Breaking the Line

I recently heard poets discuss line breaks and assume that they are easier in free verse than in formal verse. This seems logical since you can break a line anywhere in a free verse poem but in a formal poem line breaks are fixed. However, I would argue that the freedom to break a line anywhere makes it a more onerous task to find the right one.

What purpose do line breaks serve in poetry? The primary purpose is to control pacing, which in turn contributes to the overall musical effect. Line breaks also help to emphasize or deemphasize the significance of a theme or element of a theme. Line breaks help create tension or drama or, contrariwise, create ease and comedy. This is all true whether in free or formal verse. But nearly everything else is different.

With most formal verse line breaks are fixed. That is, with a standard sonnet, you have five feet to complete your line. After the fifth foot, there will be a line break, whether that line is enjambed or end stopped will be a consequence of syntax and diction. What image will be lingering in the mind of the reader as he makes his way to the next line will be determined, again, primarily by how syntax and diction shape the line toward its fifth and final foot. What will confront the reader at the beginning of the next line is also controlled by these two elements of syntax and diction. Manipulation of these two elements is really the only way a line break in a formal poem can be adjusted.

I have written and published a number of formal poems. One thing I learned is that the meter, or more generally, the rhythm, can guide you to the right syntax and diction, or at least to the right syntax. (Diction is not as intrinsically related to rhythm.) The difficulty of line breaks in a formal poem is when the rhythm clashes with the semantic need for significant terms to fall at the end and beginning of lines. But as often as not — or actually more often than not, the rhythm guides the poet to the best syntax for good line breaks. Rhythm, pacing and line breaks play off each other so intimately that one can lead you to the other if you can't concentrate on all three at once. In fact, when I write formal poems, I am primarily led by the rhythm; all the other elements are conjured from it almost as if by magic. This is where a poet writing free verse is at a disadvantage.

In a free verse poem, the line breaks help control the pacing as in a formal poem, however, the line breaks aren’t fixed. The breaks can be made anywhere, theoretically, but to make the best musical effect, they can’t be made haphazardly.

It’s important to remember that the total musical effect is not just a consequence of the rhythm, but is the relationship of every element working in concert: the grammatical structures, the syllabic structures, the phonetics, the syntax and diction, the images and ideas. It’s how all these elements relate to each other and unfold.

Since there is no fixed point at which a free verse poem ends a line, the poet has to listen to the total effect of all its elements to determine each line ending. It’s like needing to hear all the instruments in an orchestra playing in your head to determine what next note the flute should play in the symphony you’re composing. This very difficulty is what made W. H. Auden remark to Stanley Kunitz that he couldn’t write free verse because his ear just wasn’t good enough. Elsewhere, Auden said to Michael Newman, “I think very few people can manage free verse – you need an infallible ear, like D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end.”

As a regular practitioner of free verse, I find myself constantly revising lines to find the right line breaks. Sometimes I hear them right off and sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, it can take me weeks of trial and error to find the right ones, especially because the syntax and line breaks are independent of each other, unlike in formal verse. In a free verse poem, I could have the right syntax but the wrong line breaks. In a formal poem, if my syntax doesn't create good line breaks, the pacing will be off and I will need to change the syntax. There is an intimate connection among these three elements that can guide you. There is no such echolocation in free verse; all these elements are independent and must be heard distinctly and simultaneously to get them right.

Who Teaches You What You Mean?

I am a poet and therefore obsess about language. How language is constructed and what those constructs mean and imply occupy a lot of my thinking. Because of this obsession, the novel 1984 strikes me as the greatest book written about the abuse of language. True, it is a novel about political power and oppression and is a warning of a kind to those of us who take a free society for granted. But the way that political power asserts itself is primarily through the power of language. The abuse of language in the novel comments inevitably on the right use of language and ultimately has something to say to the role of the poet in our world.

1984 shows through a claustrophobic world of political oppression how the ability to articulate is controlled by the scope of our language, how we are always subject to the limitations of the language at our disposal. The whole point of Newspeak, the official language of the Party, is to reduce the available range of meaning and comprehension, to make it impossible for people to think something that is not approved by the doctrine of the Party. This language coupled with an endless rewriting of public records means both that it is impossible to know the truth about the past and that the individual is incapable of articulating the meaning of his individuality. Inevitably, the Party defines who and even what an individual is. In only the most limited sense does any individual exist in 1984 . To contradict the impulsive thought that this is merely science fiction, something futuristic and beyond reality, one only has to look at a poem by George Oppen in which he shows us that it is something we battle every day. In “Of Being Numerous,” a figure

. . . wants to say
His life is real,

No one can say why
It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech

Oppen here distills the competition between language used as a means of the most profound existential realization and language used as a means for commercial manipulation. When we acquire our language, our expressions, our definitions from corporations and the commercials they make, then the language we have for expressing our deepest feelings or insights, our ideas about who we are or want to be, is shaped by them, at least to the extent that they – excuse the word – repurpose language to manipulate us for quite specific ends and in so doing, distance us from other associations. One of the primary ways the Party in 1984 controlled language was to diminish the number of associations related to any given word. This was attained by various methods. But this same diminishment is, in Oppen’s poem, what causes the man to be unable to find the words to express his inner being, the reality of his life. As I said in a previous essay about Oppen’s poem, “The man trying to speak the meaning of his life has no language to speak it. It is unreal because politics and public life have appropriated it for ends other than an existential dialogue.” This is precisely what the Party in 1984 does.

Another of the methods for controlling thought through language is to reduce the number of words. The Party eliminated the word “bad.” They used, instead, “ungood.” This sounds farfetched but even today it isn’t uncommon to find an attitude of relying on a limited vocabulary for expression or assuming the superfluity of the abundant synonyms in English. However, in reality subtle denotative shades and deep connotations make words like “evil,” “miscreant” and “villainous,” though synonyms, all different from each other. Additionally, meaning is not merely semantic or intellectual, but is also emotional. The many associations and feelings a word or series of words evokes make even the closest synonyms still different from each other. Then consider there are many words in foreign languages that signify feelings and thoughts for which there are no English equivalents. What do we do with those thoughts and feelings? To assume they will be expressed in some way in the existing language is to make a dangerous assumption. In fact, I would guess that most of those feelings and thoughts go unarticulated, because it takes more than an act of will to find the right words to give them shape, it takes knowledge and the willingness to take risks, to sound foolish or even crazy. But if, as Jefferson said, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” this holds true also for safeguarding language and ensuring that its growth and change is for the expansion of articulation, thought and meaning.

Newspeak also attempts to reduce ambiguity. Here especially I see the playground of the poet because it is precisely at the edge of linguistic clarity that poets live and breathe. We have all had feelings we couldn’t put into words or thoughts that we just couldn't express. That’s because the range of human imagination and experience is greater than the range of our existing language and this is likely always to be so. That’s why there will always be poets and other artists trying to give shape and articulation to those very feelings and thoughts, those human experiences that haven’t come into the range of our history because we haven’t been able to document them in any way. That’s why poets are always toying with the obscure, not to be evasive or sound smart, but to get at something that’s just out of reach, to extend the light of articulation just a little farther into the darkness. This is the worthiest use of language and one that opposes other uses such as TV and magazine ads, billboards, the news media, and all other forms of mass production or corporate manipulation. It is not a self-righteous call to arms; it is simply the natural consequence of two opposing uses of language vying for control of a singular consciousness.

Parallels

I recently finished reading 1984, one of many classics on my to-read list. I had what I’m pretty sure is a common experience in that I thought, as I read, that anyone who sees this as merely a science fiction novel doesn’t understand it. In fact, as O’Brien tortured Winston and explained the nature of reality from the point of view of the party, I recalled words from a senior aide to the Bush administration. It was unnerving how similar their thinking was.

Here is the paragraph from Ron Suskind’s article “Without a Doubt” published in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Here is how O’Brien characterizes reality in 1984:

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

In other words, as the senior Bush aide put it, “we create our own reality.”

Well, for the few people out there who follow this – “fit though few” as Milton said – I decided I should start trying to keep this blog going a little. Instead of insisting that I must always and only post completed essays, which is prohibitive, I’m going to include updates on readings, publications and random thoughts on art, poetry, history, music, and anything else that I simply find interesting. I can only hope you find it interesting too.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything, that far too much has happened to post all at once. But to begin with what’s happened in my publishing life, my next 2 books have been accepted for publication: Living in the Counterpoint will be published by Finishing Line Press in January. This book is available now for prepublication purchase on their website: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm.

I will here confess that I’m nervous about this period of purchasing. From now until November 10th, the number of people who order will determine how many copies will be printed in January. It is a nail-biting affair to receive e-mails of sales on a weekly basis and see how few have come in. Sadly, I have a long way to go. But my nerves aside, I’m very pleased with the cover. The photo was provided by my friend, Kaitlyn Chow.




Also, the people who blurbed the book were very generous in their comments:



“Michael T. Young has crafted a metaphysics of memory in all its ache and luster. These poems pin down ghosts; finger the stirrings of nostalgia and its seeming perpetuity. Through a yearning to define those feelings most elusive, Young succeeds in unveiling them. Living in the Counterpoint coaxes introspection and haunts like a summer dusk, it is a true achievement.”

-- Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity


“With the deftness of a magician, Michael T. Young moves us seamlessly between point
and counterpoint, so seamlessly that we are almost unaware of the shifts from the living to the dead, from light to dark, near to far, and early to late. In tightly crafted gem-like poems, he contemplates fossils, diamonds, headstones, rivers, bridges, and even a slug, ultimately achieving and imparting ‘a deep knowledge of the earth.’”

-- Diane Lockward, Poet Laureate of West Caldwell, NJ and author of Temptation by Water

My next full-length collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published by Black Coffee Press in 2013. It’s listed on their website under their imprint, Eight Ball Press: http://www.blackcoffeepress.net/shop/page/6?sessid=VBfK8qiGV1UzGi4VrtyR8KLHcJzKCBpuAAj4urE9wByNr7wbwT8COTYreCj1LNPK&shop_param=.


In addition, many poems have recently been accepted for publication in print and online journals. The Potomac Review, Off the Coast, Edison Literary Review, Mayday and Eskew all took work recently. I’m currently in the online journals: Scythe, The Literary Bohemian, The Fine Line and Jellyroll. Links to them are below. My poem “Counting Apples” will be in the forthcoming issue of Meadowland Review.

Scythe: http://scytheliteraryjournal.com/
The Literary Bohemian: http://www.literarybohemian.com/poetry/poem/renewing-my-passport-by-michael-t-young/
The Fine Line: http://thefineline00.wordpress.com/issues/
Jellyroll: http://www.jellyrollmagazine.com/currentissue.html

Well that’s a brief update of the year. Next week, I will try to post something more interesting than a laundry list.

Michael

A Critique of Pure Imagination

Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is worthy of a dissertation. I return to it often to consider its subtleties of diction, lineation and thought. Its nuances are endlessly provocative. Recently I was considering the entirety of the imaginative movement of the poem and the speaker’s final state and in that final state I saw a consequence unique among the Romantic poets.

The speaker of the Ode imaginatively projects qualities onto the bird throughout the poem, the first is happiness. This projection of happiness is the speaker’s tenuous connection to the bird, his means of escaping the heartache and sorrows of human life. The listener’s ability to find this escape in the bird’s song is dependent upon his ability to project onto the bird what he imagines its song means. This imaginative projection or fancy is simultaneously a movement toward death in its most intoxicating characteristic, which is as a way of escaping pain. It is Hamlet’s desire

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,

This is the core of Ode to a Nightingale. The Ode’s speaker simply wishes to fantasize himself into nonexistence, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” It is here, in desiring death that he then projects onto the bird the quality of immortality. This immortality is insinuated primarily through the realization that the bird’s song today is the same as in ancient times and will be the same tomorrow after the speaker is dead.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

The speaker doesn’t think to partake of the bird’s immortality as he does of the happiness. The consequence is that, by the end of the poem, the happiness seems to be stolen from the listener when the word “forlorn” invades his musings and returns him to the human world of thought and sorrow. But the projected immortality of the bird remains intact and flies off with the bird as the song fades into the distance. Thus the imaginative projection splits and the speaker is stuck in a kind of in-between where his imagination still projects the immortality of the bird outward into the deepening silence but the happiness ends as his mind recoils inward to the thoughts of pain, aging, sickness and death that plague daily, mortal life.

Here, at the end, the poem enters a realm that is unique among the Romantic poets. Unlike other poems of other Romantic poets, especially Blake or Shelley, the Ode is a kind of critique of pure imagination. The whole imaginative effort of the speaker to posit happiness in the nightingale and then take part in that happiness, to posit immortality in the bird and then, in that context of ecstatic, immortal, joyful song desire death almost to the pitch of willing it true, finds its end in the reality of individual suffering and the limits of human thought. Once again, as the Ode so often does, it recalls Hamlet. In this instance it recalls Hamlet’s comment that, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” For the Ode’s speaker, the human condition is one of bad dreams bounded in a nutshell. The imaginative effort is to free oneself from it. But the freedom is temporary and when it ends, leaves in its wake a feeling of betrayal because “the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.” The dreamscape the speaker inhabits at the end of the Ode is not the enchanted, mythological dreamscape of most of the Romantics, even Keats in his other poems, but instead it is a dreamscape of suspicion, where everything is haunted by scrutiny and doubt.

The Long Walk Out of Suburbia

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
– Blake

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
– Unamuno


I’ve been thinking lately about what it means as a poet to have grown up in suburbia. What foundation was set for my sensibility in that first landscape? It is more specific than that since I grew up in the suburb of a very small city. I didn’t grow up on the outskirts of New York or Chicago. I grew up in Pennside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Reading, itself only just meeting the definition of a city in terms of its population when I was young. But a suburb nonetheless that must have impressed in me its tailored landscapes, those manmade terrains that are different from either the parks of a city or the untamed edge of the truly rural.

The word itself, “suburbs” is from the Latin “sub” meaning “under” and “urbs” meaning “city.” It comes from Roman times when the poor lived at the foot of the city hill outside the wall. But in modern times that “under” means something else and has a weighty significance, at least, as I reflect on it. For all its scenic advantages, the suburban sensibility feels inferior to its urban brother, feels less savvy, less witty, less cultivated. It lives in the shadow of the urban and it may contribute to why, when I was young, I preferred the eccentric to the accepted. I had rather sit alone and think than talk with my peers. It’s why I felt a kinship with a thin tree at the crest of one of the surrounding mountains. It stuck out crookedly, a bald patch on its right side, but even from miles away it was beautifully distinguishable from the monotony of the level ridge of maples.

That need for distinction has long impaired my poetic voice, loaded it with a self-conscious groping that I still labor to overcome every time I write. Any poet worth his salt is beyond the need to impress and is instead driven by the need to realize his vision. But finding that vision requires confronting life right on the spot, at its dirtiest. This is not something the suburban sensibility is trained to do. If suburbia is anything, it’s a place to learn how to evade, to dodge the shadows in the corner, to avoid ever saying what is really meant. Stating the unequivocal truth could disturb the clean-cut image of life among the trimmed lawns and hedges, the neat streets and manmade lake. In suburbia, even rage and neurosis are ordered and pretty.

That clean order — even nature itself tamed — might be what led me to first desire order in art, which is not the same as clarity. Beauty ruled all themes; the music of a poem exempted it from making sense. I could not then have conceived of aspiring to Lowell’s prayer, “Pray for the grace of accuracy/Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination,” at least not semantically. The pulse of a genuine moment was something too real for me to dare touch, not that I wasn’t aware of it. But the suburb is an adult version of a childproofed environment, all the edges are sanded down or cushioned, all the hazards are locked away. Like a child, you know the forbidden is in the locked drawer; you just come to accept the rules of the house because you don’t know any other world. These are the dark distances between people in suburbia, distances astutely explored by the poet Carl Dennis.

Within me that distance has been the long stretch between the artificial voice of my expected self and the authentic voice of my real life. All my effort since starting to write has been to bridge that distance, to close the gap between them. The best poetry I’ve written in recent years has been about how to dodge expectations, not only of others but also and perhaps especially those of oneself. Henry Miller said that for the writer attempting something new, nothing is worse than his friends. In struggling to realize an authentic voice for my poetry, no friend has been a greater enemy than that one in my head who keeps telling me how I should sound, who I should be, what I should say.

How Freudian this comes off is not lost on me. But my concerns are aesthetic and philosophical, not psychological. I refuse to call that friend my superego, though he has helped me be a better person, that is, to not say everything on my mind since that isn’t always helpful. He is the master diplomat, but this makes him a poor poet, since the poetic voice is not really about right and wrong or even kindness, but rather it’s about clarity, insight, articulation of the fully realized moment. But the fully realized moment cannot be abridged, even if it is edited. That is to say, it must be complete even if it has only one, true articulation, the way Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” So I must use every means to stifle that unpoetic diplomat, to arrive at the truly poetic moment and simply write. This has not been easy.

Between Keats’s idea that poems should come as leaves on a tree and the truism that the real art in a poem is hiding the art, there is the suburb. The suburb is the artificial wearing the natural as lingerie. It wraps itself in green and decorates its hair with flowers. It’s a seduction and a siren’s song because it is a nowhere, an in-between world that’s neither wild nor tame, neither urban nor rural. It cannot disrobe and show itself in naked honesty because its beauty, indeed, its very substance is in its apparel. It may be why, as a young poet, I was obsessed with form but was equally nagged by the dread that I didn’t have the mind to be a poet. I always felt that one day I would be found out, that, like the suburb, I was actually all appearance.

The border of a suburb is not wild. This is not because there are no untamed animals, no skunks or deer ducking behind nearby pines. It’s because between nature and such communities there are enough artificial hurtles that one is free to romanticize nature. So from my street to the nearest woods, the transitions — the community pool, the football field and tennis courts, the creek and surrounding road — were obstacles to any entrance into both the wild and the creative. I sometimes think it may be why I’ve struggled with transitions in my poetry. By contrast, the urban sensibility doesn’t feel the need to connect the dots or supply bridges. From stanza to stanza, either you’re smart enough to keep up or this poem isn’t for you. And it’s important to realize this isn’t snobbery but simply apprehending the world on your own terms, being oneself without apologies. But I’ve always been afraid of losing people along the way, and so tediously laid the groundwork for every step. The problem with such carefulness is that it crowds out the reader’s imagination. A reader should find a home for his imagination within a poem; it should be a place for him to breathe deeply and settle down, even if it’s into the mystery of what it’s all about. This means the total picture includes untamed elements, some invasion of the dark and disordered into the context of the ordered creation. Without it, there is no perspective or context and thus no true insight or cause for wonder.

For the urban sensibility, the edge of the city is not the edge of order, but the edge of civilization. This differs from the suburban sensibility in that it is not mere landscape, but an expression of our humanity. Civilization lies within us. So, for the urban dweller, the edge of the city is the edge and end of humanity. But for the suburban sensibility, the neat, clean order of the landscape is not an indwelling reality. It is, rather, imposed on both the outward and inward landscapes. The edge of suburbia becomes the edge of the safe world. It is not that humanity ends there, but that understanding ends there. Beyond is the incomprehensible, the unpredictable. So my poems have always had a laborious, plodding need to be understood, to be safe. The problem with this is that the best poems of the day are born in liminal spaces, in the outskirts, beyond the longstanding definitions. They risk being misunderstood even by the majority. It is Blake being called mad at the end of his life and his work waiting until the 20th century to be given its just admiration.

I left suburbia for New York City nearly twenty years ago. But suburbia stayed in me. It limited my art, my growth as a poet. I could never escape the logic of its layout. It infected my lines and stanzas, ordering them into a beautiful, sanitary banality. Then I read George Oppen’s poetry. He was dense, difficult and passionately struggling toward clarity. I had never before been enthralled by any objectivist poet. But he was someone who took me in thoroughly. In that rapture, I read prose about him and interviews and came across his idea of a poem as a certain “sequence of disclosure.” This idea was new to me since I had always measured a poem’s movement not by its semantic unfolding but by its phonetic modulation. I lived by Joseph Brodsky’s dictum that “for the poet, phonetics is semantics.” But this dictum had been too native to me to help me grow. I had to abandon it in favor of a “sequence of disclosure,” a modulation of meaning that was itself the music and movement of a poem.

At the same time, I had been reading a number of other poets and had recently read Horace’s 13th Ode from the second book. It was a poem that startled me by its seamless progression. It starts simply with Horace contemplating contemptuously a tree on his property and ends among the shades in Hades. I remember the shock at the end of the poem, of realizing where I was and how Horace had taken me there without jarring my senses. I had been transported from the simple earthly reality of his yard to the netherworld of shades and no charm was invoked or Sybil consulted. There were no hurtles as in suburbia. I found in this poem an example of that sequence of disclosure, something I found I then had to master, because it was a way of escape, not away from reality, but into reality.

A few other poets, modern poets, helped me cut the key to that door: Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns and Derek Walcott. These were the major stars in that guiding constellation. What was interesting was that, as I wrote the first poem of escape ten years ago, the realization of this new aesthetic, this new philosophy, occurred to me in geometric terms.

The idea that a poem should come full circle was not only axiomatic because of its long tradition but inevitable to my suburban sensibility. Although everyone in suburbia works elsewhere, life there is self-contained. Work is merely what you do to support life in suburbia. But life in suburbia is suburbia and all roads there lead back to its center. This was a form of circling the wagons. A poem then was always about redemption. However, now my desire, my driving need, was for something parabolic, something arcing out and away and ending as far from where I started as possible and arriving there with an inevitability that should not resemble logic. Logic is only one kind of meaning, but all meanings and, in fact, most meanings are not logical. And the most meaningful material is at the edge of what we know and just beyond. It is only here that poems matter, have an almost life or death significance, because it is only from here that one can look back on where you came from, and have the perspective to see the immense battle for identity involved in each moment taken for granted. From here it is possible to reenter the streets of suburbia and not be governed by them.

Thoughts on Refusing Heaven, Poems by Jack Gilbert

Although not a perfect collection, this collection is worth a permanent place on everyone’s bookshelf. Winner of both the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is deserving of these awards for the sheer life-affirming quality of the poems. These are a wondrous celebration of life not only in spite of its brevity and flaws but precisely because of its brevity and flaws. What, in the mind of others are failures, within this collection, are transformed into the substance of happiness and beauty. Memory becomes the storehouse of a future life and lazy days doing nothing, the substance of the most joyful times.

Gilbert has assimilated much of Eastern thinking more intimately, more personally, than many other poets. They are not mere stylistic tactics or adopted stances, but insights reaped by living through them, seeing how life affirms the mysticism of Taoism and Buddhism. Thus they are coherently westernized. This is so because Gilbert doesn’t always open with simply accepting their terms. Some of the poems are the struggle toward realization told from the point of view of a western mind.

However, on the whole, his poems are not parabolic, moving from point to point to a final destination, and they are not circular in reaching a resolution or redemption. They are more like a tetherball circling closer and closer to a central point. The iterations the poems cycle through may, at times, lack the peremptory quality that is typically valued in poetry, but they make up for it with their exuberance and joy, in finally transforming the daily and pedestrian into gold, in observing the overlaps of places and identity through time, in noticing the interpenetration of histories within a single life. So his poems may resist memorization because they lack inevitability, but his poems are, in spite of it, memorable.

Not a poet of great music, but a wonderful poet of insight, of the turn of thought that startles or delights. This is the music of reflection, not the right note but the well-articulated idea. If he were a painter, he would be Magritte. Because of this remove, that he is an idea poet and not a musical poet, he is fond of simile. His use of simile does not always please, but it does often provoke. And this is the point. If his similes produce a pause in reading, this does not stall the poem since it causes a consideration of the insight that constitutes the poem. That is, Gilbert does not employ simile as a mere lyrical comparison but as a way to inspire us to think and notice. But thinking means considering, pausing, lingering, which a poem called “Burning (Andante non troppo)” is all about. This is a collection worth lingering over, worth allowing yourself to enjoy. It may actually help you to enjoy life more. Few collections can claim such a triumph.