Much Magic, Much Death

James Laughlin turns discursive, prose-like narrative into what Robert Hass identified as a "portrait of a desperately vulnerable yearning." He's willing to strip away the sheath and expose the nerve, as he does in "Experience of Blood," the thoughts of a man who cleans up after his son's suicide. His poems draw me in again and again because directness of language doesn't exclude depth of meaning. In contrast to the diction, his contexts range from the Greek and Roman classics to the French and Italian languages to Sanskrit tales. He read widely as evidenced in his pentastichs, five line poems, "many of them marginal jottings and paraphrases of commonplace book notations."

But he also exposes my yearnings. In "Nunc Dimittis" he captures my current fatalism about the value of my writing:
Little time now
and so much hasn't
been put down as I
should have done it.
But does it matter?
It's all been written
so well by my betters,
and what they wrote
has been my joy.
He's also too close for comfort with "Poets on Stilts." I appreciate the humor but also feel like the butt of the joke.

In Poems New and Selected, he included Book IX from "Byways," an autobiographical poem of many books divided into segments of metrical three beat lines, a form borrowed from/ discovered in Kenneth Rexroth's work. The form keeps texts lean on the page, a direct and narrow path through white space. One segment is called Trivandrum. The narrative is rangy, yet somehow slippery. The form promotes quick reading, which would not be my choice with its backdrop of a part of India I enjoyed visiting. It vacillates between being a tourist guide and a memoir, lacking emotional weight, including that sense of unease that accompanied me on my trips though Hindu texts and Indian countryside.

The poem leaves the reader with a sense of something very structured in content and form. The content begins with a brief encyclopedic description of the part of Kerala he visited: Beginning with colonial (why so late?) history, then climate, products, language, and a lengthier sketch of religious context, concentrating on Christianity. (At the time of his visit India has been independent for only six years.) He moves on to his call to India, a rumored new novel he wanted for New Directions. The author of that book becomes his host for the major events of his trip: A Kathakali production, a visit to a guru, a last sunset, the smell of southern India with its cow patties drying on roof tops during the day, burning in cook fires at night.

Is it because the language is so prosaic that I want so much more narrative and information from it? Or is it because, for example, I too watched Kathakali, sitting in a lush meadow, at dusk, the green and red of the demon's face stronger in that light? Which of the many stories did he watch enacted? I too ended up in Indian clothing, in my case because my luggage was lost in transit, the delicate patterns making me look squat. And there was an audience with a religious figure, during which I felt "a little high on wine."

The verse form, with its short lines and long stanzas, gives the memoir weight and speed without emphasis, other than in the number of lines given to any incident. That captures something of
Laughlin's immersion in a unfamiliar culture. He keeps anchoring himself with facts. This successfully holds the alien elements around him at a distance.