“When she moved,” wrote Roethke, “she moved more ways than one.” I always feel a little embarrassed by the line. It’s a little lurid — lecherous, almost. But I love it, too, its sound and agility. It holds its shape, elastic, in my memory over time.
Form imitating meaning rarely does that much for me. That attempt to make every element of a poem agree usually leaves me cold. [1] But it’s very much the case that Roethke’s sentence, like the woman he knew and ogled — and like the poem, “I Knew a Woman,” more generally — moves “more ways than one.” And it’s worth noting how pleasurable his multivalent motion is. [2]
We talk about art embodying ideas and feelings, but I think it’s worth talking about poems — some poems, at least — as bodies unto themselves, bodies a mind can make, in which a mind can move. And that movement, which we most often refer to as musical, might more profitably be described as dance. The elements of a poem — syntax, sentence, subject, rhythm, story (maybe), rhyme (maybe), line (maybe), diction, attitude, tone, etc. — are at least as involved with each other as toe, foot, ankle, knee, and all their attendant muscles and tendons, all at work on each other under the unified skin. A single line runs through a poem, starting (in English) at the upper left corner and proceeding to the lower right. But dozens of elements, each one tangible in some way, can plot their own traversal across that axis. And just as no competent dancers move all the parts of their body in the same direction at the same time, so it is with the simultaneous parts of the poem. The vitality, the marvel, of some poems comes from a poet making something that moves more ways than one.
The majority of the poems that dance most noticeably also rhyme. Ben Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland,” for example, or the opening stanza of Yeats’ “Easter 1916.” Most of Hopkins, including “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” or, more recently, a poem like Erica Dawson’s “Placebo.” Because end-rhyme makes the line more immediately audible as a unit, it provides an added and more prominent beat where the many motions can meet or diverge (or, given the number of elements at work, both).
Here are the first four lines of “Kingfishers”:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
By the end of the first line, the poem feels energetic but orderly. The interlocking alliteration has resolved itself, as has the grammatical structure of dependent clause/independent clause and the conceptual unity it describes: As x, so with y. So too the repeated pattern of stresses in “kingfishers catch fire” and “dragonflies draw flame,” which lines up perfectly with the grammar and the alliteration.
By the end of the fourth line, though, such unity lingers as a largely unmet expectation, highlighting what the poem has been up to since. The return to relative order there — as “name” answers the second of the rhymes that the first two lines proposed, and as line and syntax once again align — is just one move among many, and even the end-stopped lines that complete the octet will not restore the simultaneity that seemed to be in place after one line.
The first break in that order feels relatively slight. The second line starts in apparent parallel to the first, but the neat iambic pentameter finishes before the thought, and its brief independent clause — “Stones ring” — drops onto the next line, carrying the alliterative pattern with it and landing hard on a double stress. Soon enough, internal rhymes (“tells,” “bell’s” — made more audible by its intersection with the end rhyme — and “swung,” “tongue”) are creating one pattern while the increasingly chaotic network of alliteration is developing another. The break between the possessive “bell’s” and the noun it claims makes the third line ending feel especially jagged, while the energy of the phrase runs off in a string of heavily stressed syllables stacked across the first two feet of another iambic pentameter line. The sentence opens up into a brief preponderance of verbs as the last of the three independent clauses stretches its legs in contrast to the brief “Stones ring” that precedes it.
All the while, the meaning is straining against the grammatical pattern of supposed parallels. The second sentence, while repeating the opening “as,” actually describes a cause-and-effect relationship, with “as” referring to sequence, rather than similarity, while the other two are composing similes. And the movement from flying creatures flashing in the sunlight to the sound of rocks echoing up from wells to musical instruments making their intended sounds presses forward as if in search of a premise that hasn’t yet been named.
Thankfully, no one needs this kind of pedantry (for which, now, apologies) to experience all this. The exuberance is tangible. It’s scored along the pulse. You could describe it all as a mimetic force, Hopkins’ joy at God’s creation manifested in wild music that reflects His earthly abundance. I wouldn’t object. But what interests me more, here, is that all this can feel like one thing, working in concert, even as, to go back to Roethke’s line again, it moves in so many ways at once. This is the kind of thing I have in mind, in physical memory, when I say that some poems dance.
*
My favorite poems in A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s [3] third book, also dance. The title poem (also the book’s first) opens in full flight, in answer to an impressively sexist essay, “Of Our English Dogs and Their Qualities,” pulled from Holinshed’s Chronicles:
It’s not criminal: it isn’t sodomy
or taking horses to Scotland
or poaching the king’s deer.
Though it seems like witchcraft, this
entranced spasm of pleasure my presence
triggers in my wriggling pup. Now lap-ensconced,
she gobbles up a fancy kiln-dried
carp skin, snowing its small
smelly flakes on the carpet.
Like Hopkins, Pelizzon uses alliteration to establish a pronounced and irregular rhythm that cuts across syntax, line, and meter, each of which also seems to be working out its own independent, overlapping pulse, while the words roll around in the articulating mouth. She also dances across time, drawing words, attitudes, and events equally from the 16th century English elite and her own 21st century American circumstance (as well as, of course, English’s own pied inheritance). It all adds up to a delightful rendering of delight — delight that proves stronger than her awareness that much of her pleasure (including her happy reading of Richard II, naked in bed) pulls directly from “the rich milks of empire” that the ships of Queen Elizabeth — childless, like Pelizzon — “ploughed the seas to reach.” Delight is the dominant mood in the book. Pelizzon seems to find the world (and the words that describe it) irresistibly interesting, even at its worst.
There’s an essayistic quality to many of these poems — essayistic in the original meaning of the word. In some cases, those poems end up feeling slight. Interest seems like the sole occasion, and as a result the poems turn aimless, scattered galleries in which the time of reading is not much different from the ordinary movement of time that preceded and follows it. And so I end up wondering why other poems, apparently in the same vein, feel so alert.
“Gypsy Moths,” for example, a lovely one-pager in which she addresses the titular insects, which “graze / unfinicky on leaves of every species”:
Now you nibble
forests to lace. A silicotic lung
sickens one morning in my oak tree’s vast estate.
Its speckles hatch, and soon, by inches, devastate,
chewing till I walk among
slicks of frass to mourn the branches’ skeletons.
The woods around me rustle with the patter
of countless soft digestive tubes raining fecal matter
as you profit from distemper in seasons:
one fungus, finding you delicious, spun through you every spring
and snipped your threads within, but that
was back before the weeks of wet
its spores require to sprout began delaying
arrival while your eggs had not.
Part of it, I suspect, is the presence of an additional counter-measure, an occasion in which delight seems like the wrong response.[4] Set against such awareness, Pelizzon’s invention grows more adamant, more determined. So when, in a poem like “Elegy for _______,” her speaker, looking back from some future time, celebrates the snow that climate change is already making rare, some spirit goes missing, and the writing turns more generic, less agile, less charged:
Many, or once
and once again and once and once
each flake “unique” as we liked
saying, tho
what did we mean
was each more singular than any
bettlewing waterdrop dustgrain
magnified more singular than the merged scintillant
irises of anyone I ever swam into
while kissing
For my money, the richest of the poems is probably “Animals & Instruments,” which keeps a meandering spirit moving for almost twenty pages as the speaker’s presence deepens into tenderness. (That said, for sheer lyric skill, invention, and poignancy, it would be hard to top “Elegy for Estrogen.”) Pelizzon’s outsider status in two countries — Namibia, first, and then, moving backwards in time, Syria — could easily lead to tired exoticizing, or careless strip-mining for material, or self-protective attempts to denigrate herself, but it mostly and convincingly avoids all three. Some of that comes down to the seeming genuineness of her curiosity, some, too, to the way she manages her limitations and intrusions. When she turns to her flawed perspective, it doesn’t feel dutiful. Instead, it’s of a piece with the poem’s larger movements, another cause for interest, another thread to work through the cosmopolitan weave.
Here she is, in the poem’s conclusion, having impulsively bought a camel’s head at a butcher’s shop in Damascus and summoned a taxi to take her home, the head swaddled like a baby in her arms. It’s impossible to account for all the threads she’s picking up here, but I think it holds up on its own:
Welcome. Was I well? My simple answers
seemed to satisfy. He paused, easing the taxi
like a needle into the rushing traffic’s vein. Did I like
the city? Sir, your city is sweet. He beamed. And how many
children had I? Hearing the half-wry reply
I’d evolved for exactly these occasions, his eyes
lifted in the mirror and — I’m sure I read him rightly —
moistened as he paled, promising he’d pray
until, with Allah’s blessing, I conceived one. And maybe
years later, having survived the war, he’s praying
still? He went on, his words
weaving through the suras their soft benedictions
while about the dragon’s head I held
politely asked no questions.
Of course, it also comes down to what you get for sticking with a poet as she does her thing. There’s a sad sweetness here, a sense of human fragility and kindness and the impossibility of knowing or doing enough, alongside the certainty that we wouldn’t do enough, even if we could. And a compassion that rises out of that. But there’s also, less pronounced here than at other points in the poem, a simultaneous commitment to the poem’s forward movement and a somehow-consonant determination to move down and out, across and back, sonically, syntactically, in lineation and perception, as in the moment she pauses with the driver to describe him “easing the taxi / like a needle into the rushing traffic’s vein.”
Alongside the two aforementioned poems with “Elegy” in their titles, the book as a whole is almost always reckoning with loss; the expired potential to have children, the small and large catastrophes climate change creates, and, in another long poem near the end of the book, Pelizzon’s mother’s death. The elegiac tradition in English insists on compensation — and so there is an inevitable tension, with succor and sorrow moving in opposite directions along parallel lines. In many of the best elegies, beauty, with its deep roots in the ultimate thinness of our soil, either harmonizes and preserves the contradictions or becomes the compensation itself. And so, I suspect, elegy is an ideal mode for Pelizzon, a style in which she can move freely, and variously, through the varied language she so tangibly adores. Here she, still dancing, is at the end of “Of Vinegar Of Pearl,” the elegy for her mother:
This is my salary:
one tear,
brine enough for savor.
And my inheritance:
dandelions, dent-de-lyon, little fanged
hungers strewing the garden
among the lilies
— from them
when I was young my mother braided me
a crown of lion’s teeth.
[1] Which is not to say that I don’t love plenty of poems that work that way; it’s just that I usually don’t love them because of that.
[2] When it’s done well, that is. When it fails it feels a lot like Elaine Benes’s dance from Seinfeld.
[3] Disclosure: When I was editing At Length, I published Pelizzon’s prose and poetry several times. She subsequently played host to me when we gave a joint talk in Providence, RI, not too far from the University of Connecticut, where she is a professor. I know her a little and admire her a lot.
[4] In this, and in many ways, Pelizzon reminds me a little of Linda Gregerson.
[A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on January 9, 2024, 72 pages, $18.00 paperback]