Who is Graham Foust? All I really know about the man is that he is, or was, a grad student at SUNY Buffalo who once made some curious comments about my reading of Jack Spicer. More recently he seems to have been teaching at Drake, which would put him in Des Moines. Buffalo ↔ Des Moines is a fair distance, both physically & culturally.

 

The other afternoon, after going on a bike ride with the kids, I sat down into this little space I’ve made with a bench and a table between a poplar & a giant wild cherry tree in the back yard & read through a little book that was sent to me in a “CARE package” awhile back. The book is entitled 6, but I didn’t realize it until I finished the volume, finding that it had just six poems and thus that the beautiful single blue looping finger-paint stroke on the cover was not, as I’d originally imagined, simply a gorgeous abstraction, but the title.

 

The poems are beautiful, complex, simple & sad – acts of condensare as tight as any I’ve read in ages. Here is just one of these poems:

 

Let me lay

quiet

awhile

 

lost

at least

in thought.

 

Let me

unsentence me

to things.

 

Give me the time

to give me

away

 

if only like a place

I wanted saved.

 

At first, for the first two stanzas, these works remind me some of the Zen-inflected post-Objectivism of David Gitin. But then “unsentence me” in the third stanza changes everything. The logic from this point forward spirals outward in ways not predictable by what we’ve (or at least I’ve) imagined about such things. At core, the poem is about the relationship between people & the world & the intermediating role played by language, as much an obstacle as a connector. So it’s not surprising that Foust entitles this piece, ”To grammatology.”

 

What is surprising, though, is that such a work comes after a poem entitled “Heroin.” Another piece in the group is entitled “Night train,” the lower case
t intended at least partly to separate the image out from the street wino’s favorite Gallo vintage, lest we think we’ve arrived at a pomo-trained John Wieners. What in fact we seem to have – based on reading just these poems – is somebody acutely tuned to the inner contradictions of language. The agon of Foust’s final poem, “The promise of your waking here,” confirms the diagnosis:

 

Terrible bliss, this

incongruous sadness –

 

this dream of leaving you,

with you, you.

 

And I in my failure

to tear open often wonder:

 

what if to stutter were

to mend?

 

It seems fitting that Foust has written on both Spicer & Wallace Stevens for the e-journal Jacket. He is, it would seem, a profoundly philosophical poet.

 

Reading the book took me back to what he’d written about my own reading of Spicer several years ago, especially one passage that had always confused me:

 

While I find Silliman's close-reading of Spicer's poem quite valuable in terms of how one might read "This ocean," I'd also argue that he could have looked more closely at Poetry, as two pages away from Berryman's "greens of the Ganges" lies what may very well be the source (or one of the sources) for what is arguably Spicer's most famous poem.

 

At the time, I recall turning to my copy of Poetry’s 50^th anniversary double issue – I still own a copy I bought used well over 30 years ago – & refound the Berryman Dream Song in question on page 7. I flipped back two pages to find another of Berryman’s pieces, “Spellbound held subtle Henry…”  -- the 71^st Dream Song. I couldn’t then, & can’t now, imagine that as a source for any Spicer text, let alone “what is arguably Spicer’s most famous poem.” So I flipped forward two pages, to page 5, where I came across Ben Belitt’s “The Hornet’s House,” of which the following is the first of seven quatrains:

 

Upside-down on their mill-stone, the hornets had already begun

That labor for slaves, oblique

Under balancing weights, where their universe hung by a wick,

Till the will of their species was done.

 

Is this really the inspiration for Spicer’s work from Language that starts:

 

I hear a banging on the door of the night

Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz

If you open the door does it let in light?

Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz.

 

And, even if it were, could that truly be called “arguably Spicer’s most famous poem?” I’d happily agree to it somewhere in the top 20 or 30, but “most?” Not.*

 

Foust’s comments still puzzled me. This time, however, I continued flipping through my copy of that issue of Poetry, and found on page 10 the following poem by Frederick Bock:

 

The Cows

 

Describing a sunset is as hard as riding a cow.

–        Iowa saying.

 

Who are we in the valley of their language?

The landscape listens to their

Shapes like sounds

 

That perfectly express the heliocentric

Slant of the rays they tread

Homeward to barn.

 

And so – grown bright enough to still our speech

And let them embody a thought

We cannot say –

 

We perch on the fence and study that free tongue

Of color wonderfully winding

The ragged hill.

 

It used to be when cows came home transfigured

One of always jumped some

Flank of splendor

 

In hope of a big ride over a thousand acres –

Only to get thrown hard

On humble ground.

 

But now their quiet moves us. Our golden faces

Crisped by aubergine shadows from

Our golden hands

 

Turn after them an abstruse longing to learn –

From the slowly pageanted idiom

Their shapes take on

 

With jeweled clarity from the hypnogogic

THAT ART THOU still hanging bright

In the West –

 

Just who we are in the valley of any language

If only the gates of our silence

Let in sky.

 

Foust is absolutely correct! Though his pagination abilities are to be questioned. One can only imagine what Spicer must have thought when confronting “aubergine shadows,” “jeweled clarity” and the breathless “THAT ART THOU” all in caps.

 

Born in 1916, Bock got his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1937 & later returned to study at the workshop in the early 1950s before becoming an assistant to  Henry Rago at Poetry magazine up until 1961. He published one book – The Fountains of Regardlessness from Macmillan in ’61 – and passed away in 1981. If it were not for the naming of one of Poetry’s annual prizes in his honor – Dana Gioia, Billy Collins, the late Jane Kenyon & most recently David Bottoms have all won it – it is unlikely Bock would be remembered today at all.

 

Newton, Iowa, where Bock was born & later died, is maybe 30 miles east of Des Moines out highway 80. I wonder if Foust realizes that Bock’s aubergine shadows are now his own?

 

 

 

 

* Actually, Belitt has been an important inspiration for contemporary American poetry, but primarily in his role as a translator from Spanish, having so enraged & appalled several poets of the 1950s & ‘60s that they began to translate from the Spanish themselves.