by Eric Bies
In geometry, a line goes on and on: it goes on and on and never stops. In poetry, a line goes on as long as the poet lets it….though in practice this rarely means more than six or seven words at a stretch.
I open the novel lying next to me—an attractively typeset hardback Bolaño—and its lines smile with the teeth of all of twelve or fourteen. Words: like the Greeks at Thermopylae, they have, somehow, to say more, do more, be more when they amass in minor number. That’s the poet’s problem.
Of course, the poet is more than welcome to set about the rather dry, administrative task of composing and arranging a rank and file of discrete poetic lines: in the end times we shall all stand watching from the horse-shaped shade of an outsize bicorn as the lines march out onto the page, ready to clash with or be routed by the reader’s eye. And this makes for a nice image, but it does nothing to dispel the poet’s problem: that blasted matter of saying more with less. If only the poet had paid a little closer attention in class. For even I can hear it now. It’s the sound of a single line begging to be many.
Such a line, whose contents spill over into another (and perhaps another, and not infrequently another yet), zigging and zagging in clots and clauses of continuous thought, participates in a process called enjambment. Most halfway okay poems—those desirous both of basic interpretability and, well, the appearance of poetry—do usually enjoy enjambments, of which the poet ensures an artfulness sufficient to staving off suspicions as to their simply having fed a sentence to a sushi chef. But then there really are those poems that one could say are little more than their dismemberments. What we end up with, for instance, when we lift the line breaks from a famous poem by a New Jersey physician is a sentence merely, and an unremarkable one at that.
See, so much depends upon a line break. William Carlos Williams demonstrated as much when he punched this one out on his typewriter:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The poem, which is everything modernists like Williams taught us a poem could be—studiously irregular, liberally aerated, colloquially disembodied—is clearly only barely a poem. (Actually, it’s safe to say it shares more in structure and spirit with the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, asserting new perspectives on everyday objects, than anything Longfellow left us.)
But what does depend upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens?
The more one reads into such a statement, the less one discovers, the more suspenseful the poem becomes. Eventually, the statement’s cryptic nature assumes a vaguely conspiratorial aspect. Finally, the poem is read out loud, not as a chant, but as a threat. Imagine the exaggerated accents in every bad gangster movie you’ve ever seen. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.… It’d be a shame if something happened to it.
Far from “The Red Wheelbarrow” itself, a handle assigned by some well-meaning and forgotten anthologist, the poem’s original title was purely numerical: “xxii” was simply the twenty-second poem in a collection Williams called Spring and All, a fact I believe I sensed long before I knew it. My eyes, anyway, have always slipped the drenched red to hover over the chickens there: they are over there, aren’t they, white and alive and what else? I tend to picture them a moment past, threading the farmyard with its wild lace, long sparse green blades, all drooping fringe, flinging droplets. I picture them scratching and pecking the damp soil between, a standing grid of white feathers, yellow beaks, red combs, rustling, playing—freezing up when the poet turns his head.
I’m reminded of “Giant chicken,” a grainy snippet of Internet home-video revealing the stunning reality of the Brahma, a breed of chicken so large that, the first time I watched one emerge from its coop, descending the steps out front to stretch its long legs in loping strides around the yard, I immediately popped over to Google to investigate. But it wasn’t a hoax; the Brahma is real, a fluffier flesh-and-blood Foghorn Leghorn. And though perfectly edible, farmers tend to tout them more for their eggs than their flesh, which to an American tongue like mine, couched in the gloss of supermarket stuff, reads as tough and chewy.
I’m reminded of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, or rather of his Life of Simeon Stylites (the saint who initiated the practice of pursuing one’s mortifications, exposed to the elements, from the top of an imposing pillar), in which we read of a pilgrim desperate to make do with his own stiff bit of bird:
Among those who believed in the saving name of Christ the Master was a distinguished Ishmaelite who had made a vow and promise to God with Simeon as witness: he promised to abstain till death from all animal food. Sometime, I do not know how, he broke his promise: killing a bird, he dared to eat it. But since God wanted to lead him to repentance through a trial and promise, the bird’s flesh was changed into stone so that then he could not eat it even if he wanted to.
My guess is the chickens in Williams’ poem—which might as well be made of stone—are Leghorns. There’s the undeniable influence, after all, of all things old and Italian in a place like Rutherford, New Jersey, where for more than half a century Williams lived and looked and wrote. Leghorns themselves came from Livorno, south of Pisa, the kind of place where, in the seventeenth century, an Icelandic minister on the run from Turkish pirates could stop and watch an upright fox, dressed in dyed silks, bring up the rear of a procession of naked prisoners. It wasn’t until 1828 that the chickens crossed the swan-road to America, where something on the order of an Ellis Island botch job prompted the breed’s adoption of a new name upon arrival.
Livorno was also, six years earlier, the land from which Percy Bysshe Shelley launched his yacht, got caught in a storm, and drowned. But first, in 1820, Livorno was the land of rolling hills and stiff green cypresses through which he strolled of an evening and where, faintly then fully, he heard the swelling notes of a skylark’s song.
“To a Skylark,” the poem the aural encounter inspired, is, in contradistinction to “The Red Wheelbarrow,” as vigorously poetic a poem as one could hope to meet. It is fully soaring where the other is grounded, kinetic where the other is static. Even the word “rain” appears, not once as in Williams’ poem, but three times. Both are wet and drippy poems with birds inside them, yes: one in song and some in silence. And while one prizes sound—“Like a high-born maiden / In a palace-tower, / Soothing her love-laden / Soul in secret hour / With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:”—the other prizes sight. Nearing the poem’s final lines, speaking of the joy the bird brings, Shelley rhetorizes; he, in fact, enjambs:
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Thank goodness for our feelings, too; thank heavens for our hurts. It’s the welter of our passions, the poet pronounces, and the beating of our hearts, the poet approves; it’s the boredom, pain, and sorrow that we have to thank for our delight, our pleasure, sometimes even our ecstasy. And yet, a red wheelbarrow is a thing, born inert—it certainly cannot cry—so the poet in America, a hundred years in wait, got down on one knee and wetted the metal with rainwater.