~EDWARD BYRNE~
SHEROD SANTOS:
THE FUNDAMENTAL
DESIRE
TO SING: TWO DECADES
OF POETRY BY SHEROD SANTOS
Santos exhibits in
this work how
his poetry skillfully blends
elements of landscape
with human
emotion, employing
evocative images that are
surrounded
by profound meditative
language, while engaging
nature
in the manner of the Romantic
tradition to attain a
reflection
of the self, especially through use
of memory to reconcile
the past
and the present.
Perhaps it’s
possible
that the way poetry can "make something happen" is quite different from
the way we’ve come to expect. And perhaps insufficient notice has
been taken of this simple but unassailable truth: that however awkward
and maladept, however grand and uplifting, it isn’t just a matter of
what
we sing, or how well we sing, it’s the quite remarkable fact that, in a
century like ours, we’ve somehow managed to save from extinction that
deep-down,
fundamental desire to sing.
—Sherod Santos, "In a Glass, Darkly"
In
"Writing the
Poet, Unwriting the Poem," subtitled "Notes Toward an Ars Poetica"
and one of the essays included in his recent collection of prose
writings
on poetry and poetics, A Poetry of Two Minds, Sherod Santos
declares
"the experience of poetry is the experience of recapitulation, a kind
of
trans-temporal immersion, a baptism in the liquid element of time: the
past in the process of becoming the present, the present in the process
of becoming the future." Santos reveals it is this aspect of
poetry
that initially drew him to the art form as a reader and as a poet.
His
enthusiasm
resulted from an infatuation with a poem’s ability to overcome the
stringent
restrictions time introduces into our lives, the harsh limitations
mortality
appears to impose upon
us. Consequently, Santos also seems to suggest that one of a
poem’s
most important elements, and certainly a source of his passion for
poetry,
may be the way its images evoked by memory and imagination readily
transcend
time or geography, perhaps allowing the people or places of the poet’s
past, present, or future to coexist continuously within the sequence of
scenes or thoughts depicted by those images in lines of words written
down
a printed page. As Santos states it, "what I loved then, what I
love
now, is that heart-stopping sense of bilocation, that body rush
of simultaneity (both spatial and temporal) which a poem’s slow fall of
images fixes in a reader’s mind."
The
poet’s
attempt to present in his or her art images of a moment stilled
forever,
moving forward through time while preserved from the shifting
influences
of time, may not be that much different from the works produced by
painters,
photographers, or even film directors; however, when its images are
combined
with an intuitive vision and meditative voice, the finest poem proposes
an unusual relationship between public revelation and personal
reservation,
or outward observation and inner contemplation, as each inspired image
triggers introspection as well as it invites interpretation.
Acknowledging
a debt to T.S. Eliot, Santos concludes, "I’ve come to feel that like
Eliot’s
rose garden in ‘Little Gidding,’ poetry flourishes at ‘the intersection
of the timeless moment,’ a moment Eliot describes, not as an absence,
but
as a confluence of all the rivers of time." Not surprisingly, one
often finds traces of this Eliot attitude towards poetry in the finest
poems Santos has produced in his first five volumes of poetry.
However,
more surprisingly, another writer’s work frequently brought to mind by
the most interesting poems in Santos’s handful of poetry collections is
novelist Marcel Proust. In "Writing the Poet, Unwriting the
Poem,"
Santos offers recognition of Proust’s influence, particularly the
desire
to preserve instances in time by describing poignant moments of the
present
or the past primarily through the use of memory and imagination.
Santos reports: "In many ways these Proustian relations correspond to a
similar set of relations we’ve established between reality, memory, and
dream — or, if you will, between art, the past, and the
imagination."
Furthermore, Santos agrees with Vladimir Nabokov’s evaluation of
Proust’s
writings (which could additionally serve as an apt comment upon some of
the strongest poems in Santos’s books): "The key to reestablishing the
past turns out to be the key to art."
Even as
early as the opening poem in his first book, Accidental Weather,
selected by Charles Wright as a winner in the National Poetry Series in
1982, Santos displays an urge to connect the present and the past
through
details in images, especially of nature, or emotional incidents one
experiences
that at the same time evoke memories of significant events from the
personal
history of the poet or a persona in the poem through whom the poet
speaks.
Although published more than twenty years ago, "On the First
Anniversary
of Your Departure" serves not only as an appropriate beginning to Accidental
Weather, it also provides an illustrative indication of some
distinctive
characteristics one will find in many of the poems to follow in the
next
two decades.
After an
initial stanza filled with vivid, yet ominous descriptions of nature’s
changes that accompany the end of a season, the speaker’s memory is
activated:
At work, yesterday evening, I remembered,
and for the first time
it occurred to me, the weather’s changing,
as it did then, so unexpectedly,
like a curtain yanked from a window,
and from now on,
from the soft hills, the cold
will be rising like a fine powder
into the broken branches, the thin air, and the clouds,
dark-edged and threatening along the horizon . . ..
Already,
the transformation of the natural landscape and the evident shift to
winter
foreshadow the speaker’s corresponding emotional transition as he
recalls
an occurrence nearly a year before, a scene narrated after the bridge
of
the poem’s ellipsis leads from the present to the past:
And then it was dark.
The lamp was on, the window black,
and my face was filling up the glass,
as strange to me as yours
had seemed that morning as you lay
on the bed, not sleeping, and said my name . . ..
The indented
line between settings ("And then it was dark.") allows a smooth switch
from present to past, an efficient transition from scene to scene, and
almost seems like a cut in a film
that dissolves to black, perhaps representing a slide into the
subconscious
and to a memory awakened by a lamp’s illumination that creates a moment
of literal self-reflection on the dark window. In fact,
persistent
images of windows recur frequently throughout the five collections of
poetry
by Santos, probably appearing more than any other detail, usually
representing
the boundary between competing states of being — the present and the
past,
humans and nature, interior and exterior, isolation and socialization,
introspection and observation, security and adventure, love and loss,
rich
and poor, life and death, etc. With this image of
self-reflection,
the speaker recognizes not only the face of the one lost, but also
suddenly
sees that he, too, has become a different individual as even now his
own
face "was filling up the glass, / as strange to me as yours."
By
the
time the poem comes to a close, the speaker returns to the present
accompanied
by the ever-present memory. The movement here resembles an
opinion
proffered by Santos in "Eating the Angel, Conceiving the Sun," from A
Poetry of Two Minds, where he remarks "that the poem’s charge is to
awaken memory to motion again, to recollect the remembranced body into
the present tense." Nevertheless, the return is accompanied by a
realization of how far apart the two scenes and the two people now
are.
In addition, a wonderfully subtle ambiguity in the last pair of stanzas
permits another interpretation:
and so
last night, staring at the window,
I thought of you then, once,
and took a long time, but the face was still
too far away,
as if flawed by a slow-falling snow.
With a clever
line break, as well as the multiple meanings of "still," the poem
presents
a suggestion that the face stilled in the window may also be that of
the
speaker looking back at the person he once was, but is no longer.
Indeed, as is often the case in those poems Santos writes about absence
or loss, including the many powerfully elegiac verses throughout his
poetic
history, he does so in a fashion that reveals as much about the speaker
as it does about the supposed subject of the poem. Larry Levis
once
remarked about the practice of writing elegiac verse: "Many times
elegies
are self-reflexive, and they often point not to the figure gone but to
the person writing them, and they are meant to reveal that mind, that
nature."
In his poetry, Sherod Santos repeatedly demonstrates just how
perceptive
an observation Levis proposed as his elegiac poems also serve perfectly
as opportunities for contemplation, meditation, and
self-examination.
While "On
the First Anniversary of Your Departure" is a very early poem in his
career,
Santos exhibits in this work how his poetry skillfully blends elements
of landscape with human emotion, employing evocative images that are
surrounded
by profound meditative language, while engaging nature in the manner of
the Romantic tradition to attain a reflection of the self, especially
through
use of memory to reconcile the past and the present.
Santos
explores similar interests in "A Visit Home: for my brother," another
poem
from part one of Accidental Weather. Once again an image
of
nature or landscape in the present evokes childhood memories, and the
two
time periods combine to create a meditative poem:
Today,
the river is low, and there’s just enough wind
you can hear the box-elder spilling
its leaves onto the tool-shed
like rain—how many days began
just this way, with you and me rising in a pale
blue light, dressing, then crossing the field
with our gear, and down the bank to the rock ledge,
only talking in whispers, when we did.
With a nod
toward those Romantic poets he knows so well, Santos places nature’s
permanence,
its seeming immortality, against the constant shift of time. He seeks
to
freeze a moment from the past so that it might remain forever untainted
by any kind of erosion, such as the unwanted changes or losses brought
about by time’s passing:
I walked there again last evening,
and the same river murmur still
poured through the trees, through the canebrake
and weeds, until it seemed, for a moment,
I had never been away . . ..
The speaker
in this poem tries to revive, perhaps even revise, a time when he and
his
brother were yet innocent and the pains or many dangers of the world
were
still "in some / deep place in the dark where we could not see / what
we
saw." As the poem ends, the reader is left with a picture of the
boys still sitting under a tree, their fishing lines cast "beyond the
edge
of a riffle, / beyond the edge / of that world, where the closed world
lay." The physical visit home in the poem has been as much, or
more,
a return to the location as it continues to exist in the speaker’s
mind,
filled with those childhood memories that keep alive the boys as they
were
(or at least as the poet chooses to remember them), as well as the
spirit
of a particular place, in a time of innocence and hope for a luminous
future
as well as the multitude of experiences that lay ahead.
One
also
discovers the traditional Romantic contrast between nature and society,
rural and urban life, in the early poems of Accidental Weather.
In "Violence" the speaker is once more situated by a window during
early
autumn, paused in a moment of reflection, observing the nature outside
with its signs of transition in weather and landscape at the end of
summer
and beginning of a new season:
Standing
at the window, I can barely see
beyond that vast stretch
of pineforest, the glow from the lights
of the city, which is, even now,
something more than I expected.
The city
is now distant and the landscape dominates the writer’s life with its
nightly
distractions, each "like a moment / of unexpected feeling." As
the
poem’s title suggests, and the poet’s word choices reinforce (ie. "the
house still / shudders," "moonlight / just broke
through
the clouds / and fell," "the summer’s heat has blistered,"
"beetles closing in circles on / the weed-choked pond"), the
mood
of the poem is one haunted by physical or emotional violence, by the
accompanying
feelings of pain and sorrow, and the speaker experiencing loss is left
alone to confront his difficult thoughts of the past. He suggests
nature tends to initiate such a meditative, perhaps often melancholy,
mood
in humans: "The landscape always seems to prefer us / this way: we
should
not be alone."
Santos
could easily be describing the process followed in many of his poems
when
he writes, "I am living again / in that memory of myself, in all those
/ moments." Additionally, as in much of Santos’s poetry,
those
memories of important instances in his past are tied to detailed and
patterned
images of nature, the exact exterior elements that reveal the interior
emotions — often pensive or grieving — of the speaker, "each one /
rising
up, mute and black, and shaded / over like dead leaves on dead."
If
the
poems in the first section of Accidental Weather present a
preview
offering some of the concerns that would be repeated in later volumes,
the titles gathered in the last section of the three that make up this
book give a greater glimpse into the kind of slightly heightened or
meditative
language and more sophisticated introspective style of writing one
might
find in further works. For readers introduced to Santos’s poetry
by this initial book, the poems in part three of Accidental Weather
provide evidence of Santos’s budding poetic talent about to blossom,
eventually
to bloom fully in his future collections.
Of
the
poems that close out Accidental Weather, six had previously
been
selected by Santos to appear as a limited chapbook, perhaps indicating
his awareness of their distinctiveness and their strength. Like
other
poems in this section, the title poem of that chapbook, "Begin,
Distance,"
opens with lines reminiscent of those works encountered earlier in the
book:
The morning stars are a torment,
if you thought long enough, and yet
how much more unsettling is the reason
you have gone to the window in the first place.
Look what they do to the landscape.
As readers
have seen before, the poem starts with the new beginning of morning
imagery
and the speaker once again at a window to observe the landscape.
However, Santos’s poetry has evolved into one that contains more
contemplation
or intellectual rhetoric as suggested by the inclusion of words like
"torment,"
"thought," and "reason," as well as lines like the following:
Up to a point you can only imagine them,
because the eye plays past
its own hysteria, which is the same thing
as saying to yourself: but think of the risk.
Santos has
already developed a way of writing — whether singing songs of
celebration
or even more often offering lyrical lines of lamentation — that gives
greater
emphasis to a meditative discourse and a nearly epistolary voice, one
that
will gradually brand Santos’s signature style so familiar in his later
books.
Speaking
of developments in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, work for which Santos
holds
high regard and an obvious fondness ("If any one person was going to
serve
as a model for younger poets, I think she’d make a pretty good choice .
. .." ["In a Glass, Darkly"]), his comments could be used to describe
the
poetry he has been producing:
The method, it
seemed, was
in the waiting, in allowing the eye to linger, in the feeling
that
the imagination — like the grandparents’ voices in "The Moose" — can take
its time "uninterruptedly / talking, in Eternity." It was a
new
cognitive music, a new way of hearing the mind, and it was a music
inseparable
from the poem’s ostensible subject. The poet’s intuitive
responses
to the world became, not the uniquely entitled subject of the poet, but
another set of things within that world.
["Connoisseurs of Loneliness"]
Like Elizabeth
Bishop, Santos believes in creating a work that focuses its attention
on
all the significant items the poet can see as a way of seeking out
clues
to those other unseen details or larger aspects of the present and past
that mark our lives. It is as if one is gazing at the heavens
during
a partly overcast night sky, using those planets or stars that can be
viewed
to chart the positions of others still concealed by clouds. In
"Burning
the Fields," a poem about autumn brush fires rising in the distance,
the
speaker’s observations lead to the thought that "the sky was darkening
/ for a reason now, a reason much more / than the grass on fire, but
like
/ something in the heart . . .." Once more, Santos combines the
images
of landscape and changing seasons with self-reflection, memory, and
emotional
moments, but now in eloquent and elongated sentences that allow the
reader
to linger a bit longer, savoring every ingredient each line serves in a
more meditative manner:
But now
the wind has carried the fields
this way, in this sense we speak of,
seeing ourselves at the center
of things, even our illusions: like
looking out a window and finding there
the same face that years ago,
climbing a fence at dawn, awakened
the dogs barking across that flood
of burn in the sky . . . It’s the way
we believe the world contains
some larger image of ourselves,
as though the burning meant
to explain, somehow, the way it feels
to feel this way, to distinguish
one moment from another until
all that remains is a little word,
like "love" or "pain," settling
on the air around us.
Yet, the
speaker in the poem concedes there is much left unseen, much hidden
remaining
to be considered, even if obtained only through the meditative act of
further
contemplation continued long after the environment of the present
physical
image, with its unique characterizations of landscape and change, is
abandoned,
perhaps because the view, like all events and experiences, will be
retained
in one’s memory. As any Romantic writer might suggest, the
natural
scenery one may witness and an individual’s accumulated experiences are
major contributing influences on the way each of us views the world,
the
way we all see ourselves. Santos presents the reader with details
discerned by an attentive eye and an insightful understanding of what
aspects
he delivers — oftentimes wise enough to merely ask questions rather
than
pretend to know all the answers, aware (as he says in "Winter Landscape
with a Girl in Brown Shoes," another poem from the final section of Accidental
Weather): "The most beautiful moments are beyond our reach."
In
the
poems from the latter pages of Accidental Weather, Santos
appears
to apprehend more completely his chosen role as a poet. Again,
the
evaluation Santos offers about Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry might just as
easily apply to his own work: "Bishop’s poems remind us that attention,
that faculty which Simone Weil called ‘the very substance of prayer,’
is
another name for the imagination." ["Connoisseurs of
Loneliness"]
Santos’s
skill at employing repeated evocation of natural images to stir his
imagination
is as rich as that seen in any recent poetry written in the Romantic
tradition.
At times it might remind readers of the way Wallace Stevens would play
with language to create lyrical lines describing nature’s scenery in an
imaginative manner to unlock the mind’s subconscious state.
Consequently,
through the indirection of natural description and an artful union of
memory
with imagination, Santos proves in poem after poem his conviction that
"poetry is intent on saying those things we’re most determined to hide,
even from ourselves." ["Eating the Angel, Conceiving the
Sun"]
As
one
might expect, the actions in the opening poem, "In the Rainy Season,"
of The
Southern Reaches (1989), Santos’s second collection of poetry, are
established by a childhood memory of the speaker and his brother
observing
weather changes across a natural landscape through their window:
The first signs of cloudbreak
In the mornings over Kolonia Cove
And we’d be up at the windows
Waiting while the mildewed air
Distilled through the wind-screens . . ..
Filled with
the optimism and enthusiasm brought by each trace of sunshine those
mornings
provided, the young boys would step through where "Blue thistle spurs
lay
like / landmines along the footpath." The speaker and his brother
would "steal" toward a promontory to watch fishing boats along the
shoreline.
Together, they would pretend to be courageous soldiers engaged in
battle
with an imaginary enemy — "heroically / Wounded we’d level our
broomsticks
/ On their bulwarks. Sea birds / Strafed the dragnets hung up
drying
/ By the pier . . .." However, since it is the rainy
season,
the day’s play at bravery is interrupted with indications of an
approaching
storm:
We could hear it in the distance,
Like rice grains in a pan,
Or like a fusillade from a cross-
Fire of snipers, something
We could die of, if we’d had
Our way . . ..
Clearly,
the innocent behavior of young boys at play imagining themselves as
heroic
soldiers tested by battle is a widespread occurrence even today, but
especially
so in the pre-Vietnam era of
Santos’s youth when the nation’s images of war were still informed
largely
by the World War II films of John Wayne and other movie stars. In
addition, one cannot dismiss the influences of Santos’s early life as a
boy in military surroundings and among service personnel on bases in
the
United States as well as a number of countries abroad. In an
endnote
on this section of The Southern Reaches, Santos acknowledges to
a certain degree such an influence: "Because that’s how they’re
remembered,
the islands of the first section are no doubt something of a composite
of Oahu (Hawaii), Pohnpei (Micronesia), and Guam (Oceania)." Finally,
as
one might expect, Santos appears particularly influenced by his
position
as the son of a real-life heroic figure, an Air Force pilot whose
expertise
and experiences are the subject of other poems. Indeed, all of
the
works in the initial section of The Southern Reaches supply the
reader with glimpses into remembered incidents — perhaps real or
perhaps
to some extent intentionally or unintentionally fictionalized by the
distortions
time’s passing presents, by the selectivity of memory, or by poetic
necessity
— that might have helped shape Sherod Santos during the formative
stages
of his life.
Although
at times possibly troubled by an inability to remember everything
completely,
Santos ultimately accepts the imperfection of the poet’s memory, even
while
struggling to recollect the details of each event in his past.
He’d
started the poem "Childhood" in Accidental Weather with just
such
a moment of difficulty:
How it is I returned
to this one memory all
morning and through mid-
afternoon could not work,
confused still by what
had, or would not, come
back to me.
Oddly though,
and with an immense amount of insight, Santos knows poems that attempt
to recall the past are often more perceptive in presenting the poet, or
poem’s persona speaker, through what they omit or only partially
reveal.
In "Eating the Angel, Conceiving the Sun," Santos echoes the sentiments
of Ranier Maria Rilke ("the ‘inexpressible’"), Martin Heidegger ("the
‘unthinkable’"),
and Wallace Stevens ("the ‘inconceivable’"), when he comments:
. . . who hasn’t
been struck,
while struggling to recall some fragment of the past, by the sudden
impression
of sifting through ash; and then, by the slow dawning realization that
who you are is composed of what, perhaps only what, you can never
reclaim
from the rubble?"
"In
the Rainy
Season" closes with lines that characterize the speaker’s formative
early
years as a period when he was ". . . braced and campaigning / From the
blasted shore of that / Weak, white empire of childhood." This final
statement
displays a perception which for Santos foreshadows the world he would
inhabit
as an adult, perhaps that later life, containing pain and growing
thoughts
of mortality, which was slowly approaching in the distance like the
approaching
storm the boys of the poem could hear. Commenting in his
interview
with Andrew Mulvania, Santos pronounces how "the imaginary childhood
enactments
of power" eventually lead to "a widening consciousness of the real
formations,
and terrors, and fascinations of power. As a child growing up in
a military environment often on bases in foreign lands, one soon comes
to realize the larger implications of the vast arsenal that composes
your
everyday environment. Not surprisingly, as that realization
increases,
so too does its looming shadow-life, fear." As in other poems,
Santos
offers a representation of the various ways we are all changed by Time,
and he suggests our anticipation of such alterations to our lives often
creates anxiety and fear. In this case, readers witness the
transformation
of a child’s naïve, playful notions of imaginary bravery and
feelings
of immortality to a cautious adult’s fearful awareness of real-life
dangers
and their sometimes deadly consequences.
Another
poem, "The Air Base at Châteauroux, France," from the same
section
(titled "An Illustrated Childhood") of The Southern Reaches,
also
narrates a childhood memory of boys "scrab- / bling for a ball / as if
/ for love" on a playing field not far from where their "fathers’ /
fighters
strafed the mock- / ups in the practice fields," the sounds of the
jets’
runs at targets "near far enough from town / it didn’t thunder all
day."
Some readers may view the fathers like modern gods, so powerful and
threatening
that they produce thunder, while the local residents remain inside
"blackened
/ cottages strong stares locked / up tight behind their shot /
bolts."
In any case, the poem finally turns back to the boys as they head for
home,
seeing themselves already "like young / uneasy gods, a little
drunk
/ on our shame, our power."
The
second
section of The Southern Reaches, titled "The Sea Change," is
especially
interesting for two reasons. First, the section includes a
cluster
of engaging poems thematically related by their consideration of the
relationships
between men and women, particularly married couples. Second, the
series of seven poems in this part of the book portend the lengthy
sequence
of works that will fill his next collection, The City of Women.
The
opening
poem of this section, "Driving Out of the Keys," appropriately presents
a portrait of a married couple, the speaker and his wife, driving for
hours
under the summer heat of an afternoon sun surrounded by scenery that
serves
as an opportunity for meditation and speculation: "The unblinking O of
oblivion had lifted / From that bright blindspot pulsing on the
windshield."
As in other instances, the poet submits a situation that permits an
inventive
integration of landscape, imagination, and memory:
What we imagine outside may not even exist:
A patch of cloud floating on the horizon
Might make and unmake a small island of its own;
And all around the landscape might become
Some world we walked away from years ago,
The things of that world called back again
Out of the rising rubble of air—
For the
poet, the world we see around us as we move through our lives is often
what we make of it and mostly comprised of those things in it we select
to examine closely. Our thoughts of the world are fashioned by
how
we perceive our observations in our imaginations, how we interpret our
present experiences in light of our memory of individual histories, and
how we respond emotionally under the specific influences of others in
our
personal relationships. Looking out of his car’s windshield, the
speaker notices how "everything, for a moment, seems both familiar /
And
strange, and everything takes on / A meaning that involves our coming
here,
and our / Going away."
Ironically,
the poem closes with the couple, their feelings awakened by the
landscape
they witness, "looking for something, though / We don’t know
why."
They search the bright sky and symbolically cross a bridge, perhaps
aware
of a transition in their lives, maybe the transformation suggested by
the
title "The Sea Change," but uncertain of its exact nature. Yet,
the
last line of the poem, the final image the couple encounters, is that
of
a boy "Drifting in a pirogue on the livid stream." The vision of
a boy one might believe is fishing from his boat could have come out of
one of Santos’s many poems of childhood (and the various ambiguities
permitted
by the word choice of livid only enrich the image). But
now
the speaker is moving past that scene, traversing a bridge that will
leave
behind the boy in his boat, the child he once was, approaching an
uncertain
future that looms ahead, and traveling a road hidden by the glare of a
late afternoon sun, that "unblinking O of oblivion." In "Writing
the Poet, Unwriting the Poem," Santos expresses similar concerns about
our passage through life:
We live between
two darknesses—the
prenatal and the post-mortem—and we hurtle inexorably from the one to
the
other at a speed, as Nabokov noted, of some forty-five hundred
heartbeats
an hour. The experience of our daily lives is largely concerned
with
marking that passage in linear ways, by proximity to the fact of our
birth,
on the one hand, and by the anticipation of our death, on the
other.
Throughout
his volumes of poetry, Santos readily acknowledges the historical and
literary
figures who have influenced his work or inspired specific poems. The
Southern Reaches is no exception, as Santos particularly points to
individual artists — fiction writers and painters as well as poets — to
whom he owes a debt of gratitude. In section three his poems pay
tribute to Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Bowen, and Thomas Hardy, and he
includes
a "Homage to the Impressionist Painters," whose depictions of nature
resemble
the images in some of Santos’s poems. As previously mentioned,
foremost
among the fiction writers might be Proust, whose work exhibits much of
the careful attention to detail and emphasis on the senses that readers
recognize in Santos’s poetry.
As
his
poems illustrate, Santos shares with Proust a belief in the primary
importance
of memory to recover past experiences and relationships as a way of
evaluating
the moments in which we live, as a method that keeps alive the people
(including
our younger selves) and places of our past, and as a manner of
understanding
just how we have become who we are. Like Proust, Santos tries to
possess the past rather than permit it to slip away. By
attempting
to take ownership of the past preserved in their memories and in the
poetry,
the speakers in Santos’s poems seem to hope to gain control, at least
to
some extent, of the difficult current situations in which they find
themselves
as well as the unsure future. For both writers, the past is
interwoven
with the present in their text much as the process of memory unfolds in
our minds. Santos also seems to have benefited from the example
of
Proust’s tactile writing style, those deliberate or detailed
descriptions
that awaken the reader’s senses within a textured art supported by an
almost
palpable prose. Each writer values eloquent, yet subtle language
that evokes an effective mood or tone.
This language
is evident in "The Enormous Aquarium (after Proust)," a wonderful poem
that opens section three of The Southern Reaches, aptly titled
"The
Art of Fiction." The poem describes life inside "the lobby / Of
the
Grand Hotel" — the fashionably elegant members of the upper class
engaged
in conversation or playing cards secure and sheltered from the world
outside
their windows, perhaps even self-centered in that isolation as their
own
reflections interfere with the view of those people and scenes beyond
the
windows:
. . . the afternoon hours, immutable
And bland, would pass before the windows
That more and more, as the sun declined,
Came to seem like mirrors in which you look
And find no other face but your own.
However,
when evening arrives and the interior lights of the hotel illuminate
everything
inside, a transformation occurs:
. . . a great hidden stream of electricity
Would flood the dining rooms and halls
Until the hotel became, in its alluvial glow,
Like an enormous aquarium against whose
Glass the fishermen’s and tradesmen’s
Families, clustering invisibly in the outer
Dark, would press their faces to look in.
Suddenly,
the upper-class occupants of the hotel are on display like exotic fish
misplaced and swimming in an aquarium. The windows of the hotel
have
been exposed as transparent barriers separating society’s classes, the
rich and privileged men or women of the hotel now becoming curiosities
to the poor gazing at them. The poem even hints that these
wealthy
patrons of the hotel no longer hold the power they once might have
exerted.
Instead of inhabiting a safe haven, sheltered in their artificial
environment,
they are really deprived of the true experiences of nature that exist
outside
the hotel windows, where the poor turn away "beneath / A disc of moon
as
round and white as an eye, / To walk back home down the darkened
streets
/ Like some ancient and magnificent tribe." In a lovely stretch
of
the poem, Santos writes:
. . . And the question now lingering
In the air was how the glass could sustain
A world so vastly different from the poor,
A world where tea gowns and sable, grosgrain
And crepe de Chine, topaz and silver
And the enameled ring that encircled a wrist
All spoke of a life grown infinitely
Distant and unreal.
The last
section of The Southern Reaches contains a number of
accomplished
poems demonstrating an increased ambition in scope, but one poem —
"Nineteen
Fifty-Five," a pivotal poem that moves steadily and deliberately
through
nine ten-line stanzas — especially stands out. "Nineteen
Fifty-Five"
is another work that begins as a childhood recollection and seeks again
to combine memory of the past with current concerns. Often, such
a blending results in hope for the future. Indeed, in "Easter
Manifestations,"
the title poem of the closing section and the final poem in the volume,
Santos ends this book with the following:
. . . like
Unamuno’s dual illusions,
Hope and Memory—the one
The shadow over what’s to come,
The other over some still
Unimaginable past—which
Will not leave us reconciled.
With terrific
description spoken in a relaxed and almost discursive voice, the
narrator
in "Nineteen Fifty-Five" tells of his time as a boy one summer while
visiting
his grandparents’ home, where he first began to notice fully the world
around him, including various stretches of darkness expanding across
the
landscape outside the kitchen window. Nevertheless, for the
moment
he remained secure and satisfied in the safety of the illuminated
house.
The boy felt "happy, / And he wondered at the way the light / From the
kitchen formed a flaming square // That lay out on the side yard . .
.."
Readers
are invited by the specifics of the narrative to accept the memory as
at
least partially autobiographical, though certainly molded by the poet’s
inventiveness and imagination. In doing so, readers might
recognize
the summer of 1955 as an early awakening of that poetic impulse focused
toward rich and vivid imagery in the young Sherod Santos. As he
states
it, the square of light cast by the kitchen window appeared "as on / A
movie screen" on which the boy could replay the day’s events:
. . . small things he’d felt himself
Feel that day: the smoke from the coal
Train winding through the hills,
The cat’s milk soured and yellowing
In its bowl, his new shoes crackling
Down the gravel drive while the eyes
Of a stranger who’d paused at the gate
Watched him without speaking in the morning.
In his essay,
"A Toy Balloon, The Man-Moth’s Tear, and a Sack of Ripe Tomatoes,"
Santos
pronounces: "Perhaps attention is one instinctual gauge by which we
measure
a poem’s effectiveness: the act of concentration that reveals to us
(groundlings
of ordinary perception) things not available otherwise."
Suddenly,
the young boy, perhaps the seven-year-old Santos, has an awareness of
his
attention to detail and his desire to preserve memories. Yet, at
the same time, the boy also realizes the extent of events playing out
in
the world beyond his grandparents’ kitchen window, the "facts and
histories"
that could influence so many, especially the "wars he’d heard called /
Beautiful names — ‘Korean’ and ‘Roses’ / And ‘Holy.’" Peering out
his window, as the adult Santos, or the personae in his poems, so often
would in his works, the boy in the poem connects the numerous examples
he sees of an intensifying atmosphere overshadowing his whole landscape
(including the "dull, gray and / Heavy-headed clouds" rising in "the
evening
sky," and the darkness beginning "to spread across / The lawns and
bushes
. . .") to the violence and suffering involved in the military
conflicts
"he’d seen // In magazines and movies." In an impressive passage
from the poem previewing the powerful poetry that would follow in later
collections, Santos speaks of the boy:
. . . he thought
Of the cities all over the globe, cities
Bombed into streets and burning, and as
He whispered their names he could feel
On his tongue the terrible impermanence
Of nations: Bangkok and London. Guernica
And Rome, Dresden and Moscow and Hiroshima.
But they were names he was still unable
To see except in small and momentary glimpses
Of things, of a woman kneeling in the rubble
Beside a horse whose belly had been ruptured,
Of a man hunched over a wood-spoked
Wheel in a frozen ditch in the tundra,
Of a naked girl whose head had been shaved
And who was tied to a chair in the middle
Of a crowd that milled about her like
Shoppers . . ..
The young
boy knows somehow that he must not merely witness the world’s
tribulations
and tragedies; instead, he feels a need to express his perceptions and
reactions in words. Perhaps Santos is circuitously signaling to
readers
here that this may have been the point in his life, though unknowingly
by the boy at the time, when a course was set toward his becoming a
poet,
one who would write in crafted lines about such occurrences throughout
his life and hope to sort out somewhat an individual impression of the
world in the lyrical language of his poetry:
. . . he felt in his throat there were unknown
Words that would never in his lifetime
Get spoken, never be given a name,
And he was afraid to think he might
Take them away, take them away forever
Into that black and dividing night even now
Unraveling the edges of the light
That fell in a golden square
From the window.
At the same
time, the lines indicate a greater understanding of the significance
Time
plays in our lives, as well as an awakening to one’s own
mortality.
Both of these realizations will contribute to a later emphasis on the
importance
of memory to arrest time in some manner, and the need for elegiac
lyricism
to preserve on the page the lives of those so valuable to the poet.
Remarkably,
a subtle but significant transition takes place in the final
stanza.
Although not totally unexpected since it resembles other instances in
which
Santos has united past and present through the use of a specific image
or setting — in this case, the kitchen window — that sparks his memory,
the persona in the poem shifts his narrative from the third-person "he"
to the first-person "I," and the time frame is transformed from 1955 to
the poet’s present three decades later, as he reports to the reader the
images he’d given:
. . . were all
I’d remember thirty years from then
When rising from dinner with my wife
And son, news of warships gathering
In the Gulf was broadcast on the radio
In the kitchen—and the kitchen,
Whose windows had blurred from within,
Would grow ludicrous before it grew dim.
Santos’s
developing skill at connecting the personal and the universal through
his
use of memory and imagination strengthens the impact of his
poetry.
Additionally, his poetry is enhanced by a willingness to convey private
responses, intellectual and emotional, that can be shared by readers
because
his acute observations or precise rendering of images instill
empathy.
In his works, Santos increasingly exhibits confidence in an ability to
confront larger contemporary social concerns or historical issues
through
more intimate inner exploration rather than overtly political
commentary.
In his essay on the state of contemporary poetry, "In a Glass, Darkly,"
Santos argues against the notion that poetry has a responsibility or
obligation
to address contemporary political concerns in a propagandistic
manner.
Santos suggests that "when poets start writing what they’re told to
write,
or what they think they’re supposed to write, the results inevitably
belie
the purpose . . . the poem has exchanged experience for persuasion,
instinct
for purpose, intuition for intention."
However,
he does not endorse a position of ignorance about contemporary social
concerns
or evasion of social conscience. "Clearly, if we were to judge
from
modern history, poetry by its mere existence appears to embody a
powerful
political purpose," Santos asserts. Instead of poetry as campaign
ad or protest placard, he sees other more subtle ways poetry may
persuade
the people it reaches. In his essay on contemporary American
poetry,
Santos discusses why today’s poetry need not be openly political in
order
to influence readers or invoke fear in political leaders. He
considers
the following:
. . . what in
poets, one
must ask, awakens in tyrants such murderous fears? Perhaps the
very
fact that poetry represents a deeply compelling alternative world to
the
one the tyrant controls. And lyric poetry in particular provides
an alternative time as well, a time outside of history, outside the
story
upon which the tyrant has established his base of power.
Santos’s ability
to address larger social or political issues through personal lyric
poetry
will be manifested more completely in later collections, with a couple
of examples evidenced in The Pilot Star Elegies, and will be
placed
on full display in The Perishing. Nevertheless, already
in
this book, it clearly appears that in end of the twentieth century
global
circumstances and continuing on into twenty-first century conditions,
Santos
considers it necessary to display greater attentiveness as a way to
draw
links between those crises of the outer world and the corresponding
inner
contemplation they cause. In "A Toy Balloon, the Man-Moth’s Tear,
and a Sack of Ripe Tomatoes," Santos further states:
The uses of
attention require
special notice in an age like ours, when the senses (the way we pay
attention)
are being bombarded at a rate unprecedented in the history of the
world;
and when the world as we’ve known it through the senses is being
rapidly
and continually revised. This was a danger Cézanne
anticipated
even as the twentieth century began: "things are in a bad way. We
shall have to hurry if we want to see anything. Everything is
vanishing."
In the face of such vanishings, it’s no wonder we feel that something
has
come between us and the world, no wonder we’ve seen the arts in our age
grow more and more inward and insular. For inevitably the eye
turns
in on itself, and the self thereby becomes our one accessible
subject.
Santos’s following
book of poetry, The City of Women (1993), presents a sequence
of
untitled poems and brief prose pieces separated into three sections
that
turns inward even more, through engaging content and an intriguing
style,
and further attempts to use memory and imagination
to investigate the intimate experiences of an individual’s personal
life.
Specifically, the volume examines a male narrator’s series of
relationships
with females (whether long-term or brief encounters, even on occasion
simply
the product of a memory formed during a momentary glance years
before).
The subjects in his works range from childhood observations of adults’
behavior, including his mother’s course of actions through marriage and
divorce, to the narrator’s own marriage. As well, the poetry and
prose pieces survey the various states of love, loss, and loneliness
one
might undergo at different stages of life along the way.
This book
more than coincidentally shares its title with a 1980 Federico Fellini
film during which a middle-aged womanizing businessman, played by
Marcello
Mastroianni, uses memory and imagination to revisit all the females —
from
his mother or subjects of childhood fantasies to women with whom he had
romantic or erotic relationships — who in one way or another influenced
him during his life. In Fellini’s The City of Women the
main
character, through a series of episodes, is seeking the "ideal" woman;
however, he discovers in the process a new, sometimes disturbing
understanding
of his "idea" of women when he is met by a multiplicity of diverse
types
of women who display numerous characteristics from which he also learns
significant lessons about himself. The narrator in Santos's The
City of Women is taught similar lessons about himself from
observations
of or experiences with the women in his personal history.
Few
contemporary
male poets are as sincere, as sympathetic, and as successful in their
admiration
for women or in their attempts to portray women with so much honesty,
so
much understanding. With The City of Women Santos gives
the
reader a procession of vivid vignettes, as in the episodic Fellini
film,
though through lyric poems or prose memoirs, each of which contributes
to the others for a cumulative effect, for a more complete picture of
the
emotional and sexual education of a male in today’s society.
In
his
interview with Andrew Mulvania Santos characterizes The City of
Women
as "a long meditation on erotic and romantic love," which sounds
similar
to a conceivable description of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse.
Santos references Barthes work a number of times in "A Story of Poetry
and Poets," his essay on the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
With phrasing that could just as easily be guiding language for his own
writings, Santos believes this mythological tale of two lovers "brings
to light poetry’s deep-seated link to love and death and the erotic:
but
no less significantly, it reveals how poetry is as much concerned with
what it chooses to keep secret (and what it chooses to safeguard) as
with
what it chooses to disclose." These principles especially seem to
apply in The City of Women. At one point in "A Story of
Poetry
and Poets" Santos quotes Barthes on an issue of fear in relationships,
particularly anxiety over the possibility an individual might lose his
or her self-identity in giving oneself over to another in love: "it is
the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin
of
love, from the moment when I was first ‘ravished.’" This "lover’s
anxiety" discussed by Barthes, the potential conflict between
individuality
and self-sacrifice in love that may lead to the death of an independent
self, is also addressed as a concern in The City of Women.
Indeed,
sometimes brief sections of the prose have a meditative and
philosophical
feel, reading like the language one might find in Barthes’ popular
treatise:
Isn’t that
actually the
reason we love, because we’re alone? Perhaps it is; but isn’t it
also equally true that what we love is the other’s aloneness, the
unspoiled isolato
the other is? And isn’t the raw sensation of love contained
somehow
in the breathless surrender of this identity to that oblivion, that
little
Eldorado of not-us-ness our emotions so hungrily, so insatiably
mine?
Though much
of the book contains compelling situations clearly based upon
autobiographical
situations — even if any one of them may be embellished by fictional
details
or told in an imaginative narrative, while carefully designed to
achieve
a sense of authenticity — curiously enough the resulting impression is
not that one is reading "confessional" writing, at least not to the
extent
one might expect. Indeed, despite the fact that the construction
of this volume with its mixture of poetry and prose pieces indirectly
owes
something to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, one of the nascent
works
that originally defined "confessional poetry," the resolution one
reaches
upon reading The City of Women is considerably different.
Lowell disdained the characterization of his work as "confessional
poetry"
when M.L. Rosenthal coined the reproachful term "confessional" in his
initial
critical essay on Life Studies. Rosenthal disliked
Lowell’s
use of intimate incriminating details from his and his family’s private
lives, dismissing the Life Studies pieces about marital
problems,
family strife, and mental breakdowns "as a series of personal
confidences,
rather shameful."
Curiously,
M.L. Rosenthal contributes a comment on the back cover of The City
of
Women in which he admires Santos for exhibiting a "new flexibility
of style and openness of feeling." Perhaps the contrast between
Rosenthal’s
assessments of Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959 and Santos’s The
City of Women in 1993 can be attributed to a modification of
critical
opinion mirroring the cultural shifts — including the intervening
introductions
of new journalism and the nonfiction novel — that had occurred over the
decades. Lowell’s experimentation with intimate autobiographical
content in his poetry can now be seen to presage numerous works that
have
followed. Indeed, today such a change in attitude can also be
witnessed
in the widespread acceptance of this style of writing and the
substantial
critical acclaim for the first wave of confessional poets (including
Lowell,
Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass), as well as the scores of subsequent
confessional
or autobiographical poets seen in more recent generations. In
addition,
a transformation of the country’s culture is evidenced by the
popularity
of the personal memoir as a literary form nearly rivaling that of the
novel,
by the high ratings of reality-based programs that regularly fill
America’s
television screens, and by those true-life movies and bio-pics that
sell
tickets so well at the box office. On the other hand, perhaps
Rosenthal’s
differing evaluations of the two books can more likely be ascribed to
the
contrasting tone the two poets project. Rosenthal recognized
Lowell’s
poetry as carrying an unpleasant, sometimes mean-spirited or degrading,
attitude toward those whose confidences he betrays. But the
intentions
in Santos’s poems, though honest in their portrayals, usually appear to
be kinder or more sympathetic, and eventually more forgiving, to the
characters
he depicts, and the works often seem to hold out possibility of a more
enriching outcome overall.
The
speaker’s
private revelations in The City of Women — with its frequent
imitation
of journal entries, whether drawn from the poet’s actual experiences,
partially
fictionalized, or invented from whole cloth — seem less
confessional
and more contemplative, less intimate and more impersonal, less
intrusive
and more welcoming, less calculating and more intuitive. Unlike
Lowell’s
work, which occasionally appears to thrive on the exposure of
particular
identifiable and sometimes sordid details about his and his family’s
lives,
Santos’s extended narrative, like that of the character in the Fellini
film, manages to come across as more genuinely life affirming (or love
affirming), more generically emblematic of the kinds of concerns or
conflicts
readers might uncover in examining such relationships in their own
lives.
The
first
poem of section one in this book again provides a childhood memory,
although
the speaker is conscious that some of the remembered details are, as
always,
tainted by erosion over time or tinged with fanciful aspects supplied
by
the poet’s imagination to enhance the experience: as the narrator
explains,
he "can’t recall / Exactly now." Nevertheless, the speaker
suggests,
perhaps constructs would be more exact, a remembered scenario in which
he spots a lovely young woman he knows to be a clerk at a bookstore
where
his mother often shops. He imagines she might have been sitting
alone
in a marketplace square café, her beauty seen by the boy as if
through
a zoom lens from among a number of unpleasant everyday items:
. . . a shifting
Fretwork of pushcarts, string bags, makeshift stalls,
The gutters a rubble of spoiled fruit, rinds,
Bread crusts, dung, stray dogs snuffing at
The entrails too bruised to lay out in the pans,
An acrid smell off the pissoirs, and the dizzying
Zigzag horseflies make in the airless crush
Of those afternoons.
In contrast
with the grit and grime of the items, sometimes seemingly positioned
like
stage props and described almost in a cinematic manner around her, the
woman ("lifting her spoon to sip some / Chocolate from a steaming
bowl")
is viewed through the glass barrier of the window in a different,
nearly
soft-focus light by the infatuated young boy.
. . . the sun’s come out, the sun’s
Reflected off the window she sits staring from,
So that her image deepens behind the pane,
Advances as if out of flame and then recedes again
Into a glassy incandescence our desolate world
Would crisscross for a moment before the next
Cloud came and shadowed her back, as in
The fade-out of a movie screen.
The speaker’s
following comment, "this is a picture / I’ve kept for thirty years,
it’s
always there," might bring to mind one of a number of similar scenes in
motion pictures over the years in which one man’s glimpse from a
distance
of a beautiful unattainable woman is held in his memory as a fleeting
moment
frozen and treasured for a lifetime. Indeed, whether identified
or
not, comparisons to films and film techniques, as well as illusions to
movies or images from films, occur frequently in this volume. The
action in one piece takes place at "the American Nostalgia Movie House
in Montparnasse." In another poem a woman "asks the question all
lovers ask: / What was it you first desired in me?" As the man
pauses
before answering, the woman "has leaned back heavily into / Her chair
and
closed her eyes," and rather than attribute such a gesture to something
like "anger, impatience, amusement," he prefers to consider her
movement
in a different manner. He credits her actions more along the line
of a theatrical presence when he concludes with the following lines:
"as
he chooses to think (for it’s what he first / Desired in her) her
brutal
cinematic ways."
However,
this initial instance of "love" relayed by the speaker from "the story
of my life / In love" seems to have an additional impact hinted by the
final pair of lines in that poem describing the bookstore clerk: "In
the
fired, unapproachable glare of the windowpane, / She seems so beautiful
she frightens me." For the young boy — perhaps as it still is for
the man who serves as narrator, or perhaps as it is for all men — the
beauty
of the woman, along with the emotions such beauty stirs, becomes
frightening.
In fact, as the poet will remind readers a few times in this book, in
addition
to love or desire, as well as other strong emotions, a beautiful woman
may also evoke various elements of fear in the heart of a man — the
fear
of giving oneself in love, the fear of rejection, the fear of
inadequately
satisfying the woman emotionally or physically, as well as the fear of
abandonment through loss of love or death, leading to the resulting
fear
of loneliness, and so on.
In
a prose
piece from section two of the work, the speaker chronicles a
disturbance
near his home caused by a drunken neighbor with a cut hand who is
shouting
from his front yard: "Help me, help me, my wife’s a whore." Yet,
after a few months have passed and a seasonal shift is once more
underway
with "the smell of autumn leaf fires in the air," the speaker sees the
same couple, "arm-in-arm" returning from a grocery store. This
time,
the narrator is "deeply moved by the resilience, by the unfathomable
mystery
of the human heart. And then, almost instantly (and with equal
force),
by its sentimentality, its cowardice, its desperate fear of being
alone."
Another prose passage from section three begins:
And yet, how
often these
days, struggling to recall some incident or other, I’m struck by a
feeling
of sifting through ash; and the adult fantasy (tinged with fear) that
who
we are is composed of what, perhaps only what, we can never reclaim
from
the rubble.
The
final fifteen
words are identical to the conclusion in one of the quotes previously
cited
as part of Santos’s essay "Eating the Angel, Conceiving the Sun," which
first appeared in an issue of American Poetry Review published
in
1993, the same year as the release of The City of Women, and is
included in A Poetry of Two Minds. Such an allusion or
reference
to his own work is not an isolated incident in The City of Women.
One more prose piece in section two contains a self-reference in which
the speaker offers a quote, "‘ . . . the methodical, unthinking manner
with which / she crosses and uncrosses her legs in public.’" The
narrator then informs his readers in a self-effacing tone of criticism
that these are "lines from a poem I wrote about my mother years
ago.
Looking back on it now I see (with a sensation of being helplessly
tired)
that everything else in the poem is mawkish, inaccurate, disingenuous,
etc." The poem to which Santos refers is "Melancholy
Divorcée";
although, interestingly enough, his quote of the lines is itself
slightly
inaccurate, at least in comparison to the version that appears in Accidental
Weather. The exact quote in that collection is " . . . the
methodical,
unthinking manner / in which you cross and uncross your legs in public
. . .."
Other than
the change of line break between the two versions, the shift from
second
person to third person appears to distance the speaker and create a
less
accusatory tone of voice for the poem’s narrator. Nevertheless,
Santos’s
reference to this specific poem from a past collection of his poetry
feeds
the reader’s natural instinct to view the speaker as a stand-in for the
author, to fuse together the persona and the poet. Such
references
serve also to reinforce the belief readers might adopt in moving
through
this sequence of writings that the poems and prose vignettes of this
book
contain autobiographical, if not confessional, revelations — whether or
not they are.
In
such
a way, the pieces in this collection assume an air of authenticity and
authority similar to what one might find in a writer’s journals or
memoirs.
Consequently, the separate works carry a weight, fortunately or
unfortunately,
they might not otherwise be forced to bear, an obligation to be
convincing
in themselves while also maintaining a narrative consistency throughout
the volume. Remarkably, however, rather than seeming overburdened
by the heavy emphasis on autobiographical details, the series of
experiences
in this book seems to gather a sense of gravity, to be endowed with a
feeling
of substance — since it appears as if the poet has invested more in
these
pieces, has allowed himself to become vulnerable while inviting readers
into his confidence — that sets the narratives apart from similar, but
purely fictional accounts. Of course, Santos correctly comments
in
his interview with Mulvania that it is a "mistake to confuse
explicitness
with truthfulness" or "truthfulness with autobiographical fact."
Nevertheless, he is aware of this possible response by readers when he
cleverly delivers the narrative in such a manner that it embraces the
power
and persuasion often associated with autobiographical testimony.
In his interview with Mulvania, Santos speaks of such deception in a
comparison
to motion pictures, which give the false impression of movement despite
the fact that their audience is viewing "an illusion created by the
rapid
projection of still photographs."
In
addition,
some readers might think Santos’s quick critical re-examination of this
poem ("Melancholy Divorcée") from his first volume — using
characterizations
like "mawkish," "inaccurate," and "disingenuous" — appears on the
surface
to contradict somewhat another comment he makes in his interview with
Mulvania
about the regard he retains for his past poetry: "I don’t feel any need
to disavow or repudiate my early work, however remote or unseasoned it
might seem to me now." Nonetheless, Santos’s reappraisal of an
older
poem in this context actually creates a contrast between the old poetry
and the new writing, between the observer he once was and the one he
has
become, between the younger poet and the more mature author.
Santos’s
disparaging depiction of elements in the early poem is not meant as
much
to reject the previous work, but moreso to mark how far his perceptions
may have developed in the intervening decade. As he puts it in a
follow-up sentence from the interview: "The journey is the thing, after
all, and the only way to chart a journey is by the distance you travel
in time."
Another
forceful poem in section one of The City of Women is initiated
by
a childhood memory. The speaker even opens the first line with a
question that appears most appropriate: "Where to begin?" As
readers
might guess, the answer, of course, for this poet is to explore a list
of sensory recollections that emerge from the speaker’s memory,
eventually
leading to corroborating information, and finally evolving into a
conclusion
with a disturbing, though enlightening, revelation:
My earliest memory is dipped
In an acid of ammonia and sweat. An enameled
Box with large, weirdly illuminated numerals;
And a sweltering room where the curtains billow
Outside in on a man and woman, mid-embrace,
Who’ve just stopped dancing to stare at me
With a barely concealed displeasure.
The woman
then blindfolds the boy, and he is locked in a closet where he breathes
the "caustic fumes" of cleaning supplies. From inside his dark
confinement,
the youngster hears music and a repeated muffled sound that "replicates
a groan," until eventually he is released and the blindfold removed,
the
man gone. However, the woman, her voice "edged with rum,"
threatens
that the man will always be watching the boy: "The threat works: From
that
moment on, I’m aware / Of him, his eyes on me, of a presence in the
world
/ That is sinister and unpitying." Fearful from that instant
forward,
the incident at first remains a secret the child will not reveal to
anyone,
then inevitably becomes a vague memory he does not comprehend.
Yet
years later, his memory of the event is suddenly clarified when his
mother
shares her own moment of retrospection, a recollection fittingly
emanating
from an image of windows:
. . . my mother recalls the curtained windows
(And the Blaupunkt radio!) of our two-room house
On the coast of Bermuda; and the Lancashire maid,
Discharged early for showing up drunk,
Who had looked after me when I was three.
The mother’s
memory evinces evidence that confirms suspicions suggested by the
speaker’s
own recollections, consequently validating the boy’s factual and
emotional
reactions, as well as alleviating confusion and satisfying the adult
narrator’s
intellectual curiosity arising from his contemporary contemplation of
those
past circumstances. Naturally, she represents the first female
influence
over the narrator, as well as a primary example of adult attitudes
toward
love and loss, desire to be with another and anxiety of living a life
in
loneliness. For the young narrator, the mother demonstrates the
difficulties
of marriage, the passion and the pain; as a result, her marital
experiences
feed the speaker’s apprehensions about love, but especially about
marriage.
The mother’s need for security, sought in the acceptance by another,
battles
against her personal insecurity as she decides whether or not she
should
leave an unhappy situation.
The
narrator
informs readers that his parents represent divergent social and
economic
backgrounds. The mother was raised in a "Southern, affluent,
aristocratic"
family while the father came from a "working-class, immigrant" family
that
had settled in a northern region of California. When the two met
in the middle of World War II, the mother a USO volunteer and the
father
a military pilot, they were essentially disguised by their
uniforms.
Revealingly, Santos describes the couple as being "more alike, more
familiar
to each other" during arguments, rather than when directing affection
toward
one another:
It was while
reading a menu,
taking a walk, working together in the flowerbeds, that I’d catch them
sometimes speaking to each other with such exaggerated tenderness, it
was
like watching characters in a silent movie.
Ultimately,
in the lines of one poem, she "thinks the reason she’ll leave has less
to do / With him than her. Some flaw. Some ache for things
/ That end." In a following prose piece, "after the
divorce,"
the mother moves "to another state," in which she gradually shifts from
mourning to a sense of independence, displaying a lesson in
self-reliance
and of growing strength. She even becomes comfortable enough to
"lose
her fear of going out alone," to attend a movie matinee by herself as
ironically
she’s seen "leaning against a movie marquee for The Diary of a
Country
Priest, Robert Bresson’s 1950 film depicting the crisis of faith,
the
spiritual and physical difficulties endured by a young dying priest
assigned
to a little French town. The narrator wonders about the picture
of
the mother, speculating that the photograph of the woman beside a sign
for this particular film "was intended as a joke — its austere
evocation
of the religious life, its useless young priest who finds that life, in
any case, so spiritually unrewarding." But another conclusion
suggests
the message she wished to convey to others is a more powerful one:
"Don’t
pity me."
The
need
to overcome fear and the ability to do so are themes that arise a
number
of times in this book, as they also do in the others. Indeed, a
central
poem in this collection, one that includes the book’s title, begins
with
the following line: "Don’t be afraid, you have been afraid enough."
In this poem the frightened boy is urged to "go back to sleep .
. . where / Sleep is the language of the newly opened book / Of trees,
of the wet window the rain blows in, / Cool and syllabled and storyless
as fountain spray." In his sleep the boy’s mother is joined by
her
sisters, a long list of women named by the narrator, as he dreams "that
night, and for nights to come, / That I’ve awakened midmorning in the
city
/ Of women, and when I awaken I’m unafraid."
Repeatedly
Santos shows the continuing isolation individuals often feel even when
in relationships, including marriage. His portraits, especially
of
the women characters who populate his poems, often resemble the
solitary
figures, also more frequently women, in Edward Hopper’s paintings who
usually
appear lost in thought and distracted from their surroundings.
One
might think of Hopper’s woman sitting alone drinking coffee at an
automat
cafeteria’s window table or the woman standing against a wall in some
New
York movie theater or the various women seated by hotel room
windows.
In Santos’s work, as in the Hopper paintings, it is as if observers are
asked to consider the fine line between aloneness and loneliness,
between
solitude and isolation. In one poem Santos describes just such a
setting:
Early morning, a woman sits up in her bed
With a cup of coffee and an ashtray in her lap,
Though she isn’t smoking and the coffee
Has long since cooled. For the last two months
She and her husband have slept in separate
Rooms . . ..
The lines
of this poem continue to describe the overcast sky and still atmosphere
outside her window, "which / For once she doesn’t find
threatening."
An additional metaphorical element of nature is given to the external
scene:
Beyond
Her window a sparrow is furiously tearing
Away at the wildly overgrown lantana bush,
Stabbing at its inky blue-black berries,
Some of which fall onto the window ledge
Already badly stained.
When the
husband enters the room, warning of his entrance by pausing and
shuffling
his feet "as though wiping his shoes on a mat," the woman remains
undisturbed
by his presence. In doing so, the reader is told, she is able
again
"To turn a loss into the semblence of a loss." Even when in the
same
room, an estrangement exists for the couple, but the woman maintains a
sense of control, though perhaps only a pretense of control. Once
more, a similarity to the paintings of Hopper seems apparent, but now
one
recalls those works containing images of couples who share a room,
whether
it be a hotel room or their own bedroom, but no intimate connection
between
the two takes place — no eye contact, no touching, not even engagement
in a common activity. Although inhabiting a room (a relationship,
a marriage) together, nevertheless the couples in Hopper’s paintings
and
in Santos’s poems sometimes seem isolated and appear to feel just as
alone
as one possibly could.
Still,
any reader of Santos’s work would be in error merely to perceive the
relationships
in this book as troubled or lacking love, and to move on without
pointing
to a few of the more positive moments. Even in those portraits of
couples in which each seeks to maintain an individuality, Santos
proposes
we might find a definition of love. As the speaker speculates in
a prose piece:
. . . imagine—if
only for
argument’s sake—how BEING IN LOVE might well depend, not on each of us
coming to know each other, but on each of us actually struggling to
guard
that which knowing would give away. And imagine, moreover, how
love
may not be a "union" at all, but the preservation of that otherness,
that
sworn, unspoken Cyrano within us. Then imagine what an act of
courage
it is, to love and (more) to be loved: the decision to endure, for the
sake of the other, that enormous burden of being alone . . ..
Throughout
the book, Santos offers moments that take place in his memory, outside
of time, scenes that are both history and an illusion. However,
in
the wonderful last lyric poem near the close of The City of Women,
Santos summarizes some of the thoughts he, and the reader, might have
gathered.
He reaches a tentative realization about the subject of love and he
achieves
an insight, as uncertain or ambiguous as it may be, about the reality
of
relationships. Santos’s suggestions about the essence of love are
not sentimental, nor are they purely romantic; instead, they are
practical
conclusions arrived at as a culmination of one man’s reflective
observation
and meditative thought. Santos recognizes the understandings
about
women and love he has gained, just as he also acknowledges the flaws of
imaginative scenarios or the limitations of fictionalized memories:
If I went back and saw them as they truly were,
I’d understand, and understanding realize
(By which, I think, she means FORGIVE)
They loved each other, she loved him, and god
Knows they have tried, tried harder perhaps
Than I could know . . ..
Santos expects
that his study of love and the difficulties of a loving relationship
will
continue, just as the difficult language with which that conversation
about
love is conducted will endure, "goes on somewhere / Outside us
replaying
those same unsayable / Words whose syllables we are laved in, / Whose
meanings
keep endlessly coming to pass."
In
the
conclusion of his essay on Orpheus and Eurydice in A Poetry of Two
Minds,
Santos characterizes the tale as "a tableau of human love and loss" and
"a spiritual journey." At the end of The City of Women,
readers
may regard this excellent book as one man’s extended essay on the
intricacies
of love and loss, desire and fear, produced through the use of brief
excerpts
of fragmented prose and episodic lyric poems. Santos knows how to
express his thoughts on this subject because of an ability to search
his
memory for crucial moments that have informed him and a willingness to
integrate those remembered events with important or inventive details
mined
from his imagination when necessary to complete the artistic
process.
The poet examines love throughout his spiritual journey from his
various
positions as a curious child, an amazed adolescent, and a contemplative
adult. Like a landscape painter, he often explores an emotional
scene
by placing himself and those observed experiences within vivid images
of
the natural vista or, as in portraiture, by isolating an individual
persona
in an evocative location. The external environment and specific
details
in these works provide connotative connections to the inner conditions
of an individual’s mind or soul. His adventures as a male are
aided
by an enormous amount of empathy for the females, both real and
fantasy,
in his life — including those who fulfill roles as mother, lover, and
wife.
He discovers in The City of Women, as does the main character
in
Fellini’s film by the same name, that the ideal woman — indeed, an
ideal
love — may not exist, but he ascertains from the women he encounters
more
about his developing idea of who women are or about what a woman can
offer
to a man, what women have contributed to the formation of this
man.
Consequently,
and perhaps most importantly, he learns more about himself. He
shares
with readers the lessons his meditative passages propose, presenting
not
the ideal, but simply new ideas for all to consider on the topics of
love
and relationships. The fascinating and persuasive results of
Santos’s
investigation into love’s variety of forms come partially from his
sympathetic
understanding of women, but mostly from a carefully crafted composite
of
lyric poetry and prose pieces, supported by portions of journal entries
or philosophical fragments. However, close readers of Santos’s
previous
books would not be surprised to find such work. This creative
combination
of poetry and prose fragments provides a daring composition, an
intriguing
endeavor that naturally follows the content in the seven fascinating
poems
on love and marriage that made up part two of The Southern Reaches.
Likewise, The City of Women’s sustained effort at meditative
discourse
focused on a single topic through lyrical poetry and fragmented prose
pieces
foreshadows another ambitious sequence to come in Santos’s next book, The
Pilot Star Elegies.
Published
in 1999, Sherod Santos’s fourth collection of poems, The Pilot Star
Elegies, received positive critical notice and achieved prestigious
honors, including being selected as a finalist for the National Book
Award
in Poetry. "A collection of elegies," as he characterizes the
book
in his interview with Mulvania, this volume signified a stylistic and
substantive
leap forward for Santos, and it solidified his position as one of the
nation’s
finest poets. By borrowing
the intense imagery and lyrical language ever-present since his first
collection, Accidental
Weather, and adding the ambitious intentions and intimate voice
that
mark parts of The Southern Reaches as well as all of The
City
of Women, Santos brings together his strengths as a poet to fashion
quite compelling and completely convincing work in The Pilot Star
Elegies.
Beyond their elegiac tone, familiar themes — love and loss, belonging
and
abandonment, preservation and absence, memory and forgetfulness,
anxiety
and fear, time and timelessness, life and death, sorrow and consolation
— connect the poems in this collection. In the best pieces
included
among the poems for this book, the poet’s voice is personal, powerful,
and persuasive, as once again the private experiences of the poems’
speakers
are made public in such a manner as to engender empathy among
readers.
Ever since
the early poems of Accidental Weather, Santos has proven his
skill
with elegiac language, mixing imagination and memory to preserve in
time
those people or places that mattered most to him. In The
Pilot
Star Elegies such preservation appears to be a primary purpose on
the
part of the poet or poem’s persona. However, Santos does not seem
content merely to memorialize those subjects of these elegies.
Instead,
as in the extended sequence of poems that comprise The City of
Women,
the elegiac poems of this book act as catalysts, particularly those
poems
including sympathetic portraits of others, which also allow personal
reflection
and greater understanding of one’s self. The inward gaze of
meditative
writing in this book had its beginning in Santos’s previous three
collections,
but not quite with the more sophisticated tone and exquisite display of
wisdom exhibited by the speakers in this volume’s poems.
Santos
does not delay moving on to the crucial issues he seeks to discuss in
his
new book. "The Story," an elegiac opening poem, serving as
prologue
before part one of The Pilot Star Elegies, perfectly
establishes
the emotional tone and aesthetic atmosphere for much of the rest of the
collection. The poem’s relaxed and meditative monologue sets a
tone
one can expect to hear often throughout the volume, and the setting for
the speaker seated at a table beside his kitchen window seems
familiar.
The
ambiguity
of the poem’s title appears appropriate as well. Certainly, the
"story"
refers to the common human story of life and death, good and evil,
faith
and despair. But more specifically, the title pertains to a
particular
remembered narrative, a tale told by Holocaust survivors about Jewish
prisoners
facing a life-and-death struggle in a German concentration camp during
World War II, that the speaker reads in a book, Hasidic Tales of
the
Holocaust, mistakenly delivered to his door instead of the
published
study of Hebrew elegies he’d been expecting from a friend: "I opened
the
book right then and read, / at the kitchen table, in a small square
panel
/ of sunlight that framed the closely printed page." In addition,
the "story" alludes to the speaker’s own memory of the experience
reading
that book and his personal responses. Most of the poem is told in
past tense by the first-person speaker about an afternoon years before;
however, as witnessed in his previous poetry, Santos creates a
transition
that shifts to present tense by the end of the poem when another mail
delivery
revives his memories: "this morning / after breakfast the week-late
posted
letter arrived / informing me that my friend had died, and suddenly /
it
all came back again, as clear to me now / as it was that day."
Once
more, Santos allows a profound moment to stir his memory of a similar
past
incident and engage his imagination in order to contemplate the
significance
of the two related events. Irony works in the information given
to
readers during this elegiac poem that a study of the Hebrew elegy was
the
friend’s work originally expected in the mail. In addition, the
poem
is dedicated "in memory of M.L. Rosenthal," whose death in July
of 1996 would have provided Santos with cause to write this poem.
During
the poem, Santos revisits a position he believes to be true for many
readers,
"that those very books we need most / choose us and not the other way
around."
This comment is echoed in the interview with Mulvania, where Santos
reveals
his own reading habits: "left to my own devices, I’m a very
unsystematic
reader, and I share Montaigne’s belief that the books we most need in
life
come searching for us, not the other way around." The book
containing
tales of the Holocaust that accidentally sought out Santos narrates a
story
of two Jews in a Ukrainian concentration camp — one a rabbi and the
other
"a freethinker from Poland" — who are forced by nazi troopers to
attempt
the impossible feat of leaping across a wide pit in order to save their
lives. Failing to clear the pit’s gap, they are to be shot with
the "ra-ta-tat-tat"
of machine gun fire and buried where they fall. Facing death
armed
only with faith and imagination, the two join hands and make the jump
"to
the other side" together: "And neither was sure that they’d even
survived
/ as anything more than the insane and unvarying wish / of two men
leaping
headlong into a pit"
Upon finishing
the story, the poem’s speaker notices how movement of the square of
sunlight
across the table’s surface has shown time’s passing, and in a moment of
meditation he wonders what lesson, if any, the world has learned in the
decades since the Holocaust or what understanding he may have acquired
from that afternoon’s reading:
When I closed the book, that small, square
panel of sunlight had shifted a little to my left,
so that part of it still leveled across the tabletop,
while the other part lay, halved and unbroken
on the hardwood floor. So far as I could tell,
other than that, nothing much had changed in the world,
perhaps nothing at all had changed in me.
By the end
of the poem, years having passed since the arrival of the misdirected
book,
the speaker receives a "week-late posted letter" in the morning mail
after
breakfast with information that his friend is dead, which immediately
reminds
him of the Holocaust story — filled with issues of life, death, faith,
friendship, and imagination — he’d inadvertently been sent that long
ago
day: "the story of the two men / huddled together at the edge of the
pit,
/ the ra-ta-tat-tat, and that small, square panel / of sunlight
sliding across the printed page."
Appropriately,
the poem closes with the window’s square of sunlight, that symbol of
time
passing, now steadily crossing a printed page. It is as if this
image
signifies the importance of the written word in bridging time and the
need
for literature to preserve people and places on the page, as in the
tales
of the lost in the Holocaust story or the elegiac lines of this
poem.
This is a lesson Santos has learned well over the years. The
valued
people in our lives cannot be kept from death and those important
places
in our lives cannot be saved from the corrosive effects of time;
however,
literature allows the writer to retain remembered images and to sustain
the cherished memories of distant incidents. Once again, a window
provides illumination and acts as a connection between the inner and
outer
worlds, between the past and the present, between the private
contemplation
of the author and the political confrontations existing
elsewhere.
"The Story" yields both an elegy for a particular individual in the
poet’s
personal past and an elegy for an unknown number of victims in one of
history’s
horrific events.
In
"Eating
the Angel, Conceiving the Sun," noting the importance of memory in
poetry,
most obviously in elegiac poems, Santos expresses his admiration for Duino
Elegies, one of "the more celebrated examples of ‘thinking’ poems"
in the twentieth century, in which Rilke refers to ‘the suspiration, /
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.’" Responding to
Rilke’s comment, Santos states:
But where does
it come from,
one might ask, all this "uninterrupted news"? Toward what does
the
direction backward lead? What lies behind that revisionist fury
of
poem and mind? And what do we gather in our moments of
recollection?
Pursued far enough, one answer to all those questions is, of course,
the
dead.
The
elegy,
especially, permits the poet an opportunity to praise those close ones
who have mattered so much in his or her life, as well as those lost
souls
who might otherwise simply be forgotten. The elegy suits Santos’s
desire to blend memory and imagination, to unite the past and the
present,
and to reflect on the larger issues — life and death, love and loss —
in
persuasive meditative language. Santos excels in expressing
emotions
through elegiac rhetoric. Beginning with this prologue poem and
continuing
through the four following sections of The Pilot Star Elegies,
readers
witness excellent examples of this skill.
The
obvious
celebrated samples of Santos’s eloquently sensitive and elegiac lyrics
are evident in "Elegy for My Sister." This poem, written as an
extended
sequence consisting of twenty-five parts that fill an entire section of
the book more than thirty pages in length, serves as an aesthetically
fitting
and pivotal piece for the collection. Honored with the B.F.
Connors
Long Poem Prize awarded by the Paris Review, "Elegy for My
Sister"
represents a sensational achievement rendering multiple feelings —
among
them, love and loss, grief and guilt, sorrow and solace — in language
bearing
just the right emotional or meditative tone.
In
"Elegy
for My Sister" the speaker questions and mourns the death of a woman
who
has committed suicide, but perhaps just as importantly the poet tries
to
find answers and comfort in reviewing the life of the woman he now
believes
he never fully understood. Santos remembers one of the sister’s
favorite
sayings, "Well, that’s what life’s like," spoken "whenever she
couldn’t
imagine what else to say." Through use of memory and imagination,
the poet hopes to discover what her life was like, who she really was,
"to answer that question which day by day / I fear I’m growing less
able
to answer: / who was she whose death now made her / a stranger to
me?"
Having begun the poem’s composition one week after his sister’s death,
Santos knows the only way to correctly preserve her memory is not to
merely
mourn, but to save on the page those details that might identify her
true
identity. In that manner the sister "could only begin to exist,
to
take her place / in the future."
Following
a collage-like prefatory poem listing fragmented memories of objects
and
scenes the speaker associates with the sister, part one of the sequence
contains one of the narrator’s thirty-five-year-old childhood memories
of the sister. The speaker reminisces about a time when,
remaining
inside and suffering from a head cold, he watched his sister through a
window, "her pinking winter-white shoulders bent / over the backyard
flower
beds," and she sunk a pitchfork into a hay bale, spearing a snake "by
the
tines / wound up like a caduceus along the handle." Of course,
the
poet is conscious that over time his memory may have become faulty or
his
imagination may have embellished the incident; however, he also knows
that
this is one image of his sister that has been kept alive, that keeps
her
alive in the speaker’s mind. Equally, the poet is aware that each
poem he writes adds its own imagined images of the sister, its own
versions
of her life. Acknowledging the girl in the poem — the girl he
still
visualizes in his mental pictures thirty-five years later — is a
product
of memory and imagination, the speaker concludes, "there she is, made
over
again / by my own deliberate confusions."
In
part
eight of the poetry sequence, Santos ponders the impact of memory in
constructing
an elegy. He concedes the susceptibility of each person to
misunderstanding
or subconsciously misrepresenting the facts in our search for truth as
we design our stories to conform with conclusions drawn from those
images
and incidents the memory retains. He considers further the
influence
of memory on the evaluation of a person’s life — especially one ended
by
suicide — and its affect on others:
Forgiving, unforgiving, fierce the way memory’s
shadings return us to such sure and simple
self-revealing truths: her life, her death,
her decision to take them both in hand
and like twin daughters summoned home
lead them back from the future.
In his memory
the poet still envisions his sister "in the black-and-white / of an
earlier
time," those years before language mattered so much and poetry emerged
from within the speaker — "a time before words / colored in to phrase
those
meanings fleshed out / from the trembling backdrop of their shadow
play"
— those moments when the poet had not yet chosen to concentrate
his
attention in the mourning rhetoric of elegiac verse. As Santos
state
in his essay, "A Toy Balloon, the Man-Moth’s Tear, and a Sack of Ripe
Tomatoes,"
a poet’s task is to begin "with attention, with the alertness which
Walter
Benjamin called ‘the natural prayer of the soul.’" Elsewhere in
the
same essay, Santos alludes to the process of writing as a way to try to
understand the inexplicable experiences in life when he comments about
a poem by Sappho:
In the face of
dying, mourning
is what, perhaps all, we do—but mourning is not nothing. It’s a
way
we have to make use of our sorrow, to form a sympathetic bond with the
dying, and, in the face of that otherwise paralyzing question ("What
can
we do?"), to form an adequate response. By the charged expressive
reticence of those lines, we discover through an inroad to the human
heart
the enabling truth of their meanings.
The
sister’s
own struggle at locating a self-identity during her lifetime presents a
portion of the problem the poet faces in trying to find the woman’s
true
identity after her death. Indeed, in a sense, the sequence of
poems
sometimes points to the sister’s seeking of differing identities
throughout
her life. Part six of the series chronicles some of the shifts in
self-image made by the sister:
She was born Sarah Gossett Ballenger—
Sarah our mother’s proper name, Gossett our mother’s
family name, Ballenger the name of her father.
Following our mother’s second marriage,
her name was changed to Sarah Ballenger Santos,
and when she herself got married, she became
Sarah Ballenger Santos Knoeppel. After her
divorce, she changed
her name to Sarah Beth Ballenger, though Beth
was selected simply because she "liked its sound,"
and because, for once, she’d felt entitled to name herself.
Later, after
suffering a stillbirth, she insists that her daughters refer to her as Mimi
— rather than Mommy, Mother, or Mom — and at differing
stages
in her life she alters the spelling of her names "from Sally to
Salley"
and "Sarah to Sara." The speaker speculates:
Thus all her life she felt her name referred to a presence
outside herself, a presence which sought to enclose
that self which separated her from who they were.
Thus all her life she was never quite sure who it was
people summoned whenever they called her by name.
Further
in part seventeen of the sequence, the woman’s daughters, who "measured
her life / by degrees of despair and happiness," will remember how at
stages
in her life, perhaps unable to know herself and seeking a role with
which
to identify, she tried to find a self-image by fitting into differing
"popular
stereotypes — ‘the suburban housewife,’ ‘the responsible neighbor,’ and
‘the loving parent.’" In part twenty, the poet will write with a
tone of regret that most who knew the sister would comment, "She never
seemed to find a life for herself."
The
sister
is described as shy and uncomfortable in social situations, though
willing
to open up some when alone with the poet. At times, the speaker
shares
with readers a sense of the seeming closeness in his relationship with
the sister, as she would be willing to confide in him. However,
the
narrator relays a revealing characterization of those confidences: "I
felt
at times that many of the secrets / she confessed to me were things she
actually / wished she regretted, more than things she suffered / for
having
done."
The
sister’s
unease with others and her apparent inability to find a place for
herself,
to discover her true role or self-identity, may have caused a painful
and
desperate notion of dislocation, an aching brought on by an assumption
of alienation. As in The City of Women, the speaker’s
perception
of his sister is conveyed with a comparison to a film image:
she reminded me of those blue translucent birds
("so the hawks can’t see them against the sky")
Marlon Brando describes in The Fugitive Kind.
Those legless birds that "don’t belong no place
at all," and so stay on the wing until they die.
As the sequence
explains, the sister’s suicide does not occur without forethought and
effort.
Clearly, her death was the result of a protracted process as she
accumulated
varying drugs — "anxiety agents, painkillers, antidepressants / and
muscle
relaxants" — from a number of doctors, all suspicious, perhaps because
of her mental history and past periods of hospitalization (including
electroshock
treatments), and cautious in prescribing a limited supply to their
patient,
but each caved to her persuasive personality. Indeed, the speaker
ends part nine of the poem with a few incisive lines concluding that
"killing
herself / required some cunning, and the same unspoken / complicity of
others that she’d needed to stay alive."
Having
attained such knowledge of the sister’s planning and actions, the
narrator
is compelled to question himself and examine his behavior. A
short
time after the sister’s funeral, while attending a family gathering at
which relatives are watching video of a niece’s recent wedding, the
speaker
spots his sister on the screen sitting among the others. His
response
is one of sadness, self-doubt, guilt, and, he reveals, ultimately
shame.
He interrogates himself:
But what guilt, or sadness, was I hiding from?
The knowledge that nothing I’d done had helped?
The fear that I’d done nothing at all? That brief
but nonetheless clear sensation, when the phone call came,
that it was finally over with, finished and done?
A few pages
later, the poet returns to the refuge of memory, specifically the final
time the two were together, a couple of days past Christmas as the
speaker
left his sister’s house in a taxi for the airport following a holiday
visit.
It is this remembered image that survives her, and that likely will
survive
the erosion of time in the speaker’s mind. Santos wonderfully
relates
the moment with gracefully meditative language forming lines in part
fourteen
of the poem:
. . . In memory, (which is to say
in the theater of regret and hopefulness) there is lightness
about her that is hard to explain by description
or imagination, as if, already, some part of her being
had relinquished its watery hold on her—
as if, like a woman standing under a falling star,
she’d momentarily assumed the stance of someone
whose fate is now certain.
Exhibiting
a breathtaking exercise of remembrance and reflection in the
penultimate
part of the poetry sequence, the speaker initially details the final
photograph
the family possesses that depicts his sister. In the picture it
appears
as if the sister has just completed a painting of the landscape around
her, "an oil color of some tall sea pines, backlit / by twilight off
the
water behind," with the "filtered-through, delaminating blue /
loosening
the fretwork of branch and crown," which the speaker surmises had
temporarily
permitted her to manage "her lifelong / childlike forest-fear."
Thus,
in this photo the sister is captured creating images of the landscape
in
art and viewing the world with imagination, perhaps as the poet often
does,
as a means for comfort and a way to confront personal fears. At
the
same time, she becomes the subject of portraiture, as the photograph
shows
those who view it closely:
her face has the slightly
moonstruck look (backlit, as well, by a thin
gilt wash too finely filtered for the camera’s lens)
of someone who’s stayed up reading late a novel
whose story could be her own.
From the
stilled image of the photograph, the poet imagines those moments before
or after the camera’s shutter had clicked. The poem’s lines give
life to the figure frozen within the frame of the picture. In the
speaker’s imagination, she is seen squinting in the sunlight and the
reader
witnesses the woman’s movements when "unpinning her hair, and leaning
back
against / the shed, she yawns once and closes her eyes / as if nothing
weighed on her thoughts that day." But an unexplained silhouette
— "the shadow of a dog (or a child?)" — marks the edge of the photo,
causing
the speaker to comment on how he believes his sister would have found
such
a distraction, perhaps the entire process of elegiac speculation as
well,
entertaining:
To think:
how once she might’ve been amused by this,
this perspective from which we’d frame her life
(the perspective from which our own deaths hide)
with who she’d been, was, and was tempted to be.
How perceptive
the closing lines in this part of the poem are as the poet, continuing
to speculate, projects what the sister’s reaction might have been, not
only to the photograph, but also to those memories others retain of
her,
and to the elegy itself, which now seems to "frame her life." In
some ways, the poem additionally has been written from a perspective in
"which our own deaths hide."
One
of
this elegy’s tasks has been, much like that of the photograph, to
preserve
a detailed still image of the sister in such a way as to suggest the
life
and liveliness of the woman that ironically remains hidden by such an
image.
In doing so, one hope of the poet is to understand the sister, that
"version
of herself," as Santos writes in part twenty, who "once was
becoming,"
but "never had the chance to become." In an odd development,
rather
than merely mourning the death of the sister, or the woman that "she
now ceased to become," this work, as the best elegies often do,
remarkably
gives life to the sister once again, not only for the speaker, but for
all its readers, as we witness her becoming an independent individual
with
an interesting identity of her own.
The
sequence
ends as it began, the final part of the poem listing fragmented
memories
or imagined scenes the speaker maintains of his sister, "the endless
moments
culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each were an event
unto
itself." The poet reinforces the links between memories and
imagination
as, once more, Santos effectively and eloquently uses his memories and
imagination to create an elegantly insightful poetry eliciting
connections
to the past, the present, and the future. The last image of the
sequence
that the speaker divulges, perhaps subconsciously displaying the
influence
of Emily Dickinson and containing the spiritual tone that might be
found
in one of her poems, depicts the woman leaving her house: "a taxi
is
waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after
all
these years, she’s about to take the great journey of her life."
Although
some may read the poetry here as confessional, one might also view the
work as more in the traditional style of Romantic poetry about life and
death, love and loss, mortality and eternity, society and nature, or
memory
and imagination — not too distant from Wordsworth’s works of remembered
emotions arising from personal experiences or Coleridge’s discursive,
contemplative,
and intensely personal poetry. Like the Romantics, Santos does
not
limit his elegiac writings to poems meant to memorialize an individual
or even a group of people. Santos also produces poignant pieces
that
celebrate a specific spot from his past, as seen in the various
childhood
memories, or that lament the lost life of a forsaken location no longer
full of the vigor it once featured. "Abandoned Railway Station"
demonstrates
just such mourning for the past, real or imagined, of a particular
place.
In
his
essay, "Writing the Poet, Unwriting the Poem," Santos focuses on this
poem,
characterizing it as "one in which nothing really happens, about a
place
in which whatever happened before now looms in shadowy afterlife, in a
past welling up through the thin-spun gauze of the present." One
by one, the lines of the poetry, like precise brushwork across a
canvas,
paint a vivid picture; however, this brief work with its two five-line
stanzas moves far beyond the visual, as it also appeals to a reader’s
other
senses. Whether one can almost catch the scent "of wood smoke
from
the baggage stalls" or one is tempted to touch the "terra-cotta dust"
that
covers the place, Santos creates an atmosphere and inserts the reader
into
the midst of this position.
One
could
legitimately wonder what importance such an empty place might have. At
first glance the subject matter for this poem may seem less than
promising.
Indeed, other poems in The Pilot Star Elegies address subjects
seemingly
of minor consequence, including "Wing Dike at Low Water" and "A Tulip
in
Winter," as well as parts from "Of Haloes and Saintly Aspects," a
poetry
series. However, in a review of James Schuyler’s poetry included
in "Connoisseurs of Loneliness" from A Poetry of Two Minds,
Santos
defends a poet’s concentration on topics or subjects that by their
nature
may appear less than dramatic. He observes that "poetry has often
taken as its proper subject the truly negligible things of the
world.
And to pluck them from the dirt of our neglect, to dust them off and
represent
them to us in a wineglass has always been one of its functions."
In
"Writing
the Poet, Unwriting the Poem" Santos explains his marked interest in
the
railway station: "here was a place, an abandoned train station, a
ramshackle
junction of time and space, which invited me (or should I say it
invited
the poem?) to contemplate both the literal and metaphorical meaning of
such things." He goes on to say that an added attraction of such
an abandoned site, one that once "served as a threshold between two
worlds,"
was "not so much the presentness of its location (as residual powers of
representation) as the heady atmosphere of its dislocations (its
accruing
powers of enchantment)." Surely, the station serves
perfectly
as a symbol of all those concerns shown by Santos for instances in
which
the past and the present are brought together or sometimes seem almost
to overlap one another. In "Abandoned Railway Station" evidence
of
a vibrant and vital past, as well as an obvious absence in the present,
exists in details introduced in each of the two stanzas — for example,
an "agent’s office like an abbey chancel" or "silence of thousands of
last
good-byes." In images like these, Santos relishes the opportunity
to use what is missing (he refers to them as "hauntings") to define
what
persists. However, he also likes to imply what has been lost
through
images of what endures, such as the "water-stain" or the "dried ink
pad."
Santos even suggests these images help to project the poem’s readers
forward
as well "into a reverie on those myriad moments of departure and
arrival
by which we come to define our lives."
Surely,
by the time readers reach the end of the poem they have a hint that
they’ve
been tricked by the poet into thinking "nothing really happens," while
they have actually been thrust into a situation in which one is
compelled
to consider the significance of time, its contribution to evolution and
erosion, the movement from past to present, and that steady drift into
the future. A false impression initially convinces the reader
that
this is a static scene of little importance; however, the poet knows
that
this place, especially as it is presented in the carefully chosen
language
of the poem, represents the critical melding between time and
timelessness.
Additionally, Santos sets the stage for a moment of tension, a state of
suspense, when he surprises the reader with a reminder of the tenuous
and
unpredictable nature of life that can be upset at any minute. The
apparent stability and constancy of the current condition may be
disturbed
when least expected, lives unsettled, as his last lines in "Abandoned
Railway
Station" playfully propose the whole location exists "with the
on-tiptoe
atmosphere / of a boule de neige before it’s shaken."
Although
perhaps overshadowed by the ambition and length that characterize
"Elegy
for My Sister," another work in the collection provides an equally
stunning
example of Santos’s skill at writing elegiac lines and creates a great
emotional effect for readers. The poem, "Pilot Stars," from which
this book borrows its title, written in third person and from the
perspective
of a daughter returning home to visit her father, "who lives alone, and
who, he’d / written her late last week, was ‘discovered with a form /
of
cancer.’" "Pilot Stars" begins with the scent and heat of
outdoors
entering the home through an open window, though the calendar has
already
drawn toward late September, a time of transition between seasons.
Alone in
a guest bedroom, which the daughter remembers as "the room / her mother
kept" at times when the parents would fight, the daughter tries to
think
of ways to comfort her father, though whenever she speaks of his
illness,
he becomes upset, and they now argue. After all, the father, a
retired
World War II Air Force pilot, comes from a generation of men who
believed
in the value of reticence rather than the frank talks his daughter
considers
"compulsory, some tested proof / of a power in words." The
daughter
seems uneasy, unaccustomed to her new role as comforter, particularly
caring
for a parent, and as a guide for one who is dying. Consequently,
as if to remind herself of another time when she witnessed her father’s
strength as he guided her through childhood, the poet gives her an
elegant
and engaging flashback in the center of the poem. Once more,
Santos
unites past and present by offering a childhood event saved by the
poem’s
persona — a memory kept almost as a manner of also preserving the
feelings
of innocence, security, and immortality the young girl once enjoyed
under
her father’s care and guidance. The twenty-eight lines of the
flashback
to 1956 are as excellent as any in this collection and deserve to be
read
as a unit:
. . . lying in bed
with the lamp still on, she closes her eyes and tries to sleep,
closes her eyes and watches the way the blood
wells up behind the lids and, mixed with tiny specks
of light, becomes a night sky flecked with stars.
And it’s as if through the dark of memory they’ve come,
all sensed and intended and pointing a way
when the frozen compass locks in place
in the green-glow cockpit’s chill, where it’s 1956
and she’s sailing above the ocean ten thousand feet
in her father’s lap, sustained by an ancient
spine-ticking shine and watching his free hand
check them off on a night map figured with a sextant:
Lyra, Cygnus, Aquila, resetting the crosshairs,
then banking west toward a hunter’s moon,
and like another constellation purled out on the dark,
the islands slowly rolling over the far-flung
boundaries of the southern sky.
Returning
to the present and the current crisis, the daughter hears her father’s
footsteps, late-night pacing in his bedroom above hers that continues
night
after night, part of a "slow / incessant, solitary dying." He is
confronted by the knowledge that an unknown and uncharted path lay
ahead.
The narrator suggests "some terrible mourning had already begun," and
without
a doubt, roles reversed, the daughter, having fallen from childhood,
wants
to accept her new position as care-giver to aid her father through his
period of darkness, to once again "chart a passage between heaven and
earth."
However,
as the poem reaches its haunting conclusion, the daughter seems also to
fear being forced to face the uncertain future without her father’s
guidance.
As is the case with many children whose sense of invulnerability is
lost
when their parents die, she might additionally feel the fear not only
of
losing her father, but also of relinquishing that buffer between
herself
and mortality he has always represented. Finally, after the
renewed
arguments in ways "they had throughout / what he still calls her
‘college
days,’" the daughter desires a reconciling of differences before her
father
dies.
She
finds
herself anguished — enduring anger, despair, and shame — and it appears
as if both are about to enter a "dark like the dark she fell through
then,"
though now it is "suddenly storyless, boundless, and black."
Professing
belief in the power of language — its narratives of our lives, its
naming
of things, its very words — she still would like to talk him through
his
journey, perhaps as much for herself now as for him, the way her father
had once found a way to chart the passage for that "girl lightheaded at
the prospect of life / taken up somehow on the scattered narratives"
while
traveling through a night sky so many years ago.
Sherod
Santos’s fifth book of poetry, The Perishing (2003),
his first since
the
beginning of another century (indeed, another millennium),
appropriately
starts with its title poem as a prologue to the rest of the
collection.
Written in first-person plural, the poem appears to address an anxiety
experienced not only by the poet, but by much of society as we enter a
new era. Within the poems there are hints at transitions beyond
the
mere chronological turning of the calendar pages to the twenty-first
century.
In addition, the poet faces further responsibilities and worries in his
position as husband and father, as well as his own growing acceptance
of
mortality as he advances in age toward the approach of his death.
Moreover, the speakers in Santos’s poems express an assumption of
greater
vulnerability as individuals and as citizens in the political
atmosphere
post-September 11, 2001.
Santos’s
lyrical lines manage to move past the purely personal and speak broadly
for many of his readers when he engages in language like the following:
"it was we came to see / the sound / of our own perishing, / the
all-but-unthinkable
erasure / that’s both part of and apart from us." Containing a
gradual
consciousness "of something unsayable slipping away," this poem
properly
sets the tone for the whole volume. In addition, it significantly
sets forth a test, perhaps even a dilemma, to be met by this writer
known
for his exploration of memory and imagination, as once again those two
aspects of the poet’s tactics are immediately placed into the
spotlight.
The
speaker
in the opening poem reveals the perishing to be "like a memory lost /
in
the evanescence of remembering." One could wonder whether present
circumstances endanger that desire held so dear to preserve people and
places from the past. Indeed, this entire collection seeks to
note
those aspects of our wider world that are passing, as well as remarking
upon people and places vanishing from the poet’s personal life.
For
Santos, time moves forward and the hopes for the future in our lives
dwindle,
just as history itself is defined as a series of losses, a compilation
of those things he sees perishing on this planet as we enter a new
century.
The mood of the moment appears pessimistic, "as the feelings it
awakened
in us / seemed gathered up into the passing, / tinged with the
nothingness
still to come." However, the poem closes with lines extolling the
saving virtue of imagination:
. . . we barely think
to miss it now the time has come
to imagine ourselves all over again,
to imagine us as we’d been before
we heard that sound in the nettle trees
and recognized it for what it was.
Most of
the poems in the first section of The Perishing, as well as a
few
sprinkled through the remainder of the collection, are brief lyrical
pieces.
In a few of the shorter poems Santos again considers subjects that
might
be seen by some as less developed, slight, or "negligible," a term he’d
used in his review of James Schuyler’s poetry. Although the
reader
is reminded of Santos’s endorsement of such subject matter as one of
the
functions of poetry, "to pluck them from the dirt of our neglect, to
dust
them off and represent them," the longer and stronger poems in The
Perishing
could be viewed as inadvertently working against these limited lyrical
pieces. In section one, "The Fostering," a more developed work,
takes
another close look at the speaker’s past with his brother and his
mother,
resulting in an additional terrific poem concerning childhood memories
of a mother’s sad situation that once more includes the importance of
imagination
to connect the past, present, and future: "She began aloud to imagine
herself,
// To imagine us, too, in a future we soon / Realized was as
inescapable
as it was / Unreal." As inviting and intriguing as "Llandudno"
(addressing
issues similar to those in "Abandoned Railway Station") and "Hill Road
in Ukiah" (another elegiac lyric) may be, these two brief pieces
surrounding
"The Fostering" suddenly seem insufficient, like beginnings of larger
works
or parts belonging to an extended sequence. Perhaps
self-conscious
of this predicament, Santos starts another short lyric, "Greencastle,"
with a question containing as well a defense: "Why complicate what is
simple?"
Almost
as if Santos has become a victim of his own success brought about by
his
skill at producing expanded meditative lyrics, one has come to expect a
greater amount of attention complete with more complex questioning and
contemplation. Perhaps the astonishing growth of Santos’s ability
to sustain a compelling meditative voice acts as another factor for
readers
who might prefer the more comprehensive poems in this book to the other
brief pieces — "Zero at the Bone," "A Sound Like Rain," "Greencastle,"
"Berlin," and "A Baker’s Dozen for Zachary." As good as these
works
may be, they are overpowered by the sheer personality and
persuasiveness
present in the voices of the poet or persona narrating the bolder and
more
moving longer works that make up most of the book. Among those
more
ambitious pieces, readers will find at least a handful of the finest
poems
written by an American poet in recent years.
In
section
two, "Café Society" tells of an exiled military ruler from a
South
American country who has been living in Paris the last two
decades.
He has been out of power so long that today nobody seems to even
remember
him, let alone want to assassinate him, and he can now participate
safely
and openly in social activities such as "morning coffee at the
street-side
/ Tables of Les Deux Magots." In an apt comparison for Paris, the
narrator notices: "Politics has its passing fashions." However,
the
reader is reminded that with the use of memory "nothing / In history is
ever lost," as Santos reports the former tyrant’s "memory of an
incident
a human-rights / Group once pointed up in a U.N. document." As
one
might expect, the poem shifts from present to past, drifting to a
detailed
description of that horrifyingly vicious occasion witnessed by "three
mothers
who’d been summoned / To watch through the open window / Of a barber
shop"
while a young rebel is beaten, stripped, and tortured, "bound
spread-eagle
/ To a tabletop." In marvelous metaphorical lyricism, the boy is
displayed as if his body was nothing more than grotesque decoration or
he was a participant in a religious rite:
The bound limbs merely symbolical,
The bruised torso illumined like
An altarpiece, or a Christmas crèche,
By the light of a hand-held kerosene lamp
Around which insects thronged and fell
In a flurry of enamelings.
In language
reminiscent of his lyrical rendering of the emotionally wrenching
Holocaust
tale communicated in "The Story," Santos’s lines again focus on the
pain
and suffering some so willingly inflict on others, and his lines
forcefully
appeal to one’s passionate reactions to the inhumane acts sometimes
committed
by fellow humans. The details prove ever darker and more
deceptive
as the officer directs that "shocks should be administered / From a
jumper
cable attached at one end / To a dry cell battery in a transport truck,
/ At the other end to the grotesquely swelling / Spectacle of the rebel
soldier’s genitals." But decades later, though never brought to
justice,
the man who once commanded such an atrocity has lost all his power, and
even his notoriety, as he spends every day idly at the café or
moving
unrecognized through the avenues of Paris. Santos concludes the
poem
with a different emphasis on memory, drawing the reader into the
current
world of this war criminal, following him:
. . . unhampered through
That lustral wash of people on the boulevard
St. Germain des Pres, a liquid element
Which has come to be, in its haute bourgeois
Anonymity, an otherness he enters as easily
As the past now passes out of memory.
The following
poem in the collection, "The Art of the Landscape," continues Santos’s
broadening and brooding examinations of pain or grief, as he also
contemplates
how art and history, artifice and reality, relate to one another.
Selecting photographs of Tanzanian refugees by Sebastião Salgado
as a starting point, Santos again describes the details of tragic
conditions
in which some people live and die. The opening stanza’s specifics
of suffering and death shown in his narrative evoke overpowering
emotions
for readers:
The far-flung encampments of washpots,
Lean-tos, scattered rags, the emaciated, fly-
Ridden children, the scabbed, hollow-eyed
Men and women gathering twigs, or skewering
Rats for a cook-fire, a populace that appears
To have wandered here across the salt expanse
Of a drought-stricken, uninhabitable earth.
The poet
sees these conditions with an understanding that the photos themselves
are both documentation and art, but in neither category can they ease
the
suffering or console those pictured. Indeed, like much artwork,
the
photographs frame their horrendous scenes forever, and like most
documentation,
they record without repairing the painful situations they depict.
Speaking in first-person plural, the narrator brings in his readers and
comments on how we expect, perhaps accept as well, "a grief beyond the
reach / Of mercy, for everything about them, / We realize, will go on
forever
and always."
Yet, the
poet knows the very act of artistic impression, whether in a photograph
or in the Luminists’ landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, can
create a false impression, one that softens the state of the natural
world
it exposes, just as a human element taints the natural landscape.
Subconsciously, the artist (including the poet) joins together "what we
honor / And what deplore," thus causing confusion or troubling the
conscience
of viewers who are torn by their admiration for any art drawn from such
suffering:
And isn’t that, after all, what worries us most
About this picture? A beauty unchastened
By experience? The idea that with deliberate care,
With weighed precision, the photographer
Has taken the measure of some pale
Effulgence that falls with what is hardly grace
On the whole anonymous tragedy held
In the hollow of an outstretched hand?
Or is it more that this is a landscape
From which human suffering is not dispelled?
Santos turns
to the theme of memory, as well as the use of a pun or two for a
transition
to a different picture, one from the Kosovo war front: "A rent in
memory
/ And Time recalls another photograph / by a
photojournalist."
A Serbian soldier, having momentarily put aside his rifle, is depicted
bent over a piano discovered among a group of musical instruments onto
which he has stumbled while on patrol. The narrator imagines that
when the soldier plays a Mozart composition — the popular, yet
deceptively
expressive concerto in D Minor — "with exceptional / Tenderness and
care,"
somewhere out of sight in a cave on a mountainside, where members of "a
family of Albanian musicians" have found shelter for nearly three weeks
with only one week’s worth of food and water, the chords of music can
be
heard. In fact, the piano’s sounds are so familiar and inviting
that
the family members find themselves "inclining nearer the mouth / Of the
cave, leaning out into the fleet andante / Of each carefully
articulated
measure." For a moment the act of art, the performance on the
piano,
seems to pitch "beyond the reach of space and time." The power of
art to still a moment, to give a false impression of peace and
security,
deceives the mind. As with the first photograph of the Tanzanian
refugees, and as with much art involved with reflecting moments of
human
suffering or human cruelty, what the viewers honor and what they
deplore
co-exist — perhaps sometimes even come perilously close to confusing
the
two in viewers’ minds. In this case, it is "as if the weight of
each
note / Could quicken the mind’s capacities." Santos concludes the
poem with a meditative passage wondering how or "if the mind could
actually
abide such things / As a sniper’s hands on the piano keys / Of a Mozart
concerto in D minor."
"Café
Society" and "The Art of the Landscape" point out a couple of
incongruities
in contemporary culture. In one poem a vicious tyrant retires
anonymously
to the safe haven available in the luxurious and civilized café
society of Paris. In the other poem powerful photographs
evidencing
atrocious human conditions and violent behavior are also evaluated as
works
of art. In both instances Santos demonstrates how contrary or
ambiguous
circumstances can create complex emotional reactions. At times,
malicious
acts and meritorious art may be interwoven in a single experience, and
one’s responses are likely to be ambivalent. Malignant elements
of
human activity cannot be easily extracted from life or separated from
those
aesthetically pleasing portions of art. In fact, much of art,
especially
elegiac poetry, relies upon one’s knowledge of sadness and suffering in
order to provide comfort and solace. The loveliness of a Mozart
concerto
or a Kensett painting is only enhanced when it is submitted for
appreciation
beside the sometimes-dreadful social or political events of everyday
existence.
The sense of immortality great art often can offer is only as valuable
when placed against the grave dangers inherent in life, when such
artifice
in literature is positioned in contrast to readers facing the reality
of
their own mortality. Wallace Stevens recognized a similar sort of
paradox when he declared, "Death is the mother of beauty."
In The
Perishing Santos also revisits a couple of the fiction writers
mentioned
as influences in poems from "The Art of Fiction" section of The
Southern
Reaches. One of the most fascinating poems in The
Perishing,
"Landscape with Missing Figure," concentrates on Thomas Hardy’s fragile
state of mind in his later years when he continued to be haunted by
memories
of his deceased wife Emma. As literary historians have
chronicled,
after Emma’s death in 1912 Hardy experienced extreme emotional anguish
and guilt for the manner in which he had mistreated his wife,
apparently
often behaving indifferently towards her needs and, even during her
extended
illness, ignoring her deteriorating health. For the rest of his
life,
Hardy felt remorse and sought some form of forgiveness for himself
through
his late poetry (including a number of his greatest poems) of personal
confession and regret. Writing the poetry partially as penance
and
to some extent as a way to record his own sympathetic version, Hardy
perhaps
hoped to achieve exoneration for the unhappy marriage and Emma’s
death.
Hardy’s series of elegiac poems even seemed intent on relieving him of
feelings of neglect and alleviating him from responsibility for his
wife’s
suffering and sadness.
The
action
in "Landscape with Missing Figure" occurs in 1919 with Hardy depicted
at
the age of seventy-eight. Amid magnificent opening descriptions
of
natural elements, Santos positions Thomas Hardy observing a figure, "a
man or woman," he believes he’s seen moving across a length of
landscape
along the coast. Hardy studies the scenery, where a "fixed,
unstable
interplay of light / And shadow fired for only a brief half-hour /
While
the sun burns down to a grenadine stain, / A blood spot on the
waterline."
Santos also characterizes Hardy’s honed talent and writer’s eye: "His
lifelong
habit to worry an image / To the point that it will render up, limned /
With the nacre of his thoughtfulness, / Some pearl-trace of its inner
life."
Like Santos himself, Hardy’s descriptions of the external landscape and
natural scenery through meditative language serve perfectly to reflect
internal meanings. However, as with much of the other poetry in The
Perishing, Santos expands the scope of the poem to include those
worlds,
social and political, beyond its individual’s private life. In
this
period, at the end of World War I, Hardy knows:
. . . he has seen it all before,
The shell-shocked soldiers furloughed out
Along the loamy Weymouth lanes;
The pauper peasants harrowing twigs
Beside a burning heap of couch grass;
The destitute and broken, the incurable
And insane washed up like dreck
In the railyards, ditches, alleyways, and jails.
Santos also
shows Thomas Hardy’s struggle with imagination and memory as Hardy
attempts
to discern the identity of the figure he believes he’s seen sauntering
beside the sea: "the more he tries to imagine it, / The more it seems
this
figure tends / From the asylum of his own memory." Hardy’s
troubled state of mind, perhaps in the same condition when he wrote
"the
belatedly heartfelt book of poems" for his dead wife, creates a
situation
in which he confuses past and present, art and reality, permitting him
to conclude the imagined person is his "Mad Emma come to rail at him
again
/ For the poverty he’d made of marriage."
Nearly
two decades ago Alan Williamson wrote, in Introspection and
Contemporary
Poetry, of how at times "the poet cultivates himself by increasing
his disunity." Williamson described the poet’s process of
introspection
as one in which "empathy itself can be facilitated by self-knowledge,
as
it is certainly impeded by self-ignorance." Indeed, one also
wonders
if the poet’s struggles with imagination and memory cause as much pain
as they offer relief. Hidden fears, haunting images, and legions
of reasons to doubt one’s motives linger in the realm of a poet’s
introspection.
The more the poet examines the miseries of his past, the more the
present
becomes sorrowful: the more knowledgeable of himself, the more
vulnerable
he makes himself.
In
this
poem, Hardy suggests just such an anguishing resolution when the
speaker
finds himself "poised between a nameless terror / On the one hand, an
inexorable
/ Sorrow on the other." He poses a question, asking if this is
"the
insight writing leads to / After all these years?" Nevertheless,
he carries on with his work, knowing only the desire to write,
continuing
to fill the notebook he constantly "carries in the pocket of his
overcoat"
with precise description of his surrounding landscape. The
conclusion of the poem is devastating as the poet realizes his links to
life may be defined by his loyalty to art. And while his
heartfelt
art has enriched those who read the works, he believes his riches were
perhaps limited to the rewards brought about by a rather heartless, yet
artful promotion of those works and himself over other aspects of his
life:
The days of happiness he has given others,
Will never amount to anything more
Than a random notation transcribed against
A life made up, in greater part, by plotting,
Rancor, book reviews, money, apostasy, and art.
"A Writer’s
Life" presents another poem designed to examine the introspective
reflections
on the courses a writer chooses to follow. The writer Santos
selects
as subject for this work remains unnamed throughout the poem, though
there
are details inserted as hints that suggest Elizabeth Bowen (inspiration
for "Death" in The Southern Reaches) may have served at least
loosely
as a model for the persona. In this epistolary poem, the persona
addresses her letter to a young woman, Anne, "the brightest student"
the
writer has ever encountered and one who has apparently expressed desire
also to become a writer. With a tone that echoes the one heard in
"Landscape with a Missing Figure," the persona in "A Writer’s Life"
questions
the young woman, wondering whether she’d "really want a life so . . .
so
what? / So self-inflicted as this one." It is as if the
speaker
has discovered, as had Hardy in the previous poem, how the
introspective
nature of art, particularly as part of a writer’s life, can be
difficult
to accept because of the vulnerability and self-imposed pain invariably
involved in the process. At one point, the author of the poem’s
letter
writes with imagery that additionally mirrors a number of familiar
lines
from Santos’s other and often somewhat autobiographical poems of
meditation
or reflection: "it’s as though throughout / That brief excursion, that
all-too fleeting / Sleight of hand, I’d watched from afar / My own life
pass across the windowpane."
The
older
author counsels the young woman a writing life leads toward an
uncertain
destination, an end not always as fulfilling as one might hope.
Especially
later on when a writer finds herself in a future where her ability to
create
great or merely creditable work may be waning, sometimes frustration,
even
embarrassment, suddenly substitutes for satisfaction. The
individual
who has been led forward by her skill as a writer, and who has given
herself
over to that talent, may be betrayed by her own writer’s intuition that
permits her to perceive her shortcomings. Soon she might see she
has been abandoned by the "gift" that had for so long defined her life
and her art as the two were intertwined:
. . . little by little,
In a slow declension imperceptible to sense,
The mind’s eclipsed, the promise dims,
And the light goes out altogether.
And then one day you find yourself
Alone and a little embarrassed
That you’ve dared outlive your gift.
Yet, the
poem’s persona admits that, even given the opportunity to start over,
she
would not change the choices she’d made to pursue the writer’s
life.
Nevertheless, the writer’s letter-poem ends with lines of advice
addressed
to the young woman positing a belief that the nature of "a happy
life" is contrary to art, thus contradictory to the writer’s life: "the
supreme art is a happy life, / And a happy life anathema to art."
In these closing statements, the speaker seemingly concedes the
supremacy
in importance of one’s happiness in life over one’s creation of art;
therefore,
she presents a dilemma artists, especially writers, must confront when
they know they would feel unhappy not striving to achieve even more
with
their inventive gifts. Indeed, the author closes the poem by
posing
a paradoxical situation for the student receiving this letter with
youthful
enthusiasm as she prepares to take up her own writing life. The
young
woman is faced with wondering how she can continue to follow a path
that
makes her happy if that path will eventually arrive at a point where
her
desire or insights involved with writing might just as likely counter
her
contentment, creating disappointment and unhappiness instead.
Throughout
his poems, Santos’s narrators are often faced with similar situations
in
which the speaker’s impulse toward recollection, reflection, and
imagination
produces magnificent poetry, but also engenders an awareness of the
world,
of others, and especially of one’s self that causes personal pain for
the
poem’s persona, if not for the poet. In his essay, "Eating the
Angel,
Conceiving the Sun," Santos states his faith in "poetry’s stubborn,
inborn,
implausible resolve to tell the truth, however incongruous, however
insufferable
the telling may be. Poetry is intent on saying those things we’re
most determined to hide, even from ourselves."
Another
powerful poem in The Perishing, "The Talking Cure," contains
two
simple and straightforward lines that could characterize much of a
message
repeatedly revealed in Santos’s works: "Things aren’t always what they
appear to be, / And neither, I suppose, are the things we feel."
Taking its title from Freud, the persona in this poem is a man, now
married
thirty-five years, narrating to his analyst an event that occurred when
he was a thirteen-year-old adolescent. In the story of the poem,
the boy is awakened at 2 a.m. by one of the guests attending his
parents’
party in another part of the home. The woman who wakes the
narrator
begins to undress, taking off her blouse and guiding the young man’s
hand
towards her. In his state of half-sleep, the boy wonders whether
what he is experiencing is really happening or just a dream.
However,
when the woman takes his hand, he discovers something unexpected: "She
draws it, you see, along / The raised abrasion of a surgical scar that
cut / In a transverse angle from her rib cage to her shoulder."
The
woman’s
purpose for approaching the adolescent becomes apparent, as she needs
to
regain the respect and reassurance she no longer receives from her
husband.
She wants to feel wanted again: "She simply wants me now to look at
her,
wants me / Just to look and see the body her husband refuses / To
see."
When she undresses for the boy, her body "backlit by an aquarium glow,"
she does so with tears. Clearly, the emotional scar the woman
endures
is far deeper and more traumatic than the surgical scar she shows the
teenager.
The woman’s sadness and emotional pain are beyond the grasp of the
thirteen-year-old,
just as the young boy’s imagination sometimes confuses reality with
fantasy;
however, as he recounts the events nearly half a century later, the
narrator
displays a sharpened ability to understand the woman’s emotional
turmoil.
The man admits, "It took me years to sort what’s fact from
fiction."
Today,
when he thinks of the incident, the man is struck by his own
tears:
What I recall is that, as she stands there figured in
The pale aquarelles her ever-receding memory
Paint, I swim out toward her to be taken up by
The current of her inclining arms, to be folded back
Into another world where my own tears start,
Though what I wept for I can’t say—that is what
I remember.
Additionally,
the narrator remembers another event concerning the same woman, that
"her
husband found her / Four months pregnant, sprawled out naked / On the
bathroom
floor beside an emptied bottle / Of Nembutal." The poem’s persona
also reveals he and the woman had continued a connection through
intimate
letters, a correspondence dismissed by a caseworker as an unnatural
perversion
having "nothing to do with love at all." Although at the time the
teenager allowed that description of his relationship, he now doubts
its
accuracy. As he reports to the analyst at the end of the poem,
"who’s
to say that what / I had with that poor woman years ago / Wasn’t
actually
love of a finer kind than I’ve / Known since, or am ever likely to know
again?"
Nowadays,
however, the man’s memories of his relationship with that woman who was
emotionally abandoned by her husband are complicated by his own
situation
as a married man. Addressing his analyst, he declares, "you’re
probably
wondering why, in thirty-five years / Of marriage, I never told my wife
about any of this." The narrator confesses he is afraid of
hurting
his wife with such a confidence. In his explanation to the
analyst
as to why he rejects the notion that keeping this secret from his wife
might "hurt her more," the speaker seems to come to a more acute and
insightful
understanding about the uncertainties humans hold when trying to
comprehend
the nature of love and loving:
. . . it seems to me, despite
That conventional wisdom, some truths
Can do more harm than good. Or maybe
I’ve only come to feel, as time has passed,
That we understand less than we pretend
About how to love, or why we should,
Or when it’s right, or what we ought
To expect from it.
At an initial
glance, "The Talking Cure" may resemble the poetry and prose pieces
concerning
love and sex in The City of Women, particularly those involving
an adolescent’s early encounters with women or fantasies about
them.
However, "The Talking Cure" derives its strength from a somewhat
different
source. Much of the power in this poem arises from its narrator’s
willingness to challenge a few conventional attitudes through an
unusual
relationship and review the concept of love or our desire to be
accepted
by others for who we are. In his interview with Andrew Mulvania,
Santos speaks of the dramatic monologue in "The Talking Cure," as well
as his misgivings about such analysis and the "very odd therapeutic
notion
we’ve inherited." Nevertheless, Santos also acknowledges great
debts
to Freud, "one of the two or three most influential thinkers in the
twentieth
century." Among the benefits modern artists owe to Freud, Santos
suggests, is the promotion of "a symbolic order."
However,
the narrator in "The Talking Cure" also recognizes the limitations of
such
a process of self-discovery, as well as the possible shortcomings of
psychoanalysis.
Consequently, the speaker in this work becomes almost as much an
introspective
poet as he is an analyst’s patient. His newfound understanding of
himself, and his discovery of uncertainties in his evaluation of past
and
present situations are similar to the kind of examinations and
conclusions
reached by the poet’s personae elsewhere. As with the
incongruities
uncovered in "Café Society" and "The Art of the Landscape," in
which
contrary or ambiguous circumstances cause complex emotional reactions,
the persona in this poem confesses to feelings of love for the woman
who
sought him out in a moment of personal pain and sorrow.
Although
the poem’s narrator casts accusations at the analyst and those in his
profession
who "sometimes feel / Like the ones to whom it has devolved — /
From
God, no less — to serve as custodians / For our souls," at
the same time his narrative, like much introspective poetry, seems to
serve
a purpose as a talking cure of its own. Once more, the poet
displays
his skill at inventing ways in which the past and present influence an
individual simultaneously. Again, through use of memory and
imagination,
situations or relationships from differing eras coexist, as recounted
images
of past experiences transcend time and act as important elements in
understanding
the present or shaping one’s future.
Indeed,
as Santos discerns the public and personal perishing that has occurred
at the end of the twentieth century, he begins to look forward to find
what the future could contain. In "Airport Security" — inscribed
with the date of January 1, 2002 — Santos steps onto the uncertain
terrain
of the twenty-first century, the post-September 11 era of fear and
anxiety.
The new century has not begun with a promising start, and the poet
asks:
"Why does anyone ever leave home? / And the answer is suddenly hard to
find." However, by the close of the poem the narrator offers a
bit
of hope in a single wonderful metaphor, when he sees those who face
each
day with courage by insisting on traveling through life and into the
future
despite the many dangers or the multiple memories of past atrocities:
. . . a hand floats up
Above the mantled, green-lit arbor and,
With a sense of divine authority,
Guides us forward with a beeping wand,
A gesture by which we can’t help feel
That we’ve been rightly singled out
For all we’ve really claimed to be:
An army of unarmed travelers who
Not only would not do others harm
But remain unhindered by those who do.
Of the many
poems written in response to the atmosphere of fear infiltrating much
of
society since September 11, 2001, Santos’s piece seems to strike the
right
note. In its deceptively plain statements, the poem poses a
question
many may have thought to ask as we face our daily insecurities;
nevertheless,
it also supplies a surprising answer. The way to combat forces
that
wish to infuse fear and inflict injury is not necessarily to reply only
with "state troopers in black jodhpurs / And full tactical belts,
heavily
armed." Another real response is for ordinary unarmed citizens
also
to move forward with their lives, continuing to travel bravely toward
our
next experiences with hope for a more fortunate future.
Speaking
of The Perishing, Santos has commented in a news article: "To
me,
the twentieth century represented the vanishing of many things, and so
this book represents coming to terms with the unstoppable march of the
twentieth century." In this collection, Santos chronicles
some
of the tragic circumstances of the past century, whether they are
instances
of genocide or terrorism, incidents of political or military
horror.
In some of the most significant poems of this collection, Santos gives
his readers glimpses at a few of the tragedies of the twentieth century
that happened across the globe: he presents a poem that covers historic
figures from Tamerlane to Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Pol Pot to Mao
("The
Monument"); he visits the tragedies of Rhwandan refugees in Tanzania
and
the displaced persons of the war in Kosovo ("The Art of the
Landscape");
he depicts the life of an exiled South American dictator and the
suffering
of his victims ("Café Society"); he presents a snapshot of "the
airlift into Germany" ("Berlin"); he offers a brief image of World War
I ("Landscape with Missing Figure"). And now in the twenty-first
century, Santos expresses the distress and dread felt by himself and
his
fellow travelers ("Airport Security").
Nevertheless,
despite the various poems of pain and loss that comprise The
Perishing,
Santos’s collection is not as totally bleak as the title might
suggest.
Just as the personae in many of Santos’s poems persevere through
moments
of personal pain, disappointment, or loss, the speaker in "Airport
Security"
calls for all of us to proceed through the public trauma and social
anxiety
of our current world. His is an example of how one must continue
on despite the great adversity or the presence of evil in our
lives.
Those who cannot move forward into the future will become victims of
the
past. For Santos, one of the mysteries of the human spirit seems
to be its ability to struggle with memories of past instances of
brutality
or cruelty and the immense desire of humans to survive despite
difficult
times. An earlier indication of Santos’s concern with such themes
was witnessed in "The Story," his poem about the Holocaust tales at the
opening of The Pilot Star Elegies.
In
addition,
ever since the poems of homage in the "Art of Fiction" section of The
Southern Reaches, Santos has repeatedly visited the lives of
artists
who experience contrary or ambiguous circumstances that cause complex
emotional
reactions. In The Perishing, readers witness similar
concerns
and fervent expressions in a few of the finest poems — the feelings of
regret and guilt expressed by Thomas Hardy that result in passionate
poetry
about his troubled relationship with his wife or his mourning of her
death
("Landscape with Missing Figure"); the equivocal advice offered by the
experienced novelist to her promising student ("A Writer’s Life"); or
the
emotional and emphatic language of Apollinaire addressing his readers
in
a final testament ("Black Corsage (1880-1918)").
In
"Red
Advancing," a poem written as an homage to Piet Mondrian and originally
titled "Love & Neglect," Santos again addresses the introspective
life
of an artist joining the images of the outer world with the inner
landscape
of the mind, as well as mixing memory, imagination, and creativity:
It was, after all, a small matter of spirit,
An inner vision of the outer world,
And he considered it all routine enough,
The canon of proportions in a slant
Of light, the coloratura of the birdsong . . ..
The artist
acknowledges that all his work is the product of past experiences, the
"poetic faculty" he exhibits was always "already there within him," and
the art created in the present is merely a product of images from his
past
preserved in his subconscious, in this case "a smithy’s anvil he’d one
day / As a boy observed floating past // On the river."
For
two
decades Santos similarly has exhibited works of art produced in the
present,
but formed in the past. People and places preserved in his
memories
have risen from his subconscious to fill the pages with vivid visions
written
in powerful and poignant poetry. As his work has matured and
become
more ambitious, Santos has engaged himself even more with the social
and
political conditions of his fellow citizens and the troubling times in
the world around him. Although his themes sometimes seem dark,
presenting
somber personal or public scenes of the past and present, the poetry
often
manages to provide moments of illumination that guide readers forward
toward
faith in a more promising future.
In
the
closing pages of A Poetry of Two Minds, Santos relates a story
of
how he once attended midnight Mass at Paris’s Notre-Dame on Christmas
Eve.
He speaks of joining others in the congregation, individuals visiting
from
all over the world, as the unified voices of the packed cathedral rose
to sing hymns. Santos reports in "In a Glass, Darkly" that
"through
the heady combination of song and the human voice we were lifted
momentarily
beyond the confines of our individual selves (or fears, as the case may
be)." Santos concludes that he believes "something similar
happens in poetry." In defense of contemporary poetry and perhaps
as a salute to his fellow poets, Santos further states: "it pleases me
to think that in America today we have all of these thousands of people
singing, and even if none of us is ‘as good as Dante,’ perhaps
collectively
we express some as-yet-unquenched spirit, some potential that’s still
important
enough to slow our march toward self-destruction."
With the
publication of The Perishing, Sherod Santos has at last
successfully
united his unique ability to present moving personal poems committed to
contemplation of issues such as desire and death, love and loss, with a
broader, but equally compassionate, concern for others’ pain and
suffering
under cruel or brutal political and social conditions. For more
than
twenty years, Santos has demonstrated an amazingly masterful touch in
his
poetry. His skill at bridging past and present through memory and
imagination has always been on display. The precise language in
his
poetry has continually exhibited an eloquence readers can appreciate
and
an elegance readers can admire. His work has provided the perfect
blend of intellectual understanding and emotional empathy. His
narratives
have often been inspired by autobiography without resulting in the
limiting
restrictions sometimes evident in confessional poetry. His
carefully
crafted lines have been written in an intriguing personal voice that
avoids
the pitfall of becoming so private that it might exclude some in his
audience.
Santos’s recent ambitious books offer evidence of a leading poet
approaching
the highest level of his art form, and they invite one to wonder what
marvelous
poetry filled with intense and urgent writing may lay ahead.
In
his
interview with Andrew Mulvania, Santos confides that there have been
times
in the past two decades when, for varying reasons, he stopped writing,
brief periods of "silence," but that "he was happy to see them
end."
He acknowledges "the subject of the value or purpose of a life in
writing
. . . does loom large in the new collection." Fortunately for
readers
of fine poetry, the intervals during which he stopped producing poems
have
been relatively short, and Santos always has found reason to raise his
voice once again.
In
the
last paragraph of "In a Glass, Darkly," Santos concludes about
contemporary
poets and poetry that "however grand and uplifting, it isn’t just a
matter
of what we sing, or how well we sing, it’s the quite remarkable fact
that,
in a century like ours, we’ve somehow managed to save from extinction
that
deep-down, fundamental desire to sing." Thankfully, just as he
lifted
his voice in song at that Parisian cathedral years ago, and that
singing
had helped him "to endure," to be "lifted momentarily beyond the
confines"
of his self and his fears, Santos has persevered in his poetry and
maintained
his fundamental desire to sing, to create a lyrical language that not
only
has helped him prevail, but has also enlightened his readers, and has
enabled
others to enjoy poetry. Santos has described the experience of
singing
hymns at the midnight Mass: ". . . pressed side to side, back to front
and front to back, so tightly packed that the sensation was not of
singing
alone, but of singing through everyone around you, and of everyone
singing
through you."
For
two
decades — in poem after poem, book after book — readers of Santos’s
poetry
have felt a similar experience, as though Santos was sharing his life
and
his lyrical language with them, as though they were surrounded by the
scenes
in his poetry and participating in the incidents of even his most
personal
poems. For more than twenty years, now moving from the twentieth
century into the twenty-first century, it has been as if Santos had
invited
his readers to partake in his contemplation of the world around him,
around
them, to join him in his meditations on the kinds of lives we all live,
and all the time his readers have felt as if he was singing through
them.
Books in print by Sherod
Santos;
Santos, Sherod. The
Perishing.
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. ISBN
0-393-05166-8
$21.95
Santos, Sherod. The
Pilot Star
Elegies. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.
ISBN
0-393-04704-0 $22.00
Santos, Sherod. A
Poetry of Two
Minds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
ISBN
0-8203-2204-0 $17.05
© by Edward Byrne