This blog is one way I have to salvage something from days on end of mere busy-ness. Of course, my dogs live moment to moment, and their lives teeter between lazy contentment and eager anticipation -- and I love them for it. (They're celebrating the completion of breakfast by running up and down the stairs, barking at each other as I write.) Why should a human need more than that? Because our brains are organs for making sense of what we encounter, and making sense means finding a connection between any thing and everything else.
A poem works, if it works, by stringing together words and images that go together in some surprising way, and the poem in turn suggests a connection to something in our experience. Prose does the same thing, only the connections are visible a mile off and well-marked, making it easier to read but padding the impact with all those subordinate clauses and transitional phrases.
The latest issue of POETRY includes an apology for its publishing more prose than poetry. Evidently, the editors had slim pickings this time. They needn't apologize when the essays are so rewarding. One, "Humor Anxiety," touches on the theme I've mentioned in this blog before, the discovery that a good poem and a good joke have much in common. Another one by Australian critic Clive James considers the pros and cons of tightly constructed formal poetry in eight pages of loosely connected prose paragraphs. Along the way, James finds delightful similes and cites apt examples. But, like real life, you've lost some of those by the time you get to the end, and you wish you had a poem that could wrap it all up in a nutshell.
Then I flipped to the front of the magazine to read the poetry in it, and found just that poem, on page one.
The poem is by Joel Brouwer, author of two books of poetry and professor at the University of Alabama. It's called "A Report to the Academy." The whiff of ironic humor entices. At first, I couldn't get much sense from it, but I did get the outline of a little story: man alone on an all-night bus ride through New Jersey, passing both "starry refineries" and "cattail ditches." Been there, seen those. The rider, immersed in Kafka, is surprised to arrive "presto" at the Port Authority in the morning. He walks twenty blocks to the home where the soon-to-be mother of his child is asleep. He fixes her breakfast, and she wakes up and greets him.
That's the real life part, and not all that remarkable. But one line in it struck me as a clue to reading the scenes and thoughts together with something bigger than one man's bus trip. Lost in his book, arriving before he even noticed the scenery, he "has been cheated of . . . a considered fingering of his long / and polished rosary of second thoughts." If not distracted by Kafka, he'd have been worrying -- evidently about impending marriage, mentioned in the last couple of lines. On a hunch, I checked out Kafka's biography, and found, as I suspected, that the author never married, afraid of surrendering independence.
Why a rosary? Is it because it suggests prayer? Maybe, but certainly it's a useful image because it calls to mind a sequence of beads, fingered in a cycle, each of which is supposed to call to mind a specific image. This poem itself works that way. The poem mentions Kafka's times in a "sanatorium," echoing an earlier line about a green tile that reminded the young man of a sanatorium. When he cracks open eggs for breakfast, we remember the "egg-white" sky in the first line; and when we see the "taut carapace" of his lover's belly, it's another kind of egg containing an embryo. The rosary of images leads to a paradox: "that the knowledge that dooms a marriage / is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage." Yes, like Kafka, he wants to maintain his separate identity; yes, when she asks him "what have you brought us," he knows it's too late to go back to singleness; and, yes, he's not unhappy about it. The question is academic, hence the title.
In an essay "Listening for the Flavor," Clive James calls himself a "diehard formalist," but he seems very open-minded so long as a poet strings moments of experience or insight together. "Formality and informality are just two different ways of joining the moments up," James writes. He adds what I've known since I first learned to love rhyme, that
the formal poem has a better, not a worse, chance of joining the moments up, so that its ability to contain them, and intensify them with a symmetrical framework and a melodic structure, becomes a satisfaction in itself.
This calls to mind music, which works entirely through patterns set up and then somehow varied. Just as James writes of formal poetry as a "system for manufactured unpredictability," John Updike once depicted a priest in rehab who called Bach's music "machines" for setting up tension and release.
All of this is exemplified in Bouwer's poem. It doesn't rhyme, but its twenty-six lines run consistently ten syllables. It's a simple anecdote developed through moments of growing consciousness that reach their conclusion not through rhetoric or argument, but by images that repeat with variations. In the end, it's just a few moments that suggest more than moments: a momentous acceptance in the man's life. And we feel good about it.
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