Maurice Manning & the Job / Hamlet Archetype

Maurice Manning writes captivating characters, and the single speaker in his collection Bucolics is one. He is less character, however, than figuration – son of an archetypal foundation laid by Job, and Job’s derivative, Hamlet. While to place the overlay of archetype on any work is to simplify it, the collection’s many intersections with such archetypical heroes prompt useful discussion from which blooms Manning’s own unique hero.

The collection is a petition of poems, titled numerically, spoken in appeal by a lowly field worker to the higher power he calls “Boss.” The collection urges provocative questions about the usefulness of a higher power that is apathetic, negligent, and cruel. While Job’s struggles stem from a wind-and-lightning-bolt-wielding caricature of God, it was Job, not God, who emerged as the deeper character through the poetry that illustrated these tensions. Similarly, by giving voice to his shame, pain and wonder, Manning’s speaker unwittingly creates a three-dimensional world in the face of an absent leader who is void of dimension.

Much like Hamlet, an outgrowth of the Job archetype, Manning’s speaker seems forced into verbalization; he is someone who likely lacks the natural proclivity of expression. His lot in life is a humble one, he is naïve, and his speech is a jaunty collage of unpunctuated low diction that has a tone of spontaneity. He seems to be composing as he speaks, at times finding beauty in what he witnesses fortuitously, at other times inflamed with a frustration he is unable to mask. The lines, spry and variously rhymed, betray this jazz-infused spirit; it is a lyrical evolution of biblical verse.

Both Job’s poetry and Hamlet’s soliloquies comment on themselves, and Manning’s speaker acknowledges the vortex his own questions create (I never know what’s going to cross / my path O never what will make / me ask another question that’s / a question in itself.”) Fixed in the monologic form, the speaker’s internal wonder and doubt necessitate his expression, and create his poetry. The act itself precipitates the ongoing argument of poetry and religion. A didactic read of Bucolics leads to the conclusion that poetry is a figuration of religion and that religion, take away the compelling force to make it fact, is no more than poetry. (Perhaps read “tragedy” for religion for a more Platonic, less biblical reading.)

The monologic form also establishes the grand irony of the collection, which is emphasized by the speaker’s often desperate appeals to engage the mum Boss. Boss’ silence becomes a mounting obstacle as the collection progresses; at times it is even tyrannical. The speaker wonders about Boss’ trousers, what he keeps in his pockets, and his seasonal schedule, and accuses him of being a birdbrain, a gambler, and a heartless manager. (His habit of familiarizing his god is also suggestive of Job.) The dramatic irony creates the gap in which the reader can comfortably turn the questions asked by the speaker on herself.

It is a dramatic, not a verbal irony – the speaker himself seems to be a victim of irony, as Job is a victim of an ironic God: Job’s own lack of irony only serves to exacerbate his struggle. Free from irony, Manning’s speaker’s hope at times undoes him, and at times it is his lifeline. The question of how human beings can become slaves (the servile, impulsive use of “Boss” implies both this power structure and racial divide) to an idea is inescapable. The speaker provides one answer as he admits he needs Boss to “tell him what to do.” Boss is in many ways a necessary fiction.

In the following poem, the speaker’s dream seems to accentuate his own powerlessness against understanding, that is, the limits of his own head. The desire for freedom played against confining boundaries is a recurring theme for the speaker as he struggles to know what is outside of his only known realm.

XVIII

there was a fox Boss in my dream
last night a fox the color of
the field before it wakes to green
I didn’t know there was a fox
about until it moved until
it moved like it was sliding Boss
it slid across a furrow then
I barely saw it sliding to
the woods sliding to the river Boss
I never know what’s going to cross
my path O never what will make
me ask another question that’s
a question in itself I’d like
to know why everything is stuck
in the middle Boss of something else
why the fox was stuck inside my dream
though it was making for the river
do you make nothing Boss but questions
did you set that fox inside my head
did you lay that field behind my eyes

(c) Maurice Manning

This poem courtesy of Harcourt Inc.

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.