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Number
286
September October 2000
Reclaiming
'Beauty'
ROBERT SWARD
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
THE ART OF THE LATHE, by B.H. Fairchild,
Introduction by Anthony Hecht, Alice James Books,
Farmington, Maine, 1998, 80 pages, $9.95
paper.
REPAIR, by C.K. Williams, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, New York, 1999, 69 pages, $12.00 paper,
$21.00 cloth. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry.
IN THE PINES: The Lost Poems, 1972--1997, by
David St. John. White Pine Press, Buffalo, New
York, 1999, 176 pages, $16.00.
One opens B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the
Lathe and is greeted by "Beauty," the first
poem in a collection of verse set largely in small
town middle America with its "little white frame
houses" and the "oven-warm winter / kitchens of
Baptist households…" The Art of the Lathe
addresses itself primarily to the subject of raw
metal, machine work, and thwarted desire in a world
populated by machinists, welders and farmers.
Unified in subject matter, Fairchild's is a
volume that tells a story, with each poem flowing
from the one before. Best read from beginning to
end, the book opens in medias res
with the speaker in Italy homesick for "the
treeless horizons / of slate skies and the muted
passions of roughnecks":
We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she
says,
what are you thinking? and I say,
beauty, thinking
of how very far we are now from the machine
shop
and the dry fields of Kansas…
"Beauty." How can one read the word and not
think of Frost's boast that in all his years of
writing he used the term only once? But here the
poet is standing before Donatello's David, with his
wife touching his sleeve, asking "what are you
thinking?" And he's actually thinking of beauty, of
a discussion between Robert Penn Warren and Paul
Weiss at Yale College, a 1963 radio broadcast
audible in Kansas only because of "some weirdness
of the air waves."
Here were two grown men discussing "beauty"
seriously and with dignity as if they and the
topic
were as normal as normal topics of discussion
between men such as soybean prices or why
the commodities market was a sucker's game
or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland
almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation.
"Beauty" is a seemingly discursive, but in fact
ingeniously constructed, long lined, eight-page
poem in four sections which touches on a variety of
topics, including baseball, hard physical labor,
popular music and the difficulty many men have,
poets among them, in saying the word, a word which
doesn't seem quite natural or right to say
aloud:
she touching his chest, his hand brushing her
breasts,
and he does not say the word "beautiful"
because
he cannot and never has, and she does not say
it
because it would embarrass him or any other man
she has ever known...
The Art of the Lathe is a book infused
with the beauty of "silver Kansas light laving the
[dinner] table," "light filtering down from
the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine
shop," high school athletes "eager to gallop
terribly against each other's bodies" light and
"the uprisings of light." [Italics are the
poet's, quoting James Wright.] The poem
"Beauty" ends with "the metal roof of the machine
shop" breaking into flame "late on an autumn day,
with such beauty."
Reading these lines one thinks, of course, of
James Wright and poems like "Autumn Begins in
Martins Ferry, Ohio." Indeed, Fairchild
acknowledges Wright in the two epigraphs that
precede "Beauty."
No discussion of B.H. Fairchild should omit
mention of his justly popular "Keats." Here is an
excerpt:
I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.
Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime
Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating
from the ball park, shouts, slamming doors
This is Keats out of Kansas, a scrappy guy,
short, but fearless. Keats, a skilled mechanic who
took no lip from anyone, Keats who once beat up a
mechanic "big as a Buick," who would lean into his
lathe "…and make a little song / with the
honing cloth, rubbing the edges, / smiling like a
man asleep, dreaming."
Reading the title poem and others like "Old Men
Playing Basketball," "Work," and "The Welder,
Visited by the Angel of Mercy," one sees the
influence of Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos,
Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. These are
naturalistic poems, objective in their
representation of human beings. Dana Gioia and
others have justly noted Fairchild's ability to
plunder "the territories of prose to expand the
possibilities of contemporary verse."
I read The Art of the Lathe from
beginning to end and, caught up in its spell,
turned, moments after the last poem, back to page
one, starting over again.
o
"Beauty." It's a risky word, a tricky word, one
to be used with caution---particularly by poets.
But now Fairchild has got me thinking, and I
approach C.K. Williams's Repair only after
consulting a dictionary. "Beauty," I read,
"craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality." Is
there beauty in the poetry of C.K. Williams and, if
so, where?
Williams is a delver, a diviner, a discoverer of
marvels. He is incisive and forthright, a
risk-taker, an unflinching teller of
things-as-they-are, yet even his images of injury
and destruction, of violence and of loss are
infused with merciful light, grief and compassion.
In his most brutal poem, "The Nail," for example,
he tells of a dictator who disposed of enemies "by
hammering nails into their skulls." The poem,
graphic and horrific as it is, modulates in the
final stanza :
No, no more: this should be happening in myth,
in stone, or
paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself,
something that would mean,
not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from
that unmoved mass of
matter in the breast…
The poem concludes:
it's we who do such things, we who set the
slant, embed the tip, lift the
sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns
the brutal human
world upon the world.
Each day of our lives images of this kind
assault us. The images themselves are like nails
driven into our skulls. Is it any wonder one is
drawn to pick up a book bearing the title
Repair, a collection of poems that, in
addition to everything else it has to offer,
explores the nature and limits of healing and
repair?
Williams's poem "Ice" describes the "astonishing
thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into
a block of ice: / the way a perfect section through
it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures,
facets; / dazzling silvery deltas…" The reader
is greeted with mad images of "the cosmos of
[the ice block's] innards. / Radiant now
with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of
glittering light…"
Williams speaks of stabbing this "treasure hoard
of light…" of disassembling the block into
smaller fragments and of the gnawed at, dull
segments of the ice block when it comes apart, and
the poet, reflecting on the limitations of repair,
imagines "the mass reconstituted…" with only a
"little of its brilliance lost."
The book is called Repair, but what is it
that needs repair, restoration to wholeness, "to
sound condition after injury"? In "The Blow," an
approaching beggar startles a man who blindly turns
on him and punches him in the chest. Knowing he has
made a mistake, harangued by the beggar, walking
away as fast as he can, the man suddenly sees
"…himself / and the beggar as atoms, /
nullities, passing beside / one another, or
through."
Musing on the fear of "our own existence,"
chastened, he recalls reading of a youth in a
madhouse, " 'entirely idiotic, sitting / on a shelf
in the wall.' " " 'That shape am I,' " the
man understands, and, "beholding his own mind", the
man sees it "flickering desperately over / the
great gush of the real, / to no end, to no
avail."
In "House," the poet speaks of that place in
ourselves where consciousness---or
something---"cries, 'Make me new,' but pleads as /
pitiably,"---at the same time&emdash;---"Cherish me
as I was." In this particular poem, Williams draws
on the language of a construction crew bent on
demolition, "Down to the swipe of the sledge, the
ravaging bite of the pick…" as he leads into
the inner core, that "rubble, / wreckage, vanity:
the abyss" we all share.
This is a book about repair, but as the poet
makes clear, repair goes hand in hand with
forgiveness. There can be no repair, no healing
without forgiveness---forgiveness of others and
ourselves. And where does forgiveness arise---and
repair occur---if not in the midst of that whirling
rubble, the center from which we live our lives? In
"Dream," we read
Strange that one's deepest split from
oneself
should be enacted in those banal and inevitable
productions of the double dark of sleep.
Despite all my broodings about dream,
I never fail to be amazed by the misery
I inflict on myself when I'm supposedly at
rest.
In some ways, this book is a meditation on the
'self', the peculiar nature of consciousness and
our inner being. In "The Lie," for example,
Williams writes of "A self which by definition
cannot tell / itself untruths, yet lies, which,
wanting / to tell itself untruths, isn't able
to,…" "and would like sometimes not to know /
it's lied, but can't deny it has…"
The book opens with "Ice," but ends tenderly,
movingly with "Invisible Mending" where "Three
women old as angels, / bent as ancient apple trees,
/ who, in a storefront window…" work with
needles, scissors and shears to repair the
"Abrasions, rents and frays, / slits and chars and
acid / splashes, filaments that gave / way…"
of our outer garments. "Only sometimes would they /
lift their eyes to yours to show / how much
lovelier than these twists / of silk and serge the
garments / of the mind are…"
Beautiful, I'm thinking, beautiful! This is
Williams at his best, at once lyrical and
colloquial, wry, witty and serious, chatty and
curiously formal.
o
David St. John's In The Pines: Lost Poems
1972--1997 is a seven-part collection of poems,
many of which appeared over the past twenty-five
years in limited edition chapbooks. White Pine
Press is to be congratulated for bringing out this
one hundred seventy-six page volume of the poet's
"lost" or otherwise unavailable work, though the
forbidding dark funereal green, black and muddy
yellow cover is unattractive, quite at odds with
the wonderful wit, humor, lyricism, and brightness
of the poems themselves.
One can't help being struck by how many of these
sixty or so poems, whatever their length, tell
fully realized stories---with the poet drawing on a
variety of personas and writing in the first
person. Consider the five-page title poem with its
Rilkean account of an ailing man who, enchanted by
an angel's singing, enters into a fantastical
relationship with her ("blond wings the breadth /
of a man's body"). The affair culminates in an
erotic encounter ("…the long feathers /
Cutting my neck like fine razors / As I unbuckle my
pants & pull myself / into her…"), and the
androgynous angel ("body / Of a condor: just as
powerful, graceful, sleek…") flies off with
the male narrator, raising him above the pines,
toward:
…the empty heavens,
& I know my lungs in this clarity of
air
Will last no longer than
Her song. Though I hardly care, though
I foresaw it all, still,
I know as well as she knows---in stories
Of this kind---when what comes
Has come finally to its end, which of us
Must fall.
Other first-person narratives include
"California," "Thinking of Cuba," "Dancing," "My
Days at the University," "Oriental Brushstrokes in
a French Chateau," the epistolary "Quote Me Wrong
Again and I'll Sift the Throat of Your Pet Iguana,"
and the moving five-poem, twelve-page sequence,
"Little Saigon," with its speaker, a young
Vietnamese orphan.
Decadent, urbane, utterly different from the
Saigon sequence, the Rilkean title poem is the
lushly erotic, eighteen-line "Don't Talk to Me,
Touch Me," a half-page tour de force which offers
more character, more atmosphere, more 'story' than
many full-length prose fiction narratives.
Casually, almost offhandedly, the poet evokes a
complete scene. In this case the main character is
a gigolo ("…he'd carefully choose the one/
Who'd certainly have money or jewelry back at her
room---/ A small price to pay for a man with a
waist / Like a cat.") preparing himself for an
evening's adventure:
Outside, his motorcycle glistened like a black
mantis
As he began slowly pulling on the shiny
Flowered shirt and striped pants that women
loved
To touch underneath the arc-rainbow...
These are poems which give "intense pleasure or
deep satisfaction to the mind." Exhibiting harmony
of form, excellence of craftsmanship and
originality, In the Pines is in every way a
beautiful body of work.
Guggenheim recipient Robert Sward teaches at
UC Extension Santa Cruz. Chosen by Lucille Clifton
to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award, he
is the author of sixteen books including Four
Incarnations, New & Selected Poems (Coffee
House Press) and A Much-Married Man, A
Novel.
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