Not to set up an unnecessary straw man, but a few assumptions about the Nature of Poetry seem current in our moment: That irrationality is inherently more poetic than rationality—that poetry works by leaps of “intuition” that are inaccessible to logical minds. That, in fact, poetry/intuition and prose/logic are in some sense opposed; hence the insistence on the resistance of true poetic Meta-Meaning to paraphrase. (Leave aside that the entireties of Yeats and Shakespeare are more or less susceptible to paraphrase; or that Milton paraphrased himself in the “Argument” to each of his Bookes.) A secondary correlate—that meter and rhyme, which are “strictures” and hence related to the cognitive strictures of logic, are old hat—is no longer a matter of contention; American poets have internalized this idea thoroughly enough that the vast majority of us, though reluctant to assert it in theory, enact it in creative and editorial practice. (Just look at any American poetry publication, this one included.)
So it’s kind of refreshing to find a truly contrarian poet in Daniel Brown, author of the recently released What More? from Orchises Press, 2015. (In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve never actually met the poet, but we turned up in the same pages of Poetry a while back, and have corresponded a bit over the past year or so.)
Refreshing, because Brown consistently employs a structurally contrarian approach: declining to overuse (or even use) parataxis as a signal to the reader of how the True Poet transcends Plodding Reason. Reason can dance; reason can make music; Brown has written a book on Bach, whose music proves this.
Brown is, to my mind, an Augustan; the poems where I felt where he attained his biggest effects were, paradoxically, the shorter aphoristic/epigrammatic or gnomic poems, as in “Jots,” a section of which reads, in its entirety, “Dost to dust.” One of my favorites, of this kind, is “Developments”:
An infant’s flurry of limb
Quiets into consequence, in time.
A child’s flurry of mind
Grows mighty by a quieting in kind.
The other side of the Augustan temperament is its satiric side, but this is less to my taste; so my least favorite poem was one about an aging libertine. I wanted to keep the poet Bachlike-metaphysical all the time and keep out the proseworld’s detail-detritus entirely; but this is a desire to limit a poet’s range, and therefore not a criticism to be taken very seriously. We often find a book of poems, or a poet, chided for being “uneven”—but there is scarcely a poet, between the occasionally-nodding Homer to the modern-day stylistic omnium-gatherum of Robert Pinsky’s career, or a body of poetry, including the Commedia of Dante, that is entirely even. Even poets who severely limited how much they published, like Eliot or Bishop or Frost, weren’t even.
The use of supernatural narrative works well when married to a rational/musical temperament. If the linear (supposedly more prosaic) and nonlinear (supposedly more poetic) are truly opposed, “Designer” keeps them in tension:
That it was a sunlit cloud he was sitting on
Goes without saying. What warrants some discussion
Is what he was engaged in: drawing something.
When I floated close enough to get a read
On what that something was, the words that came
To mind were “snowflake pattern.” Why would an angel
Be drawing a snowflake pattern? “Why wouldn’t one?”
He answered before I had a chance to ask
(Breaching heavenly etiquette in the process).
“Sorry,” I said, as in life the conciliator.
“I was only wondering what earthly good
Your artistry is doing.” “None at all,”
He said, “unless you happen to like the snow.
You didn’t think those flakes designed themselves?”
“You mean…” “You’re looking at him. Not a job
For everyone, but then nobody’s asking
Anyone but me to take it on.
Good thing I’m good at it. Don’t ask me how,
But give me a pen and a page of drawing paper
And eventually I’ll find a way of finding
My way to what I need. If you’ll forgive
A little designer’s pride, I’d like to think
The results speak for themselves. Swan-dive on down
To Boise (where, if memory serves, our Lord
Was planning a bitch of a blizzard for this morning)
And sample the finished crystals. Nothing flashy—
Never more in the way of filigree
Than the structure wants to bear (though never less
Than enough of it to keep your vision busy)…
Every flake unique (though not a one
That’s false to the tradition)…. How do I do it?
All I know is I do. It’s all I do
And all I want to do. I won’t pretend
It wouldn’t be nice to sit in with the heavenly choir
At times, or run a few of those endless errands
The others run, riding shafts of sun
Down to their destinations. But something wants it
Otherwise; something I could as soon
Resist as halt a planet with my hand.
I’m talking about the way a talent has
Of having its way with you; of making you
Its puppet; of jerking your raggy self around
Like a shark whipsawing a carcass in its jaws….
Is it only me or hasn’t it gotten even
Brighter than usual? Sometimes I think
We could do with a little shade. Not that I’ve ever
Been in the shade, but the notion of a haven
From radiance has its appeal. You’ve been in the shade,
No doubt. (You’ll pardon me for saying so,
But you’ve yet to shed the world-haunted look
Of the former mortal.) You’ve even been in the dark!
If you have a minute, come and sit beside me
And tell me about the dark. Help me imagine
Its nightly infiltration of the heavens.
Make me feel the cool that settles in,
The intimations of oblivion.
If needed take forever. Do a favor
For a laborer and tell him about the dark.”
Most readers will note that this isn’t very much like a contemporary lyric. It is clear, linear, narrative, metrical, paraphraseable poetry with a supernatural/religious element. That’s more than three strikes; that’s six strikes, by my count. The most “recent” examples of this style of poetry would be Frost’s early narratives, from the beginning of the 20th century. (Telltale phrase, revealing the lineage very clearly: The something in “But something wants it / Otherwise….” is the same “something” as the one we find in “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Likewise the oblique commentary on poetic craft, going back to the sonnet “Design.”) Frost is the forefather, avowed or not, of every American formalist; David Mason’s Ludlow is another example of blank verse narrative that derives from his work in the form. Frost usually left out the supernatural. This last fact is the key to the contrarian streak in this poet—that he has written something contrary to the universal model for this kind of poem. Your probable reaction to this poem—your sense of its being slightly backward-looking aesthetically—is the key to the nature of contrarian art in general. Literary techniques do not age, become useless or redundant, or reside in an historical era; they are not war chariots or arquebuses. Set aside whether you think the poem is, in part or in its entirety, successful; I can think of places I would change this or that. That has nothing to do with the artistic decision-making that precedes the composition. “Designer” is contrarian not because it goes against some imagined poetic orthodoxy—it is contrarian because it strives to be successful in a way that is not to your taste.
Great force is generated by Brown’s short poems like “Judo” where the specific becomes elemental—general and specific at once, Kay-Ryan-like. I prefer his poems in this style to the ones that include the prosaic detail and detritus of the contemporary world. Again, my taste interfering with my critical judgement; but what else is criticism, at base, but generalization on the basis of taste?
Judo
I.e., the kind of verse
That doesn’t try to force
People to their knees
(Seeing as it sees
To people’s being thrown
By forces of their own).
In keeping with his contrarian approach, Brown creates metaphors that don’t just “mean” something, but reward the pondering. The best metaphors liken the abstract to the concrete—this is why tomorrow creeps, and troubles are a sea—and this one does precisely that with the most abstract abstraction short of God (whose most common synonym, in more than one tradition, is The Truth, al-Haqq, The Ultimate Reality, Satya) and the concreteness of a very specific rock. Brown’s best metaphor, to my mind, likens Truth to Gibraltar. Truth is, indeed, the island of Gibraltar. Not just because truth is a Rock—Ein festes Burg is unser Gott—but because it’s a fortress, a limit, and above all, disputed to this day. Kind of like poetry.