Jeffers Studies Current Issues-- www.jeffers.org

Slip, Shift, and Speed Up:
The Influence of Robinson Jeffers's Narrative Syntax
Mark Jarman
Volume 3, Number 2

1. I wish I could change the second half of my title to "The Influence of Robinson Jeffers's Narrative Energy" in order to echo a book that I admire, Donald Davie's classic from 1955, Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. In fact, when I titled my essay, I had a portion of Davie's book in mind; for he theorizes that every sentence has a plot, even a tragic plot, and he derives this theory from H. M. McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan, to the rest of us), who suggested as much as he dwelt on certain couplets of Alexander Pope, like this one from "The Rape of the Lock":

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

2. Davie notes that the couplet has a plot and a sub-plot and that its articulation depends on rhyme as much as on images.

3. Now, I know that this is beginning to get tangled. I would like to be as accurate as possible in what I am about to claim, while at the same time to honor my deceased colleague and fellow admirer of Robinson Jeffers, Donald Davie. I will, indeed, try to speculate on the nature of Jeffers's narrative energy as it originates in him and the poets I will try to associate with him; frankly, I think it comes from a moral impulse, which distinguishes him from his two great contemporaries, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, the other legs of the narrative stool on which the curious but living tradition of modern narrative poetry rests. However, I will try to stick with the phrase "narrative syntax," not because of the plot of Jeffers's sentences, but because the syntax of his narrative verse is recognizable in a number of contemporary practitioners. It may be more recognizable than anything we hear in Frost or Robinson. The reasons are many and have in part to do with the division between free and formal verse in this country.

4. The first half of my title, "Slip, Shift, and Speed Up," comes from Jeffers's poem "Prescription of Painful Ends" and is a phrase he uses there to describe a rhythm of historical events; it is not meant in any way to be salutary or admiring, but to describe the pathetic manner in which modern nation states try to regain their footing after slipping in some moral quagmire.

The future is a misted landscape, no man sees clearly, but at cyclic turns
There is a change felt in the rhythm of events, as when an exhausted horse
Falters and recovers, then the rhythm of the running hoofbeats is changed: he will run miles yet,
But he must fall; we have felt it again in our own life-time, slip, shift, and speed-up
In the gallop of the world(CP 3.14)

5. Nevertheless, I like the phrase and think it may help to describe the narrative syntax I hear in Jeffers and the contemporary poets I wish to discuss, because of its narrative energy, that moral impulse that leads Jeffers to create the metaphor and embed in it a narrative sequence of action, and because of its parallel structure. The poets I hope to bring before you share two aspects of Jeffers, then: the moral impulse of his storytelling verse and his means of narration--narrative energy and narrative syntax.

6. First, however, I would like to draw a clearer distinction between him and his great peers in the art of narrative verse, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. Let me show you a sonnet by Robinson.

Ben Trovato
The deacon thought. "I know them," he began,
"And they are all you ever heard of them--
Allurable to no sure theorem,
The scorn or the humility of man.
You say 'Can I believe it?'--and I can;
And I'm unwilling even to condemn
The benefaction of a stratagem
Like hers--and I'm a Presbyterian.
"Though blind, with but a wandering hour to live,
He felt the other woman in the fur
That now the wife had on. Could she forgive
All that? Apparently. Her rings were gone,
Of course; and when he found that she had none,
He smiled--as he had never smiled at her." (575-76)

7. Robinson is motivated by the naturalist's desire to examine a slice of life and consider its reason for existence. In a sonnet like "Ben Trovato" he gives us a narrative almost as complicated as a novel by Henry James, complete with unreliable narrator and love triangle. The deacon conveys a story to us as juicy as gossip, a deathbed scene to rival the choosing of Jacob over Esau. We look on in amazement at the complexity of these human hearts, recognizing that this telling anecdote hints at social pressures created by the characters' beliefs about marriage and class, while at the same time giving us behavior that cannot be described by any "theorem" of society. In considering the way the wife disguises herself as her rival, we are, like our narrator, "unwilling even to condemn / The benefaction of a stratagem / Like hers--", whether we are Presbyterians or not. All of our interest is in the way the sonnet holds this microscopic universe of haute bourgeois realism.

8. Robert Frost offers us something else, of course, something more, though in rather the same dimension of the relative, the pragmatic, in his narrative poems. Take the following, for example.

"Out, Out--"
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off--
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him sister!"
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. (136-37)

9. Is it right that the boy is in the lumberyard, doing a man's work? No, probably not, but there may be extenuating circumstances. It could be this is a family concern, with his sister doing the cooking, and besides he's a "big boy . . . though a child at heart." The accident that cuts his life short could have occurred as easily in the natural world as in the world of dangerous machines, although this is not the only Frost poem in which modern technology devastates a life, if you remember his early narrative, "The Self-Seeker." The point of a Frost narrative, especially those we find in blank verse, is also to lift a section out of a life--which he has in common with Robinson-- but without the naturalistic sense of determinism. What is happening is more open to interpretation; indeed, in his narratives contending views offer their imaginative responses to the fact of an event. In "Out, Out--" even the narrator interjects his belief that the tragedy might have been averted, if they had "call[ed] it a day" earlier. The boy, the sister, the doctor, the onlookers who turn away at the end, all have their particular stake in the meaning of the accident. What we are to make of it depends not on choosing a point of view but on recognizing how all of them contend. The blank verse of Frost's narratives may be his attempt to resolve moral ambiguity, as much as the more controlled forms of Robinson's ballads and sonnets may represent the determining factors of culture and society. I suspect that a free verse narrative of the contemporary variety that I will be talking about and that I think shows Jeffers's influence may be the paradoxical result of a moral clarity missing in Robinson and Frost.

10. So, how is Jeffers different? For one thing, he is not a relativist like Robinson or Frost. His stories are enactments of moral problems that have inevitable ends because the characters presented with these problems make the wrong choices. Admittedly, he, too, can be considered in the naturalist tradition, but I would put him there with Thomas Hardy, in his novels, in which characters choose badly, at times because they simply cannot help it. Jeffers's difference with Hardy (a writer of importance also to Robinson and Frost) is that Jeffers, one senses, is less forgiving of human weakness, because he is appalled at its tragic consequences. It may be that because of the moral drive or impulse to his narratives, we hear his influence more readily today than we hear the influence of Robinson or Frost. Moral clarity is part of his legacy. I hope the examples I am going to give you, from three contemporary poets, will persuade you that this is true. And because I don't want to lose track of my title, as much as I would like to flee its demands, I believe we will hear a kind of phrasing or expression in the contemporary narratives that I have chosen, which recalls Jeffers more than Robinson and Frost, because of the nature of their syntax and free verse form.

11. First let me consider Jeffers's ars poetica, "Apology for Bad Dreams," by focusing on the first of his longer narratives.

Apology for Bad Dreams
1
In the purple light, heavy with redwood, the slopes drop seaward,
Headlong convexities of forest, drawn in together to the steep ravine.
   Below, on the sea- cliff,
A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof
   under spared trees. Then the ocean
Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished
   to shining. Beyond it, the fountain
And furnace of incredible light flowing up from the sunk sun. In the
   little clearing a woman
Is punishing a horse; she had tied the halter to a sapling at the edge
   of the wood, but when the great whip
Clung to the flanks the creature kicked so hard she feared he would
   snap the halter; she called from the house
The young man her son; who fetched a chain tie-rope, they working together
Noosed the small rusty links round the horse's tongue
And tied him by the swollen tongue to the tree.
Seen from this height they are shrunk to insect size,
Out of all human relation. You cannot distinguish
The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened,
The beast shuddering; but the thrust neck and the legs
Far apart. You can see the whip fall on the flanks .    .
The gesture of the arm. You cannot see the face of the woman.
The enormous light beats up out of the west across the cloud-bars
   of the trade-wind. The ocean
Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together. Unbridled
   and unbelievable beauty
Covers the evening world . . . not covers, grows apparent out of
   it, as Venus down there grows out
From the lit sky. What said the prophet? "I create good: and
   I create evil: I am the Lord." (CP 1.208-09)

12. As I proceed to consider this passage as free verse, let me acknowledge that I know how Jeffers regarded his double pentameter line and I know, too, that when the line contracts here, it is to a roughly pentameter line. Nevertheless, the poem is metrically freer than anything in Robinson and Frost, and its way of establishing rhythm derives not only from the English verse tradition, but from the repetition and parallelism we find in Biblical poetry and in Whitman. Notice the construction of the setting: "A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees." And notice the way the narrator directs our gaze, after shrinking the humans "to insect size": "You cannot distinguish / The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened, / The beast shuddering; but the thrust neck and the legs / Far apart. You can see the whip fall on the flanks . . . / The gesture of the arm. You cannot see the face of the woman." The syntax here embodies action, imitates action, in which the animal's pain and the agent of that pain--the woman--though they cannot be distinguished, are united by what you can see: the whip, the gesture of the arm. In parallelism like this, details take on an equality. In Whitman, it is the Democratic ideal of a self that contains all thatit catalogues--these United States. In Jeffers, whom I once heard William Everson refer to as the dark nadir to Whitman's sunny zenith, the same syntax conveys moral judgment, its narrative energy. When section one ends, "What said the prophet? 'I create good: and I create evil: I am the Lord,'" I think we can infer that the good here is manifested in the "[u]nbridled and unbelievable beauty" that "covers the evening world." The Lord has created it as surely as the evil taking place in the clearing. The two parts, good and evil, though unequal in value, are of equal weight. The recognition of that equality marks Jeffers as a tragic poet.

13. We may not see Jeffers's tragic dimension in the contemporary poems I am about to read and discuss, but we will sense his moral impulse, the source of his narrative energy and syntax. Here is a pair of poems from C. K. Williams's 1988 book Flesh and Blood.

The Mistress
After the drink, after dinner, after the half-hour idiot kids' cartoon special on the TV,after undressing his daughter, mauling at the miniature buttons on the back of her dress,the games on the bed--"Look at my pee-pee," she says, pulling her thighs wide, "isn't it pretty?"--after the bath, pajamas, the song and the kiss and the telling his wife it's her turn now,out now, at last, out of the house to make the call (out to take a stroll, this evening's lie),he finds the only public phone booth in the neighborhood's been savaged, receiver torn away,wires thrust back up the coin slot to its innards, and he stands there, what else? what now?and notices he's panting, he's panting like an animal, he's breathing like a bloody beast. (20)
The Lover
When she stopped by, just passing, on her way back from picking up the kids at school,taking them to dance, just happened by the business her husband owned and her lover worked in, their glances, hers and the lover's, that is, not the husband's, seemed so decorous, so distant, barely, just barely touching their fiery wings, their clanging she thought so well muffled, that later, in the filthy women's bathroom, in the stall, she was horrified to hear two typists coming from the office laughing, about them, all of them, their boss, her husband, "the blind pig," one said, and laughed, "and her, the horny bitch," the other said, and they both laughed again, "and him, did you see him, that sanctimonious, lying bastard--I thought he was going to blush." (20)

14. I hope you could hear the way the action in both poems comes in a series of parallel statements: "he's panting, he's panting like an animal, he's breathing like a bloody beast" and "so decorous, so distant, / barely, just barely touching their fiery wings, their clanging." This sort of repetition is one way, the primary way, free verse creates rhythm. The way it illuminates and reveals the story, in a series of pulsing, parallel flashes, recalls Jeffers's own technique, his narrative syntax and energy.

15. And the story here, of sexual transgression that is like a violation of the landscape, is also reminiscent of Jeffers, although in this case, as in the other three poems I will discuss, the landscape is urban. The vandalized public phone in "The Mistress" that puts the unfaithful husband in a rage and the "filthy women's bathroom" in "The Lover" where the unfaithful wife hears the pair of typists give their choral denunciation of her, are not directly the consequence of adultery, but they make us ponder its degradation. Both hang in the balance of the poems' parallel structure, with a weight equal to the husband's lies in "The Mistress" and the profane epithets in "The Lover." It is interesting to note that C. K. Williams in these and other poems speaks with a vehemence we sometimes hear in Jeffers, although Jeffers manages usually to keep a more Apollonian distance from what he disdains.

16. A poem that recalls Jeffers' cool, appraising, and yet judgmental detachment is Garrett Hongo's "Four Chinatown Figures" from his 1988 book The River of Heaven.

Four Chinatown Figures
In a back alley, on the cracked pavement slick with the strewn waste
of cooking oil and rotting cabbages, two lovers stroll arm in arm,
the woman in furs and a white lamé dress with matching pumps,
her escort in a tux casually worn--the black tie undone,
the double-breasted, brushed-velvet coat unbuttoned.
They're a Wilshire lawyer and city planner out on the town.
When they pass the familiar curio of the wishing well
with its Eight Immortals spouting aqueous wisdoms
through their copper mouths and baggy sleeves, they spend a minute
considering the impotent, green nozzle of its fountain.
The reflecting pool, speckled blue willow or streaked turquoise
as a robin's egg from the small litter of coins wintering on its bottom,
catches starlight and red neon in a tarn of winged ephemera
streaking across the black glaze of homely water. The lawyer
kisses his date and tosses some bus change, balls up
the foil wrapper from an after-dinner mint and throws that,
while she laughs, shaking her head back so the small,
mousse-stingered whips on the ringlets of her hair shudder
and dress sequins flash under the sore, yellow light of streetlamps.
Two dishwashers step from the back door of the Golden Eagle
arguing about pay, about hours, about trading green cards
with cousins for sex, set-ups with white women, for cigarettes
or a heated hotel room to sleep in on a dry, newspaper bed.
Bok-guai, they curse with their eyes, Lo-fahn, as the four nearly collide,
separate galaxies equal in surprise as they wheel to face each other.
The lawyer thinks little of these punks in T-shirts and Hong Kong jeans,
but the woman rhapsodizes, for no reason, in suspense/thriller prose--
slender and boylike, the bull's ring curl to their flimsy moustaches;
they must be cold in this dry, winter chill of late December in L.A.--
the sky a high velvet, indigo-to- black as it vaults, lazily,
from the city's fluorescent glow to the far azimuth
where the bear and huntsman drift casually into nothing.
Without jackets, the Chinese have bundled themselves in castoff,
cotton aprons stained with intricate patterns of lard and duck's blood
and wrapped like double-slings around their shoulders and folded arms.
Something grins on the face of the taller, fairer- complected one,
glints from his foxteeth, smolders in breathfog, camphor about to flare.
She tells herself, Forget it, c'mon, and, with a hooked finger,
snaps at the man's satin cummerbund. They turn away.
Without a gesture, in the greasy dark, the two Chonks turn away too,
back towards each other, and hear, quickening way behind them,
steps receding into the light din of street noise and sidewalk chatter.
The fair one says, audibly and in English, Kiss me, white ghost,
and, briefly staggered in the amniotic burst of light
from a passing tourist's flash, shrugs off his gruesome apron,
pulling out a pack of Gauloises, blue- wrappered, especial,
and strikes a match, holding it in the orange well of his hands
as, dragonlike, they both light up and puff, posed on a street vent,
hunching their thin shoulders and turning uptown against the wind. (57-58)

17. The narrative syntax here appears to be more relaxed than in C. K. Williams's poems or "Apology for Bad Dreams." But the long, complicated sentences that describe the lovers in their leisurely, after dinner walk end abruptly in the glare of those "sore, yellow" streetlamps. Then:

Two dishwashers step from the back door of the Golden Eagle
arguing about pay, about hours, about trading green cards
with cousins for sex, set-ups with white women, for cigarettes
or a heated hotel room to sleep in on a dry, newspaper bed.
Bok-guai, they curse with their eyes, Lo-fahn, as the four nearly collide . . .

18. Slip, shift, and speed up: repetition begins to pulse, the energy of the syntax brings two distinctly different moral forces together. After they meet, the syntax almost returns to a more leisurely, descriptive pace, as the Chinese pair become the focus, but the narration subtly maintains its parallel structure and repetition, as it considers these "separate galaxies equal in surprise as they wheel to face each other."

19. On the face of it, this poem represents what used to be called a clash of cultures, and the encounter between the expensive lovers, both indigenously associated with Los Angeles (one a lawyer from Wilshire Boulevard, the other a "city planner"), and the immigrant Chinese dishwashers looks like a literal rendering of such a clash. Although the figures meet each other in territory that by rights is Chinese, all four are identified as Chinatown figures, and, after all, Chinatown is as much a part of L.A. as the Wilshire district. And yet, the yuppy lawyer and his date, when they pause at the wishing well, which is decorated with figures from Chinese myth, behave in a way that looks awfully like sacrilege. The lawyer tosses in some worthless change and a piece of trash, and his date laughs at the act. The dishwashers, smeared with gore, appear then, as if they have been invoked, spirits of the desecrated well, eliciting contempt from the man and decadent daydreaming from the woman. In the end we also have to consider the urgent, even desperate concerns of the Chinese workers and the exotic foreignness of their curses alongside the exquisite attire and pursuits of the lovers. Insofar as the place itself exists as a reproach to the inhabitants, this is a landscape that recalls many in Jeffers, including the one at the beginning of "Apology for Bad Dreams." As the dishwashers light up their foreign cigarettes, they become native parts of a particular landscape, one that harbors dragons, embodiments of the moral impulse that shapes the poem and recalls Jeffers in the very way the human and the inhuman, the real and the mythic, the divine and the profane, confront each other.

20. I want to look at two more contemporary poems which I think recall Jeffers's moral impulse, his narrative energy, and his syntax, but first I would like to mention something that I noticed about some of these poems, after I chose them for this presentation. In each, part of the poem's moral dimension depends on an animal or animals. The tortured horse in "Apology for Bad Dreams" and the pair of dragonlike dishwashers in "Four Chinatown Figures" serve in their respective poems as a moral focus. In C. K. Williams's two poems, this focus appears in the form of epithets. In "The Mistress," the frustrated husband is likened to "a bloody beast." And in "The Lover," the caustic typists refer to their boss as "the blind pig" and his wife as "the horny bitch." Granted we are seeing in each case examples of very old literary traditions, that of the fable and the allegory; still, it is striking to me that the following poem by Chase Twichell, "Aisle of Dogs," from her 1995 book The Ghost of Eden, should summon up Jeffers's own regard for animals in his poetry.

Aisle of Dogs
In the first cage
a hunk of raw flesh.
No, it was alive, but skinned.
Or its back was skinned.
The knobs of the spine
poked through the bluish meat.
It was a pit bull, held by the shelter
for evidence until the case
could come to trial,
then they'd put him down. The dog,
not the human whose cruelty
lived on in the brindled body,
unmoving except for the enemy eyes.
Not for adoption, said the sign.
All the other cages held adoptable pets,
the manic yappers, sad matted mongrels,
the dumb slobbering abandoned ones,
the sick, the shaved, the scratching,
the wounded and terrified, the lost,
one to a cage, their water dishes
overturned, their shit tracked around,
on both sides of a long echoey
concrete aisle--clank of chain mesh gates,
the attendant hosing down the gutters
with his headphones on, half-dancing
to the song in his head.
I'd come for kittens. There were none.
So I stood in front of the pit bull's
quivering carcass, its longdrawn death,
its untouched food, its incurable hatred
of my species, until the man with the hose
touched my arm and steered me away,
shaking his head in a way that said
Don't look. Leave him alone.
I don't know why, either. (59-60)

21. The lines in Twichell's poem are short, no more than eight syllables or four stresses usually, whereas those in Williams's and Hongo's are long and recall Jeffers's double pentameter and pentameter lines, respectively. It is possible that Twichell's are short and theirs long because hers is a more imagistic poetry, that is, more inclined to condense storytelling to as much as the image alone can reveal. Nevertheless, in this poem, we once again encounter the power of a narrative syntax that brings Jeffers to mind. The way the pitbull's condition is revealed, the way the speaker takes in the surroundings, and the way she returns to regard the brutalized animal, until she is made to turn away, recall both the narrative syntax and the narrative structure of "Apology for Bad Dreams." Instead of Jeffers's grand and moving declaration, "I create good: and I create evil: I am the Lord," we hear at the end of Twichell's poem the more modest, but just as moving, "Don't look, Leave him alone. / I don't know why, either." Human cruelty lives on, as the poet tells us, in the dog's body, and it will be the dog who is destroyed, after he serves a final human purpose in the trial of his violator; it will be the dog and not the human, she notes, who will die for this crime. I think we know what Jeffers himself would have written about such a thing. It is my hope that we can hear how he might have done it, by reading Twichell's poem.

22. Earlier I suggested that free verse, as we find it in Jeffers's narratives and the contemporary narratives I have been discussing, may be the result of moral clarity. This is the kind of notion that gets expressed in passing in a talk like this, but lingers on to nag, because it sounds like a value judgment. I do not mean it to be one at all, since I do not think poetry in traditional English meters is in any way superior or inferior to American free verse. Still, I suspect that the traditional meters of English verse in their own clarity tend to resolve ambiguities as they lend their authority to the most ambivalent argument. The writer of free verse may choose to base his or her authority on the urgency of the message. In the case of the narrative that shows Jeffers's influence, the structure of this message, as I have tried to argue, includes setting side by side, in a pattern of parallel structure, contending forces in a moral drama. The very rhythm and syntax of that drama, as it is narrated, derive from the clear idea that the forces, though of equal weight, are of differing value.

23. Let me illustrate with one more contemporary poem, this one by my colleague Kate Daniels, from a work in progress, entitled My Poverty. The poem is called "Autobiography of a White Girl Raised in the South."

Autobiography of a White Girl Raised in the South
In any self-portrait from the 50s, you'd have to see the me that was not me: the black girl trudging along the side of the road while I whizzed past in my daddy's car. Or the not-me girl in the bushes, peeing, while her mama kept watch and I relieved myself inside, daintily, in the sparkling facilities of the Southside Esso, labelled WHITES ONLY. All those water fountains I drank from unthinkingly, all those lunch counters where I disdained my lunch--she was there, around the corner or outside, sipping from a Mason jar of tepid water her mama'd lugged from home, eating her sandwiches of homemade biscuits and a smear of fat on the bench for blacks, shadeless and dusty, on Broad Street in front of the depot.
From the beginning, then, there were always two: me and not-me. The one I was, white and skinny, straight brown hair. And the one I wasn't but could've been--that black or brown girl, hair coarser than mine, eyes darker, skin gleamier and smooth, free of freckles. I didn't even know where she lived, only saw her in public when she stepped upon my granny's back porch with a paper bag of okra, accompanying her mama selling turnips and tomatoes, or her daddy, with his tools, come to sharpen the knives. Then we looked at each other, I recall, hands behind our backs, faces solemn and shy, our hair plaited, mine in one long, limp twist, and hers in a dozen marvelous sprouts, each tied at the end with colored twine. Now, I think it's odd, cruel even I never put my hand out, showed off a toy, never asked her out to my special place in my grandmother's yard, the powdery patch of gray dust beneath the cherry tree, blossoms plopping down in tiny poofs of air and color. There, cross-legged, knee to knee, we might've touched each other and satisfied our terrible curiosity-- whether she, in fact, was just like me, and I, like her. There, beneath the flowering tree, as the simple creatures we were meant to be, the universe might have come to us as once it was--various in its multitudes, full of rich textures, interesting odors, a wide palette of color and hue. There, we might have seen each other as the works of art we actually were, might have understood the role of art, to explain the peculiar state of being human, how it sometimes is a glorious thing to be alive, to feel and see, how, at others, it's a crushing weight, how one cannot exist without the other, how useless any battle to divide the light from dark which can only coexist. We might have seen how necessary we were each to the other, how, separated by the bad laws and sick habits of the culture that produced us, we were doomed to live bizarre, half-lives of racist lies.
Even now I see her toes, bare and curled in the powdery dust and feel the envy that I felt for her going free of shoes, my own toes twitching in my polished brogans. I see our hands reaching out to fill with blossoms, dumping mine to her and hers to me. And then I hear my granny's much-loved voice, calling from the porch, to come away and go inside. She sends away the not-me's daddy without a sale, and chastises me throughout our lunch for what she calls "familiarity." And through the back screendoor, I see the not-me girl, walking away behind her daddy, not looking back, and I hear his voice, querulous, too, chastising
her, as well, for something bad, whatever it was we almost did but didn't, finally, dare to do. (unpubl. Ms.)

24. Not only does this poem, like the others, depend on a parallel structure, in the small ways sentences are constructed and the large ways the story is revealed, which we also find in Jeffers's narratives, but in one passage it echoes sentiments close to those we find in many of Jeffers's poems.

There, beneath the flowering tree, as the simple creatures
we were meant to be, the universe might have come to us
as once it was--various in its multitudes, full
of rich textures, interesting odors, a wide palette of color and hue.

25. Daniels tells a story about "the peculiar state of being human" in a society that deforms humanity. Even her choice of the word "peculiar" has a Jeffersian quality, though the subject-- racism--is not one he ever treated directly. And, of course, that is not my point. My point is that Daniels's poem derives its syntax from a narrative energy, the urge to tell a story in verse, that embodies a moral imperative. It puts the experience of a white child beside that of a black child, and weighs both in the balance with the prejudice that separates them. This setting side by side, of making parallels in expression and in the structure of the poem, has to make us think of the modern master of this form.

26. When we encounter a contemporary narrative poem like this one by Kate Daniels, and the ones by C. K. Williams, Garrett Hongo, and Chase Twichell, free verse poems that tell stories with a moral clarity, in which opposing forces are set side by side, in which the syntax itself reflects that opposition by its parallel structure, a structure that by its very repetitive nature creates the poem's rhythm and feeds on its narrative energy, then the poet who comes to mind in the modern American tradition of narrative poetry is Robinson Jeffers. It is not Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose ballads and sonnets are like black boxes with a voice inside. It is not Robert Frost, whose blank verse narratives, complete with live action and talking heads, are like documentary films. Jeffers took Walt Whitman's great free verse lyric, harnessed its power of reiteration for the purpose of narrative, and left this new form as part of his legacy to American poetry.

Works Cited

Daniels, Kate. My Poverty. Unpublished Manuscript.

Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1979.

Hongo, Garrett. The River of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988, 1991. Volumes 1 and 3.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Macmillan Co., 1937.

Twitchell, Chase. The Ghost of Eden. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1995.

Williams, C.K. Flesh and Blood. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987.