The Music of Daredevils and Madmen

One way around the ubiquitous Me, Myself, and I obsession of contemporary poetry is to write about characters, historical and otherwise, and provide (even invent!) the material that will fill in lacunae. Letting characters speak for themselves can also be a fruitful strategy. This is what R. T. Smith has done in Outlaw Style. Not that his earlier poems were full of self-involved navel-gazing: he has always worked deeply in the natural vein, whether examining his native southern places and people or those of Ireland, where he has spent time. Music, too, as made by the folk who are outside officially sanctioned circles, has been one of his affections. Hence outlaw style.

The major difference here is that more of his poems have crossed the unfenced border between lyric and narrative, all the while retaining the lyric’s music. He seems to have discovered that inhabiting the voices of others, a precinct left largely to fiction these days, has opened up broad new possibilities. Listen to the snake-handler Brother Fain Carouthers:

The wicked I have walked among and fought with and abandoned will call us daredevils and madmen, but I can read the cursive letters of a serpent’s spine and look him where the wet eye shines beneath its hood to seek my sweating face.

The narratives and lyrics of Outlaw Style are set in three sections. In the first a marvelous array of voices relate their stories. Besides the snake-handler there’s a preacher who launches into a hilarious defense of cockfighting, a dead woman whose ashes have been left to the winds by an absconding undertaker, and various personae whom I take to be earlier versions of the poet, particularly in “Dar He,” a boyhood memory centering on the murder of Emmett Till.

The middle section of Outlaw Style, the longest at forty-four pages, almost constitutes a biography of John Wilkes Booth, ranging back and forth over his life, as told by Booth and a collection of relatives, friends, and lovers, spies, losers, and actors, even Boston Corbett, the man who shot him. What comes powerfully through is the variety of ruin he cast on these people, not to mention the country, by his murder of Lincoln. Strangely or not Booth seems to have been the Elvis of his time. For years after his death travelers claimed they had encountered him—even drunk with him—in places as far apart as Tunis and Hong Kong. These poems are rich with the history of their time, the details that bring a narrative alive:

As dawn embered over the Rappahannock, the blazing Garrett barn collapsed. Everyone remembers the words he cried that Good Friday night: Sic Semper Tyrannis. From Brutus, and Virginia’s state seal. During the autopsy by Doctor Barnes, his head came detached. The body was thrown into a musket case, nailed shut and shoveled under the Old Penitentiary’s cellar floor.

The third section of Outlaw Style is a foray into the origins of various musics. The sad cornettist Buddy Bolden, the Carter Family, Billie Holiday, and Robert Johnson are but a few who put in appearances in these poems, as do such instruments as the mandolin, gypsy fiddle, and harmonica. Smith has the remarkable ability to translate the sounds of music into language. Thus in “Hohner,”

I’d cup my palm for a mute or give all my breath to “Fair and Tender

Ladies,” “Shenandoah,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” but it was hard love blues I’ll always remember

as the natural weather for the raspy fervor of a mouth harp’s razor edge, that stridor

and chromatic keen under the embouchure uttered only as kiss and spitfire

by woman wailing for her demon lover, all caterwaul, moan, and broken-soul-shiver.

Smith’s robust prosody is exemplary, with patterns of near-rhyme, alliteration, and loose iambics often in evidence, together with a rich word hoard. Most collections are snacks, but Outlaw Style is a verbal feast, as the very title with...