I’ve been vaguely aware of Joel Bettridge as a Ronald Johnson scholar, a Buffalo grad now working at Cal State San Bernadino, out where all the smog concentrates east of Los Angeles. Yet when I picked up Shores, his Phylum Press chapbook, I stopped thinking of him as a scholar period. Here are the first three stanzas:

 

Up stains hem of sky

Almost a sunrise

Whole lot of water

Heavy with churning

Hope the rain stops soon

 

 

 

Hope the rain stops soon

Just near the sunrise

At this point the birth

Canal curves toward sky

Light seen as a fall

 

 

 

Light seen as a fall

A thread of sunrise

Fetal head from earth

From folds of the plow

Never did find here

 

This, it struck me, is a new formalism that one can get genuinely excited about. Some of the elements are immediately obvious: five line stanza, five syllable line, the last line of one stanza becoming the first of the next. You can guess already what the final line of the poem will be (& you will be right). The form is related perhaps to other modes of linked five-line verse, including tanka, tetractys, cinquain or rondeau, but it’s even more closely tied to strategies Louis Zukofsky developed in “A.”

 

If this were all that was going on here, the poem – it’s 15 stanzas long, so not the thickest of chapbooks – would be a delight & that would be that. But there’s more – & this is what really interests me most in Bettridge’s approach to Shores – because the form here is not static, not an argument for balance or closure in the way that so much of what gets called new formalism is.

 

Note the presence of the word sunrise, repeated each time as the final word in the second line. Note also the rhyme of birth & earth in the final term of the third line in the last two stanzas quoted above, in each instance part of an image not of sea & sand, but of labor & delivery. It’s worth reading Shores just to watch the career to these two features in the evolution of the poem.

 

Sunrise appears again as the final word of the second line in the next two stanzas. In the first case, the line reads “Breath before sunrise,” that first word scrambling the phonemes of birth, the third line now freed of the rhyme but evolving the implicit theme “Its womb in the dust.” In the next stanza, sunrise has an almost Poundian lilt – “Went down like sunrise” – while the third line unites the concepts behind the original birth / earth dyad: “A seed swallowed whole.” In the fourth line – “Come make spring     Queen Death” – we find the antithesis, but one that just happens to rhyme with breath.

 

Sunrise continues onward, becoming the last word of the last line in the sixth stanza & thus also the final word of the first line of the seventh, a sequence it repeats again in the eight & ninth stanzas, at which point the word disappears from the poem altogether. This for me is a key moment in the work, because it’s the point at which the text demonstrates that its commitment is to the logic of the poem, not to an idea of perfect symmetry. In fact, sun rise does occur later in the text, not however as one word, but as two, separated by a line break, in the very last stanza. Further, rise & rising occur three other times in the text, so that it is only in stanzas 12 & 13 – a passage that begins “Off to hell again” – in which some variant does not occur

 

The tale of the poem, as I read it, shares elements both of Aphrodite & Eurydice & could be read as an argument for the underlying unity of these two myths. I’m not especially concerned with that aspect of the poem – it’s hardly ever what drives me when & as I read – whereas Bettridge’s demonstration of method completely captures my attention. I think he had me hooked as early as the first line, “Up stains hem of sky,” one of the single most memorable lines I’ve read in a long time. I’m aware that there are some poets & critics – Jonathan Mayhew & Hank Lazer, to name two whose judgment I generally trust – who cringe at the level of compression that would cause a poet to deliberately follow Ginsberg’s maxim of stripping out articles, thus making “Up stains hem of sky” possible. From my perspective any additional syllable here would only pad the poem in the name of some fake verisimilitude – adding what isn’t necessary in a way that could only detract. Poetry is not, & need not be, speech, although that is a critical source always. Bettridge demonstrates its value here also, immediately after “Queen Death” in the fifth stanza, when the last line of that stanza (& the first line of the sixth) reads “Ain’t much of a gig.” Thus this little chapbook, just 375 syllables end to end, a mere five pages, manages to register what Zukofsky termed both upper & lower limit, music and speech. Joel Bettridge is somebody who really gets the force part of tour de force.