“Not till the fire is dying in the grate /
Look we for any kinship with the stars.”
—Meredith

The post-World War I shattered visions of Pound and Eliot are perhaps fundamentally less different from the incoherencies of Kerouac and Corso, the randomly referential allegory of Ashbery, or the associative anarchy of Bly and Merwin than we have been taught. Our century seems more whole the more of it we have to look on; one of its clearest characteristics is its overwhelmingly disconnected diversity. Yeats’s “things fall apart” has become the mellowest of understatements.

In the context of such disorganization, Fred Chappell’s seventh volume of poetry becomes illuminating. At first reading Source seems to participate, both in its overall structure and in particular poems, in this chaos. Nothing, it turns out, could be farther from the truth.

The center of the volume is “Latencies.” It begins with an apparently straightforward explanation of the speaker’s book-derived understanding of the idea of latency. But the image suggesting the idea keys rich evocations:

the stars

come out, bright fishnet lifting

from darkness

those broken

many heroes we read the mind with.

The motif of human curiosity interacting with itself as source and with the external world returns at the end to those scattered stars through a modern image which echoes “heroes” dreadfully:

Or consider the young man

fishing the river. Now he

has gone to be a soldier, he

has become

a latent garden of terrible

American beauty roses

which only the enemy bullets

can make manifest.

We can move from this poem to almost any other in the book, as spokes from a hub. Most obvious, perhaps, is a lieder cycle spoken by a Vietnam veteran who has difficulty returning to his life as a sculptor—his experiences in the war grate mercilessly against the classical, polished precedents of his art.

I reach into the crumbled

centuries and draw forth cherubs.

Nymphs, and pediments, which do not overpower

The chopper’s throaty throb

and the bamboo

Straining back away and the

white grass warped down

Where the stretcher-bearers

trotted stooped.

The sequence flirts with Matthew Arnold’s resolution to “Dover Beach,” but, resisting the temptation to be content with “your slim white hands [smoothing] my thigh,” concludes:

I have imagined the stars in

clean white rows.

That was strict insanity. Now

they commingle with flesh

And shadow and stone and

breath, a nebula

Of accident I thrust my hands

into until it vanishes.

The shift to the galactic swirl as a medium for the sculptor is concentric with the stellar dispersal of “Latencies.” This time, however, we have a real broken hero.

The 11 poems grouped immediately after “Latencies” are myths and fables which offer another key to the theoretical underpinnings of Source‘s form. The self-sufficiency of these poems, belied by their brevity, indicates that myth, legend, and folktale are not so much forms we perceive our experience in, but actively ideal forms that determine the shape and nature of our experiences. It’s also possible that these ideal forms are fragments of a larger, ineffable design. One is reminded of Andrew Lang’s idea that the story was originally a monolith that broke apart into all the particular stories we live and tell, the Big Bang theory recapitulated in sensibility.

Which brings us back to “Latencies” again, and its image of stars as broken heroes. The entire opening poem, for instance, occurs in a fog in which solid objects “dissolve into spirit.” In “Nocturne” stars are “powder,” frost “emery.” The Queen Anne’s lace in “Here” is presented as a pointillist might see it. Clouds, snow, dust also recur as aspects of the air these poems breathe. This is no more accidental than it is “Nature” poetry. It is rather the rehearsal of the book’s desire to embody our shattered present and to suggest its source.

“Urlied,” one of the final poems in the book, removes the guesswork inherent in Chappell’s undertaking. It gives a philosophical and scientific base for what underlies the poetry. Lucretius speaks roughly three fifths of the poem; Chappell bases his speeches squarely in De Rerum Natura, echoing Lucretius’ ironic rejection (in a poem) of poetry and religion as perpetuators of fear and illusion. By making Lucretius’ statements anachronistic, Chappell wants the social and political upheaval of Lucretius’ time and ours compared. Rilke and Olympus become contemporary, equally detestable in their romantic divergence from the truth. Lucretius’ particular truth is that we are composed of irreducible, impervious particles and of the void in which they randomly move, things in the universe being accidental arrangements of these two elements. Space is endless and the movement of particles through it eternal. Human death means merely a redistribution of the particles. Chappell has Lucretius say “The comfort is, there’s nothing personal in it,” and evaluates Lucretius’ poem as the bravest of acts:

Lucretius has walked out far to

view the Gorgon

Terror. Returned to shape

His thoughts and suffer the

windburn histories

Of city and animal and star.

His hand is pure and alone.

Lucretius, however, is not revitalized by his daring, for the poem ends “We saw you in the white fountain of delirium / Burning but not purified.”

The other extreme of the terrestrial specks pointed out earlier are those in intergalactic space, the “nebula of accident” into which the [broken] sculptor thrusts his displaced hands, the stars in “Latencies,” the “mealy light” which may be “the afterglow of the giant / death of some far legendary sun” (“Windows”). For Lucretius such images would refer to the cold dispersal of matter; Chappell, however, suggests discovery and hope in his resolution of those clusters. In “Message,” after moving from terror to sorrow, his “man” finds everything changed in the hour of his most destructive grief:

He ascends

a finer dimension of event, he

feels with senses

newly evolved the wide

horizons unknown till now.

He is transformed head to foot,

taproot to polestar.

He breathes a new universe,

the blinding whirlpool

galaxies drift round him and

begin to converse.

Finally, the “Forever Mountains” pictures the poet’s father ascending a mountain (suggestively named “Pisgah”) which “possesses him.” He builds a fire at twilight and “in the night a granary of stars / Rises in the water and spreads from edge to edge.” In the morning he, too, “rises glad and early and goes his way.” The poet’s

vision blurs with distance.

I see no more.

Forever Mountain has become a cloud

That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.

The groundwork Chappell has laid with shattered matter, with myth and fable, with the anachronistic perspective of Lucretius, prepares us for the apotheoses— what appears as death is potentially transformation. Each character remains elementally what he is. his components dispersed into new configurations. The father’s ascent of Pisgah suggests, too, that the process may not be as impersonal as Lucretius thought.

In Source Fred Chappell renders his atomic vision visible at two extremes (“taproot to polestar”) between which the human species carries out its being, its daily heroism, its sweet music, its longing for rest. We can also choose, the alternatives imply, how we wish to join the eternal smithereens. “Message” and “Forever Mountain” suggest the desirable ways, preferable to “making it new” with erudite pastiche, or to assembling nostalgic fragments to shore us against ruin. Rats’ alley is not necessarily the King’s High Way.

 

[Source, by Fred Chappell, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press]