Gustaf Sobin. Collected Poems, edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster. Talisman House, 2010.

A poet of spectacular deliberateness, Gustaf Sobin transformed the ode into language captured in time-lapse. Reading this carefully assembled Collected Poems, published in 2010 by Talisman House, we come into contact with a mind capable of totally focused attention in which poetic speech unfurls like the fiddlehead of a fern in sunlight. Slowness is a principle expression of beauty in Sobin: “Surrounded today in self-image, we readily forget how slowly we came to represent our own features, to give some kind of graphic form to our own physical presence” (Luminous Debris, 70). That’s Sobin writing about the emergence of representations of the human form in archaic cave paintings in southern France; he could just as easily be writing about poetic form. Surrounded today as we are by the equivalency of self-image with poetic form, we’ve forgotten the elegance formal revelation can bring to the poem, one consonant with a human ergonomics of the poem – the body’s way of voicing language – and with the natural world. As he writes in “The Earth as Air,” a poem he calls “An Ars Poetica”:

            in twos, that
it ribbon    forth,    the
                                    forked idiom’s….

            each thing
eithered to    another, the    this
whatevered to the
                                that, the

            ark-

            within-the-
            lyre-    propellant:    wind
                and white roses

            wrapt in a    taut, vibratory weave. (CP 236)

Sobin started late, publishing his first book of poetry, Wind Chrysalid’s Rattle, in 1980 with the Montemora Foundation. He was forty-four years old. From that point, he produced work steadily: another book with Montemora, Celebration of the Sound Through, three books with New Directions through the eighties and nineties, and then three books with Talisman House, until his death in 2005. Strains run through the entire body of work, interesting and frequently pleasing to register in this Collected Poems: fixations on certain words, a generative facility with the ode and corresponding modes of praise, an essential minimalism stylistically matched with lavish attention to the natural world, a generally philosophical, specifically phenomenological concern with the qualities of becoming and being that define the human life, and an unusual attention to the process in language and thought of obliteration and negation, something Andrew Joron and Andrew Zawacki, in their lucid introduction to the volume, label in Sobin’s poems “transcriptions of the isn’t—a recurrent word, in his usage, suspended between verb and noun, and caught in the act of contracting against its own negation” (CP 2). But Sobin’s isn’t a poetry of doubt; rather, it’s an exploration of natural and intellectual growth and decay, conducted in repeated affirmations of the sensual realities he observes so meticulously.

There’s a remarkable consistency to Sobin’s poetry from the start of this huge volume to its finish. Poems written in his last years reverberate with elements summoned initially in his earliest poems. His vocabulary is fixated on a cluster of words; in fact, cluster is one of them. Others: Bunched. Blanched. Flaked. Vocable. Word. World. Speech. Wind. Breath. Volute. Air. Earth. Flame. Wave. Rock. Field. Iris. Neither. Nor. While this list doesn’t exhaust the words on which he fixes his work, they describe Sobin’s minimalism, which has an unusual lushness because it so often works in the realm of the natural world: painstaking descriptions of process, of light moving from one place to another, of a flower opening, of a snail moving across a wall.

    wild buds on    their wind-
            ballasted antlers, beasts    struck,
its love belling dumbly in the rain-
                        darkened rose. (CP 174)

As I read through Collected Poems, I began to think of Sobin’s poems – nearly all of which are odes – as analogies to Agnes Martin’s paintings. Just as Martin would make repeated, inexhaustible use of a grid on a pale or creamy background, so Sobin would reach for his velvet bag of words and roll them like dice to combine and recombine his language and images into new poems. Personally, I find this process intoxicating to witness. Compare these two selections, the first from a poem entitled “And Thus Unto” from The Earth as Air, the second from “The Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables,” from Voyaging Portraits (both of which books were published by New Directions in the 1980s):

worlds un-
ravel
worlds, the

wrought heavens: our blanched
reflectives.
would
leave, who’d

perched, already, a tribe-in-
flight, at the
breath’s

flaked
edges (CP 171-2)

~

that air not
end, nor
flame
gutter.        that earth not coil    —ingested —
into those nounal
hoards, but
verb-

herded, be
given:    offered forth.    wind unto
wind, foam
unto foam, be pitched, sonorous; through each
meted particle, trans-
mitted. (CP 326)

Joron and Zawacki refer to Sobin’s peculiar prosody as “vertical tracking,” following Sobin’s own description of his process, pointing to its “impetus to spill, in thrall to gravity’s pull” (CP 5). The first quotation above captures for me one of the keenest pleasures of reading Sobin: the poem works like a heliotropic vine trained to a post – as we move our eyes downward through the poem, the poem moves upward into the air to arrive at a surprise, here “breath’s flaked edges.” Though hard to know exactly what this means, it feels like a release from the lines that lead us to this moment, suggesting decay as much as freedom. The second quotation works similar terrain, shifting the eye from earth to air, from wind to heaven. Here, the slightly longer lines densify Sobin’s music, ingraining the words with sound and rhyme. (The visual/sonic pairing of “meted” and “-mitted” is particularly illustrative of Sobin’s slow-cured skills.)

Sobin, working privately and obscurely in Provence, where he moved as a young man to stay for the rest of his life, removed from the American scene but belonging not merely to its peripheries as one of its dedicated language cultivators, beholden to the work of a cluster of masters, many of whom he names in “Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables” (they include Blake, René Char, Sappho, Pindar, Anacreon, Catullus, Isaiah, Parmenides, Dante, Ibn Arabi, Tang dynasty poets, Mallarmé (“that / rush // of crushed / shadow”), Shakespeare, Traherne, Hopkins, Wordsworth, Williams, Duncan, Oppen, and the linguists Whorf and Sapir), growing his poems and ideas from a handful of seeds, was an archetypal Orphic poet. In this sense, his poetry belongs, among his near contemporaries, with Robert Duncan’s and Ronald Johnson’s, the former to whom Sobin dedicated work, the latter to whom he appears never to have made reference. (They were born the same year.) Among older poets in the tradition, besides those he names in his autobiographical poem, you’d also want to include Rilke, Shelley, Emerson, and Goethe. Elizabeth Sewell begins her treatment of poetry and natural history, The Orphic Voice, with this provocation: “Poetry is a form of power. It fell to early thought to make that power visible and human, and the story of Orpheus is that vision and that mortality” (Orphic Voice 3). She insists that the Orpheus myth permits humankind to frame an essential question: What power and place has poetry in the living universe? Answers to Sewell’s question are everywhere sought out in Sobin’s poetry. What makes his questing for these answers distinctive is Sobin’s sense that power, such as it exhibits itself in poetry, is perceived organismically, like growth, rather than as epiphany or revelation. As a flower opening its buds. From “Irises”:

    way that they ruffle    in
that rock    windcell (that their buds    un-
                        scroll and open: opened,

    asking myself only for what I see….). (CP 214)

There are four kinds of Orphic poet, each distinguished by a stage of Orpheus’ life. First, there’s the poet who subdues the natural world in the singing of poems. There’s the poet of unbridled eros and loss, singing his love for Eurydice. There’s the poet who journeys to the underworld, where secrets are revealed. And, finally, there’s the poet sacrificed to death but resurrected to prophesy to the end of time. Ronald Johnson was an Orphic poet of the first, third, and fourth kinds; Sobin was an Orphic poet of the first and second kinds. Robert Duncan’s Orphism embraced all four kinds. So did Rilke’s. No matter which kind, the Orphic poet finds power in song and vision, language and mind:

            what brought me, then,

over the low

ledges.    brought that I
bring: impelled that I urge, herd, drive the
words    into
that

luminous salvage.    and stand, there, in those
linked shadows, thus
lit. (CP 331)

Characteristics, always there to see and hear in the individual books become amplified in Collected Poems, defining a style. Sobin’s principle prosodic technique is enjambment, a brokenness practiced to the point of cutting words in half. Similarly, he avoids typical orthography, rarely capitalizing, punctuating eccentrically, and making use of frequent caesurae. He avails four “forms” in these poems, a word I use with caution only because to say form (or four) suggests an easily recognized distinction that just isn’t here. Nevertheless, Sobin writes in an attenuated verse paragraph with fairly long lines, as in the selection from “Irises” above, these paragraphs usually linked in sections (often separated by lines across the page); he writes in long strings of heavily enjambed, short-lined poetry, often serially, as in the selection from “And Thus Unto” above; and he writes in a hybrid of these two forms, moving in and out of longer lines into more atomic, tensely positioned short lines, as in the selections from “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables.” These three forms pervade throughout his writing. The fourth form is the most unusual in his work: it’s an oracular, axiomatic, horizontal line of proverb/poetry, typically center justified. In his earlier work, this line tends more toward proverb and can, at times, sound like Kahlil Gibran: “Deep down, the kisses dream.” Or: “The lover is the beauty of the beloved.” Fortunately for his work, Sobin subverted his instinct for aphorism into poetry. Beginning in the late 1970s, he began to collect scraps and unused fragments from his poetry into a running annual list he called “Transparent Itineraries.” In these, Sobin explored a lateral adding of sense and meaning to complement the vertical tracking of his other poems. The last set of these, from 2002/3, demonstrates the gnomic freedom this form permitted him. Less cast-offs of thought, these phrases suggest the poetics that made his poems grow:

For me, the apex of Sobin’s achievement is the period enclosing the three books he published with New Directions: The Earth as Air (1982), Voyaging Portraits (1986), and Breaths’ Burials (1994). These are books of a grand accomplishment, in particular Voyaging Portraits, which includes at its core the poem from which I’ve quoted most in this review, “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables,” Sobin’s finest poem by my estimation, a serial, autobiographical poem that deserves to be studied alongside Bunting’s “Briggflatts,” Johnson’s Book of the Green Man, and parts of Zukofsky’s “A” (“A”-12 in particular).

Where the earlier work suggests at times apprenticeship, Sobin’s later work reveals repeated concern with the archaic realities that captured his attention, in prose as well in poetry. (Sobin’s study of antiquity in Provence and Languedoc, Luminous Debris, is a masterpiece of observational thinking.) One of the best of his later sequences, “Late Bronze, Early Iron: a Journey Book,” written in his aphoristic form, is as much an essay as poem. (Another later poem, “Reading Sarcophagi,” is actually subtitled “An Essay,” and includes footnotes.) In his late work, Sobin seems mainly to have extended the poetic discoveries made during the eighties and early nineties; his concern seems to have been more new growth than new varieties. But he enriches in this work his study of the possibilities of the ode, which he uses as a vessel for his lapidary reflections and questions, themselves a kind of praise – of language and mind. Consider the beginning of “Prelude IV” from The Places as Preludes, from 2005, Sobin’s last complete book of poetry:

… went on resonating, the
myriad fragments of
that dec-
imated mirror.    wasn’t it that that you heard, now,
rather than

saw? yes, heard: heard the
gaze and the gracious vault of the brows as, ob-

edient to
number, the limbs, as
if accorded, entered, now, the full scales of that

singular fugue. (CP 661)

So much of the poetry I most value was or is published by small presses, or, after the poet is apotheosized, by university presses that collect the work in legacy editions. Anymore, with funding uncertainties and editorial confusion, university presses aren’t reliable to pick up overlooked work and preserve it for the future in decently edited editions. Sobin’s work might easily have fallen into benign negligence if it weren’t for the dedication of the editors of this volume or for the commitment of the publisher to keep Sobin’s work in print. Hats off, then, to Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster, and to Talisman House, for publishing one of the genuinely great books of recent years.

Coils in a silo in cavernous open space downward sloping
lined with aluminum panels crosshatched with grids; a hum.
A droning range. Tuned to the key of E. And a glare of light.
Intensifying a holy living form in the nave of the silo.
No secret for the poet-priests. What is it? Wondrous. Wall
of light: like the enormous gills of a salamander. Like a reef.
Like a colossal bone-white fungus with a feathered flesh.
Like the central nervous system of some vast exposure the light
nurses from loam and shadow. Metamorphoses of gloom.
Phase-shifting flanging of sound. A woven texture reticulated.
It is forty arborescent feet tall with three polyporous
conch-like shelves. Stained with bioluminescent signatures.
Sutures of daylight. And a central spinal stalk vivid in the form.
There’s a cord with bulbous contours out from which the life
of the animal emerges.
                                                Seeing it. Consumed with knowledge of it
incoherent unconfirmed. Terrified. But I recognize this creature.
I am its expert. I walk on one of its tremoring shelves tilting
to move toward the column to touch it. What stirs?

Shadow’s fruits are forms to shape out from the quarreling earth
the mind’s devoured worth, soil’s mash of relation
flexing hyphal threads repulsing with awareness enmesh.

Hardbound and sewn w/ metallic cloth, whitestamped foil, endsheets · 128pp · $21 · ISBN 978-0-9773401-4-9

Luminous epinoia, a Gnostic notion, stands for the primordial imagination from which the whole of creation came into being. Likewise, Peter O’Leary’s poetry moves from a mythic unconscious to its manifestation in mutual dreaming: family, friends, literary forbearers, and political demons take their place in a Dantescan vision of order and strife. Yet the prevailing mode of this book is less narrative than devotional: O’Leary’s rich diction, full of archaisms and neologisms, tessellates dreadcomb, lutrescence, fogroom, and beatitude, the whole of it forming a complex, cathedralic figure for desire.

Click here for the Goodreads page >>

Why does it perceive these sensations? For it has daggered the crown of the sun.
Why does it stick to the light? For the soul is an extrusion of resins.
Why does it stink of this rottenness? For the language of God has no grammar; it consists only of
        names.
Why does it father what is merciful? For its athanatopsis is an autarchy.
Why does it mimic knaving wrens? For it changes darkness into light in matinal song.
Why does its pressure flash awareness? For its textures are those of ice or cloth.
Why does it make this dazzling sign? For the books it wants aren’t yet written.
Why does it work itself in friendship? For the Eleontic Primordium is the arena of life.
Why is it always current and ancient both? For I live in it.
Why is it mistaking despair for depression? For the seasons, one after another, prolongate like a music
        the feeling.
Why is it so conformed to this world? For to be transformed by the renewal of your mind
is to be changed in your shape.
Exteriority. Interiority. Ascent.

Why is it a dream-power every night showing thee thine own? For a man is the conductor of the whole
        river of electricity.

In the directer consciousness fewer,
in the remoter more,
this notion of images rising and flocking and fusing
                        is mythological.
As we have all along been considering it.

reverie.
Its particulate Himalayan effluvium — stone
molten into time. Yogic
domestication of the breath. Love’s
percussion, honey, disoxygenating
fury. That centripetal feeling coming on,
sweetness coming on, that
theocentric order and ornament.

Aztec anticipations. Cataracts of fever.

.

Praise of the sun is ancient
avarice for nightless surfaces deep fuels
agonize with light
holocausts —: pure creative force. But the soul —
even yours Apollo — avoids sunshine; cool to the touch
it’s nacred with scheming shadow. You little pitiful conjurer
alchemically tinged. You pellucid daemonic maker
folded on the corners like
an important piece of paper, some
well-kept memorandum.

.

Arc. Rimes. Rice. Alms.
Claimers race camels.
Miracles: Chronos brushes the aluminum of myth, burring its sheen.
Manifestations: Magi coinages, cages of magic —: an omega
enigma. Then medical acts & the defiance of depth.
Gospels. A hag, agog.
And then at last language
itself.

A creation introit, titanic ore, aortic cantos, tiers

of rain, as in a particularly
disturbing dream.

A sonic image,
a reverberating thickening of sound.

My sons’ voices.

.

Spring’s lilac valve systoles of light pump through. Evolved
for the sake of respiration, the season is a heart.

A mammal’s startled
tachyating
heart.

.

Lords —
you ruling the disturbingly animated depths
& you shades in the zero’s oracle;
you Chaos & you Phlegethon ruling night’s unechoing hollows
& you spirit forces in the void cone of sleep:
let me say the things I’ve heard,
what the massive sulking earth makes darkness from,
what numinous abyss it hides.
What’s worth telling.

Now That Memory Has Become So Important, Karl Gartung, Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 2008

[ click here to order ]

It’s hard not to be moved by Karl Gartung’s first book, Now That Memory Has Become So Important, published in 2008 by Midwestern Writers Publishing House. Foremost, it’s a beautiful book comprised of carefully crafted sequences that provide numerous examples of the focus of minute attention on language, as well as a radiating sense of how such focus might expand into a life lived in which caring for poetry is coterminous with caring for one’s place in the world. And it’s Gartung’s place in the world, which he’s attended to with dedication and vocation, that makes the appearance of this book especially powerful.

Gartung, along with his wife Anne Kingsbury, owns and operates Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, widely considered one of the best poetry bookstores in North America. A property of Woodland Pattern that lends it a mythic aura in the Midwest is Anne’s and Karl’s devotion to poetry: from making a great variety of books and publications available in the bookstore, to hosting readings and symposia on work they care for, to providing a gathering space of a widespread community of poets, artists, musicians, and itinerants. There’s really nothing else like it, at least not in the Upper Midwest, whose poetry pathways converge in Milwaukee, at Woodland Pattern.

I speak from experience. I learned of Woodland Pattern shortly after completing college, in the early 1990s, making a trip to visit the bookstore from Chicago one day with a friend; I couldn’t believe the good fortune I’d come upon, like Parsifal seeing knights errant for the first time. (I scored copies of the three books in Frank Samperi’s grand trilogy from the 1970s, in beautiful clothbound editions at their cover price – from the 70s! $5 apiece, as I recall.) When LVNG published a broadside of Ronald Johnson’s “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid” in 1996, I instinctively sent a copy to Woodland Pattern. Evidently, upon its arrival, Gartung pinned a copy of it to one of the walls in the bookstore. This prompted Márton Koppány, a Hungarian poet living temporarily in Milwaukee, to send some of his minimalist poems to the magazine to consider for publication. When I drove up to Milwaukee to meet Koppány shortly after, I met Gartung for the first time. Within minutes of meeting, he wrote me a check for LVNG – a donation, so that we could keep producing the magazine. In the several years of the magazine’s existence, this had never happened before. Gartung and I stood in the large poetry room where we talked about work he cared about, him reaching to the shelves to find an illustration of his point, punctuated with his deep-chested, diaphragmic laugh. (It’s one of the great laughs in poetry.) [I have written an essay on meeting Koppàny, and his poetry, here.]

Since that time, I’ve benefitted enormously from my connection with Woodland Pattern. I’ve read there on several occasions, including for a Cultural Society reading set up in the summer of 2007; I’ve also participated in symposia; I’ve made pilgrimages there to attend poetry readings (including the best reading I’ve ever attended: Robin Blaser in October, 2004); and I’ve spent money there over the years on books, many books. All the while, I’ve known that Karl was a poet. Occasionally I’d see work, most recently in Stacy Szymaszek’s Gam. (Szymaszek worked as the Literary Program Coordinator at Woodland Pattern, a position taken up, when she moved to New York, by another Cultural Society regular, Chuck Stebelton.) But one wondered if and when a book would ever appear. At last, it has. And it’s very fine.

Gartung was born in 1947 in Liberal, Kansas, according to the biographical note appending the book. Typically, in the taxonomy of a poetry book, such notes are places for poets to list their publications and affiliations. In Gartung’s book, this note, paired with the preface that begins the book, explains some of the reason for the delay, and, contrary to the self-congratulation often implied in such notes, adds a layer of richness and meaning to this incredible collection of poetry. The biographical note explains that Gartung “has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, art and book exhibits. He felt that these activities were as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have been. This was (and is) really his education. Keenly aware of his late start, he would say ‘we can’t share what we know, so me must share what we are learning.’” In addition to poetry, Gartung was learning how to organize workers. Because Woodland Pattern couldn’t be sustained entirely on what it earns as a bookstore (many of the people involved with the store to this day are volunteers), Gartung took a job as a delivery truck driver for UPS Cartage Services. Over his years on this job, Gartung determined the value of organizing drivers and workers, becoming a union steward. “This necessary though difficult work became a major distraction in his life as a writer, though it finally ensured his job and the jobs of his fellow drivers and restored some dignity.”

Gartung’s book is driven by work – care for work, devotion to a tradition, and interest in “some dignity.” In the preface, he describes the “squared or rectangular spiral in the fields” as “rounds.” This image of a square in a circle, which is the emblem of a field being worked, provides Gartung with the structuring model for his book, and for his perception of the work he clearly values. “The center does not hold,” he tells us, “and not quite as Yeats had it, it is serial. The point here is as physical as a field, an illusive center tilled toward, but never to a lasting resolution. Each field leads to another, worked and reworked, for various purposes in successive seasons, from tillage to harvest.” As the book proceeds, Gartung transforms this visualization into process, such that one sequence – seemingly discrete – opens into the next, not in the creation of some grand design; rather, in the sense of an ongoing operation, where elements from one sequence of poems might be involved in the next – peripherally, centrally, in whatever way needed.

Gartung is a poet in the Objectivist lineage, clearly and plainly. And while Williams, Bunting, Oppen, and Reznikoff are all invoked in the book, his great ancestor is doubtlessly his fellow dweller of the Badger State, Lorine Niedecker, whose precision, focus, wit and wordplay, Gartung appears to have reverently absorbed. The sequence “Needful but to Breathe” concludes with a poem entitled “LN”:

after
love

making
the

night

Five words whose slightly indeterminate syntax, owed principally to a lack of punctuation, work both as homage to Niedecker and as statement of the necessity of observational accuracy. Another from the same sequence runs:

What’s so blue
as chicory?
What other flower
so completely
places sky
scatters in ditches
and across fields

non-native
they say
sky?

(Blue Chicory is one of the names of a posthumously published book of Niedecker’s.) The appeal of this little poem arises from the move from observational to syntactical poetic exploration in the lines “places sky / scatters in ditches,” where places provides an opportunity to shift thought, gaze, and attention from the scene to the words themselves, such that we end with the word sky but off-rhymed with say and they, and lifted up, voice-wise, by the concluding question mark.

Now That Memory Has Become So Important includes a surprising technical innovation that deserves to be stolen. Often, Gartung employs two seemingly parallel stanzas, run alongside each other, to suggest intercourse between two strands of thought or detail. The visual display of these parallel stanzas is important: the stanzas on the left are aligned to a right hand margin in the center of the page; the stanzas on the right are aligned to a left hand margin, also in the center of the page, leaving a clear central column for the reader to orient the Rorschach images of his verse. To his credit, Gartung uses this format as an occasion for play: often, the left column proceeds, thought-wise, into the right column. But just as often, the verse on one side of the divide springs across the gap to the other side. It makes for some giddy associations, as in the opening poem in the sequence “Alive in Her”:

“Alive in Her” is the most incredible composition in this book. It’s a sacred poem, I think, recording the data and sensations of the stillbirth of a child Anne was pregnant with. (The poem doesn’t say when.) As subject matter, this is unbearably sad to read about. Gartung uses this poem, however, not as an occasion for confession, but to provide an example of squaring an imaginary circle when the center does not hold. Gartung’s innovative stanza begins to represent then the desire to anchor words and ourselves to an invisible axis; but also to the tendency of words, meaning, and memory to scatter out, seeking new expressions of energy.

Another linking element in the book is the way one sequence finds its name in the previous sequence. So, the final poem in “Alive in Her” reads:

we touch so lightly
it is needful but to breathe
being formed
of breath completely

The next sequence in the book is entitled “Needful but to Breathe,” reinforcing the sense that these are poems of a life, integrated, in which some understanding is sought.

I hope this book doesn’t go unnoticed. It is composed with enviable craft and skill, and one senses the patience required to make these poems throughout. Too few are the poetry books published that feel immediately as necessary and generous as Now That Memory Has Become So Important. The final sequence of the book, “Seen or Scene,” meditates on the nature of work. Becoming philosophical, Gartung provides, for a moment, a credo for his book, and for why we should read it:

We live in
barbarous
times act
regardless

not because we
can in any
foreseeable
future change

history but
to suggest and
keep available
certain possibilities.

Keeping available certain possibilities: it’s what Gartung has done with his life at Woodland Pattern and as union organizer, and it’s what his poetry insists we do with our own lives.

Rhode Island Notebook, Gabriel Gudding, Dalkey Archive, 2007

[click here to order]

Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook consists of transcriptions of poems written into a large notebook on the passenger seat of the poet’s Toyota Echo during twenty-two one-thousand + -mile trips from Normal, Illinois to Providence, Rhode Island between September 2002 and December 2004. Initially, the poet was making this trip to visit his wife and daughter; over the course of the book, he is divorced from his wife and makes the trip strictly to visit his daughter (and also to take care of the legal necessities of divorce). The other thing that happens is that Gudding discovers and then devotes himself fastidiously to the tradition of Vipassana, a Buddhist practice that stresses “insight” meditation, in imitation of the practice the Historical Buddha himself engaged legendarily under the Bodhi Tree when he was enlightened 2600 years ago.

Everything the reader learns about Gudding, his daughter, his wife and their divorce, as well as his religious conversion, comes through things written down in these travel poems. Put another way, there is nothing that happens in this poem outside of his Toyota Echo barreling across the eastern half of the United States. There are no “discoveries” on the road of, say, great places to eat (Gudding prefers McDonald’s fish sandwiches, it turns out, and old fashioned donuts from Dunkin Donuts), or any discussions of historical events that may have happened in the places he quickly traverses (though the U.S. invasion of Iraq is an ongoing preoccupation).

While some places take on cumulated resonance – for instance, the Shenango River in Pennsylvania, which registers the anticipation that surges in his drives to Providence as he gets nearer to his destination – only cartographic details in Providence or Normal are ever really spelled out. Otherwise, this is a poem of interstate highways seen at 70mph, landscape blurring by as transient weather gets noted and roadside signs get read. There are three important things to know about this book, in my mind: first, it’s impressively long, almost 450 pages; second, it’s hard to put down and often quite funny; and third, you generate a lot of sympathy for Gudding – or the persona he provides in the poem – as you read. By the end, his adoption of Vipassana, his love for his daughter, his sadness at his divorce are all quite moving.

The first of these things deserves some additional comment. Rhode Island Notebook is an episodic long poem of considerable length. The poetry book, as a medium, is pitifully restricted these days in These States. Typically, it should be 45-70 pages long, it should be broken into smaller parts within, and it should perpetuate the contemporary notion that lyric poetry = all poetry. In these terms, a book like Rhode Island Notebook is essentially unreadable. While I was reading this book and enthusing about it to friends, a number of them said, without hesitation or reflection, “I’ll never read that book; it’s way too long.”

Which leads to another consideration about the long poem in American poetry. It is invariably understood to be a failure. The Cantos, The Maximus Poems, Paterson, The Bridge, “A”: none of these poems is ever invoked without the qualification that each fails in some basic way. These five books include some of the best poetry written by American poets. Nevertheless, they are failures.

I mention these two elements – the antagonism poetry readers have toward anything longer than a slender volume of poems and the rubric of failure that informs how a long poem is read – to characterize the risk at stake in publishing a book like Rhode Island Notebook, which, thanks to the Dalkey Archive, shines like a beacon in dismal times. Rhode Island Notebook doesn’t really belong in the lineage of the modernist long poems listed above – it’s constitutionally different as a travelogue – but it belongs in their company as an earnest addition to the act (and fact) of thinking about the meaning of America in a poem of length.

Rhode Island Notebook is better than most anything else I’ve read in the past year not written by a friend. I’m a little surprised to make this claim because there is nothing obviously innovative about either Gudding’s language or prosody. I’m hard-pressed to describe the poetry in this poem, truth told. Much of it reads like this:

Barkeyville Franklin Oil City Area
Slipperyrock University Butler
Dottles of rain at Grove City
Windy flags at Grove City
Grove City Shady Lake Mercer
Lackawanna
New Castle Sharon-Hermitage
Shenango River
Ohio Border 566m
Trumbull Co line
Hubbard (260)

This comes pretty much right at the center of the book; his marriage is falling apart, and he’s on his way home. Gudding rarely spends more than a day or two in Providence; we know this because he dates every journey, referring to each outbound journey as an anabasis, and each return as a katabasis (having taken his cues from Herodotus).

(One of the “hidden” narratives in this poem is the modern/contemporary farce/tragedy of the academic couple living in two cities trying to be one family: Gudding’s wife has a job in Rhode Island; he has a job at Illinois State. In the first entries, he takes off after his Friday afternoon class ends, drives through the night, sleeps for a few hours in Pennsylvania in the wee hours, then arrives in Providence around noon on Saturday. He leaves Sunday morning to arrive back in Normal in order to be able to teach on the following Monday. Madness!).

In these lines quoted above, he’s listing the names on the road signs he sees as he makes his way back to Normal. There’s a litany implied to them, almost a punishment. But the anticipation and familiarity seeing them must be involved at this point as well, having done this trip a dozen times already by this point in the poem. Interestingly, when I flipped the book open to look for a demonstrative passage, without any other context, I knew immediately that he was driving westward. Another thing: that little “Dottles of rain” is fairly indicative of the verbal energy of the poem: a kind of playful descriptiveness, even in the most embattled, saddest parts of the book.

Kerouac is the obvious ancestor to this book. Not, ironically, the author of On the Road, but the poet of Mexico City Blues, whose prosody was developed through the limitations of the notepads he carried in his shirt pocket: no line of poetry would go beyond the width of his notebook; most poems were contained on a single page of the notebook. (Kerouac reenacted this strategy in all of the other books of blues that he wrote.) Gudding appears to follow a similar compositional principle, in terms of his prosody. Here’s another example from later in the book:

I must wait for 2 Amish
buggies w/ lanterns & orange
reflective triangles. In the
dusk sky, which is green & purple
(the color of a starling) in the
west, are, in the west, venus, silver
and the gibbous sliver
of the moonball.
“Time moves from present to past.”
—Dogen Zenji
The moon is a horsefly of light.
My life is one continuous mistake.
“The awareness that you are here…
is the ultimate fact.”—Shunruyi Suzuki
I shall call Suzuki the Susquehanna Roshi. Is
the moon in the west or is it
in the south or is the southwest in
the moon blah blah (340)

Compare this with the opening of Kerouac’s “1st Chorus” in Mexico City Blues:

Butte Magic of Innocence
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
One Rough Road
One High Iron
Mainway

Denver is the same

“The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming”
“Course he paid me back”
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint (1)

What the notebook format permits is a chorus of voices that is a conversation with the self, at once freely associative and colloquial (“Course he paid me back” and “blah blah”), but also interrogative and plangent (“Denver is the same” and “My life is one continuous mistake.”) As Gudding’s poem moves along, the inclusiveness of the notebook begins to stand for the confusion of his personal life: he wants an openness and a generosity of expression in relation to the world, but his world is restricted, in this poem at least, to what he sees out of the window of his speeding little car.

The editorial reality of Rhode Island Notebook is made evident by the periodic interruptions of interesting, sometimes haranguing footnotes, as well as a really beautiful Prologue, a powerful Bridge, and an Appendix I found too long and not different enough from the notebook entries for the trips themselves. (By editorial reality, I mean it’s clear that Gudding has transcribed this poem from his notebooks, and that in doing so, he sees fit to make comments on and, presumably, revisions to his poem.)

There’s an excellent footnote interruption early in the book on “Literary Narcissism and the Manufacture of Scandal” that I think is quite astute – even brilliant – well worth seeking out (Gudding published this “essay” on his blog at one point). My favorite footnote comes in the midst of the trip in early 2003 that is written as a series of observations and questions that are glossed with forethought (begging again the question of how and in what manner these entries were revised). Asking in the poem itself, “If as Bakhtin noted the grotesque body is the collective body, what, I say, is the use of the grotesque in poetry?”, Gudding responds with a lengthy footnote of assertions that runs, in part, “that buffo, not rage, that laughter, not reason, are the only viable means of wresting dignity from the hands of bureaucrats and professionals; that the ready ease with which an academic will assume someone to be stupid is more repugnant than a barfight; that yodeling at a plate of eggs can satisfy one’s curiosity for a better life; that underdogs can be jerks too; and finally to concur loudly, like a car horn with lips, with Henry James when he said that three things in human life are important: being kind, being kind, and being kind” (106). It’s Gudding at his best.

And it gives a hint of a didactic element that makes its way into the poem, a didacticism – emboldened over its course by the religious conversion to Vipassana and its initially metabolized convictions – that increases as the poem progresses. I didn’t find it tiresome but I suspect others might.

Let me finish by characterizing Gudding as a poet and Rhode Island Notebook as a book. Gudding is a satirist through and through. His first book, A Defense of Poetry, contains some of the few poems by a contemporary I have ever laughed out loud reading. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, characterizes the satirical, hibernal phase of literature as being “excremental.” (He considers Joyce’s Ulysses to be the great modern work of satire.) Gudding’s satirical impulses are true to Frye’s sense of the form: lots of ass jokes and fart jokes; Gudding frequently gets erections while driving; he pays no mind to telling us when he hits a road stop to take a dump. At one point the poem devolves (it’s the only word for it) into a bizarre rant against Nancy Reagan. He’s also pretty savage about some creative writers in the book. There’s satire’s sense of self-awareness bristling in these moments, the egotistical un-sublime that makes up the life of a poet teaching creative writing in the U.S. But Gudding’s satire in Rhode Island Notebook is shot through with tragedy (Frye’s autumnal phase): never without love (erotic comedy is Frye’s spring phase), but bittersweet throughout. It’s a sad state of things and you’re always aware that, midway through his life’s journey in this book at least, he’s been separated from his daughter and only gets to see her for less than a day a couple of times a month in the Motel 6 where he goes to stay when he visits her because he can no longer stay in the home he used to share with her and her mother. But to the poet’s (and person’s) credit: despite the didacticism that enters the end of the poem, there’s no triumph or revelation that comes upon us as we finish the book. Rather, he struggles to stay true to Henry James’ injunction. And I think that’s it, finally: Rhode Island Notebook is an act of kindness – to his daughter, to himself, even to poetry.

Kirtland’s warbler, rare
as air on Mercury. The little phoenix fledged from fires
burned through stands of jack pines stretched
between Graying & Mio. Northern Michigan. Its last remaining habitat.
Entirely managed. Little fickle specialist. Its
only nest in the bottom branches of a jack pine no more
than five years old. How can the bird survive?
Woodland warbler. Forest fire thriver. No more woods.
No more fires. Black lores cleaving a gray cowl. Rainy day spotting him.
Gay speckled yellow on the breast. The largest
of the North American warblers.

Pyxgeau is their lord, a
twenty-five-thousand mile traveler, nine years old
banded by researchers as a fledgling then repeatedly rebanded
over the years, first purple, then yellow, then aluminum, then green, then orange,
blue-gray feathers his Odyssean oars, native
Michigander, bearer of migratory symbols zoodelic pathways
reveal in air to be the patterns of consciousness
recognized in its deepest retinal self—. Little
latter-day survivor. Little memory remnant of the forest world.
Little once-abundant mystery streamer.
                                                 Little prodigious
migrator. Little signaler of the end of days.