On Susan Stewart’s Red Rover (The University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets, 2008)

by John Kinsella

Susan Stewart is an investigator of linguistic nuance and a new metaphysics, par excellence. Each of her books of poetry has been a carefully taken step in a vision that transcends the materiality of subject, and even of subjectivity. She plays games with language, but all her games have serious implications. Maybe it’s truer to say that she observes the games that are played with language and reflects on them, then engages. The play and irony of her poetic arrangements are ladders to a kind of Trahernian affirmation and even transcendence. Spiritual yet pragmatic, her verbal and conceptual unravellings and reworkings tease and illuminate. I believe she is one of the finest poets of the last fifty years.

Red Rover, Susan Stewart’s new volume of poetry, is like a medieval codex of mostly unknown poems that have been recently discovered, scintillatingly transcribed and recast to reflect on a modern world (or worlds) that remains quite ancient in its modus operandi. I say mostly, because we have versions and takes on poems by Chaucer, ‘Variations on the «The Dream of the Rood»’, and other sublimities and embeddings of Christian and Neo-Platonic thinking. The super-genre of medieval dream poetry resonates through a book in which the representational nature of language is investigated against a longing for spiritual affirmation.

This beautifully wrought book is actually a work of resistance and trauma in which the ‘poet’ reflects on the evasions and tactics of language when it’s put to use to socialise and historicise. With a writer so intensely informed by a broad range of literary histories, who as a critic has forged a linguistic philosophy to investigate literature, it is almost surprising to see history re-invoked as a form of spatial infinite, a timelessness in which past, present and future co-exist.

Myth, always important to an understanding of Stewart’s work, becomes anchored in the child’s game, in the domestic, in the incidental, in the pro-forma of animals and plants, the here and now. Myths collate and cross-talk, and the dream of the wood of the cross is the dream of the perfect world and the world in which no death is natural. ‘Nonsense’ is only nonsense because we hear it as such. The mummer doesn’t need speech. This is a mummer’s book. Sights are seen and sounds are heard, but what do they mean and what do we do with them? This is a book of a new kind of metonymy. The parts stand for the whole, but always in the context of metaphor — a parsed metonymic metaphor, if such a thing can be imagined. Take this stanza from ‘Variations on «The Dream of the Rood»’:

It says, ‘I was a cross in the form of a man: I was made
                         from a tree, and like a tree.
                                      And I had arms like a man and
                                                  was like a man,
                                                        and from the man
                                                        a god took form,’

Then from his side the soul flew, sudden.
Like a cloud, the soul flew, flown.

I’d argue this as variation, translation, and transformation. Pivotal is the simile — so often called the lowest of poetic devices, but here restored to its innate potency. In comparing, it becomes part of; in becoming part of, it transcends. This is how the true splinter of the cross could carry such power, in its forest-scale existence. Stewart understands the primary gestures of poetry and that poetry doesn’t exist purely for middle-class comfort as a means of contemplating the ineffable, but is a very practical way of making the ineffable tangible. The gritty realities of the Middle Ages aren’t far away here. And when Stewart writes of the horrors of a crime such as the school-shootings of Amish children in Pennsylvania, it’s not in its reality of blood but in its greater reality of permanent spiritual damage. She does this through creating connection, making good and evil part of a whole. The irony of the method is that the horror is not diminished but placed in an eternalising spiritual perspective. In many ways, Stewart has learnt to write the unwritable without being appropriative, insensitive, consumerist or exploitative. She writes it because she means it and because pain needs transformation. In the end, this becomes an issue of the mechanics of expression.

Origins of language come out of the necessity of language. In a book where sequences of poems anchor shorter lyrical retorts, the ‘Songs of Adam’ sequence (in the cumulative sense) forms an ur-textual core. Basing it on the ‘Deo Gracias’, a fifteenth-century English hymn-poem, Stewart here takes lines from the earlier text and extemporises. Playing with the text’s meter, the poems stutters (in the case of Adam), lists, anaphorises, and engages with the core of the original text, the notion of felix culpa. It is essential to understand this in order to understand Stewart’s book as a whole. Felix culpa — happy fault — conveys the idea that it was just as well that Adam and Eve sinned or we would never have known the joy of redemption (or the incarnation of the redeemer). This is not to say that Stewart concurs, but she notes it as a driving theology and ontology of not only the medieval Christian world, but also ‘her country’ with its windows cut out looking east and west, its panopticon view of itself.

This is forcefully brought ‘home’ in the long and ‘string-like’ poem late in the book, ‘The Field of Mars as a Meadow’, where we see the collision between the ‘created’ (the natural world) and the imagined (a form of liberation in Stewart’s work), between past and present (across geographies, time and space: say, ancient Rome to contemporary America), the enslaver and the emancipator, war and a subverted love. The Campus Martius in ancient Rome was a public space where wheat was once grown, livestock foraged, and the military trained. The confluence of activities is the irony from which departs a history that takes the reader through to modern imperialist America. Stewart gives the impression of looping a narrative together from a variety of sources, a form of subtexual cento. The notes at the back of the book are minimal — which is the right way to go about it here — but you just know that thousands of lines inform each one. However, with a lyrical deftness and absolute control over her words, Stewart doesn’t need the notes. And the reader doesn’t need to know to get the tone or impression, indeed, the thinking.

Children’s games are a rich source of poetry but Susan Stewart has recast them as focal points of the poetic. Poetry is not always positive but it is necessary: it’s a default position in terms not only of learning but also of control. Zero-sum game philosophy is a key focus in poems such as ‘Red Rover’ and ‘King of the Hill’, as much as it is in the games themselves. The metonymic-metaphorical parsing is pivotal in poems such as ‘tag’ and ‘shadowplay’. The sequence,“Games for Children” becomes a poetics primer. Across the book, a rebuttal of this seems as crucial as Blakean contraries. Comptines — nursery rhymes (esp. with numbers), jeux de doigts (finger play) are a playground and also a private science (and an end of childhood freedom — already inbuilt in the regulation of the game, especially ‘King of the Hill’ with its hierarchy and one-ruler system, but also in ‘Red Rover’ with its breaking the chain of the opposition or failure and being absorbed — both might-is-right scenarios not only to condition for social control but also to prevent language breaking down... poetry as control mechanism and liberator...). The hand game in the private space of conscience leads to the blacking-out of the perceivable world (‘shadowplay’) —  this is a telling ontology. I am reminded of the opening poem on the owl and the Berkeleyan sense of something being as we perceive it (subjective idealism):

And still I thought a piece of cloth
had flown outside my window, or human hands

had freed a wing, or churning gods revealed
themselves, or, greater news, a northern owl

a snowy owl descended.

So, ‘to be is to be perceived’ but in Stewart these perceptions allow being on multiple co-existent as well as contingent levels. Her poetics works in the same way, and this is also a poem about writing poetry, about where poetry comes from. Stewart looks for an ‘answer’ in dreams, and would have light where darkness is, but also knows death is as much part of light as darkness. She resists the Manichaeism she invokes.

I called this poem ‘the owl,’
the name that, like a key, locked out the dark

and later let me close my book and sleep
a winter dream[...]

 

Stewart can deliver a searingly forceful and even didactic line amidst the lyrical gesture. She sets up, say, a form of direct address, or a discursive ‘point’, then diverges into a ‘different’ mode that enhances the point through juxtaposition. This shift in tonal and often formal register is not uncommon in her poetry. An example is this from ‘When I’m speaking, I’m not crying’ (which on the opposite page is preceded by the companion poem ‘When I’m crying, I’m not speaking’):

The personal is artificially political just as
the political artificially personal.

War profiteering has many means, including
the sale of poems against the war.

Those who destroy the garden and poison
the well think that streets
will be named for them in the future.

The mapping of a post-lapsarian world is a constant motif. Above we have the shift from the didactic inversions of the first couplet, to the out-and-out statement of the second couplet, through to the Edenic allusions of the third. But the major shift comes in what follows:

     When Aeneas, son of the goddess of love, strides out
               alone on the empty
                         field, so recklessly

This ‘diversion’ reinforces what has come before, but also allows for a reinterpretation of what we assume is rhetorical but is likely built out of a series of textual references (that subtexual cento at work again) that build a mosaic of context and interpretation, displacing original meaning. What is language? Susan Stewart wrote a dissertation on nonsense, and has a reputation as an acute thinker on the question of what language is. We are left asking whether lines that function paratactically or non-logically are no more ‘nonsense’ than lines that seem to make obvious rhetorical sense. Take these lines from the poem ‘my mother’s garden’ from the linguistically and structurally (and I mean in terms of Structuralism) brilliant sequence ‘Games from Children’:

I found my wooden boat
staring at a cloud

I lost my memory
when I learned to whistle

The aphoristic certainty of these statements makes sense of the nonsensical. We are often told this is how poetry works anyway, but such overt and confident statements as ‘fact’ might lead us to term these ‘absurd’ or, maybe, ‘surreal’. The unconscious logic behind the claims enforces a visualisation. By allowing this, the lines become no less acceptable than the didactic lines regarding war-profiteering, with which I, for one, agree. But I also agree with the ‘absurd’ lines as well. Why? This is the question Stewart asks and fuses with theological and ontological questionings. We can read this book as crisis or affirmation, or both!

Stewart’s quest for both a spirituality and a language of expressing the spiritual is often at its most potent when it is seemingly most ‘simple’ (it never really is, any more than Blake or Dickinson). For her, a wren has to be, and will be. It is both entirely outside human experience and necessarily connected to it through language, through ecology, and through the affirmation of being. This from ‘Wrens’:

if there’s
another
place another
world another life
there must be wrens.

The weight of the ontology is balanced between the overwhelming repetition of ‘another’ and what we (imagine? perceive?) as the lightness and delicacy of a ‘wren’.

Stewart’s theology may not be organised in a religious sense, but it is systemised. Her use of play-rhymes in the form of children’s games, as well as her Blakean innocence-and-experience ellipses and mnemonics, often function as prayer, and also as substitutes for discursive exploration at times as a kind of ploy, a kind of commentary on how ‘belief’ can be compulsive. Her sublime and double-entendrish version of Chaucer’s ‘The Former Age’ plays this in a sweetly and deftly ironic way. It’s true and fabricated at once , what she explores. I admire that Stewart can be so cuttingly satirical (and even damning) and yet retain a non-judgemental voice. All she needs to do is to allow Chaucer to be as modern as he is, and will always be, to speak loudly in this new age of violence and greed:

Alas, alas, now may men weep and cry
for in our day there’s only coveting,
double-dealing, and treason and envy.
Everywhere poison, manslaughter, and murder.

Thinking about Stewart’s use of voice in Red Rover, we might often ask who is speaking and who is being spoken to. It’s actually not a persona or personae — voice doesn’t work that way in this work (not even in dialogue forms) — the ‘voices’ are elopements from language and from the system of expression that marries us to certain outcomes of meaning. This is the irony of Stewart’s song-forms, her nursery rhymes, her songs of innocence and experience... they are enclosures like Russian dolls, or Rubik’s cubes — puzzle forms that open out and out and out. They are not containments. That’s the irony of Stewart’s ‘voice/s’. It’s why she is never sickly or twee with earnestness but capable of the most ‘sincere’ gesture. Because of this, she could write ‘Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006’ — the refrain and the namings of individual children are imprisonments that open into deliverance and spiritual transcendence. Stewart can’t make claims of deliverance or liberation in the poem — what right would she have? — but she can let form and the word  itself emanate out and transfigure from horror. Stewart was moved to write this poem out of necessity — the massacre took place near where she had lived, and place compels a response as shared space, as an echoing trauma come out of the felix culpa which backgrounds ‘acceptance’. The Amish community’s forgiveness of the perpetrator, and their rejection of pragmatic material logic with a spiritual logic that knows only its own names, goes beyond the language any poem can search for, in the final stanza:

Anna Mae, Mary Liz and Marian
Lena, Naomi Rose
when time has stopped
where time has slowed
the horses wear the rain

The poem is where the children are. The poem works through games from children but transcends the social in a way adults usually can’t see, especially in times of horror and responsibility. This is one of the most significant poems written out of America.

A variation or maybe even a striking exception to my anti-personae theory of Red Rover is the ‘In the Western World’ sequence, with its embracing of the unified self, with a kind of history of western subjectivity. I see this as a declaration of roots (as well as a lyrical-I mode that reflects on its own urges, needs, production — a kind of wonderment that it is speaking the things it ‘sees’, ‘senses’, and ‘feels’ — this ‘wonder’ understates and creates distance —  maybe that ‘stranger’ ‘unmoved and unmoving’ is also a reflection of western subjectivity, of the non-sustainability of a unified self...?) and as such, actually fitting with the anti-personae theory. We might ask which will be free of the other — the body or the soul? The body gets the soul’s ontological crisis and the soul gets the pleasures!

Red Rover is a ‘complaint’ (as it should be!) but not a didactic one. It has more resonance for its belief in metaphor. To go back to an earlier point, in thinking over Stewart’s metonymic incursions into metaphor, I am reminded of non-linear indigenous-Australian senses of ‘time’ in her use of ‘myth’, fact, observation and reflection, and kinship between land and soul. These create a different space for metonymy and not one I am sure has ever been explored in a ‘Western’ poetics. This has a range of  implications in terms of Red Rover's chains of control, chain of life, chains of being, and strings of language, that deserve ongoing investigation and discussion. Red Rover should open discussion on many levels.