This book, the first I’ve read of Keith Waldrop’s work, felt difficult, both allusive and elusive, and more abstract than the poetry I tend to prefer. It won the National Book Award for Poetry last year, but somehow I hadn’t heard of it until it caught my eye at the library, and I picked it up knowing nothing about it. The publisher’s blurb says this: “In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings,” which, along with the title, provides a way in to the work: it’s OK if this feels like bits and pieces, and it’s OK if, like Liszt’s etudes, this feels like a challenge. This was one of those books of poetry where, after reading it basically straight through over the course of a few days, I felt like I needed to put it down for a day or two, then pick it up and start over again—which is indeed what I did.
As the title says, this book is a trilogy, made of three sections of poems plus an epilogue. The first section, Shipwreck in Haven, starts with this epigraph: “I can’t swim at all, and it is dangerous to converse/with an unaccustomed Element” (Erasmus). This seemed apt: I felt immediately adrift in this section, though not necessarily in a bad way. (You can read the first part of Shipwreck in Haven here.) How do you start to navigate a text like this? I wasn’t sure. You start with a verb, “balancing,” quickly followed by the sparseness of “austere,” the tease of “Life-/less.” “I have tried to keep context from claiming you,” the poem says, and you feel, or I felt, like that’s an instruction in how to read these poems: just read, and don’t worry too much. This is sense is backed up by interviews with Waldrop: this Huffington Post article quotes a few, including one in which Waldrop says this: “What I write down is a kind of script for something that sounds. I find people often don’t read it that way. […] I want the words to remain and if people don’t know the meaning of them I don’t think that’s as bad as losing the sound.” So: the first section of this book felt like music and mood, the contrast of inside and outside, landscapes, images. There are landscapes of porticoes, colonnades, marble benches, the “imitation of a wood” (p 21).” There are phrases that stuck with me: “What passes/in the street? Pure image” (p 12), “Nothing but fade and flourish” (p 14), and this, from page 10: “Not—the world— one of/several, as if it could be/different. Nothing. Nothing different.”
Elsewhere, there is wordplay I didn’t really pick up until my second reading: “angels of incidence, rebounding from/waves, but precisely. Reflective angels” (p 16), or the fact that, in the second section of the book, the poems are alphabetized by title, and, within the poems, the stanzas are alphabetical as well. And then there are the collaged bits, the text from other places (also sometimes alphabetized, though again, I didn’t pick up on this ’til my second reading). I am a curious kitten and tend to look things up, but in these poems there was so much that might come from elsewhere, and sometimes it was obvious, and sometimes it wasn’t, and I don’t think it mattered where certain lines came from, but sometimes I wanted to know. So now I know that “I have trekked far” is from The Great Impersonation, a spy novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and that “The action seems to be wholly mysterious, as is fitting” is from a book on Plotinus by John M Rist. There are bits of ghost stories, bits of Wagner’s autobiography, a sentence from “Love Life in Nature”. (Oh Google and Google Book Search. The first two sections of this book were originally published in 1989 and 1995, respectively, and my boyfriend and I were talking about what a different experience reading it in 1989 would be: you can tell that text like: “I was sleeping soundly, when I was roused by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick” comes from some story, or is meant to seem like it comes from some story, but unless it’s from something very famous, or you happen to be very well-read, how would you know where it was from?)
Lastly: The epilogue, “Stone Angels,” made me grin because it’s about a place I have been many times, Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, with its statues and graves and its quiet.
There is a pleasing twenty-three minute audio interview with Waldrop here, in which he talks about his methods of composition.
Leave a Reply