Poetry is both utterance and object.

When we think of poetry as a political act, we are prone to consider it as the former, to the detriment of the latter. Our notions of the political are underwritten by the language of “voice.” A.O. Hirschmann’s classic essay begins with the alignment of voice and the political and exit and the economic, and it proceeds to scuttle the distinction; but the distinction persists. Democracies are incubators for complaints that are “not heard.” The losing party—Democrats most recently—need to “listen” to what people are saying. At the same time, people are speaking more than ever, over reels and via digital telegrams sent nowhere and everywhere at once; social media both concentrates and attenuates voice. There are both too many voices and, since any one person can select their channel and follow their preferred spokespeople, too few conversations. Legacy media is suspected of excluding voices; selection has come to be understood as censorship of voices, even as the voices that complain of it are represented in the forums that they find guilty. Validation requires public audience; recognition is auditory; inclusion and empathy cannot happen without hearing and listening. Some listen but do not hear; others hear but do not listen. The strain on democracies is enormous. Rousseau, perverse and prescient, suggested abolishing spoken deliberation prior to voting; the general will would be threatened by too much talk.

In this context, the political impotence of poetry is both guaranteed and mitigated: the fate of poetry—a voice speaking to only a self-selected few—is the fate of almost all would-be political discourse, the most fortunate specimens of which emerge only briefly to float on the churn of sound in which the rest is subsumed.

Over one hundred and fifty years ago, the Victorian literary critic and poet Matthew Arnold perceived the tendency to narrow one’s sense of the poem to the spoken aspect of verse—to the notiob, expressed by John Stuart Mill, that poetry is “overheard.” To his sister Jane, in a letter of March 1849, Arnold wrote: “More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit (too much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything.” Matthew Arnold was implicitly recalling the Greek root of “poesis,” “making.”  Among the Classically educated elite of his Victorian contemporaries, he would hardly have been alone in knowing the connection, but he understood its significance. Whereas they may have seen, Arnold also observed.

As was not uncommon for Arnold, his diagnoses anticipated what would follow his death, with the arrival of what we call modernist poetry, developed in Europe mostly by Americans: Pound, Eliot, H.D, and, in the United States, William Carlos Williams—and even, though it requires more explanation, Wallace Stevens. (To this group might be added late, intensely Irish Yeats.)

None of these poets would seek to suppress the spoken quality of verse; they were dedicated students, sometimes masters, of meter and cadence. Nonetheless, they understood meter as inseparable from the objecthood of a poem; meter, cadence, sound were the lines traced by what Ezra Pound’s “poet as sculptor.”  When their poems resemble collage, the conjoined elements are not merely samples of language or discourse—they are specific instances, quotations, scraps or artefacts of language, so that we are invited to approach them as traces of a material history, as if these bits of quotations and language were things set into place. We are consistently encouraged to see the solidity what we hear, as well as to hear what we see. 

It is possible to go further still in developing this formulation. We are not only encouraged, encountering these poems, to see the solidity of what we hear, but we are asked to hear what the poems see, so that the encounter with the world’s materiality is made the object of poetry in two senses: the end it pursues, on the one hand, and, on the other, what constitutes it as an object. This balance is not unique to modernism; it is achieved whenever poetry comes into its fullest self. It is there in Donne, in Milton, in Dryden, in Pope, in Blake, in Wordsworth, in Christina Rossetti, in Emily Dickinson, and so on. It is there, and then it is lost, since poetry, living in language, carried on the voice, is easily dominated by voice.

I’m suggesting that when the poem is most focused on an encounter with the objects of experience (even if those experiences are inwards, and represented as objects)--when it is most pressed upon by, and feels the resistance of, a force and form external to itself--[j1] it is most readily achieves a balance of utterance and object in what it is, as a poem. This is a principle of poetic success. (Music—song—might be said to rescue voice in the other direction, moving it further towards pure sound).

If this is true, poetry can be an occasion not for voice to participate in the political arena, but for voice in poetry to encounter a world that is not voice, and to restore us to our awareness of voice as an object among other objects in the world. To make a poem from language, and from the stuff of voice, is to fashion something that is not merely voice; made of a voice uttering words, a poem is made by the world imposing its presence on utterance, the utterance coming to belong as much to the world of objects beyond the self as to the self inwardly separate from the world’s objects. Poetry shares with politics the challenge of make voice something that is set among and against the world’s intransigent reality rather than shaping reality to its whims. They would admit the world to voice and admits voice as a part of a world greater than voice—or people—could be. Both poetry and politics are susceptible to drowning voice in voices; when they succeed, however, they place voice within a world that is not voice. They set the vehicle of discourse within an ecology of human and natural, humanity and the world’s materials, but also human and those who, though human, are encountered as profoundly other in their humanity.

Those who have perused the rich and rewarding letters of Thom Gunn, published in 2022, or who know Gunn’s out-of-print essays collected as Shelf Life will perhaps be acquainted with the name Jim Powell. Powell is an American poet, with deep roots in the Bay Area; he made Gunn’s acquaintance in the 1970s, the same decade that he published his first collection, It Was Fever That Made the World, which Gunn admired and praised. It was only in 2009 that Powell’s second collection, Substrate, appeared, though in the intervening years he had translated (with commentary) the poems of Sappho for Oxford University Press, and he has received grants and public recognitions. Despite which, Powell’s work will not be found in many anthologies or in many household collections. He has remained, I think it’s fair to say, a poet’s poet—though Gunn’s letters hopefully bring his work to a wider audience. Among contemporary poetry, Powell’s stands out for insisting on the aspiration of making the voice of poetry have the solid presence of an object in the world. His doing so goes far beyond writing in poetic forms or meter and owes instead to an ability (and willingness) to charge language with the density of the imagined world. In Powell’s poetry, world and word alike are recalcitrant but this same recalcitrance is what permits them to hold together, parts in a greater whole.

The title of Substrate is also the title of a remarkable sequence of poems; the title itself speaks of the relation to poetry in world, with poetry and world interchangeably substrate and enzyme. The word implies a hard surface, which Powell’s poetry becomes, but also which it takes its form from, like a fossil cast. For the poems that make of the sequence are fashioned from the archive of North American settlers, explorers, adventurers and inhabitants from the pre-colonial era to the twentieth century. The archives are themselves the solid objects that become the poems; but the archives are also records of encounters with the solidity of the world’s matter and foreign manners, in its minute particularity. The records, the language and the details, resist the pull of the symbolic, but invite us to envision the whole of an endeavor, a place, a life, or an event of which they are a part; They ask how we are to take hold of anything as large and evasively abstract as endeavor, place, life, or event, except in honoring the dense contours, smooth or sharp, of one of its parts. Past and future are implicit; the poems are absorbed to saturation with the present. As should be evident in what I’ve said, they exist as poems by being set in their forms—and their forms are set in place by the records of language that fill them. Here is an example that I think demonstrates just how strange, and subtle, the effect of these poems as poems is:

The Peltries

on the Klamath and Rogue, 1827

Last night our guides informed us they would separate this morning

and others will conduct us, the cause assigned is apprehension

of being killed on entering the country of their enemies.

The Clamite and the Shastise are at variance near these passes.

If they like war let them enjoy it

and we meanwhile shall wage war with their beaver. Upwards 70

skins to try, our traps far in the rear, did not raise camp.

This day 13 beaver and 2 Otter             Rain all night.

I sent twelve trappers forward with a guide and 20 horses.

Today’s success amounts to seven

Cold night and clear at dawn we started early, a villainous road

and long day’s march, worse for the horses, mud, snow in the pass

we overtook our forward party, descended and encamped

by a small brook. They will raise traps and join us in the morning.

Course this day NW 15 miles

6 men set out at daylight with 60 traps, at eight we ventured

down our brook and camped where it debouches in a basin.

An Indian came boldly to my tent with two fresh salmon.

We have now 30 trappers in advance of the brigade.

No stream escapes our observation.

Sent out my green hands with their gear. Course NNE 5 miles

We had a windy night and fair this morning, fine warm weather.

The Indians say the winter is now over. Birds singing,

grass green, and at full growth, flowers—yet it is February.

31 beaver           1 marten

All hands out hunting, in camp the ladies vie at dressing peltry

and drying meat. Today completed our first thousand skins.

We cannot have too many. Man Is Never Satisfied

Old Jacques the freeman says three Indians strung their bows at him

and made him signs to leave their land.

He drew the cover from his Gun to give them salute

when they took flight. McDouglas says the Indians break their dams

and make the beaver wild to trap. In shallow water taken

by the forefoot his grinders set him free by amputation.

Traps placed six inches under

catch him by the hind food, he cannot free himself, and drowns.

The Horse Keeper reports one gone, with saddle, the Company’s.

A cold night. Beavers snug inside their lodges, their dams frozen.

Twenty Indians assembled to make peace. Two dozen

buttons settled the affair.

This place is clear of beaver. Four days travel below our traps

the guides are ignorant in all directions further. Last night

it snowed ten inches, at dawn the rain commenced, by now the country

is underwater, the rivers rising. This will not mend the roads.

Louie the Iroquoy found his horse.

                  Peter Skene Ogden

That there is a metrical pattern here is evident, though I do not possess the skill to analyze it with any subtlety: suffice it to say that the poem hangs on the strange English “fourteener,” a line of that many syllables sometimes found in Blake’s prophetic verses; and each stanza resolves in a shorter line of approximately eight syllables. It is generally the case that meter is an ideal towards which the spoken word aspires, always an imperfect fit, with the force of meter felt in the degree of strain or ease of this fit, and poetry the wavelength of language between ideal pattern and natural speech.  In this poem, the fourteener is a rough measure, which some exceed and others fall short of; this is true to the line, which accommodates a degree of flexibility by convention, but it also registers a fact about the poem’s making, which is to say that it is made out of the facts of a moment, which are resistant to the imaginative endeavor that is poetry.

The poem begs the question, as few poems do, what a poem is, and it returns us to Eliot’s remark that whatever else it may be poetry employs a distinct system of punctuation: the line ending. But Powell’s poem pushes us further: it challenges us to ask about what we assume a poem might be: something that, even if a reshaping of documentary testimony, appeals to the imagination. What is meant by that word is often vague, but here it is not a suggestion that Powell has failed to imagine, but that the materials from which the poem is constructed are not invested in any imaginative activity: they account, they track, they state. Most notably, the poem’s voice occupies a tightly constricted horizon of time: no sense of the past, little of the present. The language is circumscribed by a need to survive the conditions of its utterance, rather than refiguring them as something they might be, but are not; the metrical form of Powell’s lines and the shape of his stanzas reveal it as possessing an inherent structure. The question to ask about the poem from a critical perspective is whether, and how, it holds together as a poem, with a beginning and end, with a unity that transcends the contingency and triviality of its materials. To this question two answers are possible: one is that it is a poem in a sequence of others, that its arc is subsumed to theirs. This supposes a unity of the sequence, however, that is not borne out; it is not truly an episodic sequence because it is not a narrative. The other would be to see the poem as something coming into a unity that it does not fully possess: the trappers in the poem gather pelts, the poem gathers statements of fact, incidents, events; the full significance of each remains latent. This is what it means that none can be converted to a symbol. It comes to an end at an impasse in the action; there is hope of continuing with the horse is found, but there is nowhere to go since the rivers are rising and “this will not mend the roads”; and this is an impasse also in the poem’s becoming. The poem becomes the impediments that occasion it; we are asked, in its words, to see its world, not to see through its world to our own; but in that opaque specificity of time, place, and action, we find what is permanent in the poem, the experience of perseverance, of hunger and acquisition, and beyond this, knowing where the poem is and when it is, we can place it within a narrative that is contained neither within the poem nor within the sequence of “Substrate” as a whole, but that runs around that sequence: the narrative of a nation coming into being. The poems that constitute “Substrate” as a sequence are akin to a series of rocks in the current of a river, a part of the river, forming it, but not the river itself.

That “The Peltries” holds together as a rock at all, that it possesses this unity, is evident from our being able to discern not only an arc from beginning (the separation from guides; a new start, but also more of the same) to the end (an impasse, but with hope of a start, as the horse is found)—but, what matters more for a poem that, by its nature, to court the success that it achieves, necessarily risks becoming a pile rather than cohesive whole, a center:

All hands out hunting, in camp the ladies vie at dressing peltry

and drying meat. Today completed our first thousand skins.

We cannot have too many. Man Is Never Satisfied

Old Jacques the freeman says three Indians strung their bows at him

and made him signs to leave their land.

Though it has biblical resonance (“evil man is never satisfied” in Job; “eyes are never satisfied” in Proverbs 27), the italicized phrase is the single moment of the poem that reaches beyond the present task: a sermon, a truism, a reflection, it is something given to the speaker, to the poem, without being accommodated neatly in its design. There is no punctuation after it except for the break of the line; it rounds out the line but is not fully of it, since it lacks the punctuation that would establish its relation to what follows. It is a still point around which the other phrases are set. It speaks to the determination of the poem’s subject to gather more, and so to gather more into the poem—though such gathering is difficult, resisted, exhausting. Each full-stop of the poem arrives like a tally-mark, so that what is counted is not just beaver pelts but propositions,  each which are statements bring voice and poem into contact with the world, sometimes gaining possession and territory, sometimes stopped short.

A fragment from Callimachus (Fragment 612) stands as the epigram to “Substrate.” In a note, Powell provides several translations:  “I’m interested in the poetry of fact”… “I sing nothing without witness”…”This is a documentary poem”… “Don’t blame me: it says right here…” … “as the Booke us telles…” (Chaucer)… “No fact without a footnote”….

Against which we might set Wittgenstein’s “The world is the totality of facts, not of things,” for even though I have emphasized the thingness of the world that a poem encounters, what emerges from that encounter, the poem that is both object and utterance, is an entity that resembles a fact: something that we come up against, that is not ours entirely, that is constitutive of a world we share with others: they are propositions that can be stated in sentences. We run up against the poems in “Substrate” as we would run up against facts in the world—facts of the world.

This brings us close to the political significance of Powell’s work: a poetry that unites object and utterance, that is world and word united in propositional statements, is a poetry that permits us access to a reality that is both imaginary and concrete, that is imaginary without being solipsistic, that is external to us without being divorced from our experience. Poetry becomes a way out of voice by means of voice; admittedly a function of the imagination and human design, it testifies to the possibility of imagination escaping the confines of a single individual, an imagination belonging to a world that we share with others, human and inhuman.

“The Peltries” embodies that world, becomes a fragment of it, and also exemplifies a proper human attitude towards it: the urge for ceaseless acquisition, though we know what ecological destruction it will bring about, is experienced in the poem as a courageous perseverance, a stoic determination that is inseparable from the intimacy of the trappers and their environment, their living up against and among the facts of the world, as the poem itself does, rather than exploiting them at a remove. Their experience is too harshly governed by necessity to permit rhetoric; they have no audience but their own actions. ‘Louis the Iroquoy found his horse” is pointedly not a statement of hope, not a summoning of inspiration or encouragement, but it is analogous in the feeling if offers, if we hear it correctly, just as we can detect the negated possibility of despair in “this will not mend the roads,” subdued pride in “Today completed our first thousand skins,” suppressed wonder in “flowers—yet it is February,” checked relief in the line break that turns into “a small brook,” and more. What does the subduing, the checking, the negating of these feelings that elsewhere might be occasions for drifts of poetic reverie is the exertion inherent in the occasion of these words, an exertion that owes to the recalcitrance of things that voice cannot flaunt or take for granted.

That is not to say that these poems of “Substrate” are without lyricism that we find elsewhere in Powell’s own poetry. Here is “Wild Mustard Remembers,” the note to which reads:

“Wild Mustard Remembers”: The title is from a poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Freeway 280” (in Emplumada). William Buckle (1803-ca. 1859), an English sailor, landed in Southern California before 1823 and came north after the drought of 1828-1829. He was baptized “Jose Guillermo” in Monterey in 1829 and married Antonia Castro, Over the next fifteen years they had eight children including five daughters (four by 1840), all at Branciforte (Santa Cruz). He prospered as a lumberman and shipbuilder and in 1838 obtained confirmation of the grant of La Carbonera, at Swanton, Santa Cruz County.

Wild Mustard Remembers

La Carbonera, Lammas 1842

When no rain fell for twenty-two infernal months

to spare the forage before it failed we tried

stampeding droves of horses over ocean cliffs.

We penned them in corrals to starve. We slaughtered

cattle in numbers surpassing our capacity

to flay or cure the hides and rescue a return

from the disaster by trade with Yankee smugglers.

And still the herds remaining grazed the native grasses

down to the barren root before the feast

of their parched carcasses gorged vultures and coyotes.

And even so, no rain. It was afterward,

once the climate’s seasonal storms resumed

their cycle that the alien mustard weed took hold here,

spreading farther north each year. Already

my younger daughters have never seen this countryside

arrayed in March otherwise than in mustard gold.

It grows so rank along the valley bottoms

by May it overtops a person’s head on horseback

but, as the summer weather settles in,

hillsides again put on their oaten coat of old

in the weeks when, well before dawn, a warming air

begins to stroke the purgatorial oven

of afternoon. Wisest to rest out the heat

within a cool retreat, shifting from shade

to shade among the oak and aromatic bay

as morning shadows dwindle to a line, a breath,

and pause and change direction while time hangs

aloof, suspended in the balance of the sun,

or from a sheltered cleft gaze out upon

the lion colored landscape with its indecent contours,

the hollows buttocks have, the dimples of a shoulder:

at dusk the deer and cougar disappear

while motionless against its pelt of brittle grasses

when lamps are lighting in the valley’s lap

and the emerging stars construct the vault of night.

This speaker has, by dint of education and place in the world, more of the stuff of poetry in his voice: allusions, registers, syntax absent from “The Peltries.”  And it may be that this is a more successful poem as a consequence—though it stands in relation to “The Peltries” as the lyrical passages of Pound’s Cantos stand in relation to the documentary: “The Peltries” urges us to attend to the mass and inertia in this poem too, and to notice how in the span of the final period, extending across the last thirteen lines of the poem, closes into the phrase “the vault of night,” here restored from its hackneyed by the preceding verb “construct,” which makes “vault” an opaque, dense thing, the light of the stars establishing its solidity, as the constellated words of the poem establish the solidity of the world they occupy. We might notice also how the sequence of stanzas follows, in abbreviated measure, the path pursued by Dante from “infernal” (line 1) to “purgatorial” (“begins to construct the vault of night”) to, at last, “stars,” while adhering to an intent observation and sensual apprehension of the land, vegetation, and weather.  The rhythm of change in the scene, and the cadence of the line, recalls the Romantic tradition that runs through Keats and Stevens (the final line comes to rest not unlike that of “Sunday Morning”); “oaten cold of old” and “oak and aromatic bay” pull towards the pastoral of “Lycidas.” The poem contains echoes of voices not its own; but it is held firmly against the lifeform of this landscape, with “the hollows buttocks have” and its “pelt of brittle grasses.” “Brittle” because of the drought, because of the fragility of the ecosystem, and because it is held so carefully by the poem itself, which seeks to impose nothing upon it, and only to hold it for what it is, conforming to its reality of waste and return, loss and renewal. These, in “Wild Mustard Remembers” are facts of the world, not claimed on its behalf but perceived and felt in what it is: the journey from hell through purgatory to paradise follows from what the landscape dictates.  The poem, with its consciousness of its literary inheritance, exists at a polar distance from “The Peltries,” and in so doing, it corrects a thought that the synthesis of utterance and object, a poem constituted by the facts of the world, becoming a fact of the world, need be rugged, rough-hewn, without allusive grace or lyricism.[j2] 

“Commonwealth” occupies a middle-ground between [j3] “The Peltries” and “Wild Mustard Remember,” recounting the construction not of the vault of night but of a cabin:

Commonwealth

west of the Mississippi, September 1837

The site was cleared and level, the chimney up.

Parties started early felling pines

and skidding back log chains with teams of oxen.

Fresh help arrived all day to join the frolic,

talkative settler wives unloading wagons,

backwoodsmen with their guns and dogs. One man

trims puncheons with an adze and a drawknife.

Other split shingles. Four partner sawing planks

to make the door and a pair of shutters.  All

the materials are on the spot by nightfall.

Sunday morning a man with an axe stands

inside each corner of the house to rise

notching mortises to lock the logs

together as we raise them into place

and seat them tier on tier, no trifling task

as the lift up to the top course increases,

yet being many we are equal to it

and the women are abundant with refreshments.

By dusk the walls are up and the roof framed,

the door and window sawn, and we retire

to Collmer’s shelter—a fifty-foot screen wall

with a shed roof on poles, three rough-hewn bedsteads,

a loom, two spinning wheels, boxes and casks

for seats, a table, turkey, pumpkin, maize bread

and the frontiersman’s favorite beverage, coffee.

The Collmars’ new home crowns its knoll, our work,

moonrise pouring through the rafters. They shingle

tomorrow, for Mrs. Collmar is again with child.

Next moon we raise a barn at Slowtrap’s. Breakfast

will be frugal: we have eaten everything.

                  Hercules Beckwith

The interlocking parts of the labor of raising a house become the interlocking lines of the poem, so that the fitting together of actions and propositions coincide: the poem is crowned by the stanza that begins “The Collmars’ new home crowns its knoll, our work” so that “our work” takes in not just the thing that is the new home, but the entire state of affairs—the fact that has come about in the poem. And the poem is exhausted with the exhaustion of the supplies of energy: “will be frugal: we have eaten everything.”  But the word “everything” is double-faced: it is the sum of a store that is exhausted, was perhaps meagre, and it is a measure of the abundance that the men seek, as in “The Peltries.” This doubleness between scarcity and plenitude is everywhere in the poem: it is in the list that constitutes the penultimate stanza, the final line of which, “the frontiersman’s favorite beverage, coffee” fills out the line with relish and appreciation, though the list itself is as much a testimony to scarcity as to sufficiency. It is in the stanza above that, with the line “the women are abundant with refreshments” where the “abundant” looks both to the women and the refreshments, as if it is in holding the refreshments that they become abundant, abundance descending upon them for the occasion, otherwise absent. In the line prior: “yet being many we are equal to it” is proud of the strength they have, but “yet” flickers with “still,” acknowledging the precarity of their numbers. It is there in the rhyme of “All” with “the materials are on the spot by nightfall” at the end of the second stanza: the rhyme, like the logs in the subsequent stanza, locks together, the word “All” makes the line by breaking the syntax of the phrase, hovering uncertain on the line-ending: is this all? The poem is called “Commonwealth” and the title speaks to the spirit of unity in the labor (“being many we are equal to it”) as well as to the poem’s being composed from an account of wealth of what is at hand, but also, barely more noticeably than in “The Peltries” of a wealth of the future:

The Collmars’ new home crowns its knoll, our work,

moonrise pouring through the rafters. They shingle

tomorrow, for Mrs. Collmar is again with child.

Next moon we raise a barn at Slowtrap’s. Breakfast

will be frugal: we have eaten everything.

Not just “moonlight pouring through the rafters” but “moonrise,” the marker of time illuminating the work that has been done, looking forward to the work of “tomorrow” and the inversion of “is again with child,” true to a way of speaking, also draws together “is” and “again,” what exists and what repeats,  and “with child” casting into a future that might be long indeed, or cut short; the thought of the child is itself cut short with the thought of the work of “next moon,” and then of the morning ahead, time contracting further still to “Breakfast” which breaks into the poem, and breaks against the line-ending, with the exigency of simple eating. Though the final phrase of the poem, “we have eaten everything” suggests how little remains, the poem does not despair. That “we have eaten everything” is a circumstance, a fact, against which the poem sets the resolution of “will be,” a verb determined and intentional as “shall be” is not. The title points us to reading this as a political poem—and it is political in its celebration of cooperation, labor, and hard-won dwelling—but it is political also in its relationship to voice. It is an ode of civic praise, but also an ode to civic praise, where praise is contained in the voice that grows out of a reckoning with, and fashioning of, perduring, intractable, and common reality. Such a voice, composed of and composing a shared world of factual intransigence, is the strength of civic bonds.