Half with editing, half with a strange humor, The Poker 2 has arrived at the door. The busy retro cover of the first issue has been replicated, suggesting that it will be a theme, billboarding not merely the contents, but also the editors – Dan Bouchard & a roster of seven “contributing” souls – & even the P.O. box in Cambridge. As with the first issue, it’s a breath-taking array of literary riches:

 

• Rachel Blau DuPlessis Draft 57: Workplace: Nekuia
• new work by Kit Robinson, Ange Mlinko, K. Silem Mohammad, David Perry, Joseph Torra & others
• a substantial & timely collection of poems from nine contemporary Iraqi poets, several of whom write about the first Iraq war ten years ago
• an essay by Jennifer Moxley
• reviews by Bill Corbett, Noah Eli Gordon & Bouchard himself

To top it all off, the back cover reprints Denise Levertov’s “In California During the Gulf War,” which all too accurately concludes:

 

   And when it was claimed

the war had ended, it had not ended.

 

With all these riches, the work I turn to first belongs to a someone whom I don’t believe I’ve ever met, Merrill Gilfillan. I knew of Gilfillan originally as a poet who had made what to this day is hands-down the finest translation that I’ve ever read of the very first prose poems, Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit – though it’s never been published to my knowledge in book form & my hand-me-down 25-year-old photocopy is getting quite ratty. Gilfillan’s translations made it possible to understand Baudelaire’s enthusiastic proclamation of Bertrand as the progenitor of a new form. So I would pay attention to Gilfillan’s work in little magazines, mostly, (which didn’t occur all that often since, outside of one eight year stint in New York, Gilfillan has mostly lived in places like Montana, Nebraska & Colorado) until I happened to pick up & read Burnt House to Paw Paw, the finest meditative prose on nature by anyone not named Thoreau I’ve ever come across. From that point forward, I’ve been hooked. I will read anything by the man I can get my hands on & I have yet to be disappointed.

 

“Bull Run in October” is a 12-page meditative poem in three parts loosely centered around the Civil War site that sits in the Northern Virginia suburbs just south of DC. Like so many battles of that conflict, this one had two names, the northern one for the geographic features of the site, Bull Run, the southern one for the nearest town, Manassas.* Because Manassas Junction was a critical railway crossroads on the path to Richmond, it was the occasion for two major battles, the first on 21 July 1861, when the North discovered to its surprise that the war was going to be long, bloody & costly – and that the 90-day conscription originally issued for troops was going to prove inadequate – the second in August of the following year, when the Union troops found themselves having to attempt to replicate the defensive stand made during the first battle by Jackson’s “Stonewall” in order to buy time so that they could escape after dark. Because of the two battles – the first represented a major turning point in the war, the second was far bloodier, with over 25,000 dead & wounded – this simple terrain has become one of the most thoroughly documented landscapes in American history.

 

Gilfillan touches on the war, it may even have brought him to Manassas in the first place, but his focus initially is on the natural environment, specifically a single persimmon tree on Matthews Hill.** 

 

      Lone persimmon,

Matthews Hill:

                     Diospyros

on a low Virginia knoll:

                                   Diospyros

virginiana,

                  fruit bright high

in the crown.

 

When the lecture group leaves

I’ll toss a stick and knock some down

 

(VMI boys, that’s my guess, professor

in a Kazootie ballcap

                                over by the Union guns).

 

      Meanwhile

resting in its spindly lee.

 

       Dios/pyros

food for (smooth) (Virginia) gods.

 

This section, the first of six in the first of the three numbered sequences that make up the poem, makes an interesting set of demands on the reader’s knowledge. It helps to know – though, here at least, I don’t think it’s required – some Civil War history, native plants well enough to recognize their formal names, that VMI is the Virginia Military Institute, something on the order of a military finishing school, plus enough of retro Americana kitsch to recognize that the Kazootie ballcap is a reference not just to Rootie Kazootie, but to the exaggerated beak of his baseball cap.

 

Very little of which ultimately matters, in the sense that it’s nice to know it, but more important – far more important – to read close enough to recognize the instant of utter stillness that is both figured and achieved in that next-to-last stanza. It’s an intriguing formulation – a lee by definition is a protection from the wind, a form of shelter, but spindly suggests quite strongly I think that it’s the tree Gilfillan intends by this phrase. Which means that the term now divided into its roots references the fruit, not the tree.

 

The text is elegant & economic. It’s a perfect example of description build around a single detail. The next four sections of the first part of the poem can be read as a series of moves back & outward – the sequence is almost cinematic in its deployment of information, like a camera pulling back from a speck on a shirt collar to gradually reveal an entire vista.

 

The last section of the first part, however, reverses the direction, in that it starts with what Gilfillan calls “multiples” – thrushes, hickories, oaks – contrasting them precisely with the singularity of the lone persimmon. This sets up a logic that will be reiterated through the next two sequences of the poem. Thus, the last line of the first section – “No single thing.” – evolves to become at the end of the second sequence “No single stranded thing,” and at the end of the third “No single stranded cut-off thing.”

 

On the surface, “Bull Run in October” has the look of a New American poem, and there are passages (“VMI boys, that’s my guess, professor / in a Kazootie ballcap”) that sound more than a little like Paul Blackburn. Yet this use of opposition & reiteration plays out on so many levels – the stand of oaks is atop Chinn Ridge, thus on the far side of the battlefield from the persimmon tree – that I don’t think it can be at all accidental. It is a level of complexity that I don’t recall from Gilfillan’s 1997 Satin Street & a degree of formal architecture virtually unheard of among the New Americans. It’s the sort of structure I associate in my own mind more with the stories of Borges or the metafictions of Steve Katz than with, say, Oulipo or the old patternism that gets called new formalism by wannabe premoderns. Gilfillan, at least in this one poem, appears to be doing something completely new. Given that his choice of a Civil War battlefield for what might be termed a landscape poem presents both something characteristically framed as historic and something else often (too often) characterized as “timeless,” Gilfillan’s ability to arrive with something completely different is a tour de force worth acknowledging.

 

I recall how, reading Baudelaire’s prose poems – which (unlike Bertrand) Baudelaire knew in advance to be both prose & poetry – & realizing that Baudelaire was clearly counting sentences so that more than a few turned out to be 14 sentence poems, I got so excited I could barely stand it. That’s a little how I feel reading “Bull Run in October.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Southern troops were welcome in the cities of the South. The National Parks Service uses the Southern name, presumably on the theory that this was the term adopted by the local community.

 

** My sense, from the one time I took my boys to Manassas a few years ago, is that most casual visitors to the park remain entirely on the taller Henry Hill, so – like the students from the Virginia Military Institute – for Gilfillan to place himself opposite is already to position himself more deeply within the historic framework than would be typical.