Anne-Marie Oomen & the Creation of Characters

Emily Dickinson wrote that the speaker in her poems is not the poet herself but “a supposed person.” The degree to which a poem’s persona or “supposed person” is a reflection of the poet herself is largely left to biographers, but the question does have an allure. Whether the persona of a given poem is rhetorical device or obscured vehicle of confessionalism is an irresistible question. And, when the speaker is a fully realized fictional character, the poet-persona relationship is further razed, and doubly intriguing. The practical angles created by the triangulation of reader-speaker-poet become as numerous as the reflections in a hall of fun house mirrors.

Creating a character is the ultimate move of subjectivity – perhaps the ultimate move of authorial trust. A character mitigates the dangers of high poetic voice and creates multiple angles of vision by placing the poet both inside and outside the poem at once. Characters can more easily slip into the role of repository for sympathy, judgment, and identification, and pave the way for heightened drama in a thematic collection (or single dramatic lyric).

Fictional (as opposed to “supposed”) personae also allow the poet to reveal difficult truths while more effectively concealing its source. In Maurice Manning’s brilliant Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, Lawrence is the book’s hero, but Manning’s quirky style creates a chasm between his characters’ life and realism; Lawrence’s drama and pain, though universal, belongs to him and him alone. In Cornelius Eady’s collection Brutal Imagination, Eady masterfully personifies Susan Smith’s own fabrication – a black man that she accused of kidnapping her children. The voice of such self-interrogation is one man’s, though the effect bleeds beyond the margins.

Beatrice, battered and on the run in a stolen pickup, is the speaker throughout Anne-Marie Oomen’s Uncoded Woman. Beatrice encounters Barn, both brute and savior, and their pas de deux serves as the backdrop to the collection’s unfolding drama. The reader comes to know Barn, a fisherman that watches the ocean with a cardsharp’s eye, through Beatrice’s defiance and surrender. His seductive promise to her is that they can “stay alive” and each poem is for Beatrice an act of survival.

Beatrice is ideal as narrator and as foil for the poet’s telling of a truth of the female experience; the practical angles created by the triangulation of Beatrice-Oomen-reader serve these poems. Beatrice is coarse, she is dismissive of hidden meanings, and her language is natural and rhythmic, which heightens the tension created between the verse line and the grammatical sentence. The book’s characters lack the demeanor for elaboration, and the reader, free of exposition, is placed directly inside Beatrice’s experience.

In the following poem, Beatrice witnesses a private act turned public with Barn, who looks on “without shame.” Together they serve to name the reader as accessory in an ignominious scene. Worth noting is that the titles of each of the poems in the collection derive from semaphores, the messages created by colors and combinations of flags used by vessels to communicate at sea.

You Should Come as Near as Possible

With Barn, I watch a pair of steelhead
hold their place in the Platte,
her at the gravel bed, him gray

and hovering, warding off
foreign males, the marks
on his body possessive

as spilled ink. He bucks and snaps
at the others, and his sound,
if there were one, a growl at the moon.

And though Barn has watched
this coupling for decades, he
cannot tell me what happens next.

The male shimmies, draws
near her tail, slides over.
Side by side. Shadow. Shadow.

In the narrow current,
the swim together.
They shiver.

We can barely see it—the quiver
before he falls back, quick
arrow into the current below the rocks.

Then the radical gesture. She
flips to her side, slaps down her
silver body against hard stones.

Don’t let the old-timers fool you.
It is not a beautiful sight,
except for the light from her belly,

gorged with river. From her liquid bones
she forces a thousand eggs into a tomorrow
where they will also tremble and slap.

They do this all the afternoon. I watch
like a sinner who lovers her sin, a voyeur
of river with this man who tells me

without any shame,

There, there, she’s doing it.
Woman, she’s ready again.
Oh God, she’ll fill the river.

You Should Come as Near as Possible, from Uncoded Woman by Anne-Marie Oomen. (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2000). Copyright © 2006 by Anne-Marie Oomen . Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.

Morri Creech & Poetic Variation

Variation is predicated upon pattern: once a pattern is established, it can be varied. Giving shape to chaos is one of the multitude effects of this compositional technique. Whitman gave shape to the chaos of his catalogues through a patterning anaphora; Eliot gave shape to chaos through repetition and rhyme. It is this interplay of structure and chaos that, when managed well, creates authority, tension and beauty.

Consider Langston Hughes’ Dream Variations, a poem which deftly cleaves to a metrical pattern and rhyming structure. Its variation of the line “Dark like me” and “Black like me” subtly disrupts the consistent pattern of rhyme and meter. In a rendition of the blues line, historically unbound to formality, the result is a surge of emotion, a breaking out — as much as is possible — from structure. This breaking free mirrors the speaker’s dilemma of being held by the “white day” and finding a temporary freedom at nightfall.

Each stanza of Morri Creech’s Engine work: variations reframes a memory, though the season and its impressions vary. Stanza i opens with the description of a traditional pastoral setting; even the capitalized first lines draw attention to the poem’s desire to embrace traditional poetic techniques. In ii, the pattern breaks syntactically and the comfort and organization that meter provides gives way to disquiet. Enjambed lines play hesitance against flow (“still haven’t made/A sound all afternoon”), ellipses and dashes show the difficulty of expression within the given confines. Creech skillfully mirrors strophic variation with theme — the birds are disconnected from the fruit, and even the fruit’s location is ambiguous — “on vine, or branch…or bramble”. There is a “frayed edge of recollection” that ravels away to nothing.

In a sentence that defies beginnings, stanza iii begins, “All right.” The speaker grasps at a language that is inept, and in a parallel effort at expression, the engine itself is aurally variant with its stammers and whines. As he grapples with distrust of memory, the tools at his disposal seem to be both too many and too few.

The metrical line eventually breaks on the page, yet the images continue to accumulate; the syntax and line coalesce again in v, and the tone reveals a longing tinged with resignation. The polite constancy of the rhythm returns, only to emphasize previous stanzas’ foiled attempt to break out and seize this now lost and complicated understanding, and the speaker is forced into an unsettling choice.

Engine work: variation
By Morri Creech

i
June morning. Sunlight flashes through the pines.
Blue jays razz and bicker, perch on a fence post
Back of my grandfather’s yard. His stripped engines
Clutter the lawn. And everywhere the taste
Of scuppernongs, just moments off the vines,
So sour that you would swear the mind has traced
A pathway through the thicket, swear the past
Comes clear again, picked piecemeal from the dust—

ii
Or else it’s late—September—and the shade
Thicker than I recall: those cardinals,
Finches or mockingbirds still haven’t made
A sound all afternoon, though ripe fruit swells
On vine, or branch . . . or bramble. Thus the frayed
Edge of recollection slowly ravels
Away to nothing, until that place is gone
Where the heart would know its object and be known.

iii
All right. Not to begin with those backlit pines,
Those scuppernongs, the jay perched on a branch
Of sweet gum—no, oak, I think. With what, then?
With my grandfather holding a torque wrench
Or ratchet? Some old engine’s stammer and whine
Before it starts or doesn’t—a house finch,
Singing or silent? Language, too, seems wrong,
Though it’s all I have. Grandfather. Scuppernong.

iv
To fix him in some moment, word for word,
That man who taught me gears and cylinders, sweat,
Precision of machinery—the hard
Love of assembling things:
I know the heat
All summer hung like a scrim where pistons fired
And the boy I was watched in the raw sunlight;
Spilled oil rainbowed in its shallow pan.
One birdcall, maybe. Fruit on a trellised vine . . .

v
Impossible not to change things, move the words
From here to there. It’s late now. Nothing’s settled—
Not engine noise nor the sound of one far bird
The mind sings true. Which version of the world
Should I believe? This morning in the yard
Scuppernongs hang and sweeten. Pine boughs yield
Some fragment of the blue jay’s call, a sound
The resonant air repeats but cannot mend.

This poem appears courtesy of The Waywiser Press (London & Baltimore)

Lynda Hull & Image

It is hard to separate Lynda Hull from her fraught biography of addiction and her early death. Her praise is never without darkness, her confusion never without an attempt at clarity, her triumphs of clarity never without a subtext of chaos. The complexity of emotion that congregates in Hull’s images is part of the gift she has left to her readers.

In her poem Utsoroi, originally published in her book Star Ledger, and now in her posthumously collected poems edited by her husband David Wojahn, only the definition of the Japanese word of the title, and the statement “I have always loved these moments of delicate transition” is expository; the essence of the poem resides in its images — as life, in this poem, is lived within its moments. In general, images are used in poetry to create mimesis — they provide the detail that serves as evidence of a believable landscape. They are also used to illuminate an inner world where descriptions give way to amplifications seeded in the mind. (Thus, one may see a cloud as the fist of Mars, or as carnival candy, depending on one's psyche at the moment.) Arguably, the best images are those that deliver a merging of the two — the representational colliding with the expressive.

Beginning with the “soft tattoo” of newsprint on the commuter’s palm, Hull’s unscrupulously detailed images in this poem are mimetic evidence of the surroundings, born on the representational end of the image spectrum. Empirical detail creates the scene: chambermaid in the window, rain laving the lawn chairs. But her images inevitably endeavor toward the expressive with the least amount of strain. The chambermaid’s unspoken wish is given voice, the chairs are arranged to recall a conversation that took place days ago — an image which provides detail in stasis, but is leveraged for its dramatic effect: people and their conversation once lived here, and they are now lost to the ephemera. A mini-plot surfaces.

The speaker says there is “time enough for a life to change and change utterly.” But in fact, nothing happens in the real time of this poem. Instead, it is a lyric moment with images used to dramatic effect, an effect emphasized by the cinematic unfolding of the couplets. The images are quiet and transitory: a face is backlit, a house is borrowed. The words over, over are whispered as the speaker grants us access to the internal dialogue of her novel’s emploted heroine, making visible what is veiled by the external world. The heroine's words are described as “that sweet rending” — the familiarity of the article, despite this intensely personal, subjective moment, contributes to the tone of inclusion: this scene exists for the reader as well as the speaker.

If there is beauty here, it is in what unfolds. It does not reside in the thing, but the thing as it is altered, as the title suggests — the perfect context for the aim of Hull’s images. Their transcendent quality is a result of the mimetic image that seems to explode with expressionism, as waiters slip out of their jackets, and around them, leaves cast a “fugitive spell.” In one brush stroke, the image deepens to depict something both earthly and holy.

Utsuroi
By Lynda Hull

Of course there’s the rose
tranced across sun-warmed tile,

but also the soft tatto
of newsprint along a commuter’s palm,

the flush of a motel sign the instant
it signals No Vacancy. I have always loved

these moments of delicate transition:
walking alone in a borrowed house

to a slim meridian of dawn barring
the pillow before the cool breeze,

a curtain of rain on the iron steps, rain
laving lawn chairs arranged

for a conversation finished days ago.
The Japanese call this utsuroi,

a way of finding beauty at the point
it is altered, so it is not the beauty

of the rose, but its evanescence
which tenders the greater joy.

Beneath my hands the cat’s thick fur
dapples silver, the slant of afternoon.

How briefly they flourish then turn,
exalted litanies in the rifts

between milliseconds, time enough for a life
to change, and change utterly.

The magnesium flash of headlights
passing backlit the boy’s face

in my novel – the heroine’s epiphany
and she knows she is leaving, a canopy

of foliage surrounds his dark hair
whispering over, over – that sweet rending.

Nothing linear to this plot, simply
the kaleidoscopic click and shift

of variations undone on the instant
evening as it vanishes gilds

the chambermaid’s thin blond hair
in her hotel window and she thinks

I could die now and it would be enough.
Long beyond nightfall, after the café’s closing

the waiters slide from their jackets and set
places for themselves, paper lanterns blowing

in the trees, leaf shapes casting and recasting
their fugitive spell over the tables,

over the traffic’s sleek sussurrus.

Reprinted with permission from Star Ledger by Lynda Hull, published by the University of Iowa Press.

Olena Kalytiak Davis & the Lyric

Gregory Orr has described the lyric poem as the I’s perception of a single incident in which the poet was overwhelmed by extreme emotion and disorder. (Wordsworth also refers to the lyric as a “spontaneous overflow of feeling”, but I appreciate Orr’s addition of “disorder”.) It is personal and subjective, characterized by a sense of immediacy, and intended for an audience only inasmuch as it is an “utterance that is overheard.” (Consider the audience of the apostrophe, a conventional lyrical figure in which the poet is suddenly blessed with the ability to address something otherwise beyond address, such as the heavens or the moon, as in “O moon!”) The lyric poem reverses the power relationship of order and disorder, as it reverses the relationship between will (action precipitated by thought) and prehension (the external acting upon the mind). The lyric is not merely the vehicle to express emotion, but it is the imaginative prehension of emotional states.

When a lyric succeeds, the persona of the poem achieves a kind of mastery over the external world and its inherent disorder (a disorder that in much of life’s events subordinates us). When a poet succeeds in having achieved momentary mastery over the disordered world, it is a rabbit hole, of sorts—it opens the door to a world of allowances.

Olena Kalytiak Davis is a poet who subverts traditional poetic techniques as part of course, but in this lyric poem she seems almost a traditionalist. Davis often presents us with false depictions of reality; her work has echoes of language quo language, characterized by exploiting tone and rhythm as she pushes against traditional formal poetics with a palpable tension. Her obligation is not to express emotion but to translate emotional states into something literal, and as a result, language and form sometimes appear disjointed. In Like Kerosene, her “hands are shovels” — a simile that must be understood aesthetically and not intellectually, for instance. But so much of this poem also has a literal clarity. It is interesting to see her proclivities as an arbiter of post-modern expression meld with the qualities of the conventional lyric. It is in some ways a perfect marriage.

The lyric is externalization at work; such a feat is subject to all sort of missteps on the part of the poet. There’s no dearth of examples of subjective or autobiographical poetry that is private and exclusionary, or poems that use elaborate poetic figures that don’t enrich the meaning. As a reader, we must be open to the poet's presentational apperception, and the poet must create an environment that coheres enough that we readily accept it. At its essence, the poem succeeds or fails by how well (realistically?) the poet builds an environment for the imperceptible to live.

Like Kerosone
By Olena Kalytiak Davis

Yes, it’s daily
that we move into each other—but this morning
I was separate even from myself—
my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair,
and the insect beating against the night
was my heart. My name was hallow
and the sky was made of shale when

I walked into a part of morning
I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still
smoldering with the nightmares of others,
the drunkenness and sorrow rising like dew, like fog,
like smoke back into the clouds. Suddenly,
my face was wet with it. I wanted to lie down
with it. To rest against the almost exhausted night.

Uncertain of what to do there
I started dividing the layers, the sediment,
thinking: Usually I sleep through his sadness.

And the morning asking: Why do you keep track
of the middle of the day when you should be
waxing the moon? How can these young fragile branches
be left out in the darkness, and who set that darkness
wandering inside your heart? Who can your love ignite,
like this, like kerosene?

And then the sky lit the morning.
And then I went in to set my own house on fire.
And then I lay down next to you:
a body filling with feathers or with snow
asking: and who are you that my love can light
like this, like kerosene.

(c) Olena Kalytiak Davis, University of Wisconsin Press (November 1997)