Alan Dugan

 

Consider, if you will, just the linebreaks:

This Morning Here

This is this morning: all
the evils and glories of last night
are gone except for their
effects: the great world wars
I and II, the great marriage
of Edward the VII or VIII
to Wallis Warfield Simpson and
the rockets numbered like the Popes
have incandesced in flight
or broken on the moon: now
the new day with its famous
beauties to be seized at once
has started and the clerks
have swept the sidewalks
to the curb, the glass doors
are open, and the first
customers walk up and down
the supermarket alleys of their eyes
to Muzak. Every item has
been cut out of its nature,
wrapped disguised as something
else, and sold clean by fractions.
Who can multiply and conquer
by the Roman numbers? Lacking
the Arab frenzy of the zero, they
have obsolesced: the butchers
have washed up and left
after having killed and dressed
the bodies of the lambs all night,
and those who never have seen blood awake
can drink it browned
and call the past an unrepeatable mistake
because this circus of their present is all gravy.

Two of the first four lines are enjambed – their last word is part of a phrase that only completes itself on the next line. The effect, because we expect all & their to lead somewhere, is to minimize the gap between the end of one line and the start of the next. This is what I meant the other day when I referred to the concept of soft enjambment as a specific literary device & the idea has been haunting me since then. The poem is by Alan Dugan, one of the masters of soft enjambment, and was originally part of his Yale Younger Poets volume, Poems. Only two of the poem’s 33 lines end on a period, partly because there are so few: just four sentences to divide up 185 words, an average of more than 46 words per sentence. Yet there is nothing inherently difficult about Dugan’s language. The length of both first & last sentence is extended through the use of colons. And note how the middle two are quite short – just 28 words between them. Which means that first & last average just under 80 each (100 exactly for the first, 57 for the second). It’s a poem that seems so casual at first that the degree of control Dugan exercises on the text seems almost a surprise – it is, after all, something of a magic trick done in plain sight.

Now consider “Deep Winter”:

A starling drops
from branch to
branch, it’s cold
but not that cold:
the feel of cold-
ness is movement
on the skin so
walking in it
robs the air of
stillness: walking
on the half-thawed
yard you charge
the air with motion
you are a kind of
breeze a light
wind stirring still-
ness like shaking
out a rug the dust
hangs and swims
and shows a pattern
for a while, unstill.
Squirrels are every-
where, they fight
and follow “chase
the leader.” Where
are their larders?
They seem still
to hunt for food
in winter-waiting
weather. The only
blue is shutters
or a car. The car
sits still behind
a house: that’s Sun-
day for you. The
church bells swing
sound invisible
so palpable, it’s
strange. Shops
are shut. That’s
Sunday for you.
Purchases can wait
for Monday. Each
day so different
yet still alike
in waiting weather.

This poem, one of the “Elsewhere” sequence in Jimmy Schuyler’s Hymn to Life, makes use of the same toolkit, but to very different effect. It’s 150 words is divided into 46 lines, the shorter line giving the poem an austere feel that echoes the leafless, sunless, colorless condition of winter in the Northeast. Once again colons are used to stretch out a sentence, but in this poem only the first, which at 73 words is nearly half of the text – the next ten sentences will average just 7.7 words each. Here four of the lines end on terminal punctuation: three periods & a question mark. More pronounced are the four lines so enjambed that they break up individual words. Note also that Schuyler here uses a less colorless, less specific vocabulary than does Dugan – Schuyler’s small nouns almost mimic the palette of Larry Eigner. Yet what is profoundly different about Schuyler’s poem, both in contrast to Eigner’s work in general or the Dugan poem above, is his use of repetition, not just that’s Sunday for you, but the subtler echo of winter-waiting / weather in lines 29 & 30, and waiting weather at the very end. Who’d’a thunk it woulda been the New American to resolve the poem through rhyme?

Yet the poems are going in very different places. Schuyler is interested in identifying a certain dailiness, an unhurried rhythm that can exist in life away from the big city. Dugan is painted a pointed political allegory, equating meat consumption with the Holocaust. Such similar devices to such dissimilar ends.

Try to imagine, if you can, Robert Creeley reading each poem aloud. Or perhaps Robert Duncan during that period circa 1970 when he was counting three beats (sometimes whispered) at the end of every line. If you hear that pause at the end of every line, actually, it undermines Schuyler’s poem fairly seriously, because these short lines sound suddenly anxious & asthmatic. Yet Schuyler clearly doesn’t want you to hear that pause – there are lines that read, in their entirety, on the skin so that become almost unless they recede almost to the point of invisibility. That recessiveness is absolutely necessary tho, in order to foreground the deliberately askew syntax of The / church bells swing / sound invisible / so palpable, it’s / strange. Schuyler reiterates the point with the simplicity & directness of the next sentence: Shops / are shut.

The idea of writing a line that becomes invisible as such is a concept that could only have occurred in a world in which the line was always already visible everywhere. Schuyler & Dugan approach it from different angles, but operating on very similar assumptions. For each, it gave their work, within their different literary contexts, a distinctness, an identifiable formal signature that they would return to again & again.