A Thief of Strings, by Donald Revell. Alice James Books (2007), $14.95.

By John Estes

One deep pleasure of a poem is lack of timeliness. As Pound says, literature is news that STAYS news. In a good (hell, even a decent) poem nothing passes but time justly measured and this, like any flow experience that defies or subsumes a syntactically one-to-one relation with stock reality (itself a lexical event), becomes un- if not immeasurable. Unlike most of the ephemera we expend our consciousness consuming—papers, websites, magazines, cereal boxes—poetry stands for the possibility that some texts will not pass away, at least until the supernova. But, and maybe this is a paradox, what poems promise is not an escape from time into timelessness—beware those who suggest a poem can push back the scrim of appearances and make the eternal or infinite visible—but rather through that most material of immaterialities—language—binds us to time, through breath and all that it animates. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” as Thoreau figured it, or as Revell writes,

As it turns out, eternity

is a half-reaped furrow, sound asleep.

Among the interesting ways to read Revell, one is to see his poems as exploring, adjusting, declaring only to explore and adjust again, a relationship with time. The final section in his book-length essay The Art of Attention reviews his own selected poems, Pennyweight Windows (a little awkward at first, but illuminating) to reveal and map this trajectory across his early to mid-career. He even quotes that bit of Thoreau above (he calls Walden the first and only manual of American poetics) in describing his transformation—his salvation, really—from a maker of poems to finder.

My soul has turned from now to then.

It’s all luxury, this being alive.

The shift his narrative imposes upon our reading is not simply aesthetic, but ethical. Using projectivist shorthand, Revell’s developmental arc might be described as moving from a closed to an open field. He comes to understand, to paraphrase Charles Olsen, that one’s stance to reality and the poems one writes are inextricable. Rather than focusing on the meter of the line, the narrative, or the perfect completion of figures—Yeats’ lid-snapping fullness—one’s self is thrown, along with all the objects of the world, into the act of breathing a line into being. Perception to perception, as it were. “Poetry passes through us,” he says. “Where’s poetry? Where the eye is turned inside out.” From “Poplars”:

My desert is just beginning.

A little while from now, I will abandon my body,

And a few year after that, the Chinese

Will abandon Peking because of dust storms

Oranging their skies, choking their athletes.

God is the sun truly, you know, and he moves fast.

One might phrase all this another way: that the more variable-lined, spontaneous, elliptically patterned poems Revell started writing in his fifth collection, Beautiful Shirt, and has continued through a remarkable string of volumes up to and including this newest one, creates a space not just for the irrational-intuitive mind but for the poem’s intelligence to admit and demand more of the reader’s. They are as noun-packed and paratactic as anything Li Po dreamt sailing down the Yangtze. In what amounts to a spiritual as well as aesthetic shift (hard to say what precedes), Revell found a way to let the force of the present and its manifold simultaneity—the experience of being itself that, despite what mystics say, is never separate from the time-bound physical world—pressure, if not dictate, the originary act of composition. As a result, the poet’s self-shaping is no longer the representative, propelling force of the poems’ consciousness; it merely is, along with everything else, present as a thing in due proportion. The poems exemplify a kind of existing in the world and being-itself that is at once primitive and progressive. As Charles Simic phrased his own poetics in this regard, “the poem is the place where the origins are allowed to speak.” It’s hard to argue with the method or the lifestyle.

Has anyone on the train

Spoken this word dusk aloud

In a long time?

All along a line of trees I go, coming from nowhere.

Another sentence of Thoreau’s that Revell takes as a touchstone is from the journals: “The poet is the man who lives at last by watching his moods.” The poems here—as in his past couple books—are lithe, playful and surprising, the product of a radiant and tectonic mind, and difficult in the way that Heraclitus found all streams difficult. Revell makes a point in The Art of Attention, as he has elsewhere, that the most welcome part of his metanoia was that writing became easy, joyful, precisely unlike the belabored stitching and unstitching of his earlier, more traditionally formal work. Even the apparently political poems in this volume are modest, to an extreme, in all but the titles’ direct, authoritative salutation. For example:

“To the Christians”:

I was one of a pod of dolphins

Living in the sky.

Mycenae. Glad to meet you.

“To the Jews”:

I am the grass I dreamed I was.

Atalanta,

From inside a drop of dew

Comes the speed to outspeed you.

“To the Muslims”:

With four years still to live,

My black dog leaped into the whitewater

At Indian Springs. He was overjoyed,

Where one expects a language that attempts to address these—individuals? cultural-historical entities? populations?—on their own terms, one finds instead a blithe, sangfroid lyricism that dismantles, rather than sanctions, the structures of identity and divine mediation that define the contours of reality for several billion souls. “Altogether it is one God, who never made a desert/And whose circus we are, all clowns swimming.” Brazen, to say the least, yet somehow wholly decorous, the only language possible given the impossibility of the occasion.

The impression these lyrics make, which aligns with the lesson he learned from Jane Harrison’s work on Greek myth and ritual, is that poetry and art—the incantatory stuff of religion—derive from and participate with the natural energies of existence. They extend, amplify and charge it, make it available in meaningful ways, but do not exist as forces of control, exploitation, or domination. Love-as-solidarity is the only reasonable outcome because it’s the only starting point. As here, when he finds himself praying for bees, on his fiftieth birthday.

It is not ridiculous. The bees

Strike into the sunlight,

Giving it a sound.

The echo is flowers.

One hundred years ago,

And the day has never yet ended,

A few men are praying.

What Revell calls the art of attention is approximate to what Emerson deems imagination: “a very high sort of seeing...the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.” In rejecting the heavy hand of Orpheus, Revell also distances himself from the mainline of Emersonian doctrine, namely the poet as hierarch and nature as symbol. As with Wallace Stevens, who had a similar break from his precursor, there ceases to be a division between the imagination and cosmos. Here, the call for the poet to be “where and what it sees” is a tune Revell can strum to, if only his guitar were blue: things exactly as they are. Telling, perhaps, that the 13-part title poem of this collection begins with a young man caught stealing guitar strings from a guitar store.

Where I have been this long, long time,

And what crime is a pocketful of strings.

I have a paperback with me,

Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.

On the cover, a man

Presses his entire body against a windowpane.

What crime?

In his Walden-closing myth about the artist of Kouroo, Thoreau tells of a man who set about to carve a perfect staff, and since “into a perfect work time does not enter,” he would brook no compromise with time; so he worked and worked as empires rose and fell. This is not a Revell doctrine. Time is not excluded because time is not excludable, and the consequence of denying that reality is any number of neurotic derangements. Time is a significant problem to be sure, and few people (I hazard) turn to poetry as a palliative for over-booked schedules, fast food, and too many emails to answer. But if one were to read poems for their capacity to engage alternate relations between the self and the worlds that comprise and entwine it, as a model for revision one could do worse. Of course one must not try too hard to invite such conversions.

I am reading The Song of Roland

Speaking for days to no one—

Set the goddess there

If the poems here risk something—a concept Revell likes to deride—it is no more than the risk that we all take most days: that in the service to living, to the breathing in and blood-pulse of moments, we will deprive ourselves of monuments that outlive us, of immortality. If they pose an argument it is that joy—“spontaneous, gratuitous affirmation,” as he says elsewhere—trumps the work of poem-making or any other castle-building, though castles must be built. But let foundations take care of themselves, they say. Where Olsen says a poem must aim to “take its place alongside the things of nature” they dispute there ever was a difference. Not timely and not exactly timeless, these poems bridge the diachronic and synchronic, incarnate fleeting instances like the veering, ever-creating clinamenic atoms of Lucretius. This stalwart refusal of transcendence is counter to artistic instinct, to the Western poetic tradition and even to good sense. I call it good.

JOHN ESTES is a doctoral student and instructor at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Zoland Poetry, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Notre Dame Review, Literary Imagination and other places.  A chapbook, Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon, is available from Finishing Line Press.  More at his web site: www.johnestes.org