Deadly Pollen | Page 6

flecks, nova spittle. Rage of?emptiness pours through, for the hell?of it, endlessly. Looking back to?what beginning. The whole shebang?advances toward, beyond our?best efforts. We live under a Niagra?of star fall, huge optics dilate time,?blackness like velvet slips over?chrome. Sounds of nothingness?strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30).
This is vintage Oliver. The language is elaborate, but perfectly judged, undercut by a colloquial impulse ('black as the ace of spades', 'for the hell / of it'). This undersong speaks of Oliver's awareness of his place as a poet of the vernacular republic; but it also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the resources of poetic language.
And something similar can be said of its use of Stevens, for where Stevens is the poet who brought romantic metaphysics to its final crisis, and with it the end of any hope of finding essential meaning in the world, Oliver's use of Stevens here seems also an act of deliberate failure. The stanza alludes to Stevens's Jove, a false divinity who 'moved among us, as a muttering king' in 'Sunday Morning', and to that poem's existential conclusion that (contra Milton) 'We live in an old chaos of the sun'. Like Stevens in 'Key West', Oliver laments the 'Blessed rage for order', the 'glassy lights' which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver's stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry.
Clearly there is much in this sequence which I find powerful, and respond to warmly. Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of poetry today: from the modernist legacy of deep worries over memory and metaphor, to a more contemporary juxtaposition of dictions and registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history. It is a sequence which is not afraid to take on Stevens, or Milton and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped, for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the texture of the poem, along with some editing of the poem's middle section, we would have a major achievement not only in Oliver's oeuvre, but in antipodean writing.
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