The obvious question to ask about Jim Powell’s second collection of poems, Substrate, published twenty five years after the first, in 2009, is how anything written in language so unremittingly disciplined in its avoidance of “poesy” could seem so original—after all, other poets write in the plain style, and other poets tauten by meter the prosaic slackness of our language. But it was Powell who led by, before returning to Baudelaire, or (though I’ve not written on them in these terms) Eliot or Stevens, to consider what it means to be a poetry of the surface. It does not mean the same thing for all of these poets, certainly, but it suggests a continuity that spans their differences. Here, in fuller form, is Eliot’s great passage on Ben Jonson:
He is no less a poet than these men, but his poetry is of the surface. Poetry of the surface cannot be understood without study; for to deal with the surface of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately that we too must be deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller men also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something at the start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well as in design. So does Dante offer something, a phrase everywhere (tu se’ ombra ed ombra vedi) even to readers who have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as well as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy reader’s fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse, but in the design of the whole. But not many people are capable of discovering for themselves the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson’s industrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well. When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean intelligent saturation in his work as a whole.
This cannot, of course, mean the same thing for Powell as it does for Jonson, or for Eliot, but it was essential to my working out my experience of reading Powell’s Substrate. Here is a collection that demands saturation in the work as a whole; here is a collection that offers historical interest and curiosity; this is a collection in which “no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused.” And this too is a collection that asks us to discover beauty not only through labor, but beauty in labor, in time, in the expenditure of energy, consciously, and unconsciously, in action large and small, tragic and mundane, and both, over time, and to recognize that the design of action lives on surfaces, as surfaces, of language, of objects, of landscape.
The poetry argues, implicitly—it embodies in its being the argument—that the minute particularity of things can only be recognized if we attend to their surfaces, and that, in turn, the surfaces of things are known through hard labor, the in the poems the action of labor is known by the perception of the surfaces upon which the labor occurs, which the labor aspires to touch, and which serves as both a limit and end; there is, in an extension, more deeply implicit, of this argument, a further notion that to respect surfaces is to respect the multitudinous abundance of the world, in history, in geography, across cultures, and that when we go beneath, subsuming surfaces to “deeper concepts” or to experiences that mean more than the labor of the surface, we are defacing and erasing their identities; that this is where exploitation lies, something becoming something else (ultimately a “one” that is nothing at all(). This is how the poetry is ecologically minded, not denying that human labor on nature, transform it, destroy it, to live, but resisting the assimilation—too easy in the crudest poetry—of the nature of things to something else. And this is true especially of history, which is the past section’s great subject—or nexus of subjects since “history” is itself not one thing, but many endeavors, which do not know themselves as such, and which stand out as distinct unities of action and meaning, on their own terms, on the own delimited, specific, contingent surfaces, which define the wholeness of the poems that Powell writes.
The poems undertake a labor that respects, and embodies, the labor and striving of the past, and the particulars from which it is inseparable; and that labor, in the poetry, is a labor that returns us to the surface of the verse: it is meter and rhythm. It took me a long time to attune my ear to these poems, but now attuned, I have never heard anything quite like them, because the metrical patterns are accommodated to a language of flat-accented assertion, predication, and observation, so that the variations of stressed and unstressed syllables are often made to seem implicit in movement that is metrical by accident: the poetry is made to seem brought to the surface of the language, rather than arising as a consequence of (as in Hardy’s image of the poet as architect) its arrangement. In the first section of the collection, “Habitat,” this effect is brought off by Powell’s craft alone, but in the third section, “Substrate,” it comes about by Powell’s applying his craft to the archive. Pound and the Malatesta Cantos are the relevant predecessor, since in those poems Pound made poetry from a grit of fact and information as it appears in primary sources—but the detection, and extraction, of verse in (or from) the archives of Northern Californian history in Powell’s poems is unlike Pound’s, both because each poem as a distinct shape, a defined beginning, middle, end, even where the beginning is in media res and the end is abrupt, in terms of the action it presents; and also because the language of the poems is not the prolix self-justifications of and by a Renaissance condottiere but words eked out among the hardship of exploration, frontiers, war, or mundane work. It is also different because Powell’s determination to trace a variety of meters in their words, sometimes stretching them to fourteeners of iambs, at other times running clear heroic lines of iambic pentameter blank verse within a longer unit of fourteen syllables, so that the former crystalizes on the surface of the other, and at times disrupting the heroic line’s pentameter with a line break, refusing a determined pattern; the lines, that is, hold onto, and set forth, meter variously in Powell’s poems. This has the effect of keeping the words on a surface—of pulling them up away from the scenes they present to the stream of phonetics that they carry, that runs through them; it is all the more remarkable that the melopoeia is sustained by a language so resolutely utilitarian and often journalistic.
An example is overdue. Here is a clear example of what Powell is up to, though the poem is especially resistant to an initial reading:
The Peltries
.
On the Klamath and Rogue, 1827
.
Last night our guides informed us they would separate this morning
and others will conduct us, the cause assigned is apprehension
of being killed on entering the country of their enemies.
The Clamites and the Shastise are at variance near these passes.
If they like war let them enjoy it
.
and we meanwhile shall wage war with their beaver. Upwards 70
skins to dry, our traps far in the rear, did not raise camp.
This day 13 beaver and 2 Otter Rain all night.
I sent twelve trappers forward with a guide and 20 horses.
Today’s success amounts to seven
.
Cold nights and clear at dawn we started early, a villainous road
and long day’s march, worse for the horses, mud, snow in the pass,
we overtook our forward party, descended and encamped
by a small brook. They will raise traps and join us in the morning.
Course this day NW 15 miles
.
6 men set out at daylight with 60 traps, at eight we ventured
down our brook and camped where it debouches in a basin.
An Indian came boldly to my tent with two fresh salmon.
We have now 30 trappers in advance of the brigade.
No stream escapes our observation.
Sent out my green hands with their gear. Course NNE 5 miles
We had a windy night and fair this morning, fine warm weather.
The Indians say the winter is now over. Birds singing,
grass green, and at full growth, flowers—yet it is February
31 beaver 1 marten
.
All hands out hunting, in camp the ladies vie at dressing peltry
and drying meat. Today completed our first thousand skins.
We cannot have too many. Man Is Never Satisfied
Old Jacques the freeman says three Indians strung their bows at him
and made him signs to leave their land.
.
He drew the cover from his Gun to give them a salute
when they took flight. McDougal says the Indians break their dams
and make the beaver wild to trap. In shallow water taken
by the forefoot his grinders set him free by amputation.
Traps placed six inches under
.
catch him by the hind foot, he cannot free himself, and drowns.
The Horse Keeper reports one gone, with saddle, the Company’s.
A cold night. Beavers snug inside their lodges, their dams frozen.
Twenty Indians assembled to make peace. Two dozen
buttons settled the affair.
.
This place is clear of beaver. Four days travel below our traps
the guides are ignorant in all directions further. Last night
it snowed ten inches, at dawn rain commenced, by now the country
is underwater, the rivers rising. This will not mend the roads.
Louis the Iroquoy found his horse.
.
(Peter Skene Ogden)
.
The standard line, the fourteener, is exemplified by “We cannot have too many. Man is Never Satisfied” where the full-stop marks the caesura; that is also perhaps the most line that serves as the semantic center of the poem, both because “We cannot have too many” expresses rapacity but also, against the numbers recorded in the poem, suggests how rapacity, in such circumstances, counts, quite literally, for very little. Rapacity in the poem is limited by the scarcity of means and the hardship of hunting. On the one hand, we know, from our vantage, what it will come to mean to say that “Man is Never Satisfied,” capitalized like the letters above the gates of a capitalist hell; but the poem testifies also to the hardship, the “Cold night and clear at dawn we started early, a villainous road,” a line that, as I scan it, stretches beyond the fourteen by two syllables, which may be either reconciled to fourteen by an elision of “early a” and a two-syllable “villainous,” or which can be felt as extending past its duration by the initial words, “cold night,” holding as it were, the line in place, for an instant. There is, as it were, heroism in the hardship, if not the greed, and in the line, “and drying meat. Today completed our first thousand skins,” the clause from “today” to “skins” lives as a line of measured blank verse, the old heroic line celebrating the “first thousand,” but perforce of the same fourteener as “and drying meat” since the counting itself is not being undertaken in account books of a warehouse or middleman, but by the trappers themselves, for whom the total of skins cannot be separated from the broader range of activities, which includes drying meat for further use—not simply discarding; the fourteener, which draws English into a prosaic length, insists that we set the heroism of trophies (the skins) alongside the act of preserving food for survival. The thousand skins were a genuine achievement when we consider what the poem foregrounds: the arduous counting towards that number: “This day 13 beaver and 2 Otter Rain all night.” In this line, the numerals and even the typography, pull against the fourteen syllables that we hear when we read it aloud: the eye and ear do not cooperate. What counts in this poem is very much counting, where counting is a task because a part of a form of life that charges it with meaning. The title, “The Peltries,” refers to the skins, “peltry,” but echoes also the word “paltry” and suggests also a type of person, a kind of person, middle-ground trappers and their Indian guides, who are “peltries,” ragged and inseparable from their work. What is peculiar about the word is that “peltry” is plural, already a gathering of skins, and so the title nods to the abundance, a gathering of gatherings, a layering, in the word, of what is countable (three peltries? four?) with does not specify a number to count.
We need to think, as we read this poem, and all of the poems in “Substrate” (the section, not the book), not so much of counting, but of the activity basic even to counting: listing. This, then this, then this, then that. For these poems establish a sequence of events as a list: not quite a narrative, not even a chronicle, but something close to either, lacking the implied causality and motivation of the former, the implied significance and teleology of the latter, though possessing elements of both. The paratactic structure of lists was exploited to new ends by Pound, but Powell’s method is not Pound’s, and because his listing of what happened, approximating, and likely deriving from a record in a journal or daybook, suggests the raw material but not the shape of narrative or chronicle, and because Powell does not want to impose either but only to admit the possibility of both, the challenge he faces is one of closure. In “The Peltries,” closure happens in each stanza with an unevenly syllabled tail-line, nine, eight, or seven syllables. Each of these lengths has a different effect on the stanza it closes, with the eight syllables having an effect like the tightening of a couplet at the end of a sonnet (“and made him signs to leave their land”), perhaps too closed to close the poem as a whole; with the nine syllables in tantalizing proximity to, but not realizing, the heroic line (“Today’s success amounts to seven,” where the success comes up short); and then there is the seven syllable, half of the fourteener serving as a natural unity of incompletion, half rather than whole. The final stanza gives us a perplexing line to close, which might, with an elision of “th’Iroquoy” be heard as eight, or which might, if we shorten “Louis,” compressing it, be heard as seven; its metrical ambiguity is fit for the cliffhanger of the poem’s action, the roads impassable, the horse found, more pelts to be hunted. But look again at the several lines that close the poem:
Last night
it snowed ten inches, at dawn rain commenced, by now the country
is underwater, the rivers rising. This will not mend the roads.
Louis the Iroquoy found his horse.
“It snowed ten inches, at dawn rain commenced, by now the country” stands as a perfect fourteener, but in that perfect fourteen is the heroic “at dawn rain commenced, by now the country,” and “by now the country | is underwater,” separated by a line break but not a comma, does the same, and so, too does “is underwater, the rivers rising: this is not action but it is the hardship that fortitude must overcome. And the flat “This will not mend the roads” is wrly understated, resigned, but also unflappable, a coda to the heroic cadences of the earlier lines. We are not exactly returned at the close to the surface state of affairs, since we never left, but the surface state, the list of what happened, where, and how, is felt, by the incapacity to act that brings the poem to a close, to constitute an arc of action, something of a whole, extracted by Powell from the archival drift. New Critics ruined “unity” for everyone by telling us what unity ought to mean, but Powell’s poem, like any really good poem, is a rediscovery, or reinvention, of what it means for things to be whole, or not. It is an argument that what it presents is a whole, and we are left to decide not what the poem “means,” but what it means for this all to belong together, what it means to see this series of actions as part of a greater action that fits; that is, we are left to reassess what counts as a block in the construction of history, recovered from rubble often cast aside from the edifice.
We do not need to specify what all of the labor of these poems amounts to, but the poems themselves might be said, to trot out a phrase that I formerly thought helpful, to dwell in the work of dwelling—and, more particularly, to dwell on the surface of that work, recognizing that work to concern itself with experiences of surfaces, faces, glances, questions, exteriors, skins, vestiges, not yielding depths, but constituting dwelling in what they are. Even the meter, the fourteeners, and sometimes even ‘sixteeners’, ask us to dwell in their expanse, to hold ourselves present in the line, hearing its unity and measure, even as it outdoes the pentameter to which we are accustomed. Take the beautiful and moving poem:
Advent
.
I was a grown man when Bogus Tom, Peter, and Shasta Mollie
brought the earth lodge dances. Some folks here spoke their language.
On the way they stopped at every rancheria. At Cache Creek
men, women, boys and girls, even children and old blind ladies danced.
The women had their hair down long and crowns of flowers.
.
Joijoi the Woponuch brought word: ‘My father asked, ‘What kind of dance
can you give now, when everyone is dead?’ I said
I dreamed the earth is going to be changed and when grass is knee high
the ancestors will rise at dawn and move to meet us from the east.
A wave of north winds and high water will come first
.
and wash the world ahead of them. Inside earth lodges underground
the people will be safe. The flood tide will roll over
and withdraw. Acorns will be plentiful again. We will live well.”
Depot Charlie had one built by fall. The center poles were cedar.
Indians came from the Mendocino as far as the coast.
.
The Warm House was crowded. We circled, men and women alternating
short steps clockwise facing inward. The four dream singers
sat inside with split-stick clappers of elderwood. The Big Head maskers
danced five sets by turns. They had owl down pompoms and yellowhammer-quill
headbands with quail plume tremblers nodding from the temples.
.
People who never danced before did now. Old women danced like girls.
It went on till past dawn. Then we ate, and slept
in the big house half the day. Hardly anyone went to sleep
in his own camp. Everyone was waiting for the world to end.
Most of wanted to die together in a pile.
.
We danced four nights and stopped. Some fainted and fell over and started dreaming.
There would be no more getting sick and no more dying.
Sixes George said things like that. He lost his wife and son. He shook
all over when he talked, his voice like running water. He stayed with us
for years. He died at Baird about 1902.
.
The dreaming lasted two years maybe, the dances twenty. Finally the old
dancers died off and the earth lodges rotted away.
Sometimes the town folk would invite the Indians to give a dance
and people used the old time dream song feathers. It was for fun. They called it
the Feather Dance. It was mostly a white man’s show.
.
(Coquille Thompson, 1932)
There are other poems in the sequence (“Substrate,” I mean; it is not just a section of the book, but a sequence in itself, as I hope is clear from how I’ve been reading it) that move me, but none quite as this poem does—and no doubt the plainness of language, both detached from and inseparable from the pain of what Jonathan Lear, in his study Radical Hope, calls “cultural devastation,” has much to do with that. But the formal control, the selection and arrangement of words alike, cannot be separated from the plan language or subject matter. “Most of us wanted to die together in a pile” is a stunning line because it is allowed to feel stunned, to yearn for the stunning insensibility of death, and it is allowed to open out, to both the piles of massacred dead, eerily and unwittingly (for the speaker, but not the poet) summoned by it, and to the pile of an embrace of kindred, the childish tangle of limbs. And there is the word “Most”: calibrated not with doubt, but with a respect for limits of the intensity of this experience at the limit of a civilization and way of life, and a word that returns, spun on its axis to face in the opposite direction, in the poem’s last line, “It was mostly a white man’s show.” Here “mostly” registers the loss of what had significance but concedes also that something else was preserved. In neither instance does the word hedge; it is exact.
Though none of the poems in “Substrate” is narrative or chronicle, they can be considered to transcend a list of happenings, and to become actions, because the poem itself gives to them a beginning, middle, and end. This is their essential unity. In “Advent” the title of which suggests an arrival or coming upon, the entire poem is about a coming to an end and gives the arrival of the end an arc in itself. More than “The Peltries,” the sequence of happenings in “Advent” curves more naturally into a narrative; but the most startling, and powerful, parts of the poem are where that curve is bent in another direction, or broken, as when we are told “The center poles were cedar.” But in the break comes most properly when the dance itself breaks; this dance cannot, the poem says, be in itself the source of a coherent narrative, because it lacks the arc of a tragic unity, which we might be tempted to bestow on it; here too, Powell is returning us to the surface of action—an end without a sense of social or historical resolution, a beginning without the need for such resolution, and, in Aristotelian fashion, a beginning, middle, and end defined internally, by relation to one another, rather than by a prescribed set of conventions (“once upon a time”). But here, in “Advent,” where the subject is history, the narrative principles that govern historical writing, push upon the poem; when it breaks free of them, when it refuses them, it achieves finds a new key, unexpected and moving:
We danced four nights and stopped. Some fainted and fell over and started dreaming.
There would be no more getting sick and no more dying.
Sixes George said things like that. He lost his wife and son. He shook
all over when he talked, his voice like running water. He stayed with us
for years. He died at Baird about 1902.
Something remarkable happens in the third line, in the abrupt announcement, made to feel entirely continuous, in a natural sequence, a matter of one number following another, that “He lost his wife and son.” I want to hear “He had lost his wife and son,” to impose on his saying “things like that” (“no more getting sick and no more dying”) a cause, a motive: he said things like that because he had been stung by death. But this is not what the verb tense means, at least not primarily: instead, it tells us that this other thing happened, also in the past. And we are left to be guided by the sequence of phrases to understand that the one thing happened another, not related by cause, or feeling, but by sequence alone. This is how things went. And yet they are part of the same action, the action of the dance coming to an end, and the ending of a way of life being felt in its no longer having the means to mark itself. But I am getting ahead of myself “He lost his wife and son” is in turn followed, on an entirely different scale, by “He shook,” which ends the line, which stands looking out over the void of the line-ending, as Sixes George looks out over his life; we might take his shaking to be mourning, to be grieving or loss of self-control at what is absent, but this is in turn resolves with the turn of the line into another state of affairs, no more connected with what came immediately before than with anything else: he grew old, “he shook | all over when he talked.” This shaking happened, and though we might think the shaking to be a diminished bodily repetition or hangover of the dancing that had once happened, and now stopped, the poem does not point us there. “His voice like running water,” clear or burbling without sense? Here, I think, we are meant to catch a difference between this and “the flood tide will roll over”: that flood diminished as the language itself is diminished from a visionary statement of metaphorical truth to a simile, as the voice has been removed from first-person prophetic decree to recollection. His voice is like running water, but not water that wills or does anything; it is water that simply runs; it is water in action with movement but not purpose, and even while his voice runs on, “he stayed with us,” the poem staying with him, Sixes George becoming a part of its sequence of what happened, though his presence in the poem, and certainly the things that happened to him, are not part of whatever narrative the poem might have offered if it were to be about the end of a people or the end of history. Then the counting resumes: “He stayed with us| For years. He died at Baird about 1902.” But the counting is not exact, and is not a counting is not towards or from: “about 1902” is a date without significance beyond it being when he died. It’s the date’s not mattering, and the significance of Sixes George, not realizing itself, that is poignant here. What matters about this surface of action is that it is not a narrative, and that it could not be one, because of what happened.
Dislocation, disorientation, and the encounter between incommensurable worlds and environments are the conditions of many of these poems; and it is not their aim to make sense of what happened, or to analyze the circumstances of their arising, but to trace the shared membrane that forms across the experiences of dislocation and disorientation they recount:
The Staves
.
April 13, 1817—44 degrees 3’ N, 181 degrees b’ W
.
Confined to cabin through five days by storm off Oonalashka
the expedition’s scientific gentlemen
cribbed in the narrow coffins of our berths
continued quizzing Kadu in the dark while heavy seas
lifted the Rurik heavenward and pitched her
.
shuddering from the brink again: Why is the taboo
on men and women eating together not true for fruit?
The answers drifted back like oracles
from the Polynesian’s upper bunk. Fruit is a drink.
Why are drums the women’s, boats the men’s?
.
Midway from the equator to the arctic pole, bound north
for the Aleutians, a sailor from boyhood, Kadu noted
Sirius setting nightly southward, observed
the flight of birds at dusk and dawn, and could not answer this one,
but when Chamisso asked what the staves meant
.
carved with notched rings, implanted in pandanus groves, the Kadu
who was seized with shaking to behold a snowflake pause
and vanish on his palm repeated calmy:
What kept the islands’ population scanty enough to feed,
and healthy, and long-lived, was ancient custom.
.
Each child a mother bears after her third she must herself
bury alive. The staves designated burials.
This he attributed insistently
to the scarcity of the islands’ parsimonious soil.
We could not help him grasp the concept of life’s
.
continuance after death, he scarcely trusts our accounts of suicides
though history in her book records the self-destruction
of the tribes of the Marianas under Spain—
and still our busy merchant captains rake up the flames of war
to raise their profits on the weapons sold.
.
(Frederick Eschscholtz, M.D.)
The poem is about the encounter between the German doctor and naturalist, Frederick Eschscholtz, who travelled on board the Russian ship the Rurik, circumnavigating the globe in 1817. Kadu was a native of what would become known to the United States as the Marshall Islands; Erschcholtz’ friend Chamisso, also a naturalist, would use the doctor’s name for the classificatory designation of the California Poppy. Wikipedia makes this sort of fact-finding easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_von_Eschscholtz. Recent academic articles easier still: https://www.jstor.org/stable/90001120. Powell relied on the primary sources, though, and what is not easy from either is making sense of how the fascinating history became a remarkable poem.
The staves of the title are the staves of the third stanzas, wooden rods used to mark the burial spots of infants; they are also staves of a ship, holding together the vessel the men gather on; and they are also the staves of a piece of music, the lines upon which notes are written, being five, corresponding to the five lines of each stanza—each “stave” as it were. With music as our analogy, we might ask about the closing note, a discordant turn to an object of rumination that does not square easily with what came before. “And still”—but it does not seem that there is “still” anything, since we have not read about war until this moment. But this is a leap of thought that the poem does not want to explain: it is traced out in the movement from staves of burial, the survival of a tribe, the purported self-destruction of tribes under the pressure of the Spanish, and the perpetual violence against indigenous peoples of which he, Eschscholtz, the speaker, is a part as he sails on the Rurik. “And still our busy merchant captains rake up the flames of war” looks elsewhere, but in looking elsewhere reminds us what the vessel of his inquiry and passage alike have floated upon; it reveals his frustration, his disgust, and his surrender, for though it is a leap of thought, visible in the dash, it is a leap in the same direction, though it might seem otherwise. We have been looking at observation, but we need also to look at what enables the looking, and this is where the poem ends both because it says enough and because the end of observation in and of itself comes with the widening consciousness of the observer, and the transition from seeing along things, to setting them into history.
“Staves” turns on asking “why,” on looking into depths; but the actual object of focus is the looking itself, on the seeing that occasions asking, so that it pulls itself back from inquiry and understanding to the staves, standing, what they are, marking burial grounds owing to the “scarcity of the islands’ parsimonious soil,” an explanation that takes the surface of the island as the foundation of custom, as it must be. Reason, this poem suggests, is visible to the eye, even if fleeting, like the snowflake disappearing on Kadu’s palm. We would expect a naturalist and doctor to be sympathetic to the empirical and functionalist, but the empirical and functional are not of the essence of Kadu’s response, which is instead metaphysical in its suppositions: about things being and then not being, passing away, able to survive, or not, life being itself, crucially, of a piece with the available soil, on the same plane of ecological features. This is what the speaker cannot, will not, accept; he does not deny empiricism, but Kadu’s explanation denies a meaning that would itself deny that surfaces are what is, which is why he attempts to help Kadu explain the continuance of life after death, something that is beyond a surface, independent of surfaces, as the snowflake on the palm is not.
What is remarkable about the poem is the absence of bafflement; what distinguishes it from poems about dislocation and disorientation is that these do not correspond with, or give rise to, an intensity of perplexity; instead, they are mastered in the poem, by the poem, without resolution or effacement. Even granting what Kadu does not understand, and what they do not understand, even confined in a cabin at sea, the naturalists on the ship preserve their equanimity, heroically. The poise they achieve is achieved in the poem by the heroic pentameter line that sits at the center of each stave or stanza, not a still point, but a balanced measure, whose strength and worth lies in its accepting that dislocation and disorientation are not to be dismissed or overcome, but must be borne; the poem maintains its course, afloat not adrift, upon their surface. Note the syntactical dexterity, the breadth of observation and control, in the following stanzas:
Midway from the equator to the arctic pole, bound north
for the Aleutians, a sailor from boyhood, Kadu noted
Sirius setting nightly southward, observed
the flight of birds at dusk and dawn, and could not answer this one,
but when Chamisso asked what the staves meant
.
carved with notched rings, implanted in pandanus groves, the Kadu
who was seized with shaking to behold a snowflake pause
and vanish on his palm repeated calmy:
What kept the islands’ population scanty enough to feed,
and healthy, and long-lived, was ancient custom.
The lines settle repeatedly, at “bound north,” at “a sailor from boyhood,” at “Sirius setting southward,” at “the flight of birds at dusk and dawn,” at the description of the staves, especially the delicately recorded “implanted in pandanus groves,” then again at “and vanish on his palm,” and finally at “and long-lived” until at last “ancient custom.” That is, each of these moments is made to count, and to hold the verse in place, each one pausing, and then vanishing, sometimes because they round out clauses, sometimes because they still the progress of the lines; and yet their movement is onward, from one thing to another, one happening to another, not a deepening of an idea, but a roving across a single moment that unites the global and local, past and present, the personal and the cultural, the numinous and the material—all of which come into themselves as what they are in relation to one another, as coterminous with the moment of inquiry, and as adjacent, contiguous, patiently laid out.. What we would expect is that the perplexity of the encounter is tangled, or crumbled, but here it is unfolded, uncrumpled even, and smoothed not just by the poetry, but as poetry; its being unfolded like this is what it is for it to be the poem.
I could talk about other poems in this magnificent sequence, and they would allow me to develop what I am trying to say, in ways I could not anticipate (one of the measures of good poetry); I’m thinking especially of “Two Million Feet of Vinyl” and “Commonwealth.” But then I’d want also to talk about the soft beauty of “Wild Mustard Remembers,” the beguilingly comic “Annals of San Francisco (Days of 1854),” or the perplexingly straightforward “Epistemology.” A sequence about the past, about the vast surface of the past, that asks to be traversed and not mined, observed and not extracted, it also opens up a horizon, a hope for what American poetry might find itself capable of being in the twenty-first century.
Critical Provisions 