Starlight Drive

Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Dissertations Graduate College 6-2005 Starlight Drive William R. Reynolds Jr. Western Michigan University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations Part of the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Reynolds, William R. Jr., "Starlight Drive" (2005). Dissertations. 1054. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations/1054 This Dissertation-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARLIGHT DRIVE by William R. Reynolds Jr. A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan June 2005 STARLIGHT DRIVE William R. Reynolds Jr., Ph.D. Western Michigan University, 2005 Starlight Drive is a book-length manuscript of poems that reflects my abiding interest in how poetry can use the fiction writer’s tools, such as characterization and set- ting, without sacrificing the beauty of the lyric. Like Rodney Jones, I write about my north Alabama childhood filtered through the lens of my adult life here in the Midwest. My field of perception does not begin in a cotton field like Jones’, but on a cul-de-sac in a middle-class neighborhood of Huntsville, where my father was an engineer for NASA. The poems in my manuscript show my protagonist moving through a landscape peopled by sometimes grotesque, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes tragic characters who are mostly middle-class, white, and “educated.” I have tried to spin out of many life-studies the core narratives of a life, the ones that show not only bewilderment and a hunger for the unnamable, but swift glimpses of grace. Copyright by William R. Reynolds, Jr. 2005 UMI Number: 3177395 UMI Microform 3177395 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 INTRODUCTION “Memory is recovery”—Stanley Plumly “Memory is genius”—Robert Lowell, reported by Helen Vendler I remember sitting in my first poetry seminar as a graduate student at Mississippi State University back in 1995, a course that I was taking with Richard Lyons, who turned out, after much cajoling on his part, to be my first writing teacher. I was looking out the open window of the second floor of Lee Hall, seeing the distant lights from the quad, the moths like flakes of sawdust rising toward the light, hearing the clank of the flagpole and the low rumble of thunder. Already it was spring, even in early March, the wind outside gusting so the tall windows that Rich had opened earlier the wind now slammed shut. The book in my hands was Charles Wright’s The World of the Ten Thousand Things. The poem in front of me was “Self-Portrait,” the very first one. I had no idea what this poem was “about,” or what it “meant,” nor did I have any inkling as to why it, and many of his poems, showed Wright working within a long tradition of meditative poetry, dating even as far back as John Donne’s “Prayer (III)” or George Herbert’s “The Collar,” poems which that night we were reading alongside some of Wright’s. Influence, tradition, the personal and the impersonal: I was a long way from the kind of conversation that can arise out of poems. The knowledge and experience necessary to participate in a sophisticated conversation about poetry were several years away, but that night I fell for Wright’s music. Lucky for me, a city and state later and I would begin to 1 2 recognize how he created his signature music, all those phrases clotted with spondees and trochees, all those accordion-like lines with their odd number of syllables (no doubt, an instance of a poet’s conscious decision to resist the traditional baseline of the iambic pentameter and thereby create his own “sound”). Although that night I was charmed by the poem’s sounds, today I also admire the subtle manner in which dramatic tension arises from evocation of place in Wright’s apocalyptic pastorals. Wright’s scene dramatizes his musings: Someday they’ll find me out, and my lavish hands, Full moon at my back, fog groping the gone horizon, the edge Of the continent scored in yellow, expectant lights, White shoulders of surf, a wolf-colored sand, The ashes and bits of char that’ll clear my name. (11) I like how he plays the images against one another. “White shoulders of surf” is a phrase that is immediately undercut by its partner, regret and longing here suited up and disguised inside the image of the “wolf-colored sand.” The opening clause plays with the colloquial but Wright unsettles the thought with the phrase “lavish hands.” Even one line of the poem gives a sense of Wright’s baroque style, the way he, for instance, embroideries like sounds into a pattern that create shifts in tone. In the second line, the long o sound makes an appearance in the picturesque “full moon” but its subsequent reincarnation in the phrase “fog groping the gone horizon” signals a sudden change of heart. There’s an interplay here between the pastoral and the elegy and between landscapes sponsored by the English Romantics and then the Modernists, the full moon of Coleridge’s “Frost At Midnight” and the fog of The Waste Land, echoes, reminders, allusions that can jumpstart poems. In the second stanza, the pattern is much 3 the same, ironic acceptance and passive relaxation, as if the poet were sitting in a hammock thinking up a song while he looks out into his backyard. Whereas the opening stanza’s one sentence creates shifts in tone from clause to clause, the second stanza begins with a three-sentence idyll that is abruptly unsettled by a sentence whose corresponding image in the natural world would be that of the undertow: Till then I’ll hum to myself and settle the whereabouts. Jade plant and oleander float in a shine. The leaves on the pepper tree turn green. My features are sketched in black ink in a slow drag through the sky Waiting to be filled in. His features won’t be filled in until he’s dead, when he becomes a part of the landscape, that final and permanent merging with the natural world. Of course, I had read already that Wright was born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935, and already that fact mesmerized me and made me want to make a bundle out of the coincidence that I was conceived at Pickwick Dam in the July heat of 1971. There’s an old photograph of that trip that ever so often I search out and gaze at when I’m visiting my parents: my father, Ray-ban aviator glasses and long sideburns, the red hair, which had caused family and friends so long ago to nickname him “Red,” beginning that slow fade into a burnished copper of a penny showing my sister how to bait the hook or cast the rod and reel. In the snapshot he looks animated, excited, his body showing her how to reel in a catch. Or have I misremembered? Do I have in mind a Polaroid snapshot of my father instructing, no, not even doing that, but just merely looking on, grinning, my brother shining in our father’s eyes. I cannot exactly say that my sister is nowhere to be found, it just feels that way. She’s there, I know, kneeling in 4 the sand, the clear lake water before her. She’s not on the other side of the bank, but in the foreground, the picnic tables, the swing set, and my father blurred behind her. Her back is to the camera: no doubts, no doubt, she’s going to dive in. That night in the classroom, all I could do was scribble a few words into the margins: in the upper-right-hand-corner, I wrote “edges and silos.” And as if to emphasize my own confusion at the intoxicant sounds of the second line, I wrote “silos and horns of the hound.” Later, I would come to know this poem so well that I would memorize it and even be able to stand up at my sister’s graveside service and say the last stanza of this poem just before we placed our red roses on her casket: Hand that lifted me once, lift me again, Sort me and flesh me out, fix my eyes. From the mulch and the undergrowth, protect me and pass me on. From my own words and my certainties, From the rose and the easy cheek, deliver me, pass me on. (11) The liturgical power of this stanza, the final directives to the dead (“protect me and pass me on”; “deliver me, pass me on”) that echo the New Testament, the anapestic feet that slow the rhythms down to a stately pace, the identifying marks of this passage’s power come back around to the poet’s life, the care and attention he gives to each line he writes down. Even back in my first year of graduate school when I didn’t have the language to talk about poems as made objects, I was drawn to poems like James Wright’s “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio” because its structure brings the speaker back around to the isolated and isolating self.

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