Dionysus and Apollo
My ten-year-old daughter protests and complains, she summons all her suasive efforts, but I remain an Elvis fan. Not limited to songs by Elvis, my appreciation extends to songs about Elvis, for example, “Calling Elvis,” by Dire Straits. It’s the lead track on their final album, On Every Street. About this album there are two schools of thought, both visible on its AllMusic page. “A disappointment,” asserts William Rohlmann, the site’s professional reviewer: “low-key to the point of being background music.” But the people think otherwise, and give it, on average, 4 out of 5 stars. Sophisticated subtlety, or bland lifelessness—it’s a fine line, and fine taste is needed to see it.
Timothy Steele’s poetry is on the good side of this bar. It is rewardingly subtle, in both form and content. The poems tend to start small, with close attention to tiny details in a mundane scene:
The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall.
(“Herb Garden”)
By placing in its path an index card,
I catch an ant that scurries round the sink.
(“For Victoria, Traveling in Europe”)
Sometimes, this attention is all: at the end of “Herb Garden” we’re still among the herbs, where, “quarrying between the pathway’s bricks, / Ants build minute volcanoes out of sand.” Other poems expand, and concrete details yield to something higher, or more abstract. The beach in “Starr Farm Beach” is named after a farm that’s named (I presume) after its owner, but that name inspires the fancy of “stars / ... sown and grown and gathered for the sky,” and the poems ends thus:
We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.
As delightful as the what of the poems is the how. There’s joy in seeing each thing fall perfectly into place. Not just, for example, the rhyme of “savoir-faire” with “air,” but the slotting of the complex and foreign phrase “quick piscine savoir-faire” into the iambic template with exactness and precision. Steele asserts, in All the fun’s in how you say a thing, that “the chief sources of variation in metrical composition reside within the norm”: good iambic pentameter, he holds, rarely contains anything but iambs, and this, he argues, is less of a restriction than one might think. A beautiful example is this amazingly thick line, describing the titular bird in “Black Phoebe”:
Compact, black-capped, black breast puffed to the sun.
The “within the norm” claim in Steele’s theory, made me expect few “trochaic substitutions” in his verse, and even fewer that were not preceded by a “grammatical pause,” the main excusing condition he lists. But they were surprisingly common, relatively speaking. There’s one, in fact, in the just-quoted line, and here are two more, in consecutive lines (each time, in the “second foot”):
A bat cracks, a crowd rises to its feet;
Huge jets lift to the sky, and, higher yet...
(“April 27, 1937”)
Still, it remains true in Steele’s poetry that, metrically speaking, the reins are held tight; things never get out of hand.
Bob Dylan regards the control that Steele so prizes as the enemy of art. Depth of meaning is to be found at the bounds of sense; so one must risk crossing over. Describing the creative drought that was the 1980s, in his memoir Chronicles Volume One, Dylan says, of his famous songs, and of the demands that he perform them,
It was like carrying a package of heavy rotten meat.
And he writes,
after relying so long on instinct and intuition, both these ladies had turned into vultures and were sucking me dry. Even spontaneity had become a blind goat. My haystacks weren’t tied down and I was beginning to fear the wind.
Instinct as vulture; spontaneity as goat; haystacks as...something: three metaphors in three sentences. I don’t know what they all mean, but I want to.
See also:
Nice, Brad. I'm a fan of that push-up lizard!
If you pronounce “compact” as a trochee, the way many people do (try saying “compact car” otherwise), it’s easy to read Steele’s “Compact, black-capped, black breast puffed to the sun” as four trochees followed by an iamb. In fact, I think it sounds much better that way.