Mark Irwin

Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series we will be publishing from a critical anthology focused on the writings of Donald Revell, Till One Day the Sun Shall Shine More Brightly: The Poetry and Prose of Donald Revell, for which Derek Pollard is serving as editor. The book also features previously published critical articles, reviews, and interviews spanning Revell’s distinguished career. An earlier version of Mark Irwin's text is included in the book Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, published as part of the Studies in Modern Poetry Series by Peter Lang Publishing.

“The ply of spirits on bodies”

Diaspora and Metamorphosis in Donald Revell’s “Short Fantasia”


The fantasia, a musical composition in free form and often in an improvisatory style, becomes a model for many of Donald Revell’s later poems. Since his first collection, From the Abandoned Cities, Revell has addressed matters of body and spirit, but it is in his later, more transparent forms that he achieves a transcendence less possible in his earlier, more formal work. Although long influenced by Thoreau and Emerson, Revell achieves a marked openness in his work after moving to the southwestern edge of the Las Vegas Valley.

“The poet either is nature or he will seek it. The former constitutes the ‘naïve’, the latter the ‘sentimental’ poet” (Schiller 110). Friedrich von Schiller argues that the naïve poet is a part of nature and is able to represent it without imposing any of his or her own personality or nostalgia. The sentimental poet is often one who feels exiled and finds nature more in the imagination than at first hand. Schiller does not use either term in a pejorative sense, and he goes on to mention that genius is “naïve.” The works of Hölderlin, Keats, Rimbaud, and Dickinson come to mind immediately as examples of such genius that require the poet to sustain an unmediated vision over time, a rare feat even among those writers capable of the naiveté Schiller theorizes.  Like many poets, Revell begins in the sentimental mode, but in numerous later poems he achieves that more difficult mode that is one with the natural world and with creation. “Survey,” for instance, from the 1990 collection New Dark Ages, is predicated on the very nostalgia that marks the “sentimental” poet according to Schiller, as we see in the poem’s opening lines:

I am so lonely for the twentieth century,
for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti
of armed men and the beautiful bridges (35)

Compare this to the more calligraphic and at–one–with–nature vision of these lines from “No Difference I Know They Are,” from the 1998 collection There Are Three.

                                    this day
there is no paint like the air
                                    this day
is a godsend to the wasps (131)

I am not suggesting that Revell must leave form completely to attain this way of writing about nature from the inside—here, for example, the poem finds a syllabic 2/7 form with its last four lines—but what I am suggesting is that Revell’s work moves in a diasporic manner toward the world of spirit where a more recognizable authenticity is attained, one where forms dissolve and recombine with greater energy. Here in full is Revell’s “Short Fantasia,” a variation on the sonnet that appears in his 2003 collection My Mojave.

Short Fantasia

The plane descending from an empty sky
Onto numberless real stars
Makes a change in Heaven, a new
Pattern for the ply of spirits on bodies.
We are here. Sounds press our bones down.
Someone standing recognizes someone else.
We have no insides. All the books         
Are written on the steel beams of bridges.
Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoes      
With a brown leaf. I stand, and I read again
The story of Aeneas escaping the fires
And his wife’s ghost. We shall meet again
At a tree outside the city. We shall make
New sounds and leave our throats in that place. (159)

Although the narrative of this poem is somewhat straightforward, the forms and locations within it, especially those representing heaven/earth, often change or become interchangeable. Here, passengers landing in an airport struggle with the new landscape they have not yet caught up to, a struggle that appears to be precipitated by a conflation between sky and earth, for we are told that the descending plane “Makes a change in Heaven, a new / Pattern for the ply of spirits on bodies.” Our perspective, which we share with the passengers, is wonderfully altered through slippage, for where we expect to encounter the real beneath the inspirited, we actually encounter a simultaneity of the real and the spiritual in a time–worn transitional moment—passengers at the end of a flight arriving to an airport and beginning to de–plane—made unfamiliar through Revell’s use of what we might call the “language–of–jet,” a transportational syntax that reinforces the concept of contemporary diaspora: “We are here. Sounds press our bones down. / Someone standing recognizes someone else.”

The phrase “Sounds press our bones down” suggests the non–fixity of this new existence as it prefigures the “New sounds” at poem’s end, but it first becomes the signal and catalyst for rapid transformation: “We have no insides. All the books / Are written on the steel beams of bridges.” Revell’s two–fold “Fantasia” is not only improvisational through language but also through resonant metaphor. Are we on the tarmac, a bit disoriented, jostled, and jetlagged, or have we actually been transformed in some fantasy Heaven on the way back to earth? The phrase “We have no insides” oddly recalls the pupal stage of the insect, in which the larva dissolves to a liquid before reforming into an adult insect with wings—a biological form of transformation, a kind of pre–Heaven as Revell’s canvas grows larger and language becomes a city–text: “All the books / Are written on the steel beams of bridges.” The transformation here is marvelous, for language moves us from a reflective to a utilitarian state: to cross from one space, from one moment, to another, we must read the book of the bridge across which we are journeying.

Relentless in its dislocations, “Short Fantasia” provides nothing less than a kind of transfiguration for the reader who struggles for new coordinates and joins in the speaker’s conflation of sky and earth: “Seeing the stars at my feet, I tie my shoes / With a brown leaf.” The vulnerability of this new existence seems joyously imperiled, for how does one tie a shoe “With a brown leaf”? Perhaps nothing less than a ritual by which to pass into a new world, Revell’s poem recalls a theme by another poet, William Blake, who also defies dimensions:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower      (90)

“Short Fantasia” culminates in a recasting of Aeneas’s classic flight. It is a re–visioning that springs us, even in our bewildered disorientation, toward yet another new place and, possibly, yet another transfiguration:

                                                and I read again
The story of Aeneas escaping the fires
And his wife’s ghost. We shall meet again
At a tree outside the city. We shall make
New sounds and leave our throats in that place.

The reference here, of course, is to Book II of The Aeneid, where Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy and the death of his wife Creusa, who follows behind and is lost as Aeneas carries his father Anchises on his back while his son Ascanius follows. The speaker in Revell’s poem could be reading the classic text as the plane lands—and what better epic of place to read than Virgil’s to contrast Revell’s boundless voyage? Ascanius (also called Iullus, prefiguring Julius Caesar) will continue the lineage in Italy and become the ancestor of Augustus, to whom Virgil dedicates his poem.

Revell ends “Short Fantasia” with another compelling diasporic, metamorphic gesture: “We shall make / New sounds and leave our throats in that place.” How beautiful, and how boldly reconceived, is the throat when we consider it a column of speech. But then, what is poetry if it doesn’t change us, or make the familiar unfamiliar, as Frost suggests? What better assurance that this is so than a poem such as Revell’s that reminds us that the body is itself a transformation and a journeying?

Works Cited

Blake, William. Selected Poetry and Prose of Blake. Edited by Northrop Frye, Random House, 1953.
Revell, Donald. Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems. Alice James Books, 2005.
Schiller, Friedrich von. Naïve and Sentimental Poetry & On the Sublime. Ungar Publishing, 1979.

Mark Irwin is the author of nine collections of poetry, including A Passion According to Green, which appeared from New Issues in April 2017. Other recent collections include American Urn: Selected Poems 1987–2014 and Large White House Speaking (2013). His collection of essays, Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, & Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, has just been published. Recognition for his work includes a Nation/The Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, two Colorado Book Awards, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program at the University of Southern California.

 
 

More from Vol. 34, Issue 3