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While
the blunt instruments of early 20th Century poetry still
carry enough potency to pry open literary list-serves
spanning the modern, the post-modern, and the avante-garde,
four new works by Nancy Dembowski, D.G. Jones, Susan
McCaslin, and E.D. Blodgett quietly present four original
methods of slipping out of their range. Each of these
writers gains a measure of freedom from tradition by
neutralizing it, if only for a short time. They all do so by
slights of hand, and by bracketting 20th Century traditions
in broader or older concerns. Dembowski and Jones, the
classicists of the group, escape by distance, wit, and by
relentlessly extending irony until it snaps and devours
itself. McCaslin and Blodgett, the romantics, slip away by
the passion of their engagement and the delicacy of their
touch, by reclamation of older traditions, and, not least,
by re-envisioning boundaries. To greater or lesser degree,
all four writers have translated the brash distance of early
20th Century irony into proximity and
self-knowledge.
Dembowski
centres her poems in a fairy tale, "The Princess and the
Panopticon", in which a woman lives in a magical tower "with
twenty-six windows, which looked out in every possible
direction," which allows her to see
- everything
above the earth
- and
under the earth
- and
nothing at all could be kept secret from her.
Not
wanting to share this magical tower, she promises to marry
only the man who could "conceal himself from her so
effectually/that it should be quite impossible for her to
find him." Any man who failed had his head struck off and
stuck on a post. Hence the title, and a book full of dead
men glaring at us. And glare they do, as Dembowski steals
their words and power. We are granted a fine revision of
Pound's "Kung" Canto, in which Pound's dictums are turned on
their heads,
- And
Confucius gives the words 'order'
- and
'fellowship with men'
- And
has reservations with 'the nature of
Heaven.'
- And
he said
- 'True
fellowship among persons are not
exclusive,
- The
basic principals of any kind of union,
- Must
be accessible to all concerned.
The
deliberateness of this technique reveals and calls into
question the deliberateness of Pound's own.
Each
of Dembowski's poems borrows, steals, and remakes works of
the 20th century, with insight and a great clarity of
vision. Neutralizing the century through replacing its
content with new content sounds like bludgeoning, but
Dembowski works with considerable subtlety, working from
within the energy of the original pieces. Her poems modulate
against remembered passages, gaining meaning from the
discrepancies between the original text, the static and
accumulations of meanings and connections it throws off, our
memory of the original text, and Dembowski's use of
it.
Dembowski's
Apollonian clarity is often expressed through apocalyptic
imagery. In the midst of a terrifying new version of Pound's
Pisan Cantos, for example, Dembowski writes,
- And
in the morning, under the tent flaps, the smell of
mint
- And
it rained, deep and heavy
- And
there is wind space and rain space
- And
flashes of lightening,
which
lead into "An earthquake so violent the great city split in
three," a storm so violent that
- Bones
tumbled out of tombs
- Stars
fell from the sky
- The
earth caught fire,
and
then throws us right back to the beginning of the Cantos and
Odysseus' journey to the underworld for wisdom at the
beginning of Western History,
-
- And
before day's end
- A
whole day's wage for a quart of flour
- And
we went down
- Into
the sun burned black
- To
the souls of those who had been
slaughtered
- Into
the hole
- Again.
Dembowski
flinches from nothing. She goes into the hole again and
again and again, and comes back with wisdom. What gives the
book its considerable strength is that Dembowski draws no
easy conclusions, and writes fully aware of the culpability
of her position.
McCaslin's
Veil/Unveil is a thin and gentle book of poems without
irony, interested not in deconstruction, but in
reconstruction and reconciliation. Included are poems
purifying the intent of the gnostic heretics, bringing into
a central Christian spiritual concern those excluded from it
by exclusionary dogmas &emdash; including women, Buddhists,
and, of course, gnostics. McCaslin's rendition of gnosticism
is clear and moving. Reading her work is like encountering
C.S. Lewis or T.S. Eliot of The Four Quartets, for like them
she extends the tradition of Anglican spiritual verse into a
time more characterized by ignorance &emdash; or repudiation
&emdash; of that tradition. McCaslin takes a long view of
history, but she does so with authority.
Typically,
the poems in Veil/Unveil slide off heavily-weighted final
lines, into presence and unity. She notes this tendency
herself in the poem, "Blessed are the Merciful", which she
closes by writing,
- even
if there is no mercy,
- yet
will I have mercy on myself,
- for
the crime of separateness.
Her
mastery of the expansive &emdash; yet contained &emdash;
closing can be seen in "Gnosis 3", echoing the troubadors
(also gnostic):
-
- You
were not in and out and away
- like
any ordinary lover, but lingered
- all
night, sequestering, calling me
- beloved
and
I told no one when the morning rose.
The
opening of a physical or spiritual rose out of the verb
'rose' is handled with a light but sure touch. In the same
way, McCaslin reaches out to include women within Christian
spiritual tradition. In "'Lift up Your Heads O Gates, and be
Lifted up, You Everlasting Doors," she closes with "Were you
always carved in me,/swinging open in the small breath?",
effectively placing the traditional image into the context
of a woman, the child in her womb, and birth. Other poems
explore the nature of the bride. She presents both Christian
bride, with a veil which
- Falls,
covers, shields, filters, kisses,
- is
light, almost diaphanous, unstifling
- all
it clothes,
and
an ancient one, Persephone returned to independence from
bondage,
- She
will not rejoin her mother this year
- or
return to the dark king who scooped
- her
body up so many turns of the earth.
-
- She
will (at the risk of disappointing
- or
seeming rude) remake her myth
- as
the seasons rotate without her.
In
Veil/Unveil, McCaslin is doing just that: remaking the
mythology of her faith to include all the positive openings
which it has excluded. As a mark of her maturity, she does
so with a combined strength and gentleness.
Jones
uses the tired contemporary trick of loading his last lines
with heavy weight, but as are most things in this book of
feints and sleights-of-hand that use is not what it at first
seems. In poems as chiselled as if cut out of blocks of
stone, in rhythms and conflations echoing the later poems of
Ralph Gustafson, Jones puts his individual twist to the
modernist tradition. Like Gustafson, he expresses a complex
sense of history through contemporary events embedded in the
frame of the commonplaces of the human and natural world.
Even the Gustafsonian tone is there:
- hurry,
I say, mix and match
- it
may not help
- a
man in Cambodia says
- it
cannot be genocide
- even
racist, killing your own parents
- brothers
and sisters
-
- in
which case there's no help.
Like
the modernists, Jones' language is abbreviated, his line
breaks are used for deliberate effects of modulation, and
collage is widespread. In resilient, unpredictable poems
laced with an at times almost crippling detachment, Jones
has found his own path out of modernism. He uses collage,
for instance, not as an assemblage of external material
designed to spark a symbolist-derived field of meaning, as
did Pound, but as a self-reflexive collation of the material
of the poem by the poem, as it is being written. Jones
pushes his poems along by austere image clusters
masquerading as rhetoric. The early 20th century
amplification of imagery and mocking irony of "Prufrock" or
"Mauberly", have become here at the century's end, imagery
which seeks, through an ironic distance, to shatter any
rhetorical development and to throw the poem continually
back upon the world. The world so encountered can only be
seen against the foil of an observing self which destroys or
changes or beautifies it as it observes. Look at his
bees:
- a
woman makes notes
- blessing
the thunder
-
- and
something the size of a match head
- yellow
with a dark band, moves
- over
the screen, its
- ghostly
text
-
- it
is (is it?) justification
- for
aging.
Wild
Asterisks in Cloud contains many such moments of beauty and
renewal, and like this one they are framed in a tragic
vision, of a trapped self relieved only by intelligence,
precise observation and sly humour. Jones is relentless in
his mission, however, for at the same time that the self
distorts the world through observation, words from the poem
in the act of its creation invade the observing self, are in
turn taken up, and their metaphorical opportunities
explored. As a result, the self of these poems is a tangled
presence, in which the observer, observing himself observe,
observing his observations, is continually striving through
this method to escape his observations and enter a state of
balance. In unmediated Western tradition, the end of this
process would be madness. Often in these poems there is a
sense of tragedy about the pursuit, but there is no madness.
It is rescued because Jones has fused its extenuated western
irony with eastern Zen practice, to flip the observing mind
over into its opposite, into the moment of observation, in
which nothing any longer is being observed and the self and
the world are equally negated, and so, paradoxically, set
free. Even that Zen approach is negated, as in "The Window",
which opens with "glass is beautiful like/a Zen mind", yet
continues with a dead bird, seen through that glass, which
is "a koan/hard to see through", a pivot on which balance
the first, and these final, lines:
-
- the
glass
- holds
no birds, clouds
- vacant
air
-
- leaves
pretty rubbish
- perhaps
- clearing
the mind.
Perhaps.
In one of his very first poems, originally published close
to 40 years ago, Jones wrote of snow buntings, "You must
make them/Out of earth and snow." That Gustafsonian sense of
resolution of the searchings of the mind through the
physical world is stronger now, but now the birds are dead.
It is heartbreaking and austere, reminiscent of
Shostakovitch's last symphony, or the last scraps of Pound's
Cantos. So is passed on to us the wisdom of the
masters.
Blodgett's
through you I unites Elizabethan and Symbolist traditions.
In poems echoing Shakespeare's sonnets, Blodgett uses very
firm, almost wooden free verse line breaks and a metronomic
rhythm, amplified and often swelling over the linear sense
of his sentences, as a ground against which to hypnotize and
to foil expectation. Rhymes are subdued, chiming, and are
often placed before the end of the line, so that the musical
movement of the piece moves in a sliding motion, like that
of a minimalist composition, against the larger structure.
These sliding rhythms, sparking against each other in
unexpected and delightful harmonies, are anchored and driven
forward by a steady beat, working much as the 3000 C notes
of Terry Riley's "in C". There is no discord in these
pieces, and their hypnotism is very reminiscent of the
mantric harmonies of Philip Glass, a kind of New Age
Gregorian chant completely purified of Gothic angst. These
are love poems. They work through the reverberations of
association and accreting levels of symbolism created by
obsessive repetition, to portray the mythic, romantic poetic
mind in the act of creation and perception.
Blodgett's
imagery centres largely on a few words, rose, sea, sphere,
star, dark, bones, and sun. These words appear in a
shimmering, ever-changing context, as the speaker moves
through the variations of the body seen as the world and the
world seen as the body. Ultimately, through the experience
of love for another, the poems arrive at a conscious sense
of the human. This sense of a known self is created through
"memory becoming flesh", through memory of the visions of a
perceived world cast up by previous encounters with the
beloved, all amplified by the symbolic accretions of the
poems. The variations of the poems are profound and subtle,
beginning at an Eden, in which the body of the beloved sits
beneath a tree, in one sense the bones of the body, in
another breath and cognition:
- The
words you spoke settled on your lips. Flowers
appeared and grass,
- trees
and the small stones, rising in your breath.
Animals
- were
standing in the shade, your breathing in their
flesh.
The
vision unfolds into language itself, in
- If
I were to write your name, shaping letters through
the night, I need
-
- another
alphabet, composed of roses and the fragrance
of
- a
spring that rises intermittent through the
mind.
In
the last third of the book, the original sense of a world
translated into sense impressions, goes through a series of
transmutations to become an incarnation of the physical
world in symbolist language. On this bridge, the original
Eden opens at last into the transcendence of
- I
held your head within my hands. It might have been
a fallen bird,
- a
stone, the moon in memory, but it was not a stone,
and it
- was
warmer than any moon that passes through the sky at
night
- and
then is gone. My hands are holding you,
contemplatives of your
- being
in them, your speaking passing into flesh and bone,
a word
- incarnate
and corpuscular.
That
bird rises again simultaneously from the substance of the
poem and the body, in a manner representative of the
allusive movement of every poem in the book:
- I
think that sometime all that will remain of
me
- will
be the silence of my hands, and when the trumpet
sounds the final
- time,
my hands will clap once, and nothing will be heard
but echoes
- of
all you said to me, no flesh put on again, but air
alone
- assuming
sense.
In
that sense of the self living in the other, of world and
body living in and through each other through the agent of
amplified and modulated memory, the speaker finds
completion, "the moon appealed to once, a stone, and
memories/of birds aloft within eternal skies, both of us
recalled." 'through you i' is simultaneously a profound
series of love poems, a sonorous piece of music, a map of
the romantic creative mind, creating order from a sea of
undifferentiated perceptions and emotions, and the journey
of self into consciousness through poetry. It is
masterful.
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D.G.
Jones, Wild Asterisks in Cloud, Empyreal Press, Montreal.
1997. 5.5x9. 137 pages, with 9 drawings by the author. Pbk.
ISBN: 0-921852-15-0. $14.00.
Susan
McCaslin, Veil/Unveil, The St. Thomas Poetry Series,
Toronto. 1997. 4.5x8. 45 pages.Pbk. ISBN: 0-9697802-4-9.
$?
Nancy
Dembowski, Ninety-seven Posts with the Heads of Dead Men,
Tortoiseshell & Black, Toronto. 1998. 5.5x9. 64 pages.
Pbk. ISBN: 1-896901-07-7. $13.
E.D.
Blodgett, through you I (Apostrophes II), The University of
Alberta Press, Edmonton. 1997. 6.5x6.5. 74 pages. Pbk. ISBN:
0-88864-304-7. $14.95.
This
review first appeared in ARC magazine.
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