It was mesmerizing to hear Reginald Dwayne Betts read “What We Know of Horses,” the final poem from his most recent collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), to a full house this past Saturday at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC. I had read the poem in the book itself, but hadn’t “heard” the form when I read it on the page. In Betts’s voice, I heard the repetitions and tried to tune in to the particularities of pattern. Sestina? I couldn’t tell, but knew I heard the pattern’s aching— world . . . world . . . world . . . horse . . . horse . . . horses . . . embracing . . . embraces . . . brace . . .
Back at home with the book, I marveled at the poems built on repetition throughout the collection, the forms inseparable from the (vicious) systemic cycles at the heart of the work. In “The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Reginald Dwayne Betts,” Betts reveals the specific form of repetition and rhyme weaving through the collection, speaking first of the book’s second poem, “Elegy With a City In It”:
It’s a canzone. Sort of an amped up sestina that I amped up more by repeating the words more frequently and at different places. The book has three canzones in it, though only that one remains true. The final poem is also a canzone that I pull out of its form and the poem about the Cooler Bandits is one as well. I’m interested in repetition as a way to think, if that makes sense.
In Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), he writes:
Dante established a maddeningly difficult form of the canzone, which was modeled on the Provençal chanso – a poem that uses the same five end-words in each of the five twelve-line stanzas, intricately varying the pattern. There is also a five-line envoi (a tornata) that uses all five of the words. It operates with mathematical precision . . . The Dantescan form of the canzone has been keenly employed in our time by W. H. Auden, L. E. Sissman, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and Marilyn Hacker.
And by Reginald Dwayne Betts.
“What We Know of Horses” first appeared in River Styx in May 2011 in a different form—a form in which stanzas and end words more closely approach that “mathematical precision” of Dante’s canzone. Selected for a Pushcart Prize, a different poet might have taken publication and accolades to mean that the poem was obviously “done” as is. But between these publications and its “final” publication in Bastards of the Reagan Era, Betts returned to the poem to “pull [it] out of its form.” If the poem is “what we know of . . .,” and repetition is “a way to think,” Betts’s knowledge and thinking are restless, ambitious, searching—the opposite of complacent.
One can sometimes get the impression that poetic forms are tidy receptacles in which tidy poets deposit the tidy thoughts and tidy feelings of their tidy lives; Betts’s poems reveal how active an engagement with form can be. The final poem of Bastards of the Reagan Era takes its central figure from Psalm 20 (“Some trust in chariots and some in horses”) but Betts’s relationship with form throughout his body of work calls to mind a different biblical allusion – Jacob wrestling with the angel.
In the 2011 version of “What We Know of Horses,” “A man was killed near him, placed / on a gurney and rushed down a sidewalk. Dead in a place / where no one gives a fuck if you’re breathing.” In the 2015 version, “A man / killed a man near him, placed / on a gurney & rushed / down a sidewalk. Dead / in a place where no one gives / a fuck if you’re breathing.” Shift from passive to active voice, shift from lines whose precision comes from received form to lines whose precision comes from individualized attention to the suspense inherent in the deployment of syntax, while the received form still echoes internally.
There is so much to say about Betts’s work as social and political commentary. There is so much to say about Betts’s work as autobiography, and about Betts’s ongoing work for juvenile justice in the world “off the page.” My hope is that you seek out (or continue to read) Betts’s work for all of those reasons. But as you read, feel the poems wrestling with their materials as Betts grapples with, and orchestrates, chaos and order. Whether it’s in the dense sound patterning and paratactic percussion of a poem like “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers,”* or in the Homeric trajectory and Frost-like marriage of speech rhythms and pentameter in a poem like “A Postmodern Two-Step,”* Betts asks us to attend to form and (as) (in) content, story and (as) (in) song.
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*I don’t believe that either of these last two referenced poems appear in Betts’s published collections, though both were published in Poetry and are available online.