I’ve been vaguely aware of Joel Bettridge as a Ronald Johnson
scholar, a
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.
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.