Resonance (review)

If you've never read Richard Jackson's poetry, you might think he is the latest chronicler of overload in the so-called Information Age. Take this confession from his new book, Resonance:

It's hard to keep upwith all the new information: hundreds of new speciesdiscovered last week, new planets, new flavors, new policies.Everything speaks. Everything is alive: trees use a languageof clicks in the wind like the sun people near the Namibia-Angola border. Geneticists say they are the origin of our species.

He ends this poem, ironically titled "Waiting for the Bus to Arrive," by observing, "I'm just standing here like a sleepwalker asking for directions."

Resonance is, in fact, Jackson's tenth book. His penchant for the long line reflects a love of Whitman and well suits the style of associational poetry he has championed over the years, both as a poet and respected teacher, and most recently articulated in his essay "Language-Driven Poetry: An Introduction to the Principle of Generating Poems" (The Cortland Review, January 6, 2006).

Unlike most contemporary poets with a highly formulated aesthetic, Jackson does not play the game of post-modernism, making it clear from the start that poetry for him "is not a question here of arguing that poems are only about language, as some language poets argue." Instead he has roots in Dante, Wordsworth, Petrarch (his last book, Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems featured sonnets in a contemporary mode). He admires Petrarch' s vario stile ("shifting style"), "language beyond language . . . always in the impossible position of trying to say something beyond itself." On one level then (the most important) the "essential power of language" is "as sound and as a physical thing as opposed to meaning and representation." This echoes, as Jackson points out, Wordsworth's notion of "words, not only as symbols, but as things, active and efficient," as well as a number of other well-known formulations: Frost's "sentence sound" that "often says more than the words," Richard Hugo's "triggering town" whereby an image, a prompt, even the "sound of words" can carry "the poet and poem in unanticipated directions," and similarly Brodsky's "dictate of language," which also "prompts, or simply dictates, the next line" and may surprise the poet with the poem's outcome. Jackson wants "an excess of associations through the play of language," "a rich array of possibilities, a kind of fluidity of meanings—though not totally out of control since they are limited by the shape of the quilt."

Jackson's quilt is held together by obsessively recurring subjects and key words: stars, love, hearts, atrocities, ecological concerns, painters and paintings, geographical and naturalistic and biological tidbits, poets, philosophers ancient and modern, mathematicians, the New Physics. He is a romantic documenting the transience of love and life on Earth in the context of a universe of ever-expanding knowledge and mystery. Just as Petrarch wrote in the extremely uncertain time of the Black Death, we have our mind-boggling physics, environmental worries, and ongoing brutalities, but the poet must still get to the central theme associatively. Simply put, "What the critic looks for—and some beginning writers who don't know 'what to write about'—is the point, a way to nail down the meaning and intention." Instead "the meaning is always something to be explored." And so Jackson makes a clear distinction between "language-driven" and "idea-driven" poetry:

The point is simply that there is a tendency for poems to be primarily language-driven, and that the best poems are language-driven, and the others tend to become propaganda, confession or therapy. That does not mean that poems are best when they eschew ideas, only that the ideas in the better poems arise out of a play of language.

Dogmatic as this may sound to some, Jackson is not above making fun of himself. He calls one poem "Why I So Digress." In "Personals," which references among other things and people Confucius, grouper, Tiresias, Big Bang theory, Bowery graffiti, jazz, Caravaggio, Jesus, the Nile, and hermaphroditic frogs, he...