David Gordon, Outward: Part I of a Long Poem, The New York Monograph Society, NY, 1988. No price listed.

Outward continues the Poundian line of modernist poems of epic scope. It shares with Pound the crucial concern with values in American history and politics and the universalizing of the local with the aid of Classical Greek and Chinese quotations (though almost inconspicuously in this book). Other aspects of the technique seem Poundian as well since the free verse runs from passages that are very like Anglo-Saxon meter, to intense lyricism, to chopped prose. In the following example, alliterative half-line structure with hyphenated words like "wave-lair" that echo an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary seem very like Pound's practice, though unlike it because it stays within its intense lyrical focus and it is not dominated by the allegoric or anagogic:

With wind's increase

night leaped down, wave-twist

rolled ship to deck's edge

in flaring night glow;

prow plunged into foam-

buried wave-lair,

two deep counter-force currents

seized the hull

like a muskellunge

nibbling a minnow...

In another passage we again hear Pound echoes, Elpenor and the underground voices from Canto I, but despite the Chinese quotation, the effect is again very different. The portentous "repeat in history" is subdued here, and the primary focus is on an individual's intense experience, the tenor and not the vehicle.

With such packed light

underpinning our sills

we woke in cobalt dawn

to cawing crows

and old Linnie, near by,

who once broke his spine:

horse bolted from bee's nest...

fell from hay wain...

heard loud timber-snap...

swift night lit...

saw his bones

laid out in an oak pail

unreeled down

to clean out the stone-lined well,

a Ching well

to seek Wang-ming light,

a leader's light.

The reference to the I Ching is usefully explained in a footnote, but it is already glossed in the phrase that follows it, "a leader's light."

The following passage continues from the last as a bridge to the third section of the poem, and while it employs the half-lines of Anglo-Saxon, it handles the stress and alliteration with greater subtlety, flexibility and beauty than we usually find in Anglo-Saxon verse or modern versions of it. It introduces the next section of the poem, which is a meditation in the form of quotes, "voices...as out of the stones", on the 18th and 17th centuries in Maine, as it continues to echo the descent into the underworld.

III

And as Linnie was lowered

down the well shaft,

heard drone, far off voices,

rasping flint throats,

stringy old men, tough,

bull-chest men, boys,

scared whispers, screams, women,

from close at hand

as out of the stones

along the well wall:

Despite the echoes of Pound's techniques, the book is nothing like the Cantos. The most conspicuous difference is its commitment to clarity of texture and design (or such units of design as we can see in the first part of the projected poem) and the Poundian poet as hero seems entirely absent in the poem. This is also what differentiates it from Paterson and Maximus with which it shares a commitment to the local and local history. The echoes may finally be an irreducible part of the inevitability and complexity of the Pound legacy. (There was a personal connection as well, since Gordon was Pound's resident expert in Chinese during the Rock Drill years, and following.) Their interest in American politics is fundamentally different. Gordon develops the theme of the growth of the institutions of civil liberties and has none of Pound's one-note economics.

The underworld that we land in here is not a moral geography, as in the Divine Comedy, nor a hell, as in Pound's Hell Cantos. Rather, it is a historical exploration of the background of the Maine world in which Gordon finds himself. Startlingly, it is presented in reverse chronological order. Reno Odlin has suggested that the model for this strategy might be that of a core sample, like the one we find in Paterson. The effect of this technique is disorienting and then reorienting. The first thing to be shifted is the sense of causality and as a result, of inevitability, fate, destiny. Especially national or regional destiny. What emerges most clearly in this sequence is the human voice, mostly individual voices, but occasionally the institutional voice--in the language of law, and of political declarations and so forth.

A great deal of quotation is incorporated in the poem in the form of very artful arrangement, but there is no sense of the passive or the pastiche in the making of it. The sources vary from seagoing journals to legal and political documents of Maine history to personal letters and diaries. The technique is fascinating. All of the quotations are resonant, as they must be, within the context of the poem, but there is something about many of them that enables Gordon to turn them into poetry while others, by contrast, stay hacked prose. I can not discover a thematic difference between the two.

The way that the lines are broken in the following passage (which is in the shape of a fish) creates an intense rhythmic contrast to the formality of the language quoted and we decidedly have poetry of a high order:

1790, Novr 23rd

"...now the common custom...

is to

fish

every day...

to fasten several long nets

together...and so taking

advantage of the tide and slack

water, Run them off the mainland

and both sides of the Island...in

that position...nets

do almost Intersect...

Others do play their long Nets

off and on as the tide

Ebbs and flows--By which

reason the course of the salmon

is so

stopped

the shoals broken

the fish scattered

and so affrighted;

that there is the greatest danger

of their course being turn'd

and all the fishery

Ruined...

By contrast, the entry dated 1786, March 23, seems irreducibly official prose:

"...when there shall be occasion

of a town meeting, the constable...

shall summon...the inhabitants...to

assemble...and when ten or more..."

Even Homer nods. And that passage is a crucial part of Gordon's picture of the generation of the institutions of New England democracy--which would be flatter without it. He is trying to present the range of the culture, and the wide array of elements is an astonishingly ample tribute to the many mansions of the human spirit. Even prose, alas.

The voyage outward, in this book, is the voyage inward in the same motion:"Human work is the search into self...into the unknown." This is a path that Pound forswore often and he chose instead to dramatize the self. Nor do we have here the growth of the poet's soul as a paradigm of the moral world and of "human work". We have instead a historical setting, implying that we are revealed not by human nature but by a human history. This is the true meaning of the local for poets. It is the growth of the soul of a place that we are given by William Carlos Williams and David Gordon, and as they succeed they do so with a vision that it is not only all art that is local, but all life as well. Outward is connected to a vital modernist tradition which it renews with its originality.