germ warfare. But the Native Americans had a collective sense of
meaning -- "Why else paint bodies red/for burial, symbolize
sunsets/& erect tombstones/ like it meant/more than loss &
remembrance?" -- and this is a springboard to a more hopeful, airier
sense of personal possibility. The last intense imagery is of wind,
snowflakes, "a shock of blue asters/A frost in the grass/Sunrise,
breath."
We have come through a difficult journey by this point. On first
glance these poems seem typical of our poetic era, and maybe
unremarkable in superficial ways: clipped lines, sparse punctuation,
untitled poems, and intensely personal imagery and voice. But a
major difference here is the surface accessibility. Much poetry of
our era seeks to put the "underlying" or "subtextual" meaning on the
surface by inverting it, through complex word-arrangements, with
the traditional surface imagery or narrative. The literal meaning
becomes the subtext and the interpretive meaning becomes the
surface meaning. This can make confusing reading, as if the tip of
the iceberg were turned down into the water and the huge,
uncontrollable block underneath were exposed over the surface. The
literal meaning, in other words, submerges, and what would
conventionally be the interpretive meaning -- the wiring of words
and thoughts figured in the literal images and events -- emerges as
the surface. Our poetry turns the conventional poem inside out. This
creates a reading situation in which the literal meaning (what is
easily accessible) must be uncovered from the abstract complexity
of that which conventionally had to be inferred or subjectively
described (what, in other words, is accessible only with difficulty
and uncertainty). This makes a lot of 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s
poetry very difficult to follow. As the foregoing sentence itself
suggests.
But the poems in Tourist are mainly directly accessible in a way
that many of Bernstein's poems, for example, or even Creeley's, are
not. Holsapple hovers insistently around a critical cusp where the
linguistic necessity of exposing the underlying implications
submerges the literal. But most of the time he keeps his literal
meaning clear; sharp imagery used for its own sake keeps us
humanly engaged. If we choose we can read and understand these
poems only for the sheer delight in pictures, sounds and sentiments,
while the language enforces our awareness of the prodigious blocks
of ice riding and melting under the traditional surface.
The last lines of Tourist unfold powerfully, by the force of
traditional imagery wired into contemporary poetic diction. They
probably signal that the next two volumes, due out soon from
Buffalo publishers, will contain more pictures from the journey.
These are books to look forward to: one wonders where the journey
leads from here, and where home might be.
© Dana Wilde 2008
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Contraband: A Recollection
Reading Forays home
The Mind Errant
This essay originally appeared in Andrew Rosen's occasional magazine Technology
of the Sun in the winter of 1997, out of Bangor, Maine.
Tourist