As with
all Flood productions I've seen, this book is a gem of fine design — a
quite exquisite volume. I've been intrigued by Taggart's poetry
since seeing his Elizabeth Press volumes in the 1970s, and was
also impressed by his collection of literary essays, Songs
of Degrees,
but I have not managed to stay au courant with his poetry
in recent years, so this provides a welcome opportunity to catch
up. There
are fifteen poems in the Pastorelles sequence — I
believe a Pastorelle is a poem or song on a pastoral theme — and
these are scattered through the book, much in the manner of Robert
Duncan's Passages poems in his collections of the mid-to-late
1960s. The poems — or occasionally parts of poems — are
rarely more than a page in length, and never outstay their welcome.
The
lineation is quirky, with very long lines interrupted by one- or
two-word lines that act almost as rests, in a musical sense. The
poems tend to unfold in a conventional manner, syntactically unexceptional,
and then subvert themselves: subjects disappear or are ambiguous,
and, when they are present, they can be very vague. Deceptively
simple at first, these poems can become unsettling; take Pastorelle
3, for instance:
They will shoot your dog
running deer
they will say devoted members of the instated church of deer
devoted
and licensed
they will drive around your house around and around
their devotion not limited to a single time of day
day or season
they will drive slowly around your house
at night
light from their spotlights
slowly peeking around about woods and fields and around your
house
and they will shoot your dog
somehow got back
standing at the door of your house
eyes glazed over slobber on the muzzle
standing shaking in shock unable to move further.
The
lines seem to be cut into breath-units, the breaks functioning
as punctuation,
but even then you can't
help wondering if Taggart would actually read those long lines in one swift
rush. Perhaps he does: it's certainly how I've found myself
reading them here.
Then
there is Taggart's use of repetition, where phrases re-occur in
different combinations throughout the poem, both for
the sound and for the release of
alternative meanings through recombination. Thales the Milesian /
In a Time of Drought, for
instance, has the following closing stanza:
copper beeches
young leaves of the young copper beeches
shrivelled up shapes
corpses
these shrivelled up shapes in the shapes of corpses
shapes in the shapes of clutching.
There are clear echoes here of Theodore Enslin's current methods,
though Enslin's use of repetition is much more intense, and
is based on the musical
notion of repletion
and variation, which does not seem to be the case with Taggart*,
notwithstanding the name-checks for J.S. Bach here. Interestingly
enough, Taggart entitles
one poem The Compulsion To Repeat, which begins:
Gradually how gradually
one comes to understand the poets
as gradually as
the compulsion of one's own compulsion the compulsion to repeat
and the poem's two sections close with near-identical stanzas,
the second a variation upon the first. This is something
he does a number
of times
in this
book, repeating
phrases and lines across the sections of a poem, changing
the environment of the words each time.
As far
as 'content' goes, Taggart is a meditative, reflective, even philosophical
poet, observing the sights and sounds
of
rural Pennsylvania, but here too are tribute poems — usually
a situation where sincerity overwhlems the art, but not here. The
poem William Bronk is one of the finest memorial poems
I've ever read, and the two-part poem, Lorine Niedecker,
is a wonderfully impressionistic
approach to her singular world. I could go on and on,
but let me just say that this book is, in short, a very fine one
indeed, one of the best I've read this
year,
and one to which I shall be returning often.
*A response
from Devin Johnston of Flood Editions with respect to this issue,
which I quote verbatim, and for which clarification I am grateful:
You
write, "There
are clear echoes here of Theodore Enslin's current methods, though
Enslin's use of repetition is much more intense,
and is based on the musical notion of repletion and variation, which
does not seem to be the case with Taggart, notwithstanding the name-checks
for J.S. Bach here."
In fact, in Taggart's work from the 1970s onward, one finds just
the sort of intense use of repetition and variation – based on
musical models – that you describe. Poems in Loop draw on Steve
Reich, Olivier
Messiaen, and Thelonius Monk, for example (that volume was published
in 1991, but collected work from the previous decade). Taggart
discusses his methods and influence in relation to such influences
in a talk
from the 1970s called "The Preface" (published in Songs
of Degrees).
So Pastorelles moves
away from the intense, musical repetitions and long sequences that
Taggart
became known for in the 1970s-80s.
I do
know that Enslin and Taggart are friends. I suspect the influences
are reciprocal, complex, and long-developing."
