Blizzard of One: A Review (Ernie Hilbert)
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the preface to his monumentally difficult Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that "what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." Throughout his distinguished career, Mark Strand has successfully voiced with clarity that which is seemingly beyond the purview of everyday language. His poetry is situated on a volatile fault-line between what we accept as reality and what is just beyond our grasp. As a result, his poetry is remarkably serene with the promise, always the promise, of impending fury and disintegration. The cover of his latest collection, Blizzard of One, which won the Pulitzer Prize, features a collage by Strand himself. Two amorphous pale forms are settled on a horizon and resemble icebergs on an eerily still sea beneath a red sky. It is as if a storm is approaching. For the moment, however, the sea remains motionless, waiting. It is impossible to determine if the worlds depicted in the Blizzard of One are fixed-landscapes frozen and held for the searching eye and questioning mind-or are merely calm, lulling us into a vulnerable tranquillity. The tides that move slowly beneath the taut rhythms of the poetry set the world into motion, allow us to experience what rushes out from each moment while reflecting on the causes and purposes that led us to it. This is what Strand describes as "the weather of leavetaking." The finely-wrought metaphysical poetry of his earlier books is continued here, where to "stare at nothing is to learn by heart / What all of us will be swept into." Indebted as much to André Breton as to Wallace Stevens, Strand encloses the fluid course of time and action in a discursive framework that disturbingly provides as many questions as answers.
The book is divided into four sections that achieve together a strangely comforting music, recapitulating and transforming themes that recur throughout his poetry, the opposing poles of fixity and flux, creation and loss, action and remembrance, but this music is more a succession of sad songs than movements of a string quartet. Throughout Blizzard of One, a spectral narrator leads us through disquieting landscapes and rooms much as, in a more literal way, Virgil's shade conducts Dante through hell and purgatory in the Divina Comedia or as the apparition of Dante in turn leads T.S. Eliot through bombed-out London in the Four Quartets. As in Strand's earlier books, most notably Dark Harbor, there is an atmosphere of changing light and weather that reflect changing perceptions and emotion. Figures seem to exist in a perpetual twilight, waiting for the fullness of night.
Strand holds this cooling distance in a timeless present that leaves the speaker free to contemplate the dead, learn to accept with grim determination the unalterable past, yet wistfully imagine that things could have been different, "the bitter remains of someone who might have been / Had we not taken his place." In the first section, which most resembles Dark Harbor, everything seems to be on the brink of a quiet finale. The sea and its endless change are never far, what he describes later in the collection as the "vast ungraspable body . . . that huge and meaningless empire of water." 'Old Man Leaves Party' recounts a dreamlike sojourn that recalls William Wordsworth's childhood night visions in Book One of The Prelude, a world washed to purity by darkness, half real, where
Strand devotes considerable attention to The Prelude in a chapter of his forthcoming book of essays, The Weather of Words. He writes that "it is always Nature which brings Wordsworth back from despair and disappointment." The same can be gainfully said of Strand's own poetry, though nature, uncapitalized and stripped of its broad romantic implications, is both the cause and the cure of the despair. Figures emerge from the bewildering gloom of both forest, shore, and dinner party to utter what are at once warnings and sad reminiscences. In the background, as always, is the light of moon or sun over water.
What is beyond immediate sight is not beyond grasp. It is waiting for the inevitable journey that will bring the translating eye to the appropriate frame, draw objects into a range where they can be understood, even as the time available for us to do so seems to be slipping away.
This gray world perpetually threatens to break up and grow brilliant. It is a world on the brink of some great ruin, yet rich with memories and objects that can stand in for one another and stubbornly persist despite their own inescapable ruin. Towns and cities have the ominous feel of places where war and its horrors will soon arrive, places that have been recently evacuated, the rumble of armies in the distance pressing ever closer, where "the air is pure, the houses are vacant." At the end of the first section of Blizzard of One, however, Strand reminds us in 'The Great Poet Returns' that there is "'No need to rush.'"
These are hardly comforting words. The poet in the poem refuses the role of savior. Poetry may serve as anodyne but not explanation, whatever the question may happen to be. We realize that this is the same Strand who wrote in his 1970 collection Darker that "If a man fears death, / he shall be saved by his poems." Perhaps he will be saved, but, as Strand makes clear in the more mature Blizzard of One, he can lay no claim to saving others by these frail means. The poet may experience life as a "blizzard of one" but never as an army of one. If there is a message to these poems, it is that we must not mourn the passing of all things but take solace in moments of reflection that bring unity to the confused pace and range of life as it is being lived.
In his introduction to the Winter 1995-96 issue of Ploughshares, Strand wrote that he was "not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful." This is true in many cases of his own poetry. He finds beauty in unsettling stillness and slow realization. His poems share more with the airy landscapes of Albert Cuyp than the violently tragic paintings of Francisco Goya. Beyond this, Strand is more surrealist than expressionist. But setting to one side the sometimes surrealistic veneer of the poems, we encounter an exquisite and gravid reality, a hyper-real world that has been locked expectantly into place like a painted landscape.
Again, there is an ever-present sense that a storm is approaching, its dark wind moving the trees in the distance, deep shadows over landscape, yet the storm never seems to set in, instead looming ceaselessly over the horizon.
Though occupying but a single page, the centerpiece of the second section of Blizzard of One, is 'A Piece of the Storm'. All the frenzy and energy of the universe beyond the speaker's immediate experience is literally brought home in a single dense mote, a small desperate detail that reveals the universe in its nearly imperceptible form.
This is a magnificent portrayal of the instant of illumination that can be released by language to the solitary reader, the intuitive leap that can be activated by a line of poetry.
The moment of the storm will one day arrive as it did for a single instant of comprehension, a "time between times, a flowerless funeral," and it will mark the beginning of a journey. Until then it broods far and near, all around us, waiting just behind the reality we perceive.
In 'The Suite of Appearances', the sequence that follows, this wisdom is borne out "wherever the end is happening." The spectral guide takes us through the fits and starts of destiny in our everyday lives, concluding that "what happened / Before tonight, the history of ourselves, leaves us cold." Despite the longing for discoveries and the journeys that bring them, the speaker, as often as not, remains in place wondering
Darkness closes over this world of infinite mutability but with the persistent prospect of light breaking even as the sun finally sets. This can understood as a projection of the enlightening backward glance in the midst of irremediable dissolution. Thus Strand is ultimately optimistic. Even when it appears impossible to regain the past in a meaningful way or gain the courage to face the future as it unfolds in the weighty if dull present, the storm opens not in darkness but new light, the changing light that holds all the fragments of the world in place but does not bind.
Strand also pays homage to the Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), whose metaphysical paintings portray a haunting dream world, where the acute contrasts of light and shadow confuse perspective and where landscapes are filled with wildly juxtaposed images. The two poems, both villanelles, are on specific paintings, The Philosopher's Conquest and The Disquieting Muses.
Strand shares the pictorial vocabulary of the surrealists, and it is not surprising to learn that he began his long career as a student not of literature but of art history at Antioch College (he is also the author of books on the American master Edward Hopper and contemporary painter William Bailey, whose still lifes appear on the covers of many of Strand's own books). So much of Strand's poetry is suffused with what could be called a surrealist texture that it is almost tempting to describe him at times as a surrealist poet. Of course it would be conspicuously wrong to characterize Strand's poetry as surreal in any formal sense. Surrealism, which never really flourished in English (despite the astounding achievements of contemporary American poets like Ivan Argüelles), has certainly had its influence on contemporary American poetry, though its nectar has been thoroughly diluted from its heady source in the Parisian cafes of the 1920s. Unlike either the brilliant surrealist formulations of British poets like David Gascoyne or the tedious attempts of J.F. Hendry and Henry Treece to transfer the continental surrealism of Apollinaire and Breton into the staid domain of mid-century British literature, Strand's poems are nonetheless those of an artist whose proclivity is liberated from the compulsions of logic and reason, the currency of the daylight world. It is impossible to deny the dreamlike quality of Strand's poetry, the scenes that seem to take place in the vast depths of the sleeping mind.
What Breton described as a "vertiginous descent" of the self into the hidden regions of the mind is apparent in the last two sections of Blizzard of One, which are shorter than their previous counterparts. The third is comprised of a sequence entitled Five Dogs, a series of playful poems written partially from a dog's perspective but still freighted with the recurrent themes of memory, death, and yearning that pervade the other poems in the collection. A dog's universe is a limited one, particularly if he is domesticated, but he still sings at night to the "great starfields" and the "wished-for reaches of heaven" even in his happy captivity. The rowdy life and play of dogs opens the way for turbulent romantic sentiments.
The vestigial Latin vocative "O" lends what can be termed a doggy wonder and thrill to the poem. The playfully surreal circumscribes a street scene where "The sky / Was a sheet of white. And here was a dog in a phone booth / Calling home. But nothing would ease his tiny heart." This anthropomorphic gambol succeeds without yielding to the plainly sentimental and allows Strand to reiterate the terms of his compact with humanity and the cosmos, the existential letting-go, and his dogs begin to sound like the dinner party guests that populate the earlier poems in the volume.
The fourth and final section of Blizzard of One is dominated by a long poem entitled 'The Delirium Waltz', a possibly premature canonization of Strand himself and several contemporaries with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson (the characters are thinly veiled by their first names; those present at the ball include Russian Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, the painter William Bailey and his wife Sandy, poets Donald Justice, Red Warren, Jorie Graham, and Charles Wright, among many others). The poem oscillates between ruminative prose and quick rhythmic bursts of quatrains that emulate the energetic movements of the waltz itself.
These dizzying twirls and embraces are offset by solid blocks of prose in which the speaker meditates distantly on the giddy enthusiasm of the waltz.
The waltz engulfs the dancers and becomes a metaphor for life itself, a ceremony of motion and varying partners that whirls on and on until the dancers realize that they cannot, in their Yeatsian euphoria, tell themselves from the dance. They are joined by their children; still they continue and are distracted by the dance that keeps them at prescribed distances from one another in variable orbits across the ballroom. "There was nothing to do but dance / They would never sit down together." By the end we realize, as we have perhaps suspected all along, not only that the "season of dancing was endless" but that we ourselves were there the whole time: "I cannot remember, but I think you were there, whoever you are." What warmer closing gesture than this? Those beyond the proscenium offer a reassuring hand up to join them and share in both the Parnassian elegance and bewildering gyrations of the waltz.
As we set the book down, we are left with a sense of having visited an enormous art gallery inhabited by a host of friends and strangers living and departed. We pause and gaze at paintings, then turn to converse. Our last and longest conversation leaves us waiting for a reply, wondering whose portrait is before us. Only upon turning to leave do we realize that it is neither partner nor painting but mirror. Bestowing as much as it accepts, Blizzard of One is a fine continuation of a deservedly celebrated career.
The book is divided into four sections that achieve together a strangely comforting music, recapitulating and transforming themes that recur throughout his poetry, the opposing poles of fixity and flux, creation and loss, action and remembrance, but this music is more a succession of sad songs than movements of a string quartet. Throughout Blizzard of One, a spectral narrator leads us through disquieting landscapes and rooms much as, in a more literal way, Virgil's shade conducts Dante through hell and purgatory in the Divina Comedia or as the apparition of Dante in turn leads T.S. Eliot through bombed-out London in the Four Quartets. As in Strand's earlier books, most notably Dark Harbor, there is an atmosphere of changing light and weather that reflect changing perceptions and emotion. Figures seem to exist in a perpetual twilight, waiting for the fullness of night.
But now
In this lavender light under the shade of the pines the time
Seems right. The dust of a passion, the dark crumble of images
Down the page are all that remain.
Strand holds this cooling distance in a timeless present that leaves the speaker free to contemplate the dead, learn to accept with grim determination the unalterable past, yet wistfully imagine that things could have been different, "the bitter remains of someone who might have been / Had we not taken his place." In the first section, which most resembles Dark Harbor, everything seems to be on the brink of a quiet finale. The sea and its endless change are never far, what he describes later in the collection as the "vast ungraspable body . . . that huge and meaningless empire of water." 'Old Man Leaves Party' recounts a dreamlike sojourn that recalls William Wordsworth's childhood night visions in Book One of The Prelude, a world washed to purity by darkness, half real, where
The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection.
Strand devotes considerable attention to The Prelude in a chapter of his forthcoming book of essays, The Weather of Words. He writes that "it is always Nature which brings Wordsworth back from despair and disappointment." The same can be gainfully said of Strand's own poetry, though nature, uncapitalized and stripped of its broad romantic implications, is both the cause and the cure of the despair. Figures emerge from the bewildering gloom of both forest, shore, and dinner party to utter what are at once warnings and sad reminiscences. In the background, as always, is the light of moon or sun over water.
Then a man turned
And said to me: "Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more,
For in it I see someone in bathrobe and slippers, brown-eyed and poor,
Walking through snow without leaving so much as a footprint behind."
What is beyond immediate sight is not beyond grasp. It is waiting for the inevitable journey that will bring the translating eye to the appropriate frame, draw objects into a range where they can be understood, even as the time available for us to do so seems to be slipping away.
The great hotels of the west are waiting,
In somebody's yard a pristine dog is hoping that we'll drive by,
And on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down
Will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let's
Take off before the world out there burns up.
This gray world perpetually threatens to break up and grow brilliant. It is a world on the brink of some great ruin, yet rich with memories and objects that can stand in for one another and stubbornly persist despite their own inescapable ruin. Towns and cities have the ominous feel of places where war and its horrors will soon arrive, places that have been recently evacuated, the rumble of armies in the distance pressing ever closer, where "the air is pure, the houses are vacant." At the end of the first section of Blizzard of One, however, Strand reminds us in 'The Great Poet Returns' that there is "'No need to rush.'"
"The end
Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it."
These are hardly comforting words. The poet in the poem refuses the role of savior. Poetry may serve as anodyne but not explanation, whatever the question may happen to be. We realize that this is the same Strand who wrote in his 1970 collection Darker that "If a man fears death, / he shall be saved by his poems." Perhaps he will be saved, but, as Strand makes clear in the more mature Blizzard of One, he can lay no claim to saving others by these frail means. The poet may experience life as a "blizzard of one" but never as an army of one. If there is a message to these poems, it is that we must not mourn the passing of all things but take solace in moments of reflection that bring unity to the confused pace and range of life as it is being lived.
In his introduction to the Winter 1995-96 issue of Ploughshares, Strand wrote that he was "not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful." This is true in many cases of his own poetry. He finds beauty in unsettling stillness and slow realization. His poems share more with the airy landscapes of Albert Cuyp than the violently tragic paintings of Francisco Goya. Beyond this, Strand is more surrealist than expressionist. But setting to one side the sometimes surrealistic veneer of the poems, we encounter an exquisite and gravid reality, a hyper-real world that has been locked expectantly into place like a painted landscape.
Whatever the star charts told us to watch for or the maps
Said we would find, nothing prepared us for what we discovered.
We toiled away in the shadowless depths of noon,
While an alien wind slept in the branches, and dead leaves
Turned to dust in the streets.
Again, there is an ever-present sense that a storm is approaching, its dark wind moving the trees in the distance, deep shadows over landscape, yet the storm never seems to set in, instead looming ceaselessly over the horizon.
Though occupying but a single page, the centerpiece of the second section of Blizzard of One, is 'A Piece of the Storm'. All the frenzy and energy of the universe beyond the speaker's immediate experience is literally brought home in a single dense mote, a small desperate detail that reveals the universe in its nearly imperceptible form.
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From you book saw it the moment it landed.
This is a magnificent portrayal of the instant of illumination that can be released by language to the solitary reader, the intuitive leap that can be activated by a line of poetry.
No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."
The moment of the storm will one day arrive as it did for a single instant of comprehension, a "time between times, a flowerless funeral," and it will mark the beginning of a journey. Until then it broods far and near, all around us, waiting just behind the reality we perceive.
In 'The Suite of Appearances', the sequence that follows, this wisdom is borne out "wherever the end is happening." The spectral guide takes us through the fits and starts of destiny in our everyday lives, concluding that "what happened / Before tonight, the history of ourselves, leaves us cold." Despite the longing for discoveries and the journeys that bring them, the speaker, as often as not, remains in place wondering
where is endlessness
Born, where does it go, how close has it come; and to see
The snow coming down, the flakes enlarging whatever they touch,
Changing shapes until no shape remains.
Darkness closes over this world of infinite mutability but with the persistent prospect of light breaking even as the sun finally sets. This can understood as a projection of the enlightening backward glance in the midst of irremediable dissolution. Thus Strand is ultimately optimistic. Even when it appears impossible to regain the past in a meaningful way or gain the courage to face the future as it unfolds in the weighty if dull present, the storm opens not in darkness but new light, the changing light that holds all the fragments of the world in place but does not bind.
Strand also pays homage to the Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), whose metaphysical paintings portray a haunting dream world, where the acute contrasts of light and shadow confuse perspective and where landscapes are filled with wildly juxtaposed images. The two poems, both villanelles, are on specific paintings, The Philosopher's Conquest and The Disquieting Muses.
Is this another scene of childhood pain?
Why do the clockhands say 1:28?
This melancholy moment will remain.
The green and yellow light of love's domain
Falls upon the joylessness of fate,
And always the tower, the boat, the distant train.
Strand shares the pictorial vocabulary of the surrealists, and it is not surprising to learn that he began his long career as a student not of literature but of art history at Antioch College (he is also the author of books on the American master Edward Hopper and contemporary painter William Bailey, whose still lifes appear on the covers of many of Strand's own books). So much of Strand's poetry is suffused with what could be called a surrealist texture that it is almost tempting to describe him at times as a surrealist poet. Of course it would be conspicuously wrong to characterize Strand's poetry as surreal in any formal sense. Surrealism, which never really flourished in English (despite the astounding achievements of contemporary American poets like Ivan Argüelles), has certainly had its influence on contemporary American poetry, though its nectar has been thoroughly diluted from its heady source in the Parisian cafes of the 1920s. Unlike either the brilliant surrealist formulations of British poets like David Gascoyne or the tedious attempts of J.F. Hendry and Henry Treece to transfer the continental surrealism of Apollinaire and Breton into the staid domain of mid-century British literature, Strand's poems are nonetheless those of an artist whose proclivity is liberated from the compulsions of logic and reason, the currency of the daylight world. It is impossible to deny the dreamlike quality of Strand's poetry, the scenes that seem to take place in the vast depths of the sleeping mind.
What Breton described as a "vertiginous descent" of the self into the hidden regions of the mind is apparent in the last two sections of Blizzard of One, which are shorter than their previous counterparts. The third is comprised of a sequence entitled Five Dogs, a series of playful poems written partially from a dog's perspective but still freighted with the recurrent themes of memory, death, and yearning that pervade the other poems in the collection. A dog's universe is a limited one, particularly if he is domesticated, but he still sings at night to the "great starfields" and the "wished-for reaches of heaven" even in his happy captivity. The rowdy life and play of dogs opens the way for turbulent romantic sentiments.
A little step forward, a little step back. And they sway,
And their eyes are closed. O heavenly bodies.
O bodies of time. O golden bodies of lasting fire.
The vestigial Latin vocative "O" lends what can be termed a doggy wonder and thrill to the poem. The playfully surreal circumscribes a street scene where "The sky / Was a sheet of white. And here was a dog in a phone booth / Calling home. But nothing would ease his tiny heart." This anthropomorphic gambol succeeds without yielding to the plainly sentimental and allows Strand to reiterate the terms of his compact with humanity and the cosmos, the existential letting-go, and his dogs begin to sound like the dinner party guests that populate the earlier poems in the volume.
I am the last of the platinum
Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.
But there's no comfort being who I am.
I roam around and ponder fate's abolishments
Until my eyes are filled with tears and I say to myself, "Oh Rex,
Forget. Forget. The stars are coming out. The marble moon slides by."
Magnificent words, spoken by dog or master.
The fourth and final section of Blizzard of One is dominated by a long poem entitled 'The Delirium Waltz', a possibly premature canonization of Strand himself and several contemporaries with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson (the characters are thinly veiled by their first names; those present at the ball include Russian Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, the painter William Bailey and his wife Sandy, poets Donald Justice, Red Warren, Jorie Graham, and Charles Wright, among many others). The poem oscillates between ruminative prose and quick rhythmic bursts of quatrains that emulate the energetic movements of the waltz itself.
And Jeannette and Buddy were dancing
And Louise and Karen were talking
Angels must always be pale they said
But pale turns round to white
And Louise and Karen were talking
Saying that blue slides into black
But pale turns round to white
And Jules was there in heels
And day and night were one
Rosanna was there and Maria
And Rusty and Carol were there
And day and night were one
And the sea's green body was near
These dizzying twirls and embraces are offset by solid blocks of prose in which the speaker meditates distantly on the giddy enthusiasm of the waltz.
And I was dancing alone in the absence of all that I knew and was bound by. And here was the sea-the blur, the erasure of difference, the end of self, the end of whatever surrounds the self. And I kept going. The breakers flashed and fell under the moon's gaze. Scattered petals of foam shone briefly, then sank in the sand. It was cold, and I found myself suddenly back with the others.
The waltz engulfs the dancers and becomes a metaphor for life itself, a ceremony of motion and varying partners that whirls on and on until the dancers realize that they cannot, in their Yeatsian euphoria, tell themselves from the dance. They are joined by their children; still they continue and are distracted by the dance that keeps them at prescribed distances from one another in variable orbits across the ballroom. "There was nothing to do but dance / They would never sit down together." By the end we realize, as we have perhaps suspected all along, not only that the "season of dancing was endless" but that we ourselves were there the whole time: "I cannot remember, but I think you were there, whoever you are." What warmer closing gesture than this? Those beyond the proscenium offer a reassuring hand up to join them and share in both the Parnassian elegance and bewildering gyrations of the waltz.
As we set the book down, we are left with a sense of having visited an enormous art gallery inhabited by a host of friends and strangers living and departed. We pause and gaze at paintings, then turn to converse. Our last and longest conversation leaves us waiting for a reply, wondering whose portrait is before us. Only upon turning to leave do we realize that it is neither partner nor painting but mirror. Bestowing as much as it accepts, Blizzard of One is a fine continuation of a deservedly celebrated career.
From Bold Type
posted by egay at 9:00 AM
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