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Ben Lyle Bedard
reviews
REAL
by Stephen Ratcliffe
474 pp. Avenue B. $22.00. 978-0-93961-13-5 paper.
and
Portraits and Repetitions
by Stephen Ratcliffe.
474 pp. The Post-Apollo Press. 0-942996-46-1 paper.
This review is about 5 printed pages long. It is copyright © Ben Lyle Bedard and Jacket magazine 2007.
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In his collection of essays, Listening to Reading, Stephen Ratcliffe writes about Larry Eigner’s work: ‘One doesn’t commonly find ‘I’ in Larry Eigner, though plenty of “eye”: — what sees what’s around one being in his case primary’ (153). The statement is a fair assessment of Ratcliffe’s own recent work, REAL, the continuation of the work begun in Portraits & Repetitions, and to be continued in future volumes. In these poems, all titled by date, we see the project unfold before us, massive and glimmering with Ratcliffe’s tenacious hold on the integrity of the objective world.
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Each day Ratcliffe records the world, what fragments of it come to him, into a poem distilled of ‘I’, distilled of rapture or desire, sorrow or pain. Reality becomes a series of angles, relationships, minute changes in the weather, the action of sunlight, memories and imaginations. Language speaks, but not from a speaker. It rises itself from the view ‘outside’ to give testament to the verdant geometry of reality’s structure. To read Ratcliffe’s continuing poem of the extraordinary complexities of the quotidian is to experience the radiance of the every day with monk-like discipline. The experience of this epic (or anti-epic) is the experience of perception, of finding yourself rooted in the ‘eye’ so prevalent throughout Zukofsky, an eye that both sees and comprehends in one action. These poems are the apprehension of being — of being human, alarmed by the simple act of existing, the most critical (crucial) act of any artistic endeavor.
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film of light grey clouds moving across surface of area (a),
distant edge of a field imagine to approach the observer
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This couplet from the poem 11.6 in Portraits & Repetitions articulates the distance between Ratcliffe and the poem itself. The poem’s sense of geometry melds finely with Ratcliffe’s de-centering move in the last words of the couplet, as he posits not himself but an ‘observer’ in the field of his own work. This is not the portrait of his perception but the perception of anyone placed within such a field. It is the kind of self-effacing humility common throughout Ratcliffe’s work as the poems struggle to reflect and wonder about the construction of the world about them. This kind of perception is common in Larry Eigner, a poet whom I see as a major influence in this work, and the only one I know who is able to live as vividly outside himself as Ratcliffe does in both Portraits and REAL.
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Eigner writes in areas/lights/heights:
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‘Well, how does (some of) the forest go together with the trees. How might it, maybe. Forest of possibilities (in language anyway) — ways in and ways out. Near and far — wide and narrow (circles). Your neighborhood and how much of the world otherwise. Beginning, ending, and continuing. As they come what can things mean? Why expect a permanent meaning?’ (125).
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It is precisely this action, of ‘ways in and ways out’ that mark Ratcliffe’s work. It is the careful recording of the action of perception, not as apprehension of language or the marriage of language and image, as in Pound or Zukofsky, but of language used to record extra-lingual aspects of the human’s relation to the world around us. Ratcliffe does not show us the world as in ‘nasturtium,’ he shows us the construction of the nasturtium in relation to the world about it.
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By complicating language’s relation to reality, by placing it alongside reality instead of through it, Ratcliffe shows his reliance on Gertrude Stein, another major influence on this ongoing project. He writes in his collection of literary criticism, Listening to Reading, regarding Stein, that
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‘[the poem A Feather] is not the text pointing through its words to the world, but the text making the world of its words — a world whose patterns, connections, and “readability” have been transcribed as the grammar of its landscape, made present literally in a syntax whose shape and direction are set before us as if for the first time, unmediated it seems by any writer’ (76).
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In his Portraits, Ratcliffe carefully constructs his own grammatical landscape, even creating pseudo-linguistic, pseudo-mathematical parenthetical intrusions, such as ‘(concept)’ and ‘(structure)’ to make the reader aware of the language landscape which is being erected about the poem. Throughout this project, Ratcliffe creates landscapes of language which actively construct a relation with the world, the world about us, ‘unmediated it seems by any writer.’
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This act of construction is foregrounded by Ratcliffe’s strict (and visually striking) adherence to form. In Portraits, the second line of every couplet is exactly three characters short of the first line. The first line is always 60 characters long, the second, 57, including spaces, commas, parentheses, etcetera. The effect of the strict form is a practice, a discipline. Bob Perelman writes in The Marginalization of Poetry: ‘I’ll/say that both the flush left//and irregular right margins constantly loom/as significant events, often interrupting what/I thought I was about to/write and making me write something/else entirely’ (4). This structure, this arbitrary form, is what Ratcliffe has decided to work within in Portraits & Repetitions, and its construction, reliant on the active retaliation of the flow of language, constantly informs the reader of the limits and confines of the writing, not word by word, but letter by letter, showing the kind of careful attention Ratcliffe demands both of himself and his reader. Ratcliffe is a poet of meditation where we see craft as a total construction, a work of sculptural integrity.
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In REAL, Ratcliffe alters the structure of Portraits. The couplets are gone, replaced by a block of text, 17 lines long, with spaces between each line that gives every poem an open feeling, as windows letting in the light. The longest line is 48 characters long, other lines varying most commonly from zero to four characters from this form but with some interesting exceptions. The last line is usually much shorter than the others. The visual affect of these choices is wavering blocks of text, graceful sometimes, and at other times, tooth-like — but always organic. Ratcliffe is able to use this construct with surprising variability: some poems slant to the end like a blade of grass, others are able to saw back and forth like a mind meditating and crafting.
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Ratcliffe is the electron microscope of critical attention. Instead of mites on fleas or the strange urchin landscape of a virus, Ratcliffe demonstrates the minute transformations of sound and letters as they move through REAL. The attention to the form, character by character, forces the reader to narrow their perception to the turning of letters and sounds:
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Sun-warmed mass of viscous amber honey folding
into jar standing on the table, circle of light
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These two lines from 4.18 in REAL begin and end with a vision of light, a common motif throughout both REAL and Portraits. As in many Ratcliffe poems, the transformation is important, where the attention falls. Here, the restricted ‘a’ of “warmed” combine with the nasal ‘m’ that first moves to “mass” and then to “amber,” opening the vowel into the open-mouthed ‘a’ of “standing” and “table” in the second line, illustrating by the structure of the mouth, the circle of light. “[F]olding” and “standing” tie the two lines together while creating the progressive tense aura that permeates so much of Ratcliffe’s work: action is always occurring and is rarely finished, bleeding often into the past and future. The sibilants repeat from “viscous” to “circle,” until the lines are closed with the new long ‘i’ and tightly clipped ‘t,’ creating the splash of light whose action is often a painterly gesture in Ratcliffe’s work. Such sound work is not uncommon. This care occurs throughout the 474 poems that comprise each book.
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Woven by this strict form and attention to sound is a book full of objects, people, imagination, and life. Birds, flowers, plants, and clouds all occupy and live in these poems, within the frame of Ratcliffe’s attention. But Ratcliffe’s real is not limited to the natural world. In REAL, much more so than in Portraits, his poems move in and out of imagination. Women with fur hats and short-haired girls make their appearances along with men in green shirts. Glimpses of narrative and fragments of movies interact with the weather to create a landscape particularly contemporary. Reflections on literature, music, and politics, exist side by side with birds on wing. All subjects are treated with equality. Ratcliffe is able to show us a particular American landscape filled with medievalists shouting “Fuck!” and boys surfing in the sun. In REAL, a kind of Whitmanian transformation takes place, the seeds of it evident in Portraits, where the American landscape is blended seamlessly with people, events, and the imagination. It seems that in REAL Ratcliffe has found his stride, and the poem’s form allows for the ingredients of the world to be folded inside the book. With its unique cadence and rhythm, Ratcliffe’s work is able to construct the world again, with an astonishing lucidity as in this passage from 2.3 of REAL:
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Drop of water falling into the curved copper
sink in the adjacent room, sound of invisible
bird followed by its still dark shape flitting
across branch of tree in middle window.
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This continual serial poem, of which these two books are only the beginning, is a monumental meditation on the nature of existing in a world mixed with thought and atmosphere, a world where birds populate the realm of our imagination alongside the green dress in the room upstairs we’re not looking at right now. The poems seek to expand, to exist in an always-widening relation to the ever more complex notion of “real.” Bled of the judgment of voice and the tyranny of personality, a muse of stone, the poem exists as a kind of perfect perception, utterly careful, blindingly pure. REAL and Portraits & Repetitions mark the beginning of an invaluable contribution to literature, one which we will be demanding our attention for years to come.
Eigner, Larry. areas/lights/heights: writings 1954-1989. Edited by Benjamin Friedlander. New York: Roof Books, 1989.
Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Ratcliffe, Stephen. Listening to Reading. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Ben Lyle Bedard
Ben Lyle Bedard grew up in Maine, studied creative writing first at the University of Maine at Farmington where he later served as acting director of Alice James Books, and secondly, at Mills College where he received his MFA. He is now pursuing his doctorate at the University of Buffalo. His poetry has appeared in BlazeVOX, fhole, and Damn the Caesars, and his adaptation of the Ugaritic epic KRT appeared in Ninth Letter. He has upcoming work in Yellow Edenwald Field, P-Queue, and Vérterbra.
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