Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets

Stephen Dobyns: The Uncertainties of Narrative

be involved. Without these features, indeed, a literary work could hardly be called an object at all, even though in its written form it must be conveyed to the reader through the medium of an object. But this object is not the artwork itself; it is merely a thing that contains the artwork, as a box might contain a sculpture. Which is why Dottor Postiglione, the art restorer and lover in Robert Hellenga'S novel The Sixteen Pleasures, says: "You can tear up a musical score without destroying the music. You can burn a novel without destroying the story. But a painting is itself, has no soul, no essence other than itself. It is what it is, a physical object. If it is destroyed, it is gone forever." 2 As static objects, paintings and sculptures are relatively ineffective in presenting the moven1ent of time; what they present instead are frozen moments that we may contemplate for as long as the artwork endures. Poems may not exactly give us objects that we can appreciate with our eyes, but they can give us effective renderings of actions taking place within time, actions that are perhaps used to make some point. In the case of Dobyns, this is what they give us, but only in his best, and later, work. In his earliest poems, Dobyns seems unaware of both the general power of narrative and his own particular talent at presenting it. In his first three books, Dobyns is primarily concerned with delivering various truths through discursiveness; rather than tell stories using concrete images he tends instead to use fantastic situations, generalized statements , and hazy speculations to arrive at puzzling but aphoristic conclusions. His early poems thus tend to be static, talky, and unreal, particularly when viewed from the perspective ofthe later, and much better, poems. Dobyns does occasionally attempt to use narrative in his early poems, though generally in such an unreal and unbelievable way as to render them baffling and ineffective. "Passing the Word," which Dobyns presents as the first poem in the (~oncurring Beasts section of Velocities: New and Selected Poems , 1966-1992 (1994), exhibits all these traits.3 In the opening lines, Dobyns announces this poem as an ars poetica by defining The poem as object; communicable; naked as a mannequin after closing, stripped between dressings, wig torn off, arms and legs S T E P HEN DaB Y N S 51 piled on the floor- the ability to rebuild, a movement from nothing. The poem as bell and the mannequin's head as clapper: a silent bell, insistently proclaiming. Dogs stir. A cat moves into shadow: now a jungle, now a tiger. Had Dobyns stuck with his original image, the poem as mannequin, he might have been able to develop it to the point of successfully communicating meaning . But even at that earliest point in the poem, we do not know so many crucial things, primarily this: from whose perspective is the poem seen as a mannequin ? The poet's? The reader's? That of the wife or husband of one of these two? Time is as mangled as the doll, being set first as "after closing" and then as "between dressings." Things get worse when the image of the poem mutates from being a mannequin to being a bell using "the mannequin's head as clapper ." What does this mean? What does it mean when this bell becomes silent, though "insistently proclaiming"? Narrative enters in the ninth line, where the poem, back to being a mannequin , appears "at your front door at three in the morning." Again we ask: at whose front door? Who is this character who "stumble[s] downstairs; a single slipper and slap / of bare foot; tugging at your robe" to greet "the mannequin dressed in dark silks - / a jumble of arms and legs for you to assemble"? Is it the poet meeting the poem he is going to write? Is it the reader of this (or perhaps any) mannequin poem, which must be assembled to be understood? Whoever this character is, his insubstantial identity begins to disintegrate as he attempts to deal with his visitor: But you wait too long and now your face, at best never more than tacked on, begins to slide, drip like a bad tap between your slipper and one bare foot. And you would move your arms, legs, but suddenly they are moving into you, into...