"Old Woman in Country Winter" by Stan White: a perfect poem from the "School of Quietude" (this time)

Poet Stan White

I once remarked here on the properties of a Robin Blaser piece, "Image Nation 2 (roaming", that make it almost poetically perfect. Not something I said lightly and without some close attention to the poem's structure & details which it was then my task to give in Deleuzian language. But the claim that Blaser's poem is perfect must come with qualifications, of course. For Blaser a kind of radically unorthodox poststructuralist way of talking is always appropriate. That is one important restriction, obviously.
An intentionally incongruous way (such as I used) to get to the core of a Blaser poem will make it inaccessible to ordinary readers who perhaps read for pleasure only rather than for displays of clever criticism.

There is another type of poetry in which language and content can combine as flawlessly as they do in a Blaser poem, but making it 'perfect' in what I consider a much more accessible sense, and I offer Stan White's "Old Woman in Country Winter" as example. Here's evidence of verse mastery able to co-exist with the fashionable academicized 'writing class' (flarf, collagist, visual, mash-up & conceptualist) poetries of our day. I'll go so far as to say it's the real reply to Ron Silliman's description of "official verse or mainstream" poetry as "neophobic", a poetry too afraid to come forth and identify itself as a legitimate movement. A fact he thinks is definitive of an entire mainstream presence that curries favour still with an ever diminishing reading public (as was recently seen in the appointment of W.S. Merwin to the prestigious American Poet Laureate position). Cowed into silence by its inability (or reluctance) to enter the arena, it's dubbed the School of Quietude. They're out there but too timid to offer themselves as an alternative to the brash, outspoken & more daring contemporary poetries.

A perfectly crafted 'formalist' poem like Stan White's, however, can cancel out in a single reading this Sillimanesque characterization. I'm not going to make any normative claims for White's style being better nor say that it's even set a standard of literary excellence of which postmodern poetries fall short (though in the minds of many of his readers, myself included, his writings certainly can): "Old Woman in Country Winter" ("Old Woman") is, in short, as good a poetry as anything Blaser, Silliman, et al. can give, offering something to the reader every bit as vital and original (as I hope to show). Silliman's way of thinking is (to my mind) notoriously format intolerant, with a penchant for labelling, and rallying progressivists everywhere to cover ground lost by the traditionalists, while I'm inclined to see the poetic world rather as peopled with variations on a theme of self-expression that is inherently perfectible and theory-neutral. Here's a poem that won't, in other words, be silenced by the theory-bullies.

I will give White's poem (reprinted with permission) in its entirety first.

Out of her hourglass filled with memory
now half empty with forget
and laden with December,
                                            falls,
from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields.
Over dawn a land reborn in style
coddles the farm in downy dreams.
                                           Its drift,
blown to the hedgerows, in a woman's curve,
cottontails the hatted house in gingerbread.
The morning blarneys the blushing barn,
its wimpled roof once handsome and metal'd.

Pristine, the ermine land invites
the ditched and foraged fox.
Footsteps along a dotted line,
                                           his sign.

How little the pen has colour over cold?
                                           Not so the page.

Close silenced, by the distant earshot-wind,
the snow-perched sparrows.
Even the chocolate stream,

                                          lucid,
crochets quietly on its icing pass.
And clement, a sun-made photo-sky,
all clear to Aldebaran.

In this Elysium,

                                         quiescent,
out of a firmament of blistering stars
and forever-rampant gravities, space curls away
as though it knows she is the centre of her universe;

                  safe from the neighbouring wars,
caught in the brief of morning glory
                  —an interlude of loveliness,
that nips her fingers and consumes her heart

Symmetry is, to begin with, the poem's greatest strength (in contrast to the fragmentary and collapsible properties in a Blaser poem); there's never any doubt about the subject (an old woman's reveries) and the most suitable lyrical language for it. The "Old Woman" is also a poem about the nature of a distinctive tradition of writing. But is it just a case of the usual form and content juxtaposition? The unity requirement is met but it's done primarily through an interestingly contrastive interplay of style & subject matter that despite their apparent incongruities do manage to take shape wonderfully on the page. "Old Woman" is a tale of fading memory and an escaping lyrical landscape but also, and more importantly, of the underlying processes that carry it forward and give it shape as poetry. The poem dares to follow a trail of "Footsteps along a dotted line" to a final "firmament of blistering stars" resolution in which memory, consciousness & an old woman living on ermine lands are eventually consigned to oblivion. This is its fateful unity. Elysium is a place that "nips her fingers and consumes her heart" as if even here the harsh narrative of her life continues.

The whole is weak without also the inner workings (subroutines, you can say) of mood, rhythm, the most elegant interweaving of imagery & meanings selected over their rivals for charm & poignancy.Though appearing to be artfully designed in practice, with one leading to the next, they ought to be explained as showing the dynamics of a single focused intention. White may himself to be experimenting with the notion of the fixed standard of a formalist poem and perhaps arbitrarily setting the limits to the ways an old woman's tale can be represented. Maybe intentions are meant to stray, almost by design, from their meanings, as receding memories oftentimes do. And if they do, the mood will jostle about, quixotically trying to set its sights on the right object. It can be, for example, mournful and celebratory: the result, even early in the poem, of a half empty hourglass commingling with "wedded icing", sadness of passing life with wedding happiness.

Out of her hourglass filled with memory
now half empty with forget
and laden with December,
                                             falls,
from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields.

After the opening "Its drift" in stanza three, placed there to mark another mood change, the poem takes a turn for the folklorish, sad landscapes feeling both cold December winter winds "blown to the hedgerows and (as if now in a Dylan Thomas Christmas)  a "hatted house in gingerbread" and "blushing barn". A kind of prelapsarian order in which "the ermine land invites/ the ditched and foraged fox." But if we continue to follow the "Footsteps along a dotted line,/his sign (an interesting concession to the textuality of the piece since we're now led to ask: whose footsteps: the fox's, poet's?) we find "Even the chocolate stream,/lucid/crochets quietly on its icing pass", and gingerbread optimism turns into a distant Aldebaran hope, now light-years out of reach. Safety in space, envisaged as the old woman's final Elysium, is hopelessly relativized. Death is envisaged as a return to a cosmic chaos whose coldness and fire continue to form processes of life.

The rhythmical effect of this quixotic "rage for order" at the heart of unity seems to have taken its cue from the pivotal "Its drift" transition noted above.The free verse supports a language of shifting moods & results in fairly detectable syllable-stress patterns of varying length and intensity, with long & sustained rhythms to support a mostly cheery, happily nostalgic mood, as in

from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields...

where the ear detects a predominantly four-beat stress pattern in each line, and an interesting formation of contrasting images formed around the first two stressed words ( 'grace', 'clouds'/'caked', 'icing'), whereas the shorter two- or three-beat lines, as in

Pristine, the ermine land invites
the ditched and foraged fox.
Footsteps along a dotted line

favour shorter, more episodic transitions to colder and more desolate realities such as a country winter. Reminiscences urged along by the old woman can hover around familiar terrain of things "once handsome and metal'd", the mood smooth & celebratory, until more quick-paced rhythms begin to scatter comforting recollections and make things feel more decidedly icy & wind-driven. Meters don't just tear unified impressions apart and form only transitory alliances; they're a sure way to keep the dance of imagery in front of us as we read.White's poem is sublimely context-sensitive—it is a poem about a person, landscape, season—but one that looks at its subject through a field of creative energies, unafraid even to dress traditional lyric in images of "downy dreams" and "chequered fields". And, as I've already suggested, if Elysium is the goal, it can also be seen as boldly asserting the uttainable outermost limits of the representational space of poetry itself.

The strength of the poem is intuited ("felt") rather than constructed regardless of its easily accessible contents. Formalist meanings cannot be predictably generated out of whole cloth either (as extreme postmodern poetries seem to do), nor succumb to a best-fit type of interpretation as per the usual form and content analysis. There's always room for unresolvable tension and ambiguity. It's rather enjoyable to see how White's poem works from a primary tension between memory "laden with December" and a "chocolate stream" landscape, with an introspective unity provided by what seem like the stray reminiscences of the old woman who recalls a joyous "blushing barn" youth. But tensions persist & unity is tenuous and the narrative of seasons, changing landscapes and starry nights skips along too joyously for its own good. Who would have expected to find a mine field in a formalist poem!

Now that I've looked at the whole of White's poem I can see the points of intersection with Blaser's "Image Nation 2 (roaming". If to be nomadically errant in Blaser poem is predictable, here it's a wonderful, unexpected surprise and perhaps just the right sort of critical noise to get Silliman's attention. Who would have a thought a poem from the "School of Quietude" could do as much! To Blaser's "machinic assemblage" I've arrayed the lyricist's own repertoire of mood, speech rhythms and imagery and gotten the same result; and, in fact, nothing would be easier than to replace the Elysium ending in "Old Woman" with Blaser's own dangerous night-journey: "then we, the apparatus, burned by a night/ light, are travelling in company with the messenger."
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I would like to post Stan's email reply to my discussion of his poem, if for no other reason than the uniquely insightful way he's defined the problem.

In Modest Praise of Form


With the demise of poetry as a force equal with religion, philosophy and natural science and with the advent of empirical science, some 400 years ago, as an influence of “fact,” there came with it the illusion of more certainty that we knew who and what we were and where we were going.

Over the past half century, that illusion has worn thin. Never have there been more speculation and less certainty about anything. It is therefore not surprising that artists, and poets in particular, should depict uncertainty in an uncertain way. Perhaps this explains the absence of form in much of contemporary postmod poetry.

However, our vision of uncertainty is equally uncertain. Nobody can deny that we “think” we are here. There is no uncertainty about the illusion of our world. Those of us who still might write with some vestige of form could argue that change in a mode of thinking is no more than a change of illusions.

Stan White