LYRIC AMBITION:
THE POETRY OF THEODORE ENSLIN
If you are a fan of Theodore Enslin’s poetry, the appearance of Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993 will be cause for jubilation. Handsomely produced by the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, this is a most copious (over 400 pages) collection of this most prolific but not very well known poet’s work. From Enslin’s 80 or so previous collections, issued from very small presses and nearly all now out of print, editor Mark Nowak has provided a generous sampling of poems small and large, along with a chatty interview with the unpretentious Enslin as a "dialogic afterword."
From the beginning, Enslin displays his trademark sharp eye for detail, and a delicate sweetness of sound. The book begins with a characteristic free verse lyric from 1958’s The Work Proposed, "Road or River":
Wheat, and a river is it?
Wheat,
A River or a road in
long, numb spirals moving?
By morning, moving gold and
pale star shadows to the sea;
and moving reeds with blackbirds
noon and evening.
It will move.
Or road will move its pale gold sand–
through fields of coreopsis move its noon.
The night, for river or for road,
will move its silence, and a few
night singers: Crickets, and the wind in wheat.
Enslin, who has lived in rural Maine since 1960 (in the coastal village of Milbridge since the 1970s), is a keen observer of the natural scene. The slant of winter sun, the brooding weight of an overcast sky, the tang of ocean breeze–such things run through his poems, early to late. Enslin is at his best when chronicling the shifting weathers and seasons playing over his characteristic landscapes, and the associated moods moving through a feeling mind.
An untitled lyric from 1973 nicely displays his strengths:
When gulls
and ducks
ride it out–
swell of the last storm
preparing for the next–
moon rubbed against
cloud–the sun smudged,
a dying bonfire.
Sound. Sound. The ceaseless
sound pervading,
but low key.
Hiss of the coming tide.
I, too,
ride it
out.
In such poems, Enslin makes subtle music ("pervading, but low key") of ordinary event and natural cycle.
Yet as the years pass, Enslin becomes increasingly ambitious. More and more of his books from the 1980s on are dominated by lengthy sequences. He develops an increasingly fragmented, elliptical manner, which to my mind cuts against the lyric virtues of his best work. In these long poems he orchestrates the glimpses and glances of his earlier lyrics into lengths they cannot always gracefully sustain. It is as if this always-musical poet has tried to compose multiple symphonies for solo flute–moments of piercing beauty emerge from every one, but as a whole each too often collapses for lack of structure, variety, and development. At the same time, Enslin’s fondness for making language itself a central concern, rather than language addressing the physical and emotional landscape, frequently produces the sort of opacity which is common in the poetry which has been termed postmodern. Increasingly in the later sequences, readers must labor through a great deal of tedious wordplay and fragmented or downright ungrammatical lumps of language:
Let it not
impersonal
flare of lightness
not common
gold as light
the noble frame
of window
gold
caught east and west
morning and evening
If I confess that I don’t really understand this, I may be revealing my weakness as a reader. But it’s undeniable that such poetry asks a lot of us. Perhaps the shimmery elusiveness of passages like this one makes its valid point about the refractory nature of language and the difficulties of perception, but I am afraid that my eyes glaze over when faced with a page of this kind of poetry, much less ten or twenty. And over time, Enslin’s work gets more rather than less challenging in this respect, unfortunately:
In triples threads
bridge three
openings among
triple once
make mention
move away
forma antiqua
(Iberian)
set spacing
twice as three
break. . . .
This particular Gertrude Steinian cadenza from 1990 rolls onward for another four pages, leaving me in the dust. Enslin’s fine-tuned ear is as much in evidence here as in his more linear lyrics, yet the disjointedness dominating the later poems hardly helps a reader expecting the usual structural coherence of long poems: narrative, argument, exposition, drama, and even grammatical logic. It is like listening at length to a stutterer, wearisome even when the speaker is someone you love and the message seems an important one.
Yet patient readers will be rewarded from time to time, even in the late work, by Enslin’s lovely turns of phrase, glints of insight, and potent description:
Just as the oars lie hushed above the water
so the water quitted below the lapstrake hull
where shadow flattens wave along the drift
not always memory the surge is on
slips oil the trace a little closer
wake that stirs
Though I am not certain I fully grasp everything in this passage, it wins me over with its darting descriptive touch, its smooth segue from physical to spiritual motions, and its rhythmic lightness. At his best, Enslin remains a fulfilling poet of hushed oars and stirring boat wakes.
--David Graham. Published in Maine Times, Spring 1999
