If you get the copy of Colorado Review that this poem is in, as well as the poems I mentioned in two previous posts, I would direct you to the poems in the issue by James Shea. The two poems are doing the same thing I've seen from Wilkinson's poems these last few years. The crisp, flashy imagistic drive-by. Oh, how exciting they are for writers and editors alike. They risk little, really, because they work mainly by leaving most everything implicit. I made a friend recently who likes to show me parts of poems she likes. She will open the book to a poem, and then point to the exact lines I should read. Because those are the best part of the poem.
Personally, I don't believe poems are allowed to get off so easy. I think a poem should stand with its best parts, possibly conscious of which parts are its best, and it should lead me to them, with an intentional crescendo or decrescendo. Or it should be conscious of the tradition surrounding the poetic turn. It's very seldom the orphaned image, whether offered to someone as excerpt to a poem, or as stand-alone poem, can accomplish the resonance of the longer work. For evidence I point to Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow." Read it alone, as it seems everyone in America has (praise God, at least, for that point to ubiquity), then read it as part of Williams' book Spring and All. Yes, the wheelbarrow is supposed to be a crisp, flashy drive-by. But it's one shiny point among an entire arsenal of prose fragments and poems, including the popularly anthologized "Spring and All" and "To Elsie," that work toward Williams' general argument.
How does this relate to Wilkinson's poem in the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review? "A Saint Among the Stragglers' Beds" is, at last, to my taste, a committed work. Having been overwhelmed by Wilkinson's first book Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, whelmed by his U. Iowa book, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk, and then underwhelmed by everything I've seen in magazines since, I had become a reader-in-mourning of his work. Suspension... is vulnerable and openly thoughtful. It has flash, it's even stagy (with Wilkinson, at times, taking on the voice of Egon Schiele), but these gestures come in service to a center.
And this center is what I see in "A Saint Among the Stragglers' Beds." Yes, Wilkinson has splayed out a set of images, flashy images, like a forest summoned from a man named Ashley, a mattress of hydrangeas and wasps, a saint's shiny pocket watch. But these images are strung together by implied pronoun referents (at the very least an "I," the saint, and a "they," the stragglers), and this offers the structural convenience of narrative. There are also pleasing associative leaps stringing many of the images together. Most importantly, though, there appears to be a modulation from the general and chaotic, to the specific and centered. Toward the beginning of the poem, there is "the river // cored like an apple" and "a wind / which summons the forest from / a man named Ashley." Both images touching on a paradox that could unite the general and center. How can a river be cored? Does a forest coming out of one particular man only complicate the idea of his self, to himself, and to the general idea of the self?
And this is only the beginning of the poem. A glorious beginning in my mind. I'm still not sure I have a full handle on how the saint and the stragglers are interacting, nor who all the pronoun referents are, nor how much narrative I should be granting, but I can surely sense Wilkinson knows. And with every shift from general to specific, I find a flash that further complicates my ideas about how these two things might relate to each other.
Related Links:
Colorado Review
Joshua Marie Wilkinson's home page
The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth
Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments