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Number
289
January February March 2002
Southern
Elegies
ERIC
GUDAS
Copyright
© 2002 Poetry Flash
THE LAST NOSTALGIA: Poems 1982--1990,
by Joe Bolton, edited by Donald Justice,
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 1999,
206 pages, $24.95 paper.
LATE LEISURE, poems by Eleanor Ross Taylor,
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge,
1999, 72 pages, $19.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.
Here are two fine books of poems by Southern
writers: Joe Bolton's The Last Nostalgia: Poems
1982--1990 collects the work of a poet who died
by his own hand at twenty-eight, posthumously
edited by his mentor Donald Justice; while Eleanor
Ross Taylor's Late Leisure is the fifth
volume of poems by one of our most
accomplished---and least-recognized---poets of the
generation born in the 1920's, who has done much of
her best work from her fifth decade onward. Bolton
and Taylor are very different writers, but their
poems have some important traits in common. Both
are unabashedly rooted in the contemporary American
South, without being in any way limited by this
allegiance. While they are both primarily lyric
poets, their poems are refreshingly full of the
presence---and voices---of other people very
distinct from the lyric 'I'; readers of these books
can expect to meet, among others, a group of
insurance men at a diner breakfast, the Kimrey
cousins, a retired pilot walking his dog Boofy,
Hank Williams, a sixteenth-century Spanish
chaplain, and (as one of Bolton's poems is titled)
a "Bored Cop Leaning Against Abstract Sculpture on
Plaza Below Skyscraper." Finally, Bolton and
Taylor---in very divergent ways---are both master
elegists, who can write of personal and cultural
losses with equal pathos.
It is difficult to read Joe Bolton's The Last
Nostalgia without being reminded of his
suicide; this is in large part due to the poems'
relentlessly elegiac stance vis-à-vis
experience itself, as in this emblematic evocation
of autumn as a time:
…when the trees turn and the rains
begin,
And the failing light makes the days ahead
Seem like so many pages on which nothing will be
written,
And you can feel each moment, as it passes,
Transforming itself into one small, bright
stone
In the huge and forever-unfinished mosaic
Of all that is lost.
(from "The Changes")
For Bolton, the changing seasons and the passage
of time itself are imbued with the inevitability of
loss and death; the speaker of these poems is
loaded down with "this burden / Of what was lost /
Almost before it arrived.… / this weight / Of
what is / And what I can feel myself already
losing." But the weightiness of loss and
dissolution is counterbalanced by a desire to
glorify the passing of both self and
world---Bolton's is a poetry not of poverty, but
lushness. The two lovers portrayed in "The
Parthenon at Nashville," standing in a city park at
the end of their affair, "…won't have this
clarity / Again for a long time, maybe amazed / At
the distance from which they see themselves: /
Luminous, hardly human, / And already half in love
with the beautiful ruins." At their best, Bolton's
poems are infused with this clarity---as in the
following lyric, which reads like one of Rilke's
New Poems, set in Miami instead of
Paris:
Tall Palms
Their loveliness
Is that they seem to need
So little; and their loneliness
That they have only themselves to give back:
Staying out in the dark all night
Where they turn black,
Ordering the blue morning sky,
And looking as if they wished to take flight
On the wind as they thrash and sigh,
Standing still at great speed.
This poem is evidence of Bolton's prodigious
talent: one has to keep reminding oneself that most
of this work was written by a poet in his early to
mid-twenties. Bolton is at home in both formal and
free verse; his sense of the exact shape and tone
his poems' subjects require is nearly perfect. The
success of "Tall Palms," for instance, lies in the
skillful modulation of longer and shorter lines,
which embodies the palms' thrashing motion, and in
the way the delayed rhyme of "need" and "speed"
lends gravity to the poem's ending: while we're
attempting to assimilate the contradiction of the
palms' simultaneous stasis and movement, our ear
apprehends a long-voweled note sounded much earlier
in the poem. Bolton is a master of this kind of
lyric compression, which may be one reason he
turned out so many sonnets; his best hold their own
against the many fine examples of the form written
in the latter half of the last century, including
Justice's, and are worth reading solely for the
pleasure of the splendid conclusions. This is the
work of a poet whose audacity is matched only by
the pleasure he so clearly takes in his mastery of
the art.
Bolton's fidelity to the people and landscapes
of the lower-middle-class South, urban and rural,
is another of his work's distinguishing elements.
What Justice characterizes in his introduction as
"Bolton's helpless love for the subjects of his
poems" serves to bolster and expand the personal
sensibility in evidence here---in fact, to separate
sensibility from love of place is to do this work
an injustice. Bolton's elegiac stance finds its
most poignant expression in his remembrances of the
friends of his Kentucky youth, "[t]he boys
of Dexter," who've "…crashed their cars out on
old 641, / Drowned drunk in Calloway Creek, / Or
slunk off at dusk // Into the bottoms / With
illiterate local girls…" and whose wasted
lives are summed up in this couplet: "Their dying,
it seems now, started at birth--- / Dying to find
out what their lives were worth." And here is his
evocation, in "Breckenridge County Suite," of a
dilapidated rural homestead:
Now in autumn, walking the long mile
Back from the empty mailbox,
You can see the place, what's left of it:
Two Plymouths and a '34 Ford
Squat rusting, wheelless, home
To broken tools and rotten clothes, mice.
Gray barns and outbuildings lean graying.
And the house is white
Only in memory,
For the photographs, too, have faded.
Back of the smokehouse, from limp fur, the
skull
Of an eaten raccoon grins skyward.
This passage shows how Bolton manages to combine
a novelist's eye for setting with the poet's
delicacy and compression. Here is a place both
vividly evoked and meditated on: the seasonal
details and fading snapshot---which recalls Rilke's
lines (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), "Oh
quickly disappearing photograph / in my more slowly
disappearing hands"---work on narrative and
figurative levels equally well. Bolton's awareness
of impermanence is especially acute when his
subject is the contemporary South's decay: "I can
remember moments in summer when this country was
beautiful / To me, but tonight in the white of the
moon / See only satellite dishes." There are an
equal number of poems here set in what Bolton
calls, in one of the book's section-titles, "The
New Cities of the Tropics," the best of which evoke
a gaudy and degenerate urban landscape.
Bolton was very much aware of his literary
antecedents, and his poems include a number of
adaptations of Vallejo and Jiménez (the only
full-length collection published in his lifetime,
Days of Summer Gone, takes its title from a
line of Vallejo's), as well as homages, both
oblique and explicit, to Rilke, Chekhov, Faulkner,
Stevens, Hart Crane, Turgenev, Henry James,
Sherwood Anderson, James Wright, Tennessee
Williams, and Roland Barthes. An important facet of
many young poets' apprenticeships is the process of
finding and claiming one's figurative parents in
the art; what makes Bolton's poems in this vein
more than set-pieces is the extent to which he
manages to meld his own, original sensibility with
that of the writers from whom he unabashedly
derives so much. I find the versions of
Vallejo---characterized by Bolton as
"adapted…with considerable and intentional
liberties"---to be the least contrived, and
therefore most successful, of these self-conscious
tributes to the poet's chosen literary
predecessors. The kinship Bolton felt with Vallejo
was clearly a touchstone for his own identity as a
poet; and Vallejo's evocation of a provincial
Peruvian childhood seems to have opened the door to
much of Bolton's best writing about his own youth
in rural Kentucky. While his adaptations of Vallejo
are compelling to read alongside the originals,
they stand up on their own and give occasion for
some of his most memorable writing, as in "Lament
on New Year's Day": "Still, they don't come back,
the great days, / The cries clarified with
distance, / The fragrant lining of a patent leather
shoe / Already beautiful beyond its function."
"Already beautiful beyond its function" is an
apt distillation of these poems' aesthetic stance
towards the objects of loss: the speaker's self,
the South, failed love relationships, summer's
abundance, to name a few. Bolton's appreciation of
how tenuous and potentially overblown his core
conceit---the romanticization of the pain
associated with impermanence---is turns out to be
the element that saves his work from crossing the
line into mawkishness. As Robert Hass writes, in a
now-famous poem more than twenty years old, "All
the new thinking is about loss. / In this it
resembles all the old thinking"; what keeps The
Last Nostalgia from being a mere footnote to
this couplet is the genuine passion Bolton brings
to his theme, combined with a profound awareness of
how quickly that passion can turn maudlin. In
"Elegy at Summer's End" he writes "…this
summer may come to seem / A season less remembered
than invented," and it is this careful fidelity to
the process by which memory is transformed into
invention---moment by moment in an individual's
consciousness---that provides these poems both with
their great subject and with the proving ground for
their integrity:
Already there have been too many words,
Too many versions of the way
The light fell across the water some certain
dusk
And the "stunned" trees on the far shore
Caught fire: candescence,
conflagration, blaze.
(from "Elegy At Summer's End")
The Last Nostalgia is the record of a
young and brilliant poet trying his hand at lyric
poetry's oldest contrivance, namely the
mythologizing of individual experience; for this
reader, the attempt is wildly successful. However,
I don't want to finish discussing Bolton's work
without touching on its one notable failure, namely
the romanticization of self-destructive impulses.
These poems are full of a womanizing,
hard-drinking, pill-popping persona that is
singularly unappealing: when Bolton writes of being
"too tired to sleep / Without whiskey and pills,"
or celebrates last night's binge---"I ended up
getting drunk in La Carafe / And having to call a
woman to come rescue me. / Christ, Frank, what
would we do without women?"---his poems become very
unsympathetic. Here on the page is that
beery-breathed guy on the next bar-stool you can't
wait to get away from. One wants to send Bolton
home with a copy of Fitzgerald's The
Crack-Up (or a biography of James Dickey), and
not let him out till he's memorized it. One hopes
that Bolton would have matured beyond the need for
this kind of persona had he gone on to write a
life's work. Justice contends that Bolton would
have, in fact, achieved nothing further of
substance had he lived: "The early death of a
writer tempts us to imagine what unfulfilled
promise the future would have seen realized.…
But in this poet's work I would find it hard to
make a case for this kind of progress. The charm of
the poems---and ultimately their worth---depends on
a certain blazing youthfulness allied with the
doomed romantic spirit which haunts and drives
them." I very much disagree with this
pronouncement, which seems to me patronizing and
utterly wrong-headed. Bolton was gifted both with
tremendous talent as a poet and with a great deal
of existential wisdom about the nature of
experience---which happened to have been granted to
him as a very young man---and I believe that had he
lived he would have continued to build on these
gifts. It is not youthful bravado, but mature
insight, deeply felt and experienced, that drives
his poems. The Last Nostalgia is a book that
will endure, and whose readers will echo Bolton's
own words upon finishing it: "Now this page is all
that's left of summer. / Is that all there is?
There has to be more."
"Who are/were you?" Eleanor Ross Taylor asks in
her elegy for Joe Bolton midway through Late
Leisure. The elder poet evokes the younger in
terms of great respect: "The disturbing marvel, /
dead when I got there, / Chopin, Baudelaire, /
living in the dissonance / music calls harmony"
("Joe Bolton, 1969--1990," page 35). Taylor's
characterization of Bolton's poems may be even more
appropriate to her own, which are full of an
odder-seeming, more muted, and less obviously
harmonious music than his. Where Bolton aims for
surface clarity and lyric grace in a traditional
sense, Taylor's poems can strike readers as
idiosyncratic, elliptical, and indeed quite
'dissonant'. These poems' apparent difficulty may
be one reason why Taylor's readership has never
been great, despite high praise from such writers
as Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, and Richard
Howard, and more recently from Alan Williamson and
Jean Valentine. (Lack of self-promotion on the
poet's part, and a history of working with small
publishers have not helped either). Indeed, many
readers may only be familiar with her as the
subject of one of Jarrell's lavish 'appreciations'
in the form of an introduction to her first book,
Wilderness of Ladies (1960), later reprinted
in his A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. As
any reader of Late Leisure will soon
realize, however, Taylor's poems are no footnote to
American literary history, but a formidable and
rewarding body of work that repays sustained
re-reading; Jarrell was right, forty years ago, to
claim that these poems could "be good almost as
Dickinson's or Hardy's poems are." Like Hardy,
Taylor is committed to exploring the possibilities
of the dramatic monologue, and of narration within
essentially lyric poems; she also shares his
preoccupations with the elegy and intergenerational
family history---often, in Taylor, the latter two
are very much related. With Dickinson, Taylor
shares a fascination for the kind of introspection
that can only arise from a condition of extreme
solitude ("Always Reclusive," one poem is aptly
titled); and the music of her poems is as
individual as Dickinson's.
The importance of region in Taylor's work simply
cannot be overstated. These poems are grounded in
the consciousness of a woman whose familiarity with
Southern history, culture, and landscape is
profound. One of her primary subjects is the way in
which wilderness, both psychic and geographical, is
both contained by domesticity and constantly
threatening to overtake it. This tension has
everything to do with the history of white women in
the male-dominated, white supremacist South; and it
is embodied in the music and rhythms of the poems,
wherein a restrained, almost genteel tone is shot
through with "a passion always threatening to go
undisciplined with the characteristic intensity of
her native South" (in the aptly-worded jacket copy
of her last book). In "Retired Pilot Watches Plane"
the speaker observes her suburban neighbor on an
early morning dog-walk "…stopped / midstreet
looking up / The early NY flight / slowing for
coming in":
His head
turning with the plane a maze
of speeds and altitudes?
controls he is unleashing
there in the cockpit?
Half dizzy
I come down to
my yard yews my late
husband planted East and color
raying far no line between
earth's atmosphere
black space no oxygen
Taylor's use of stepped tercets, spacing, and
spare punctuation in these lines helps to reinforce
a sense of the vastness, both terrifying and
exhilarating, not just of the open sky but of outer
space making its presence felt in this sedate
neighborhood. And since early on the poem's speaker
admits to the speculative nature of her ruminations
("He sees? I can't know More / than my party-talk /
acquaintance wouldn't help"), we are fully aware
that the true subject here is not the retiree's
memory of flight but the speaker's imagination of
that memory: "Half dizzy," she is the one
who "…come[s] down to / [her]
yard." Down from where? From a place, I would
speculate, that is halfway between the pilot's
imagined cockpit, and the speaker's own inner
experience of "a maze / of speeds and altitudes,"
of psychic "controls… unleash[ed]."
The poem ends on a characteristically wry
note---"…I think I'll wait a minute / to get
my paper in"---that both belies and reinforces the
seriousness of its introspection: although the
intent observation of her neighbor ("…as /
through a telescope") has prompted this potent
confrontation with amplitude, the speaker knows a
face-to-face greeting would betray that encounter's
essentially private nature.
In the stanza quoted above, "raying" is a small
but significant example of Taylor's word-play,
which is in evidence throughout these poems.
Instead of "rays of color," we have "color" itself
as the subject of an invented verb, a new word for
the sunrise's force. What distinguishes Taylor's
peculiar and always surprising manipulation of
language is the way it seems to combine Southern
vernacular speech with a sophisticated, and
specifically literary awareness of the
possibilities of word-usage---her vocabulary is as
quirky and voluminous as Stevens's. The preceding
may be an inept characterization, however, because
I don't think Taylor is really opposing the
vernacular to literary sophistication; rather, she
has created a hybrid of the two all her own, as in
the opening lines from "Shaking the Plum Tree":
Such light there was.
Ben up the plum tree,
red plums snaked with light,
gold veins jagging in the plum skins
like metal boiling,
plums bolting, knocking, to the ground,
the sky, a huge shade-tree of light
tenting the stubblefield with centigrade.…
I'm struck by how this passage manages so
seamlessly to juxtapose language that sounds
spoken---the first line, and "Ben up the plum tree"
(where's the verb?)---with wildly inventive words
like "snaked" and "jagging"; there is, as well, an
echo of Keats's "To Autumn" in "stubblefield," and,
finally, the introduction of scientific diction
with "centigrade." To pack these different, almost
divergent, kinds of word usage and association
together in a poem that manages to sound utterly
natural is quite a feat, and one Taylor pulls off
over and over throughout Late Leisure.
A poem in her first book is entitled "Woman as
Artist," and much of Taylor's work had addressed
the difficulty of balancing a domestic identity
(daughter, wife, mother) with an artistic identity;
Late Leisure looks at this question from the
perspective of a poet in her sixties and seventies.
In "Converse" she writes, "The artist has two
guises / in one time / and so must I." I take these
"two guises" to be the domestic self, participating
in life, and more specifically in family
relationships, countered by the artistic or
introspective self, which flourishes most in
solitude, both observing and imagining the former
self's life. The juxtaposition---and, at times,
opposition---of these two related selves or
"guises" fuels a great many of these poems,
including "Cuts Buttons Off an Old Sweater" which
contrasts a woman's purposeful daytime
activity---"It takes a dark, thin book to tray the
pickings / (they're hard to gather off her skirt,
the floor) / and chute them into the trash
can.… / And it takes time. Minutes she crooked
from the hour, / shoplifted from the day"---with
her dream life---"The dream was.… / crashing
tall ironweed, / hushed, purple fireworks /
whispering fragrance / and light years of taking
leave.…" The time spent dreaming---reckless
and incautious---is characterized as "an hour of
some real use," as contrasted with housework's
"devised delay"; yet I find that the language in
the poem's first section, with its precision and
genuine interest in the subject's labor, her search
for "such buttons… that might be useful on
another sweater, / a weary blouse, some baby
shirt," to be much more vital and interesting than
that in the dream section. This considerably
complicates the poem's appraisal of activity
undertaken under the "guise" of domesticity, and
maybe that's the point. In Late Leisure's
opening poem, "Long-Dreaded Event Takes Place," we
find the speaker's self split in two under much
more dire conditions, namely the illness and death
of a loved one. Here, the distancing "guise" is
more specifically that of an artist: "it blurs /
happening as on a canvas / distanced.… /
… as I / remote, half-turned away, / my eyes
half closed / half watch, // a painter at my easel
/ distancing my sketch / pretending I
recede.…" It's notable that Taylor chooses to
portray grief's numbing effect in terms of
artistry: even under the pressure of such a
terrible event the fundamental sense of a
bifurcated identity remains intact---and is perhaps
even heightened.
This poem can be presumed to
address---obliquely---the death of the poet's
husband, novelist Peter Taylor. Readers who
approach Late Leisure expecting to find
poems that address this material head on, as in
Hardy's elegies for his first wife or, more
recently, the poems of Tess Gallagher and Ruth
Stone, may be frustrated by Taylor's reticence,
seemingly so outmoded in our age of disclosure. But
it is the tension between privacy and revelation
that invigorates Taylor's work, and produces some
of her most vivid writing, as in "Long-Dreaded
Event":
glazed eyes catching
small smithereens:
the nurse's ring
bone pink smooth though modified
the brief convulsive reflex
and the driver's shoes well tied
......................
later somewhere
I'll paint-in gaps, fill in
the larger picture,
withholdings spilled
out of my pockets of resistance…
What makes Taylor's poems so compelling to this
reader is the extent to which "the larger picture"
is so often not "fill[ed] in"; and while
the accumulation of these chilling "smithereens" is
related to this poem's attempt to enact a
grief-stricken consciousness, it seems to me that
her work as a whole, and never more so than in
Late Leisure, presents the reader with
scraps of consciousness and perception that it is
our job to render coherent. From Eliot onward, this
kind of aesthetic has been familiar to poetry
readers; what makes Taylor's application of it so
inventive is the extent to which her method seems
so imbued with her own particular personality and
consciousness. The terms in which Jarrell states
this are enduring and useful: "The poems are full
of personal force, personal truth---the first and
last thing a reader sees in a writer---down to the
last piece of wording. Their originality is so
entire, yet so entirely natural, that it seems
something their writer deserves no credit for: she
could do no other.… [T]hey are so much
the direct expression of the object that their
words are still shaking with it---are, so to speak,
res gestae, words that, repeated are not
hearsay evidence but part of the fact itself." This
characterization of her work holds true as much for
this latest book as for her first, in which the
taste of life, both experienced and meditated on,
is as present---almost--- as a living person.
I've primarily addressed Late Leisure's
first-person lyrics (perhaps the easiest poems to
get a handle on), but what about Taylor's extended
narratives on historical themes? Her previous books
have contained longer poems based on the diaries of
Florence Nightingale and of a Northern father's
retrieval of his soldier-son's body from North
Carolina at the end of the Civil War ("Welcome
Eumenides" and "A Few Days in the South"), as well
as the accounts of white women held captive by
Native Americans in the nineteenth century ("War
Paint and Camouflage" and "Rachel Plummer's
Dream"); these poems prove Taylor a master at
integrating documentary material into her own
ruminations on American culture and history. Late
Leisure contains a complex meditation on the
Spanish conquest of Florida, "Worlds Old and New:
Father Lopez, La Florida, 1565--1569," which
integrates writing from the journal of a
"…Fleet Chaplain with / Menendez out of
Cádiz sailing for Florida." This poem is
distinguished by the subtle interlacing of the
subjectivity of the poem's subject with that of its
speaker, which becomes emblematic of the
individual's attempt to confront and understand
Southern history as intimately as possible:
…no one thought I would be fingering
these offset pages, thready letters---
a place I hungered and explored, where he
knew nothing of predicted hurricanes,
called meteors comets, faced unknown frontiers,
believed in resurrection of the flesh---
and, coming on this blackout, feel a pang.
I have tried to explore some of Late
Leisure's highlights, and in doing so of course
I've left a great deal out. Taylor's poetics are
deserving of ample study---she is a master of many
different techniques, whose formal poems are as
finely-tuned as Hardy's, and whose free verse is
wide-open and searching as Charles Olson's (while
eschewing consciously avant-garde pyrotechnics).
Contained here are a whole stratum of poems whose
subject is isolation both chosen ("Sitting in the
Dark, Morning") and enforced ("Contemplating
Jailbreak," or "The Accidental Prisoner," whose
narrator is trapped "under [her] own back
porch"). And there are a number of family elegies,
such as "These Gifts," in memory of the poet's
brother, which recalls "…yarns you invented at
/ the feedsack that fed the planter / as it worked
the pear-tree field / minding small sibling in
straw hat.…" Late Leisure's meditations
on aging are particularly acute: in "Dust," the
speaker comes face-to-face with passed time in the
act of taking neglected goblets down from a shelf:
"Can I / still in / a dustless time ago, / in a
fool's dustless now, / be clock-stopped / by these
my goblets / sotted with dust.… / Who's this /
I have invited?" This last question ---bemused,
sardonic, plaintive---best indicates the
idiosyncratic, and always rewarding pleasures of
Eleanor Ross Taylor's poems. Late Leisure
contains the work of one of our most accomplished
poets at the height of her powers.
Joe Bolton and Eleanor Ross Taylor are firmly
grounded in region and tradition, but neither is a
conservative poet in any sense of the word. The
Last Nostalgia and Late Leisure offer
poems that are imbued in different and often
divergent ways with "personal force, personal
truth" (to quote Jarrell). These are poems defined
by personal sensibility without being limited by
it, and which do not resort either to disclosure or
experimentation for their own sake. While both
books are published by regional presses that
strongly champion the work of Southern poets, they
deserve to reach as wide and diverse a readership
as possible.
Eric Gudas's poems and literary interviews
have appeared in The American Poetry Review,
The Iowa Review, The Barnabe Mountain
Review, and Mark My Words: Five Emerging
Poets, a new anthology from Momotombo Press. He
has an M.A. from the University of California,
Davis. He is Associate Editor of Sandra McPherson's
Swan Scythe Press.
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