Discord is also grossly—thereby, aptly—foregrounded:

The North won Nash- [//] and Knox- [//] ville, cutting Tennessee [//] in two2

—the verse suggestively enacts. So too, ruptures within a single line may mime—as much in awkward sound as in appearance—the unnatural "crack" of

a country to a North and South two.2

When likeness hoists difference on the latter's own petard, notice—in addition to Cole's cutting irony—the amalgamating action in the parenthetical lines. As words "mesh" like the cooking they describe, we are viscerally reminded of our nation's identity as a melting-pot (Necessity again dictates typographic variants):

Sam. The North is trying to run the South, telling us what to do, so's we don't have no say with our own lives, so we can't choose for ourselves.

(Gristle releases grease in the heat)

Cole. Soun' like de Yankees want y'all to be jus' likes us slaves... We got no say wit' our lives.

(Meal m with congealed dr )

Much in Masasam may be discerned on the page, and I encourage you to buy a copy of the text, thereby aiding your enjoyment and the artist's welfare simultaneously. Yet as the citings above also demonstrate, plays (—it's true especially of verse-plays—) are intended for the ear. Drawing from his mentors, a good poet nevertheless must sound unique.

Davis' sound-scheme intermixes Seamus Heaney with Dr. Seuss. The blending vocables we've taken pains to show likewise characterize the


work of the Nobel laureate; and with such crooning Davis fuses downright Seussian (and occasionally Wallace Stevensian) insouciance. (The play actually contains the line, "Sam I am,"—but more on allusion momentarily.) As when punning, Davis operates interpretatively, that is "to convey a definite meaning."3 The silly sounds, never gratuitous, underscore asinine slaughter.

Carnage everywhere, ... grunts and crunch of the hogs gobbling on the slop and parts of foddered boys; ***

The patriot's pulse filled Howe with her hymn and gave Dixie the pluck to drum minions to muster, but what reason

was found in tunes to answer the groans of bloody bones and mounds of heroes bloating through meadows like ripe melons rotting?

(Davis loves ghosting. The hint of hobgoblins, and “reason” (never mind “groans”) rhyming with ‘rotting melons’ invests the import, as required if the passage would constitute “great literature: language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”4.)

"The value we attach to the theme," Jon Silken writes of First World War poetry, "is not necessarily the same as the value we attach to an expression of it. Yet the degree to which we feel a discrepancy between an evocation of the theme and its crystallization...express[es] the difference and the disjunction between art and life. The disjunction is disturbing. It sometimes makes us ashamed."5 Davis would elicit shame in us by setting what disgusts into attractive language. Our consequent discomfort with our complicity might prompt many into protesting such crimes as those described.6

Masasam may have been "written in scrupulous meanness" (—what James Joyce, another humanitarian, called the spirit motivating Dubliners). Yet the playfulness of its (legion of) allusions notwithstanding, Davis always treats past poets deferentially. Concomitant with perceiving our essential unity, and awaking—via nettling—individual conscience, the poet posits Tradition as a third regenerative source. By adapting Shakespeare, Eliot, Homer, Hardy, Longfellow, Stevens, Seuss, Roberta

Chapter Two 30

Flack, Stephen Foster, and the prolific Anon., Davis models our literary heritage in order to make sense and new beauty. Our Verbal Arts festivities could not close with a better exemplar.

Notes 1 Davis’ verse play, performed in April of 1998 at annual Verbal Arts Festival, University of Illinois at Springfield 2 A hint of hendiadys (logic can dictate ‘North two and South two’) twice again insinuates evisceration—even as the zeugma yokes opponents into a one (North and South two”). 3 Ezra Pound, "Cavalcanti" (1934), distinguishing "interpretative" from mere "ornamental" expression. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 154. 4 Pound’s definition—certainly debatable, though apt, I think, for poetry. Moreover, if “charged” be construed to compass total effect, a still more plausible generalization. (See Pound, Literary Essays, 21; ABC of Reading 28, 36.) 5 Jon Silken, "Introduction" to The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1979) 16-17. 6 Eliot similarly compliments Baudelaire for "elevating [grotesque imagery] to the first intensity," as "a mode of release and expression for other men." T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1932) 341.


Davis, Sam B. Poetographs: Selected Poems. Dawson, IL: d[avis] I[ndependent] P[rojects]. 2005.

She sings low

She sings low in the morning, her notes slowly floating, miseries siphoned into sounds designed to carry the world's worst weight away. Each do, re, mi, or fa she sows with real or fabricated woes, knowing no resolutions resound from such soundings, and yet there's comfort in converting internal worry to aerial airs, simple suites for her sweet melancholies she sings

A Gray anatomy

Her love-starved eyes were too big for her passionate stomach, as she fed on his lines, filling her head to toe with idealized dreams of a perfect life together. Thumb under, she gave up her softest skin,

but his was hard and held a fickle heart for he had a nose for knowing when to lunge for loving jugular, and then the balls to leave and let her fall apart, like mutinous crutches to wounded knees. And in the fall she faces she's nothing but a numb-skulled lass who learned too late she loved an ass.

Chapter Two 32

Drove till a hole in the oaks

Drove till a hole in the oaks framed a stream composing art from mulch fumes and evening. In the far yonder a bridge seems erected by Dutch painters, moodily hazed in lazy light and smoke from a camp; the bottoms smudge their twiggy shapes to dull nests of nappy, purpling shades. It always happens that the Bohemian day yawns and timber rinses its oily hues and twilight stretches canvassed specters:

today puts away all that it has drawn- tomorrow paints it out again at dawn.

Important Porter

Jim Porter's the daily drugstore special on the lunchtime menu. It's a title earned in forty years of faithful service as Pulaski's main downtown pharmacist.

Out of humble habit Porter ordered lunch from their counter, and never wavered with his request to eat the same item, despite the ribbing friends had given him.

Now, enshrined by bright curds and mayonnaise, Jim is forever memorialized, laid to rest on lettuce and thin Wonder slices, for any stranger to ponder

if asking for Jim Porter: they'll be led to pimento cheese spread on soft, white bread.


the boxer

He likes to use his fists and with each sharp blow he suffers no pain or calloused palms, hears no single clobber, only ringing in the ears of those he strikes.

He likes to use his fists enjoying the thrills he dishes out so well and through his rehearsed hands he earns the respect of crowds, who look up to him as he makes them see stars, hear angels.

He likes to use his fists alone in his loft, lodged in sunsets or storms above treelines and dews, boxing the clappers of clavier keys, drenched in a hellish heaven of slow hymns or anthems. Light fades, and still his tunes ring on filling autumn eaves with carillon.

Chapter Two 34

Had Neruda preferred haiku

Naked hands, you are moon-lines, apple pathways, leaves drop— your hands again. You messy chestnut, sea-thing toenail, wheat-scoop breast- love your ugliness You are whole— exact— and all that you are is one, so I go along. You, The One Who Puts Things in Order, like a bee constructs clarities. Flesh-apple woman, kiss by kiss infinity flimmers in your light Daughter of the sea, rest your turquoise pieces here, in the foam of dreams Waves on restless rocks magnolia foam breaks salt You and I, love. Hush.. Don't go far, not for long— I think,'Will you come back', and then, I'm waiting. The house heard you leave in leafless rain. I'll wait and see— my windows ache. Now you're mine. Without you, I am a dream, only that, and that is all.

(Neruda sonnets 27,20,43,32,12,34,9,45,65,8,81)


A Biker's bio

A middle aged man passes on a bike. I do not know him and, unknown, I presume him another life, for here's a man who lives in the nice house across from the real nice homes, the ones spread out on rich lakefront property, but if you stand on a chair near the far corner of his living room picture window in winter, water can be seen between a neighbor's house and four car garage. A medium level executive at Horace Mann our man is, a sufficient status earned a decade ago, and there he'll stay till he goes. He once had a bit of a heart condition a few years back, and had to give up a few things: smoking, late nightcaps, and his boozy wife who traded his medium level life for a high level exec (she claimed she needed the change). His world improved after losing a bad woman and getting a good dog, and after his high-school sweetheart got sick of chasing handsome men in two abusive marital stints, she looked our guy up. She had aged disgracefully after bad love choices and raising two evil kids, both dead; but she's really been good for him because a dog can't fill all a man's needs (at least not this man's), and so they share his house, and he has a good retirement portfolio so she's been hinting about getting hitched. He's a fascinating fellow and I could tell more, but he's gone beyond an anonymous bend in the road and out of sight, you see; but here comes a jogging lady, and she...

Chapter Two 36

Self serving buffet

What few tears are left gather as mourners in meager corners of cheerless pain-jaded eyes and when they fall they'll drop dead dry.

Soon she will return to him from fear that survival alone is slim and a sense that fractures in pride mend less than a simple break in a feminine wrist.

She'll go back then not from love but for lack of a shack and face a future bruise or crack within a few week's span.

knotty old ladies

There was a time when the time of a life laid itself out in intricate patterns of lace. Old women's nimble fingers have long thimbled out intimate issues and knitted distresses into the fidgets of delicate knots, each row an impenetrable prose, hard-luck journals written in patient hours of rare repose.

I watched them at it once, at an "ole time” jamboree, marveled at how their arthritic digits flittered, fingertips slickened by decades of doily duty, as the artists recast simple thread into complex art of cotton frost.

Today some gadgets hack up crates of lace, each tatting pragmatically put in place by robots, but lifeless fiber touched by fingers of dead steel fails- lace needs the warming weaves of old wive's tales.


Sonorous Supper

While a patient waitress asks his order the old man in the next booth breathes a nasal symphony as if extra air must be sucked to his brain to think. He mutters a potato choice twice, but she needs to know if he wants salad or slaw, and pain- fully hepicks slaw,but it's an unsure answer, spoken like a question, one he could once answer before sides were issues, before his retention resembled the shredded head of cabbage served by one stranger and ordered by another.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SOPHYPOETICS OF BLAKE SCRANTON

Gray is not green Like grass is. … To enhance your view Try looking at the world through Gray glasses.

Distinguishing philosophical poetry from poetical philosophy, T.S. Eliot (who, like B.T. Scranton, takes keen interest in nuance), insists that the former "proceed from the side of poetry, not from the side of philosophy"; that it constitute "poetical work of the first intensity," in which thought and verse are "fused at a very high temperature."1 Scranton and his readers benefit from that caveat. For however much his concepts impress, lyricism resonates at least in like proportion. The heat is tempered to the context. From the prefatory "Shades of Gray," intended to orient perspective:

A corrected me in the past Would lead to a current me Without the advantages I've learned from Previous disadvantages.

Clear lines complement expressed complexity. To mistake this passage for prose chopped into verses ignores the symmetry of the possible and actual selves on either side of "Without the advantages"; and the swing line's asymmetric attachment to "I've learned...," according torque to the actual. The setting, moreover, underscores alliteration, echo, repetition with a difference—qualities praised as poetic, though they enrich prose when monitored, just as narrative sense can also (as here) bolster, not occlude, lyric. Yet undoubtedly, in this particular philosophical verse, this "dance of the intellect with words,"2 thought leads, the verbals dipping gracefully on thought's arm.

The Sophypoetics of Blake Scranton 39

But a new waltz in the same key ("Revisiting Achilles' Creed as an Afterlife Thought") concludes:

Now you admire the hue From the shadows as you view The grass in the killing fields. You've been Mowed down and it's not so green When seen from six feet under. I wonder do the Elysian Fields have Bright green bluegrass? You can't hide From death which is everyone's eventual fate. The great divide from life is wide. The grass is always greener From the other side. But then if you had chosen differently I wouldn't be writing about you now, Nearly three thousand years later, Would I?

The rhymes, end, slant, internal; pun on shadows; fresh casting of an old phrase ("greener From" for "on" also highlighting "The great divide..."); layered allusions (to Homer, Marvell, John Wayne; more soberly, Cambodia); predominantly three and four stressed lines; at times flamboyant alliteration—clearly signal a lead-change. But how splendidly, in both dances, spin words with intellect!

That Scranton engages in this dialectic between (what Stevens calls) "poetry expressed in words" and "a poetry of words"3 to yield unities of varied intensity makes him a definitively philosophical poet by virtue of

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