Stanley Plumly

from Narrative Values, Lyric Imperatives

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Narrative is one of those loose-fitting generic literary terms that gets applied like mayonnaise, like metaphor and tone. In the post-WWII generation, it has become a term handmade for literary theorists and speculators, narratologists and narrativists, and other neo-narrative onlookers. Even narrative poetry, linked to neo-formalism, has had a turn. Postmodernist Paul de Man has written that narrative as a figure is "the paradigm of all texts," whose "unreadability" engenders further texts, suggesting a deconstruction of a line--whatever its shape--without beginning or end: for the maker an endless formal possibility, for the reader an endless reading. Whatever the implications of this deconstructive insight, and however true, it's been passe for some time; which is to say that it has become an assumption since the symbolists that the text is artificial, even when it pretends to be organic. For the poet, form draws the line, shapes the figure, and limits the circumference. For the lyric poem, narrative functions as form, as an internal, achieved construct, working from the inside out, from the living guts, which is why the sequential, suggestive shapes of lyric poems so often resemble shapes in nature, which also create an artifice: the meander, the branch, the elliptical circle, the hexagon within the snowflake or the xylem of a tree, and the spiral or the gyre.

The relationship of the needs of narrative meeting the needs of lyricism--or at least the line break and the stanza--is old hat, depending on how you frame the question. For the modernist it takes on subject status beginning with the Romantics, particularly the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In making so much of the language of men and the rhythms of prose as the idioms of reality as opposed to the absolutist and moralistic mindsets of eighteenth-century diction, Wordsworth describes a separation between two kinds of language. "I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood," he says, "in a selection of language really used by men." (I think he means Dorothy, too.) It's not too long before this essentially Miltonic-blank-verse versus Popeian-verse-couplets argument sublimates into the now familiar and ongoing debate between new-age formalism and free verse: you hear it in Whitman's ars poeticas, Dickinson's letters, Eliot's English commentaries, Pound's ABC's, Williams's Paterson, Moore's use of syllabics, Crane's explications, Olson's Maximus, Lowell's conversion, Ginsberg's Howl, and Plath's "Words dry and riderless." You hear it now, in the last twenty years, in the quarrel between poetry and theory, coherency and indeterminancy, self and construct, autobiography and history, personalism and politics, lingua franca and linguistics...a quarrel between who or what is speaking the poem and in whose or what language: the discourse of our dailiness or a discourse of a discourse.

These meter-making and -unmaking arguments have, historically, obscured not only the way in which good poems are at once formal and free, personal and political, of a piece and difficult, but the way in which the lyric poem continues to depend on narrative's "fare forwarding," that constructed sense of followability, line-turn, connection, disconnection, and one damn thing after another. Verse and prose distinctions mask the multiplicity of languages we have come to accept in a poem, in a single work as well as a single career. These forced distinctions also blur the demands of rhythm, cadence, and spoken emotional texture in a line, in favor of an idea or agenda. Eliot's Waste Land and Berryman's Dream Songs are obvious examples of dramatic and dynamic multiplicity, but the former leads to the great harmony and unified resonance of Four Quartets and the latter comes out of the riven complexity of the mono-voiced Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Plath and Ashbery, as "language poets," both evolve and combine rhetorics over a lifetime, crafting and recrafting. Some years ago, in an overview of recent American poetry entitled "Contemporary Modes," the critic Sven Birkerts spoke of "a bewildering plurality of poetic styles" and thus tried to bring clarity to the unclear by dividing the scene into "two kinds of poets: those for whom the world is prior to the word, and who use language to depict reality; and those for whom the world is only accessible through language, who use words to create reality." Poet Alan Shapiro, in 1996, split the categories this way: "While the world of American poetry is too heterogenous to be usefully described in terms of dichotomy, the recent debate if not recent practice of American poetry does seem to divide itself roughly into two opposing camps: one based in the lyricism of subjective life, the other in the skepticism of the intellect." Then he goes on to add, in a curiously infected diction, that "in the former camp...we find mostly free verse poems underwritten by an unexamined faith in old-fashioned notions of individual authenticity and self expression. In the latter camp, embodied most rigorously in the poets associated with the Language school, we find all fictions of unmediated selfhood thoroughly exploded, and subjectivity in general sacrificed on the experimental altar of the indeterminate sign."

Birkerts and Shapiro are correct in dividing down the center of contemporary American poetry, if for no other reason than the fact that there is so much of it and just to begin to sort and judge requires a certain arbitration. Curious, though, that Shapiro, whose poems fall well within the scope of his first category, falls prey to the language of his second category when he writes in the abstractions of "unmediated selfhood" and "the altar of the indeterminate sign." Perhaps the drawn differences aren't so different. Does Hart Crane's sometimes beautiful unreadability make him a poet for whom the world is only accessible through words? Does Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful readability make her a poet mired in self expression? What really is the difference between the world and the word, once you've got past the chicken-or-the-egg part of it? A sentence is a narrative, the word a world, the way a man or a woman is made of words. You can screw a sentence up any way you want--make it, unmake it, invest it, divest it, add, subtract, reorder it, reduce it to a word, it is still alive in time, with time. It still proceeds from the breath--of the world, into the world. I would submit that there is no such thing as an "indeterminate sign"; there is only a less determinate sign. And I agree with De Quincey, that time is a "greater mystery" than space, that connections hold more power than divisions, and that words are not singularities and stillnesses but move together with the arrow of time.

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When Robert Pinsky insinuates his mother into his poem, through her affection for the piano and her ambition for her son, he permits her presence to define the emotion; he asks her, in effect, to become the real antagonist and source of imaginative tension. The mother, after her fall, is carried "up the last / Steps and into the living room," just like the piano. And in the years of confusion that follow, it's the piano that will assume the mothering role. This is the kind of dramaturgical information narrative brings to the occasion of and reason for our poems--emotive as well as imaginative, spiritual as well as material. Narrative provides not only the characters but the character of the event. For Sharon Olds it's the memory of fifty years ago brought painfully, and immediately, into the present, lyric moment. "I do not know her...I have not seen her"--the mother will die with the daughter's knowledge that our most fundamental relationships can also be our most alien, and that this fracture will continue. The speaker will pass this knowledge on, in a larger narrative. Paraphrasing "content," however, is dangerous in that it tends to reduce the language of the experience to a sort of rue, even roux, when the poem as an entity has spoken well enough for itself--not only in the best words in their best order but with an intensity that brings art to life. Charles Bernstein is correct in saying that "there are no thoughts except through language, we are everywhere seeing through it, limited to it but not by it. Its conditions always interpose themselves: a particular set of words to choose from (a vocabulary), a way of processing those words (syntax, grammar): the natural conditions of language." Nor are there feelings in a poem without language, just as narrative--the impulse to sequence and consequence--underwrites the natural condition of a sentence, which is vocabulary turned into syntax and grammar. The lyric shape of this natural condition is poetry, the art of the need of language to connect.

The secret subject, or subtext, of narrative is time; the subtext of time is mortality, mutability; the subtext of mortality is emotion. Loss is our parent, poetry a parental form. "Twenty-four Logics in Memory of Lee Hickman" is a late poem by Michael Palmer from his Selected Poems 1972-1995 overtitled The Lion Bridge. Palmer is commonly associated with experimental writing in general and Language poetry in particular; he seems to me to be the closest poet we have to a classical French symbolist. "The call to language in a poem," he has written, "does not begin or end with its discursive flow and does not give way to qualified priorities. Not to make of poetry a 'purer' occasion, simply to give credit to its terms and the range of possibilities it attends. Poetry seems a making within discrete temporal conditions...and is profoundly meditational and relative and exists as a form of address singularly difficult to prescribe or define." This strikes me as very much an update of the theoretical thinking of Mallarme and Valery and Eluard. Palmer's work is certainly interested in "the range of possibilities" and is "profoundly meditational," but what interests me in his formulation is his reference to "discrete temporal conditions," a typical oxymoron from a poet who wishes to separate just at the moment he connects. Palmer's poetry flows beautifully, but discretely.

The bend in the river followed us for days
and above us the sun
doubled and redoubled its claims

Now we are in a house
with forty-four walls
and nothing but doors

Outside the trees, chokecherries, mulberries and oaks
are cracking like limbs
We can do nothing but listen

or so someone claims,
the Ice Man perhaps, all enclosed in ice
though the light has been shortening our days

and coloring nights the yellow of hay,
scarlet of trillium, blue of block ice
Words appear, the texture of ice,

with messages etched on their shells:
Minna 1892, Big Max and Little Sarah,
This hour ago

everyone watched as the statues fell
Enough of such phrases and we'll have a book
Enough of such books

and we'll have mountains of ice
enough to balance our days with nights
enough at last to close our eyes

"Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence," writes Eliot, and Palmer is nothing if not a poet of the language of and reaching into silence. This is obvious in his most austere writing ("The voice, because of its austerity, will often cause dust to rise."), such as "Recursus" and the brilliant "I Do Not" ("I do not know English."). Yet even in his most severe symbolist voice he speaks from circumstance, from time and place, from specifics, within an overt, or covert, gesture toward action, motive, identity. In a different context, Eliot also says that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape these things." In Palmer's poetry, universally, you feel the pull of the terrific tension between the source of "these things" and the resource of their transformation. What arrives at the page is a kind of distilling, utterly clarifying provenance of the word. The "logic" of "Twenty-four Logics" is meant to emphasize the integrity of the line over the sequence of the eight stanzas, in order, perhaps, to maintain equally the tension and to create a kind of float over the flow. As a poem of observation, it's not that far from the out-of-doors of Gary Snyder, what with the bend in the river, and the chokecherries, mulberries and oaks, the coloring of night, the color of hay, scarlet trillium and blue blocks of ice--a good reading of a mountain scene. The difference, of course, is that Palmer is a poet of committed interiority: the outside is immediately indentured to the inside--within the self and, in this case, within the forty-four walls and "nothing but doors" of a house.

"Twenty-four Logics" starts off, fait accompli, in the past tense, but quickly sets up in the present, active voice, and ends its progression in a future, speculative tense ("we'll have"), creating at least a patina of narrative. It moves through time, recording time, in other ways as well: "the light has been shortening our days"; "Words appear...// with messages etched on their shells: / Minna 1892...; "This hour ago // everyone watched as statues fell." Ice is the presiding metaphor, in both its destructive and enabling modes, and it, too, suggests a passage through landscape in time. An anaphoric "enough" is about all Palmer will give the reader of the announced emotion, the elegiac claim of the material and the valuing of memory. That's a feature of Palmer that is especially appealing--his lyric reading of the mortality of the word, the price of its purity and beauty and hard-won artifice. There's a passage in Palmer's most recent book, The Promise of Glass, that illustrates pretty effectively the distance he keeps in the connection between his narrative source and its lyric transformation. It's a beautiful but brief sequence called "Five Easy Poems," dedicated to the contemporary French poet Anne-Marie Albiach: and no one in contemporary American poetry builds fictions of silence against appearances of fact with more subtlety and style than Palmer. Thus to start his elegant quiet suite of dedicated poems, he leads with a "Note" of rather outre exposition that is really a prose-poem.

In the summer of 1982, I went to the Hotel de l'Odeon in Paris in the hope of meeting the poet Anne-Marie Albiach. She was for the moment in residence there, but without a phone, and Claude Royet-Journoud had suggested I simply drop by and try my luck. I had first read her book Etat in the nineteen-seventies, and it had seemed a perfect work, a work perfectly realized and perfectly necessary. It had filled a space in the poetic imagination of the time that had until then been awaiting it, unoccupied.

At the Hotel de l'Odeon, the poet Ann-Marie Albiach was not in, so I left a copy of my Notes for Echo Lake for her with the desk clerk and departed. After my initial disappointment, I gradually began to comprehend that this had been a most excellent first meeting with the poet Anne-Marie Albiach. Neither had failed to meet the expectations of the other. The poet Anne-Marie Albiach had been spared the embuscade of gaucheries and malaproprian ejaculations with which it is my habit to greet the French. Our conversation, in short, had never deviated from the highest plane. And, as is the case with absence generally, a trace of the erotic had lingered in the atmosphere, at least from my point of view.

This non-encounter (or what the post--structuralist might term this "in-place-of-an-encounter") served further to spur a series of reflections on the odeon, that is the odium, that public space for theatre and the performance of poetry from which, these days, poets not infrequently find themselves excluded. Such reflections have continued to the present.

Now these "Five Easy Poems," dedicated with love to Anne-Marie Albiach on her sixtieth birthday.

Remember "91 Revere Street," the autobiographic section from Lowell's Life Studies? In microcosm, Palmer's "Note" serves a similar function as Lowell's prose in relation to the follow-up poems--in Lowell's case, the poems in the section titled "Life Studies"; in Palmer's, his five easy poems. It's as if, in both instances, the prose rehearses themes and images distilled in the poems. Palmer's "Five Easy Poems" are among his most elegantly rendered--"a perfect knowledge of the fragment / and the discourse of liquid surfaces"--; and if the poem for Lee Hickman is an elegy, this suite represents a love poem. It's the narrative relation between the prose and the easy poems that's interesting.

"Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea," writes Mina Loy, in 1925, the year of Andre Breton's surrealist manifesto. Whatever Palmer's relation to surrealism, his "prose" here is bewitched with music and the sound of an idea. First, the lyric leitmotif of the phrase "the poet Anne-Marie Albiach," with its rhythmic naming "trace of the erotic." Then the charmed word-play: the title "Note," for instance, found in the title of Palmer's gift, Notes for Echo Lake; the use of the French "embuscade of gaucheries" (an ambush of awkwardnesses) met immediately by the exact example in "malapropian ejaculations"--gauche and left-handed at the same time; and the self-irony in the reference to "the post-structuralist," who would translate "non-encounter" into "in-place-of-an-encounter," which is precisely what Palmer has done. Next the intentional self-conscious distraction of toying with the word odeon (Hotel de l'Odeon) or odium (public theatrical space), from both of which he experiences a certain "exclusion," or non-encounter. And finally, "Such reflections have continued to the present," and will continue by the implied open form of the easiness of his poems. The tag-line, "dedicated with love," adds to the whole tone a quality of missed opportunity replaced with another kind--art--"I gradually began to comprehend that his had been a most excellent first meeting...Neither had failed to meet the expectations of the other."

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Stanley Plumly's Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry, in which this essay appears, is to be published this November by Handsel Books/Other Press. contents | previous