Daniel Nester
REVIEW
Dobby Gibson. Polar. Alice James Books.
I imagine, in the parallel and bizarre universe of poets, that it might be an insult or put-down to say that someone’s work reminds one of, is beholden to, or is continuing in the vein of, the late work of Wallace Stevens.
I certainly don’t mean to be taken that way when I say that Dobby Gibson’s first book Polar, the winner of the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award, picks up the baton left by Wallace Stevens in his last proper book, The Rock; the book where, I like to say, this brilliant and allegoric poet’s mind and body slowed down a bit.
The comparison is intended as the highest praise. When I read Polar, I see that same brilliant and allegoric mind; I see Stevens’ sky, the “horizons of perception”; I feel our physical beings as “the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye” (“To an Old Philosopher in Rome”). That is exactly my overriding feeling, anyway, as I read and enjoy Gibson’s poems:
It may be true that everything
has already been said,
but it’s just as true that not everyone
has had a chance to say it.
This opens Gibson’s poem “Open Season,” and is perhaps the most direct statement in a book that comprises many direct statements. Just as Stevens writes in Opus Posthumous that “[i]t can be said of the romantic, just as the imagination, that it can never effectively touch the same thing twice in the same way.” Taken one way, I think, Stevens and Gibson both say that poetry’s obligation to reveal truth is forever renewable. Taken another way, they both say the whole enterprise of finding truth through the poem is the reddest of herrings; simply the pleasure of the attempt makes it worth the price of admission.
Gibson’s mind works in that lyric way I have long wanted to come back to current American poetry. Lately, it seems to me, poets have spent too much time dancing on the grave of referentiality, of storyline, of lyric, of preciousness, of connection, of gesture, of crying, of beginning-middle-end. The lyric, especially the narrative lyric, is dead, replaced by what is considered a high speech that is really, at least lately to me, just two post-fillintheblanks talkin’ here. We inhabit, these poets’ assertions say to me, a purposeless age. The poetry reflects this.
Me, I want poems to do something, make something happen, slap me around, tweak my earlobe. In too many poems—and I am more than willing to admit this has always been the case—there’s no desire to make a connection, no desire for gesture. And the gesture, if it was made, would be a “gesture.” In this mucky-muck, ideas don’t stand a chance. A poem is part of a “project”; a project makes a poem important; it supplants the poetic object. What. Ever.
Gibson makes things happen in his poems. I do know I’m far off my comfortable ground here, engaging in late Stevens studies, and maybe I’m turning readers off with the complaints and so forth. But please know that my main point here is that Polar is a special book in any poetic climate, and especially today’s.
Let me tell you what I mean. Take a look at the first stanza of “Flying Buttress”:
More attention should be paid to the dramatic
pause. The first snow as softly as snow
can happen, sky sniffling, like a child
in a laundromat, miserable autumn socks
stained with regret. Chicago prone,
desperate for even a sloppy autopsy
of sun, every solitary mortuary
curtain drawn. Because these clouds lead
nowhere but to themselves: from lion
It ends here. First, pay attention to the n-sounds:
attention// snow/snow// can happen/sniffling// laundromat/autumn// stained/prone// even// sun/ curtain drawn// nowhere/lion
At its most fundamental level, there’s a sprung sound system here—one that ‘buttresses,’ if you will, the meaning. No sound is ‘touched twice in the same way’ as Gibson explores his idea of order in the Midwest.
Second, there’s a gesture. A direct address to someone, yes. Me. You. Here, we have a poem that is not only a pleasure to re-read, I would say; it’s not just clever with rhetorical flourishes. It also has feeling. A kid in a laundromat, snowfall, the personification of sky with the sniffles—all in a poem in 2005. I like to think that saying all this might make this poem blush, as if I were to stop this stanza on the street, grab it round by the neck and give it a knuckle-noogie, and say, “you got feeling, kid.”
So many of the poems in Polar have this potent combination of a philosophical and rhetorical power that the best lyrical poems use, alongside intimations to the reader with a desire not only to be understood, but to be felt, to be taken somewhere. To be, I’ll say it: transformed.
Sure, there’s some false notes in the book. In the poem I’ve just quoted, “Flying Buttress,” there are the apropos-of-nothing section monikers—first is “I,” the second is “B.,” and the third is—you guessed it—“3.” It’s one of the few tells that Gibson is writing in the bell-and-whistle age of poetry, where novelty trumps feeling just about every time. There’s a “thrumming” in the book somewhere, too—one of those genteel poetry neologism stand-bys that one goes to when a poet shoots at the ole sublimity skeet in the air a little too much.
I remember an omnibus Helen Vendler review a few years back in which the poetry critic grande dame writes that an inordinate number Philip Levine’s poems end with the speaker looking at the sky, howling at the moon, or generally looking upward. I used to giggle at this, especially when I shared a classroom with this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet himself; he looked at the sky even inside a seminar room in Greenwich Village.
The thing I’ve realized over the years is that, when there’s drama and people in a poem, it’s inevitable the poet is going to direct us to look at the sky quite often. (A practicing poet-critic might have realized this.) The trick is to not put viking hats on people while one does it.
Gibson does not put horns on any self in his poems, but he too, has a knack for ending his poems with flaming gongs, especially when his poetic image’s stakes are serious, which is often. Me, I like these kinds of endings, but I do know the fashion is to end with things much more subtle than:
larger than our own.
(“Encroachment”)
why this is beautiful: it’s already forgiven.
(“Solstice”)
what you secretly tried to destroy.
(“Kinetiscope”)
When I look at these individual lines of Gibson’s I also think about what a single line of a poem can look like. They are beautiful and they are flaming gongs. Gibson grabs hold of that lyrical bead and works it. Rarely does he resort to needless fragmentation and bell-and-whistle. There is, always, a beginning and a middle and an end. Thank God. Gibson’s lines make me feel warm. If one were so inclined, one could look at them as units of poems. He goes down those Stevensian ‘courses of a particular’ and gently and firmly gives it his own lyrical mark.
One of the tough questions to ask about Gibson’s poems, I guess, is: does he offer an update to Stevens’ Late Romanticism? The only honest answer is time will tell. What I do know is the fact that these words—Romanticism, narrative, lyrical—are being bandied about is, to this reviewer, a refreshing, life-affirming development.
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