Non-Narrative Vision:
on Is by Wayne Dodd

by Mark Halliday

     Wayne Dodd confronts ontological mystery more directly and persistently than any other poet I pay attention to. What is being? What does it mean to exist at all? Dodd’s poems rise again and again like intrepid warriors unwilling to find another battleground, hurling themselves against the shut gates of that First Question. The keynote of Is (BOA Editions, 2003), Dodd’s ninth book of poems, is sounded in these lines from "Now: A Gathering of Fragments":

How mind clings

to the mystery of it: What is –
name, question, indefinable

yearning.

     Whether or not that statement is true of your mind or my mind, certainly it is true that Dodd’s mind clings to that purely total mystery. To my own sensibility, this clinging can seem like an avoidance–or repudiation–of mysteries that are less pure and less total, mysteries of social and moral experience. But I recognize an authentic intensity in the devotion to ontological mystery in Wayne Dodd, as in Wallace Stevens. 
      Stevens has such charisma he can lure a reader into agreeing that the most urgent questions of our lives are ontological (what is real?)–or epistemological (how can we know?), since ontology always morphs into epistemology as soon as it is under stress. When I step back from reading Stevens, it’s as if I shake off a drug and remember that actually in my life the urgent puzzles bypass the ontological and hover in the moral and the psychological: Who am I, as a distinct individual, trying to be? Why? What is the right life for me? What do I owe to other people? What should I do with my memories? Those questions were anathema to Stevens, terribly threatening to his campaign for a sense of well-being in the present, and he constructed incredibly elaborate defenses against those questions in his poetry. Not perfect defenses, though; and I feel that the most touching moments in his poetry occur when those questions suddenly shine through chinks in his armor.
      I will be saying something like that about Wayne Dodd’s poetry, but first let me describe it further in terms of its style and its attitudes toward language, action, narrative, and detail.
      Comparison with Stevens is manifestly appropriate, as allusions to Stevens are everywhere in Is, as they were in Dodd’s previous collection The Blue Salvages (Carnegie-Mellon, 1998). There are also many tonalities of the Eliot of Four Quartets. Dodd clearly intends these echoes and is not diffident in attempting to enact anew the Modernist insistence on radical confrontation with fundamental mysteries. There is a nakedness, a right-out-frontness, in Dodd’s repeated attacks on the essential irreducible nature of existence. I admire this quality of the work: Dodd does not throw us into impenetrable tangles of hints and implications which may or may not be profound, like some loquaciously philosophistical poets (I’m thinking of Graham, Palmer, Ramke); his poems have a dignified openness about what they offer.
      At the same time, this openness is not unrelated to a lack of passion for narrative and for sustained detail, and the minimizing of narrative and detail in Is constantly threatens the poetry with sameness and flatness. (Every kind of poetry generates its own threats.) Dodd’s strategic response to this danger (like Stevens’ response) is a playfulness with language. Indeed, an arch self-consciousness of language is the quality that most noticeably distinguishes Is from Dodd’s earlier books. Many of the titles in Is require us to be aware of language as language, as game of signifiers–"Some Sentences," "Let’s Say This is a Propitious Day," "Postulation and Reply," "Non-Narrative," "Précis," "Q & A (Mostly Q)," "In the Age of the Declarative," "Language Study," "This is a Poem," and more. Such titles might seem to promise a book in which language is proposed as our entire life–language is all we know, language controls us, language is only about language, etc.–that deadly postmodern circle. Fortunately, though, Dodd is actually not trapped in that kind of hypersophisticated reductiveness. Instead–and here again he is like Stevens–Dodd remains painfully aware of realities beyond language. He knows they’re out there, in the vast isness; he feels their darkness. Language does not insulate him from that chilly apprehension–"the world’s body we dream of and long for, its colors burning behind our eyes when we sleep."

Out there? Is?
Well, yes, but always going away

faster than even a dream can dream
of catching. All this dust in motion, this

hereness–That’s it. It
is us,

in moonlight, say,
say under a window.

The language-consciousness of "in moonlight, say," does not point toward some needless theoretical reminder that a poem is only words; instead it points toward a more seriously bleak perception, namely that the little distinctions we make (moonlight, starlight, sunlight) cannot alter the fact that we all must live the same story.
      The eight lines quoted above might be expected to belong in a poem with a stark title (like "Going Away" or "Out There"), but no, the lines begin a poem entitled "Looks Like We’re Going to Have to Knuckle Down Down Here, Winsocki". The anti-mandarin playfulness of such a title signals Dodd’s core feeling that all human experience–our encounters with Nature, our longing for a sublime beloved, our cheering for a touchdown in college football–must keep spinning around the same essential bafflement. Language, then, can only help us endure that bafflement: maybe by providing the relief of momentary epiphanies which feel like glimpses of the Truth; but more definitely by strategically postponing the impact of pure sheer bafflement, divertingly decorating the surfaces of our ontological ignorance, enabling us to pose a briefly appealing figure against the ground of chaos. Here is the first section of Dodd’s poem "Figure and Ground":

Late-winter definition: Quotidian: that is to say,
"rain." Always

the same slow drag of gray
along the window, always

the same erosional track
down walls, that steadily downward

wash of mind
toward matter’s ultimate (hypothetical)

stillness. Still,
the words keep showing up for work,

as always, pushing and pushing us
past the moment, urging their claims

of something beyond
this brown swirl

of mice and mud,
of something more within the swirl

and the swirled.

     Language keeps showing up for work, though our company will not emerge from this bankruptcy. Since the world will not answer our questions, we can engage in dialogue with ourselves, pretending sometimes to echo the world’s voice with our own. That game is the subject of Dodd’s poem "Postulation and Reply" (among others), and it is not all misery; we can create "patterns which, momentarily, // despite the lapses and lacunae, comfort / and assuage."
      Yes, but the playfulness in Dodd’s Is does not turn out to imply a comic redemption of our lives the way it purports to do in the work of more essentially ludic poets. Play is not permitted to dissolve or disarm the central frightening ignorance that is Wayne Dodd’s inescapable subject. That condition never goes away, and never even seems to go away for more than a second. What we do won’t make a difference. This is why Is can’t sustain any interest in action, or in narrative.

Who are these two who kiss and pass
among the benches, beneath the trees?
They’re the same ones you remember. "Belle,"
he is perhaps saying, polishing his glasses
or adjusting his gloves, "there’s something big going on
right now, and I want to be smack dab in the middle
of it." And so he is, of course (will he, nill he),
the center everywhere racing forward
at a thousand miles an hour (give or take).

     To the sensibility that writes those lines, every tale of Belle and Beau reduces very rapidly (1000 mph) to the same basic story; such a poet would never want to write a novel (unless perhaps Beckett’s kind of novel). All acts of will amount to nil. The writer’s problem becomes: How deftly can you evoke our inability to ever get anywhere? And, how much variety of expression does this view permit? I like the stanza about "these two who kiss and pass" for its perfectly pitched evocation of delusory aspiration as in Dreiser’s America or Gissing’s England (and I enjoy placing it mentally alongside the first section of Stevens’ "The Rock"). Dodd is remarkably deft in shifting the figure one way or another way ("give or take") against the blank ground. Reduction always impends, demanding the bare bones and nothing more–as in this passage from "This Place" in The Blue Salvages:

Year after age after eon,
we the local people, in imperfect

union, groan our pale bodies
into the varicolored earth.

It opens. It closes.
That is its story.

And there is sun.

Hard to justify any loquacious Constitution after such a Preamble.
      Yet we do wish to speak. We try to embroider the abyss. We make a romance of our lives because we can’t not. Stevens, when he’s in his affirmative mood, celebrates our romancing power (while abjuring any myth that to him seems stale, like Christianity). Dodd is more in tune with the sterner, bleaker side of Stevens, the Stevens who feels he should slice through romance to the rock beneath. Still, when Stevens appears once by name in Is, Dodd honors him, wistfully, as wistful romancer, dreaming of an exotic paradise.

Wallace Stevens Considers the Untranslatability of the Word Gita

What, think you, is the population of Ceylon?
Do the women there wear saris,
graceful in their carriage, demure
in their walk? Is Sanskrit the tongue
their temples sound, above the villages,
beside the fields? Do many-armed gods
ride elephants by the sea, rubies
on their foreheads, live snakes in their hair?

See the flat-bottomed boats gliding out
on the river. How the thin men stand
in their sterns, stroking and stroking
the long oars behind them! Jasmine,
on the shore, is the memory that drives them
on. Jasmine, on the shore, guides them back.

The poem is sweetly steeped in Stevens. Those boatmen are dreaming their lives, hypnotized by beauty–and not really going anywhere, gliding from jasmine to jasmine, tethered always to the same unpossessable essence. The scene is enchanted and enchanting.
      Yes, but the flurry of vivid imagery in that poem is ignited by an indulgence of illusion. Dodd’s stern preference is to see past our romantic fascinations to whatever it is that wipes them out: bafflement, doom, the doom of bafflement. Consider these quietly frightening lines from "Some Sentences":

Sentences, like our lives, have beginnings, middles, and ends.
All the women of my childhood are gone now, the soft comfort of their
clothes, the reassurance of their voices.
Once, in the backyard, we saw the birdlike shape of the Concorde,
hanging in the air above us, its graceful nose pointing toward LaGuardia,
beyond the small houses.

Or consider the magnetic force of the last word in these last two lines of "Standard Candle": "Think of melons, think of oranges, think of grapes. / Think of eyes. Think strands of hair. Think specks of dust."
      According to Is, time is not the material of meaningful story. Time is disappearance. An infinite number of moments happen, now now now now now … A strong poem called "Non-Narrative" expresses this firmly. Dodd is not immune to the human narrative impulse, but he undercuts it, or mocks it, or accentuates its dreaminess, so as not to be its fool. We see this in several passages quoted earlier; like any decisively self-consistent poet, Dodd leads a commentator to repeat himself. (Critics of Stevens are outrageously repetitious.) A haunting passage in "This is a Poem" shows the tension of Dodd’s resistance to narrative:

I have a history

of repeating myself, obsessively telling
my one narrow story: I, Wayne.

And there were Homer and Maggie, there were Eugene
and Delorese. Oh, we

were the only humanity vouchsafed us
by circumstance, the only ears and throats

language could utter itself in
within those narrow rooms,

telling its luminous story.

Is will not tell us any more about Homer and Maggie and Eugene and Delorese. This passage fascinates me because it is a doorway passage–the kind of passage in which a poet points toward a kind of poetry he or she has chosen not to write, toward rooms he or she will not enter. The word "only" in that passage could, for another poetic sensibility (like mine), point toward a savoring of particulars, an exploration of the colorful nuances of the experience of certain persons in certain times and places. The word "luminous" seems to yearn toward such elegiac affirmation. But notice that the agency in that last quoted sentence is attributed not to the individuals, but to "circumstance" and "language"–mysterious forces in whose patterns "we" are no more than ephemeral particles. We may love our particulars, but our self-importance is illusion.
      Now I have an impulse to argue with Dodd’s vision, to cry out on behalf of our little selves, to say "Tell us more about Homer and Maggie and Eugene and Delorese!" I want to say "Even if our essential condition is bafflement and doom, why shouldn’t we cherish the small but colorful variations in our living out of that sentence, as persons from Oklahoma, or Hartford, or Ceylon, or the London of Dickens? Why is it foolish to love our details if the love gives us energy, joy, a sense of worth? Our love for our sons and daughters is extremely attentive to detail; if this is, in some ultimate view, illusion or delusion, then too bad for ultimate views!"
      Aesthetically, Dodd’s determination to see through life’s surfaces to the unknowable essence restricts the artist’s palette, militates against variety in the poetry. If we are not importantly different from birds, or leaves (all controlled by unreadable forces, all living only to die), then the poet need only glance out the window of his study to see sufficient images of the world; and indeed, a hillside scene of trees, wind, and birds recurs frequently in Dodd’s work. This recurrence can seem too monastic. It can seem so even where Dodd temporarily finds comfort in that scene’s expression of "the uplift / of it all" (in "Say a Person Suddenly").

Surely light upon the hillside
can seem, at times, our only sign

that night is not the earth’s true measure —
shapes and shadows that save us,

temporarily, from the vertigo of space
and the sequencing of the stars:

white, then red, then black

That passage testifies to a sense of rescue, but the saving is so emphatically brief! The passage–which comes just before the end of Is–gravitates toward the word "black" the way the end of "Standard Candle" gravitates toward "dust".
      But the last word of the book is not "black"–it is "firelight"–because Dodd knows that a poet cannot finally refuse to care about our flickering shapes. We have to make a romance even in winter. I’ll quote two more sections of the final sequence in Is, both of which beautifully confess an inability to feel that the "swirl" of our lives is nothing but "this brown swirl // of mice and mud".

At the crossroads where darkness
pauses, its gaze turned back

toward some remembered
light, the traveler hesitates.

How they ravished one, those fragrances,
glimpsed bodies wrapped,

like the stars, in their nebular
swirls, diaphanous

and irresistible

That passage deftly manages to convey both the attraction of the inhuman infinite and of earthly lives: both irresistible, though Dodd’s poetry tries harder to honor the former attraction at the expense of the latter than I usually want poetry to do. The passage has a magic–as does the last passage in Is:

Even the mandolins and cymbals
cannot drown them, the calls the dead make

from their new homes. Hai! see their bright eyes
and dresses! How they leap and swirl

in the taverns!–damp curls along their necks
and shoulders, smooth arms that

turn and turn in the firelight

For us, with our unreasonable imaginations, the dead cannot be only dust. The dead dance in us. "Is" must give way to "seem" as long as we’re alive. The power and beauty of that last dance in Is are especially striking because the scene flashes against the background of Dodd’s struggle–sardonic, ascetic, Stevens-like–not to be enthralled by the jasmine charms of what can’t last.