by Robb St. Lawrence
In 1845, a writer for Littell’s Living Age wrote that an American looking onto the development of telegraph communication lines across the United States “will regard this new and mighty agency in interchanging thoughts, sentiments and feelings, as one of the indissoluble links of firm and enduring union, and of making us all feel that we are still one nation—with one language—one capitol—and more than all, with one heart.” If we ignore the colonialist undertone, it’s a pretty notion: that to share information—and, importantly, to share a language—could lead to the sharing of a heart. It’s a utopian idea, but borne from what we know a shared means of communication can/must do: make community, bring us closer together.
In Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story, a sense of community, or even of communication between the poet and the reader, might easily be the last thing on a reader’s mind. Morrison’s collection dramatically foregrounds form—each poem consists of three stanzas of three unpunctuated lines, each line is right-justified, and each line ends with the word ‘stop’, ‘please’, or ‘advise.’ Each poem ends with ‘please advise’ and is titled “please advise stop.” The lines accumulate their sense through parataxis for the most part, standing more or less apart from the others in a given poem by the way that the end words (‘stop’ or ‘please’) function as a sort of vanishing point, the place at which sense dissolves into speech, surface. All we are left with at the end of the line resides in the speaker’s voice; the image or contemplation that comprised the line until that point is refined into that more fundamental pleading: stop. please. The speaker reaches out to the reader, and the reader completes the circuit of the plea by giving both an ear and a voice to these pleas, extending the gesture of crisis embodied in the poem even further, toward some further place, some further listener. Or, that is, toward some audience—the highly repetitive and ritualized nature of these formal tropes (including the numerological symmetry throughout the book: 3 stanzas of 3 lines, 9 sections of 6 poems of 9 lines each) is reminiscent of prayer: as the speaker hopefully claims, “my repetitive gesture will eventually wear through its surrounding world please” (8). A hope here, that repetition that might clear off the trappings of material existence, lead us beyond this world and to some other place. Or maybe, as Robert Fink has written, in a study of Minimalist music, “We repeated ourselves into this culture. We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”
This sense that the material world might just be temporary, a thing to worry our way through, is fitting, as the poems that make up this collection are elegiac in nature, for the most part seeming to respond more or less directly to either the death of the speaker’s father or (more often) the state of the speaker in some indeterminate span of time surrounding that loss. For instance, in the first poem of section five:
I might travel his death a creaking and swaying beneath me stop
there are static expressions freed now and passing along the walls stop
an object isn’t what is hidden but what smiles out from the hiding please
(35)
“His death,” as the first line here has it, comes to encompass the whole of the book’s referential reach. Even though section five of the book is the space most marked by the presence the speaker’s father’s death (followed by section seven), its positioning, so plainly at the center of the collection, means that even when we come across a passage far later in the book, and even if that passage has little obvious connection to the death of the speaker’s father, we are pressed toward the memory of what has come before. Here is the first poem of section eight, quoted in full:
sullenly disposed to needing the sound of a second no stop
rootless in jars geranium-cuttings already telling time stop
spidery cracks in the wall’s plaster the breath of coarse masonry beneath stop
with each invasion of new furniture the same parade music please
patches of original carpet-color shine like exposed modesty stop
an impatience stiff and aromatic as sticks of cinnamon stop
crows on the lawn their shine so black it staunches modification please
some skies must remain unrecognizable to be kept stop
in the dark my flashlight is eager to toss its tight-fisted gleam please advise
(59)
Given the almost irresistible (despite the alternative mapping we have been given by the poet) pull of conventional narrative, it’s hard not to read this as a meditation on the clearing and re-staging of a deceased loved one’s house, though there is little in the poem itself to supply the suggestion that this house has anything to do with the speaker’s father. One of the effects of the paratactic evolution in these poems is to scour out an ellipsis between lines, to supply a blank space into which the speaker invites the reader’s participation in creating the poem’s sense. This is one of the ways in which the poetry in the true keeps calm biding its story functions as an invitation toward community: the reader’s mind and voice complete the circuits of the poems. Whatever sense comes from these telegraphic packets of data, it is a sense that the reader has made in communion with the text itself and the poet, the assembler of these forms. And since there are few umbrella-sized touchstones in the book aside from the death of the speaker’s father, that particular umbrella tends to cover what cannot otherwise be assimilated.
So, on some level, the success of the book rests on the extent to which the reader is willing to lie across the synapse and complete the circuit of meaning themselves. On another level, the success of the book depends upon the reader’s tolerance for repetition. Some readers would, quite understandably, find the formal trope of this book either annoying or superfluous (perhaps the one because of the other)—a reason for that could be the self-reflexive tendency in some poems:
fill a page with words never letting a single phrase form stop
not for avoiding but for allowing what refuses to be remembered stop
displace all practiced confessions with a small shudder stop
(63)
Moments like these can lead a reader to question the purpose of a formal experiment—if the poem is about the process of writing the poem, what has the purpose of this formal innovation been, and what change has this brought about in me?, a reader might ask. But to take that view of the poetry in this collection would be to ignore such compelling meditation, such purposeful constellations. It would be to ignore the places where the poem makes the kind of invitation to be a part of its meaning that mark this book as truly interested in its readers, when it could have—given the locus of concerns it addresses at times—turned its back to them entirely.
Here is a poem from section six in full:
the driver wasn’t guilt-wracked but a pedestrian who saw the accident lost her sense of smell stop
according to the gondolier each wave strikes the hull in a different language stop
I find a new direction because every planet stays locked in its orbit stop
no way to tell the weeds that are flesh-colored from the flesh that is weed-colored please
listening is a composite of glossing novelty and following my fears around in the dark stop
emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop
the road to the asylum forks each time I genuflect please
the entire morning gone callow with a rationale stop
now even the least leaf rustling must be theatricalized please advise
(43).
This is neither the ritualized and clichéd language of mourning nor the skittering horizontal parataxis of much of the (prose) writing that has been referred to by the label “the new sentence,” but something far more approachable. A constellation that brings together the acute physical response of a pedestrian who witnessed an accident with a speaker’s inability to differentiate between color and texture, bodies and weeds, that pulls into the same orbit a speaker who finds new direction in—and is filled by—the swarm of celestial bodies in the night sky and a gondolier’s suggestive platitude about the many languages of the canal’s waters; the poem invites the reader to participate in the processing, in the making sense of, these fragments—yes—but it also invites the reader to gawk and marvel at the craft and emotional precision of each of its constituent parts. The emotional space carved out by the line, “emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop,” is both exact—that is, specific to this speaker—and open and available to the reader. There is no retreat to private language, and that seems to be the point. We’re reading an open communiqué, a missive sent off to us and folded into the codex.
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