TOP13-DES12
This Old Poem #13:
Pattiann Rogers’ Opus From Space
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/31/02

  Pattiann Rogers is a poet who has used science better than just about any other published poet. Her poems have had very Stevensian titles like The Importance of the Whale in the Field of Iris- easily her best poem- 1 that is great & important. She has, however, proven that she is not immune to the senescence that accompanies most poets on the down side of middle age. Just about all of the poems of hers that will make up her ‘canon’ to readers in 50 years were published in books up until her mid-90s book Firekeeper:, New and Selected Poems. Her earlier poems all had music (usually lush), interesting wordplay (inserting scientific or philosophical terms seamlessly), and long lines upon which these other 2 features could play. She was often a dense poet, who surface-wise would remind 1 of the older Amy Clampitt, or her contemporaneous poet Mary Oliver. PR was better than both of them because, unlike AC, her poems were not all style over substance, &, unlike MO, her poems were not aimed at simply an emotional response 1^st. Often they would be circular poems- in the best sense- starting & ending where they began; the point of the poem being where it took you. Often, at her best, the overused criticism of poems being ‘lush’ was apt. Sometimes she would veer off into description just to describe & fill space, but at her best she could leave the reader wanting more.
  Her poems of recent vintage have not been nearly as good- it’s as if she peaked & faded. The poems are not so much bad as mediocre- they could have been penned by a PR acolyte, rather than PR.  The weakness from her earlier work- basically seeing ‘just what’s there’, & not ‘what can be there’ in a poem- is till there, but more prevalent. Her poems now lack the music & longer lines of her best work. In a lot of ways- she’s a textbook example of a poet whose work went from being singular to generic- 1 of the primary, most noticeable differences between good & bad poets.
  Of course, bad critics are oblivious to this. 1 of the worst poets & critics around is former Poetaster Laureate Robert Hass. I’m gonna try something different in this TOP installment. I will, as usual, dissect & then improve the poem. But, then I will compare my criticisms on the original poem with those of RH on the same poem, in the insidiously bad Washington Post Sunday column called Poet’s Choice. This appeared in the late 1990s with Rita Dove its 1^st guru. RH was the 2^nd dullard to helm the column, followed by- I believe- Robert Pinsky, & currently Edward Hirsch. The best of that lot was RD- who seems to have followed the same arc as PR, in that her published poetry of the last decade is atrocious- after early precocity. The column in question was called One Poem, by Pattiann Rogers & was published on 3/7/99.
  Let us now look at the poem, from PR’s 1997 book Eating Bread And Honey (not a promising title, eh?):

Opus From Space 

Almost everything I know is glad
to be born – not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.

Almost everything I've seen pushes
toward the place of that state as if there were
no knowing any other – the violent crack
and seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood-sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning
for luck toward birth by water.

And I'm fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings going on
continually, the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells. Legs
and shoulders, knees and elbows flail likewise
against their womb walls everywhere, in pine
forest niches, seepage banks and boggy
prairies, among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.

Mad zealots, every one, even before
beginning they are dark dust-congealings
of pure frenzy to come to light.

Almost everything I know rages to be born,
the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.

  Unlike most poems I’ve trimmed in the TOP series, this poem is not really execrable- it’s just predictable. There is too much listing & over-description- a familiar problem in poems that are based on science, for the tendency is to be a bit pedantic & jam in words just to show the poet knows them. Even if scientifically accurate, there is no excuse, literarily, to use such. This poem has its moment here: ‘the philosophy implicit in the inside out/seed-thrust of the wood-sorrel’. Perhaps this is a legitimate natural phenomenon- but it’s a reach as a metaphor in this poem- not to mention fairly clunky sound-wise. The enjambment- a bane in many of the poems TOP’s torn into, is solid to good- the only clunker is midway through stanza 3- why are those ‘legs’ dangling? There’s no musical, syllabic, nor dramatic reason for it. & biggest cliché occurs not within the body of the poem but is the poem’s whole trope: the ‘isn’t nature wonderful approach’. Yet the poem never gets to the O! moment needed to put it over the top as a successful poem.
  Before I suggest my revisions, let’s look at what a former Poet Laureate had to opine on this rather formulaic poem:

  I always seem to want it to be spring before winter is done with. I start counting it as spring, secretly, mentally, from about March 1 onward, which is not cheating in California, where in fact I start counting in mid-February, or in Washington. But I have thought of spring and gone out looking for evidence, at times, on the edges of Lake Erie and along the Iowa River and even in muddy iced-over fields in the Norfolk Broads in bitter March and in a Mexican desert in December. I was musing on this fact of my character when I came across this poem by Pattiann Rogers from her book "Eating Bread and Honey." It was published in 1997 and I'm just catching up with it. Rogers lives in Colorado. Her work has always appealed to me because she knows so much natural history, and knows it with such exuberance.

  That’s it, then we get the poem. Not an iota of why the poem succeeds or fails. Here’s the rewrite:

Opus From Space 

Almost everything I know is glad
to be born- not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.

Almost everything I've seen pushes- the violent

seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood-sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning.

And I'm fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings,
the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells.
Legs and shoulders, knees and elbows
flail against their womb walls
everywhere, in pine forest niches,
seepage banks and boggy prairies,
among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.

Even before beginning they are dust-
congealings of pure frenzy come to light.

Almost everything I know rages
to be born, the obsession itself
explicitly in the coming bone
harps and ladders, the heart-thrusts,
vessels and voices of all those speeding
fury toward this singular honor.

  Stanza 1 is a list, & solid. Stanza 2 is trimmed & gains by what is not overtly stated. What is lost was fairly prosaic, anyhow. Stanza 3 loses some thes & ands, is tighter & more musical- albeit it is still another list & does not really develop the poem’s ideas more. It also goes from solid to good enjambment, which allows the speaker of the poem to pick up the pace to a more natural sort of dervish. Stanza 4 goes from: 

  Gone are the worst clichés in-poem cliché: mad zealots & ‘dark’. The break of ‘dust-congealings’ at the hyphen makes it both a hyphenated word & a dash, which allows the 2^nd line to also be read as a comment on the preceding line. The last stanza contains the best metaphor in the poem: ‘bone harps and ladders’, but my version is tighter & the ‘fury’ does double duty as noun & verb- this done by dropping the ‘with’. I could, being well-versed in mimicry, make this a bit more like an early PR poem- but that is not this series’ function. Perhaps PR, herself, will rise to challenge herself to re-tap the Muse. While the best of early PR poems were unique, & readily identifiable as PR poems, the original, here, is a standard, albeit well-wrought, workshop poem. The rewrite, is just an even better written workshop poem- such are this series’ dicta’s limits.
  It’s not surprising that PR would revert back to workshoppery after having been a product of the early MFA mills in the 1960s & 70s, & then becoming a ‘Distinguished Writer-In-Residence’ at Mercer University, & Creative Writing Program guru. Nor is it a shock to see a poet of talent get lazy &/or lose the Muse after the passing of the big 5-0. Still, it’s a disappointment. Yet, her own personal website is worth checking out: http://www.mindspring.com/~pattiann_rogers/. Hopefully, she will be 1 of the rarities that actually does not decline with each successive book. That she will ever regain her former powers is a long shot- still, here’s hoping.

Final Score: (1-100):

Pattiann Rogers’ Opus From Space: 75
TOP’s Opus From Space: 82

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