Freeing the Form

Eric Pankey shows a preponderant fondness for the unrhymed couplet and triplet in Apocrypha and Cenotaph, and even when he chooses longer 12 or 16-line unrhymed stanzas, these are marked by regularity of line length and meter. These earlier volumes are also characterized by density of language, a certain obscurity of meaning, and a distancing of voice from reader. With Reliquaries there is a decided loosening of form and a correspondent freeing of content. The voice engages the reader on a more personal level and the poems become freer in spirit and accessibility.

The predominant metaphor for the volume, the reliquary, the enclosure for the religious relic, retains that sense of tightness that characterizes the earlier work, but in a sense it takes an ancient form and breathes new life into it. The studied irregularity of form in this volume does the same thing. It breathes fresh air, a certain openness onto the page and correspondingly breathes a freshness and openness into the content. The depth and profundity of idea is retained, but the increasingly personal voice provides the reader an entrance into the poetry that was often difficult to find in the earlier work.

The first-person pronoun that occurs in only eight of the poems in Apocrypha, enters almost all of the poems in Reliquaries. The opening poem signals the more personal voice in its title, “Light by Which I Read.” The poem acknowledges the presence of memory in the origin and purpose of the reliquary. The form, after all, is a repository of the remembered, a way to preserve the fragments of earlier lives and deeds, but in its implementation it is ironically a container of death, and just as in memory, it is a container of life.

The voice equates the years he “managed without memory” to the deadness of the “dismembered saint enthroned in two hundred/ reliquaries.” The un-memory years are described as “stalled, unnumbered,/ abridged.” These adjectives are expanded by the their association with the image of the “dismembered saint.” The fragmented saint is necessarily stalled, aborted and static in his enclosure, as unproductive in an effectual sense as he can possibly be. The saint is literally “unnumbered” as he is represented to be in multiple locations, his body almost infinitely fragmented, and further he is rendered meaningless in proliferation as the unnumbered prints, devalued copies, an art dealer might distribute. Each part is simply an abridgment of the whole and thus the incompletion of functioning without memory is heightened. The form follows the disclosure figured in this stanza. The fourth line of the stanza confesses that “[n]ow, it is hard not to say I remember,” and pauses. The caesura drops to the line below to continue “hard, in fact, not to remember.” The form, far freer than anything seen in the two earlier volumes, says more than the words can ever say about the acknowledgment of the recovery of memory.

Each of the other three stanzas of the poem use the same technique and always to underline the emergence of memory in the life. In the first stanza, the speaker suggests that he has tried to “patch” the past with words. This “flaw” is seen to be “in the silvering.” The caesura separates the assertion from its visual actuality “memory seen/ through to.” The actuality is heightened by the second caesura separating “memory seen” and “through to.” In the third stanza, a caesura separates “two tomorrows” from the “archive of chance effects” that is one and the “necropolis of momentary appearances and sensations” that is the other.

In the fourth stanza, the caesura separates the characteristic cataloging of natural images that papers the backdrop of the poetic landscape. This word picture, similar to those that lull the reader into the obscurity of meaning of the earlier poems, is broken by the caesura that invites the final confession. “Clay-cold at the marrow. A hollow pulse-tick/ And it seems, at last, I’ve shed my scorched and papery husk.” The imagery pulls the reader back inside the reliquary that houses the saint while at the same time it speaks of the reality of the absence of memory in the speaker. The confession is chilling in is close-up, personal intensity and at the same time profound in its notions of historic memory.

The long flowing lines that often double onto the lines below characterize this volume and contrast starkly with the shorter, controlled lines of the two earlier volumes, but there is nevertheless a sense of order that maintains requisite control throughout. The poems have four stanzas, all of which are divided by a replica of a leaf. The content tends to form a pattern as well. The first stanza usually sets up a philosophical proposition, the second stanza personalizes the proposition, the third stanza begin to place the proposition and response into a broader pattern, and the fourth draws a conclusion. A constructed form though freer is still a vital element of the poetry, suggesting that the voice is more openly revealing but it still must reveal itself in a form that it makes familiar.

“The Mandala and the Square” is a good example of the pattern that exists throughout the volume. In the first stanza, the assertion is expressed in rhetorical form: “If all phenomena are empty, why does the underdrawing bleed/ through.” In the second stanza, the speaker struggles with freedom from form. He confesses that he “[c]annot hear the twilight language/ beyond words” and that he “cannot step outside this well-fed furnace [he] calls a body.” In addition, he confesses that he “[c]annot reconstruct the sequence of events that was the day-before-/ yesterday.”

The third stanza quotes the artist Agnes Martin, whose work is concerned with replication of ordinary patterns and designs, as insisting on surrender to the underlying forms that only the artist sees. The fourth stanza moves back to the personal dimension and again probes the notion of memory. Breaking a stick of rosemary wood, the speaker notes that the “fragrance did not conjure memory, but had about it the essence/ of the remembered.”

In “Lines Composed Above the Occoquan River,” the speaker asserts that “[t]he more [he] whittle[s] away the self the more the heartwood shows.” This fascination with the pattern beneath, the pattern that inevitably reveals itself, seems to be the struggle of Reliquaries. It is the terror of memory recovered. Metaphorically, the fragments of the saints held in a thousand reliquaries, hold the design of Christendom, and the patterns in the natural world hold the design of creation. There is something awesome in seeing these patterns that is only heightened as the patterns become intensely personal. The voice of the poetry is caught between wanting and resisting, and thus the form of the poetry wants to free itself even as it imposes its own form.