Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. 117 pages. $15.95.
Foremost among the muses of the modernist poets was Calliope, muse of history. T. S. Eliot urged poets to cultivate an “historical sense” that grasps the presence and immediacy of the past. His longtime friend Ezra Pound spent decades composing The Cantos, a sprawling epic that he called simply “a long poem including history.” They and their contemporaries knew that discerning the connective threads between past and present was an essential part of the poet’s vocation. But such a faith in transhistorical connections always risks either incoherence or a unity that arises solely from force of personality rather than logic. And eventually even Pound—who lacked neither force nor personality—admitted: “I cannot make it cohere.” David Wojahn’s ninth collection, For the Scribe, professes a modernist faith and runs the same risks.
For the Scribe is a book of poems about memory and extinction, about what endures and what does not: species, signatures, marginalia, photographs. It is frequently ekphrastic, elegiac, and sentimental. Like all of Wojahn’s intelligent work, it is also dense, allusive, and associative. Few poems are untouched by his encyclopedic historical knowledge. The Roman Emperor Hadrian, Ernest Tubb, the Wehrmacht, and electroconvulsive therapy all make oblique appearances in the book’s first poem, an elegy for his father, which begins:
Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted
One last survey. Your twenty-one grams of sentience,
Little soul—the weight exactlyOf a ruby-throated hummer
There is an elegant simplicity and lyricism in these lines, one that Wojahn’s unremittent density elsewhere often seems at pains to avoid. Dispersed throughout the volume’s three sections are poems titled “Extinction Event,” such as “Extinction Event: Decoy Birds” and “Extinction Event: Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908.” Sometimes these involve actual extinctions, but they are largely occasions for Wojahn to meditate on history and cruelty. Modelled after Rilke’s famous “The Panther,” for instance, “Extinction Event: Two-Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger” is ostensibly about the last thylacine—a carnivorous marsupial—which died in an Australian zoo in 1936. But the poem’s rhetorical energy is directed toward indicting the trappers, zookeepers, and taxidermists that take part in the animal’s undignified demise. “Look closely,” he writes, “& you see the scar / where the mouth of a trap // slammed its teeth into his left rear leg.” Similarly “Decoy Birds” seems to be about passenger pigeons (now extinct), which were once used as live bait to attract wild birds. But Wojahn’s focus is the hunters who sew the birds’ eyes closed; the desperate immigrants compelled to do the hunting; and the pigeons’ ultimate slaughter, which he likens to the Holocaust by way of allusions to Adolf Eichmann and the Wannsee Conference. Poems like these apportion sympathy and blame with an equally heavy hand; never do readers find themselves uncertain of the author’s judgment or asked to struggle with their own. Maybe the contemporary political climate demands such single-mindedness. Maybe Wojahn simply does not hate, unlike Keats, “a poetry with palpable designs.”
The logic of Wojahn’s poems is fundamentally abrupt and associative. Rather than building toward complexity, it leaps and veers and careens. His idiosyncratic overuse of the ampersand is emblematic: shorthand for a shortcut, the quickest route to the jumpy, cumulative logic of addition. This & that & that as well. It can produce interesting moments, as in his elegy for Claudia Emerson, when the iamb tattooed on her wrist evokes first a scythe, a spear-shaft, and then a “crescent or chalice.” These images drift meaningfully from harvest to sacred ritual. But more often it results in surprises that are bizarre and incongruous. “Bivalve” begins in a raw bar where Wojahn is teaching his sons to eat oysters, but it then veers to an imagined scene of forced feeding at Guantanamo Bay, and afterward to a fireworks show. “Canis Familiarus” begins with the household dog, jumps to a Victorian steam engine, then a “drone / above Waziristan.” Of all the possible rationales for these random and unpredictable leaps, the most likely seems to be: David Wojahn’s wandering thoughts.
I admire the title poem “For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 B. C.” which addresses itself to the author of the first known “signature” (on a cuneiform tablet). Its more immediate “signatures,” though, are the marks made by his late wife, the poet Lynda Hull, in books she owned. “The one whom I loved is dead,” Wojahn writes, but “her hand lives on in concord / Peerless with William Blake.” The poem concludes tenderly:
Guide my hand, o scribe.
Instruct me to affix her here, that she may,
For a moment, raise her head toward me,
So that in this bless’d gesture I may linger.
Like his topics, Wojahn’s diction is also deliberately abrupt and unpredictable, though it’s best when lyrical and slightly archaic (“bless’d”). One senses, again, Pound’s influence; the Cantos succeed in similar moments: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.” In a recent interview, Wojahn professed admiration for poets who “abruptly shift from colloquial speech to highfalutin lingo and make the shifts look seamless.” I’m not sure, though, that anyone could make the “bedazzled opalescent mojo / Of transfiguration” in this poem appear seamless. Likewise for another speaker’s suggestion that water “roils / & heebie-jeebies out the tap, synced to my own hands’ tremor & quaver.”
Wojahn has suggested the poet can be “one of the last remaining custodians of the authentic.” And the best poems in this volume are in an authentic (if sentimental) mode, such as “Robot Folding Laundry” or “Anniversary Poem,” which recalls the “subtle tap of ring against ring / In sleep.” The least successful poems are the most wildly associative and unmoored. In “Year Zero,” reflections on the brutal violence of the communist Khmer Rouge regime combine with thoughts of the sinking Titanic (a pirated copy of the movie is playing in the hut where Pol Pot was found dead), yielding this unfortunate formulation: “seawater gang rapes a chandelier.” Other examples abound: Rupert Murdoch and the Reichstag fire; suburban piano lessons and John Brown’s hanging; chicken tenders and swastikas. These ideas aren’t yoked by violence together; they are simply held in loose suspension by the ampersand.
The series of lyrics in “Body Politic: To Ezra Pound in Purgatory” returns to address Pound’s later life, his anti-Semitic wartime broadcasts, his incarceration at Pisa (in his 1987 “Pentecost,” Wojahn wrote eloquently about his father guarding the poet there), and the contemporary parallels to his hateful politics. Despite a groan-worthy pun (“Ezra Loomis Pound,” “From the earth your name looms up,”), the poem ends with lyrical and rhythmic delicacy:
Beneath my shoes the ivy snaps
In a century where I pray your honeyed lines
may outlive your opinions.
Wojahn’s own honeyed and lasting lines—evident on rare occasion here, but more obviously in books like Icehouse Lights (1982) and Glassworks (1987)—will, I am confident, outlive some of these less successful experiments in For the Scribe.
