Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review

Gabriel Welsch

SINGING THE BODY FAR-REACHING: A CENTURY LATER, AND THE LIVELY WHITMAN SUBTEXT
by Gabriel Welsch

A review of Walt Whitman Bathing, poems by David Wagoner, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996,
88 pages, $12.00 paper.

.....Last year, The College of William and Mary in Virginia, in collaboration with several other leading universities, put The Walt Whitman Archive on the World Wide Web. Because of that show of scholarly democracy (Whitman would have been delighted), anyone with a computer can now look at the man himself and his work, in a facsimile of how it would have appeared when first produced. Upon accessing the pages of photos taken during Whitman's lifetime, I was moved by the many visages, ages, and personalities that confronted me: from the familiar white-bearded sage to a strapping and somewhat saucy young man with a Mona-Lisa-like smile, to one picture where he looks like a priggish haberdashery clerk. For better or worse, those images are the faces of the self-proclaimed seer not only of American poetry but also of American identity in the late nineteenth-century. Viewing them, it becomes easier to understand how one man could so completely identify with such a diverse nation and, in turn, so profoundly affect its cultural growth.

.....In fact, it is the variety of Whitman's legacy that most clearly echoes in the most recent collection by contemporary poet and Ruth Lily Prize winner David Wagoner. His Walt Whitman Bathing does not address the most familiar incarnation of Whitman, however. Contemporary poets like T. R. Hummer and Mark Doty cover well the political Whitman, the Whitman of ideas, concerned and in a troubled love with the people of a country in various turmoil. Wagoner instead troubles himself with the sensuous Whitman, the Whitman in celebration of nature and the individual, of the dramas of everyday, the Whitman less like an intellectual godhead and more like an old and stooped father or neighbor.

.....David Wagoner's elegies, childhood narratives and most especially his poems on landscapes use Whitman's occasional spareness, the style more typical of his shorter poems, along with the seer's penchant for naturalism. Wagoner allows the spare power of landscapes to move us into a conception of natural America and our conflicting instincts of conquest and reverence, detailed in "Mapmaking:" "It's an old desire: a sketch of part of the earth/ there in your hands. You touch it, saying, There./ So make your map:/ If you have no crossroads, no confluence of streams/ To set your starting point, you simply pretend/ You know where you are."

.....Throughout Walt Whitman Bathing, Wagoner's fourteenth book of poetry, characters are undone while pretending to know where they are. Adopting a more detail-oriented and narrative approach to his poems, more like Whitman's observances of battlefields, for instance, Wagoner outlines scenes, reserving commentary entirely or for the very end of the poem, as in "My Passenger," when a young man cruising in his father's car is forced to drive home a drunken cop who loses his hat halfway through the ride: "he jerked awake,/ Said Here, fumbled the door half open, squeezed/ Himself outside while counting his handcuffs,/ His wallet and gun-butt, stumbled, and went crawling// Up to the swaying curb. I drove away/ Quickly and turned the corner. He was standing/ Flatfooted like a man in a windy city,/ Holding his ground and clutching his bare head.// That afternoon, I fooled almost everybody."

.....Wagoner's poems retrieve the past, work to recreate the magic of images both natural and cultivated on the young and old alike. In "Come with Me," the persona recalls how "I was on the verge of the actual genuine/ Casbah once, two steps from the beginning/ of that tangle of bad ends, stairwells like cracks,/ and desperate tourist trappings. A shill with two teeth,/ Grinning, wanted to take us in by ourselves." The persona considers whether to trust the shill, to believe in the romance of the real world and, later, decides "there by the gate lay the difference between Love/ And Death in the matinee and love and death:/ A man on his only carpet, which wasn't for sale/ but was flying in darts and circlets under the spell/ Of blue-tailed flies." He refuses the risk of seeing the real, already disappointed by a world beyond him. Wagoner's poems recall magic, tragedy, the thrill of snippets in time that brought forth God, in a tone plaintive as Whitman's.

.....So, when we read the title poem of the collection, and feel the terrible frustration of Whitman viewing the world after a stroke hasdiminished his capacities but not his senses, it seems Wagoner's poems are working the same struggle: "He would sit down on the bank and stare at the water/ For an hour as if expecting/ Something to emerge,
some new reflection/ In the place of the old . . . He would dress then, helping/ His left side with his right as patiently/ As he might have dressed the wounded or the dead,/ And would lead himself toward home like a dear companion." Wagoner has the same tone of empathy and remembrance in similar poems about Roethke, Auden, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, invoking the "Secret Agents," the aged poets at the points of their greatest wisdom and corporeal frailty, as when Roethke, at his own party, left in disgust to visit his rose bush: "He took his drink outside and watered a bush/ on which two roses, ragged, livid by moonlight,/ Overblown and lopsided/ Like the heads of broken puppets, were still dangling/ From their thin stems. Grimly, he ate them both." In the end, after a series of spare, haunting and beautiful landscapes, Wagoner's collection summons a complex anguish and artful nostalgia for beauty untainted by our observations, and, in the last lines of "In a Field of Wildflowers," Wagoner, like Hummer and even Whitman, resolves to perhaps share what tatters of vision and beauty he can provide: "Should we sing or dance? . . . Or quietly presume/ out of honest destitution to share the wealth/ Of emissaries with roots and nests and wings/ Without their consent/ For as long as we can imagine through a clear/ Benevolent afternoon that has no end?"

Gabriel Welsch* is a poet and freelance journalist living in Central PA. His poems have appeared in The Black Bear Review, Confluence and Unkempt. His reviews of poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Salt Hill Journaland The Heartlands Today.

Isaiah 61:1-3

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