For Gustave Flaubert, style is elegiac; it is, he writes, an “irrevocable farewell to life.” He says early in his career: “One achieves style only by atrocious labor, a fanatic and dedicated stubbornness.” The process of writing, for Flaubert, is essentially a process of connecting, of cutting excess words, of substituting other words, of altering phrases and perceptions — a negative process of continual worry. We often call these sorts of “adjustments” stylistic changes, orienting our thinking according to the classical model proposed by Aristotle where style is what we add to content for “clarity” and “dignity,” or according to the renaissance model where style is considered as “clothing” or “costume” for the essential body of thoughts underneath.

However, for Flaubert, as Roland Barthes has pointed out, “These corrections are not in any way rhetorical accidents; they affect the primary code, that of the language; they commit the writer to experiencing the structure of the language as a passion.” The Flaubert goal — fluidity of style — is not only a surface that seems to project the reader along smoothly, thus masking the torturous process of writing, but is more importantly a triumphant, philosophical victory over those negative forces. In the end, style is an elegy to an elegiac mode of thought. Style ultimately has to do with vision, not grammar.

Style is a form of that untelling, what is unexpectedly revealed in the switch between musical instruments, in the inappropriate words that seem suddenly right, what is revealed about our mortality despite the poem’s best efforts.

Aesthetic distance, for Flaubert, is style, the ability to keep locating the self in new contexts of language. It is the essence of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a “carnivalistic style” — in his book on Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, he writes that the point of writing is not the presence of a specific linguistic style but the counterpointing of different styles. Style is the way the poem moves, almost beyond the words themselves. In his poem “By Heart,” contemporary American poet William Matthews asks, “Which came first, style or content?” What the poem suggests is that the masses of things we live among are nothing until they are stylized, as a jazz musician knows in putting down one instrument for another, one mood and vision for another. In the end, the narrator muses, “Content is what style’s failed.” Content is style. The poet, then, the stylist, becomes like the poet in Mark Strand’s “The Untelling” who writes several versions of a scene in several styles through which he begins to understand that it is not one version but the idea of versions that is important — only to end at a title, the title of the poem he has become a character in. Style is a form of that untelling, what is unexpectedly revealed in the switch between musical instruments, in the inappropriate words that seem suddenly right, what is revealed about our mortality despite the poem’s best efforts. It is a way of untelling our mortality, of trying not to speak it so elegiacally, and yet failing because words themselves always fail us. “Much goes unsaid,” Matthews says in “Construction.” Flaubert, too, in his constant whittling down, knows the secret of this untelling; and André Breton knows in trying to get at the beginning beyond words, Akhmatova in the silent image of the other that often haunts her poems; Matthews knows in the way our worst words untell more than we bargained for in an unforeseeable future. Style, to adapt a phrase from another American poet Robert Hass, is elegy to what it signifies, itself, a notion that John Ashbery and James Tate exploit in their seemingly unemotional poems.

All the poets I have mentioned here are known as great stylists, and all, with the exception of Akhmatova, in some sense suffer from a common misperception among readers and even younger poets that style precludes emotion and thought, is only a surface consideration. On the other hand, I don’t want to suggest by the choices of poets to discuss here, especially in the cases of the American poets Ashbery, Tate and Matthews, that a good style has complex contradictions and ironies, involves a comic or at least tongue in cheek tone. I focus on these poets because they provide good examples for a principle that can be extended to all poetic styles: that style is always a matter of tension, that it fights against something.

It might be well to remember, too, then, how Jacques Derrida has written that style is “a means of protection against the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat [of that] which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view.” Style, for him, is what attempts to cover up, in the classical sense, the wound of our mortality, our emptiness, or what absents that knowledge, but it differs from the classical conception in that it always fails, and in that through the failure an essential drama of the poem, however comic or tragic on the surface, works itself out. It is just this sort of vision that Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and critic, has used to describe the work of André Breton. Breton’s style is characterized by a reliance on automatic writing, on subordinate clauses that correlate rather than subordinate, on interruptions and resumptions of trains of thought, on abrupt shifts in the contexts of language, on syntactic disjunction, on ellipses, on the linking of unrelated words and the elimination of surface grammar… in short, on any number of strategies to disguise theme. For Paz, Breton is a mannerist poet, a stylist, in the true sense: he generates a vision, coincident with his reworking of language, that attempts to extract itself from the usual patterns imposed by traditional language styles, traditional habits of thought.

So it is, I believe, in Breton’s poem, “Always for the first time,” where the stylistic leaps literally fill the “rift” between the beginning of love and its decline so that the narrator in the end can lean over the enormous void of time that has elapsed since that beginning of the affair and thus behaves as if “always for the first time”:

Statements of the theme are simply not going to work in the poem, for they would be unconvincing lies; instead, the poem has to enact a sense of always beginning. That is, the poem’s style has to enact a beginning that will counter the potentially elegiac end to the relationship. Breton accomplishes this by linking various sets of images such as the references to sight, to angularity, to flowers, to the rift of time between them, so that each time one image or another from these sets is mentioned it seems to emerge from a new context. Yet syntax of associations begins to emerge: “the house at an angle” in line 17 suggests “the diagonal slant of girls” and the “T-square of dazzling light” in line 19, but the references to house, girls and light suggest connections that have not yet been explained. The images perhaps connect suddenly in the next few lines with the reference to the curtain (of the house), to the woman (one of the girls?), and to the invisible (dazzled by light?), though these links are themselves tenuous. As the poem says later, the images seem to be “flaring out in the center of a white clover,” constantly adding new categories of association along different categories of thought — geometry, aesthetics, draftsmanship, and decor, thus forcing us to see connections differently we see the items; they connect as if for the first time. But there is always a haunting since the poem, in modulating images, is building a history, a time for itself.

We might also look at the last thirteen lines to see more closely how things resolve themselves. The two legs in these lines derive from the rocking chair image earlier, and the stockings are literally “high-lows” suggesting the “silken ladder” image and also the precipice that was the original rift. In the space of a few lines, high, low, and center have been conflated, suggesting eventually the “fusion” of presence and absence. All this is meant to establish a logic of sorts to fuse ending and beginning as the poem repeats its first line title, literally starting over. And yet, for all its triumph, the poem also acknowledges the seriousness of the precipice; throughout the poem there have been “plants stripped,” branches that “scratch” threateningly, the “dark falling wing of plants,” and words such as “hopeless” and “unknown” that can’t be kept out. If the style provides a protection against time, as Derrida suggests, the elegiac sense nonetheless threatens in these words and the history in the poem, providing a dramatic tension.

In linking, on a philosophical level, stylistics and elegiacs, I am not suggesting a terribly dark vision of what a poem tries to do. Poets like James Tate, for instance, project a comic and surrealistic surface that becomes more comic as the vision it masks becomes more tragic. And we should remember that an elegy is not meant to be a dark and sad poem, but a triumphant one, if we are to listen to the elegies from Ovid through Tasso and Milton, to Rilke, Jiménez and Auden in our own age; these elegies always define themselves within a larger context of consolations. It might be useful to examine an elegy — Anna Akhmatova’s “March Elegy” — to explore these connections. As in the case of Breton’s poem, a certain risk is involved in using a translation, but in both cases the translations are excellent English poems. Besides, our concern is with style as a mode of thought, with a philosophy of style. Joseph Brodsky notes that Akhmatova’s style is characterized by strict rhymes and meters, relaxed a bit by the time of this poem, and short sentences with little or no subordination. It is, he says, a non-assertive style that diminishes the role of the “I.” And yet, Brodsky notes, there is a kind of movement that rivals the push of Breton’s lines: “Often within just one stanza she’d cover a variety of seemingly unrelated things,” Brodsky says, so many so quickly that she undermines the “formality” of the poem. The effect, I believe, is that the voice lets down its guard, the timeless metronomic ring of the lines is disrupted, and time, with all its reminders of death and loss, subtly enters the poem. Her poems hold off, but never fully, what they argue against, and this tension is the source of their dramatic power. Here is the poem, translated by Stanley Kunitz:

The struggle within the poem is against memory: the more we remember from the past, the more we remember how irretrievably past our experiences are. The little catalogue of images beginning in line 5 suggests the sort of failure of traditional consolations that the poem argues against — beginning with a “modest church” and ending with “Bible-oaks,” but containing within that frame a movement from “a harsh chorus” to a “secret conclave,” a kind of “jail” for the soul. Memory, in fact, becomes “malevolent.” In addition, the quick movement and the impersonal notation method mutes the elegiac potential in this part of the poem; this impersonality is then underscored by the notion that the whole catalogue comprises an unknown “somebody’s dreams.” However, the reference to the “somebody,” with its rowboat that comes out of nowhere, presents the first problem for the drama of the poem, for while allowing the poem to escape a reference to a personal and concrete loss, it also suggests the kind of detachment and coldness where, the poem goes on, “winter… fills the world.”

The poem, then, has begun to sense a paradox: a sense of the wintry void conjured by memory and a sense that memories themselves fill the void. The ending complicates the paradox by adding more details that radically revalue the associations made so far, a typical technique for elegies. Akhmatova has begun the poem by half-discounting her past nihilism, her belief that everything ended with death, but the “filling” action of memory in the guise of example details and musings within the poem has raised as many problems as it has protected against. So she introduces another image, another unknown character, except that in this case the character turns out to be a “frosted pane” of a “branch” or “cobweb” and with a voice obviously dreamt or imagined. The questions underscore the interrogative mood of the end, but also of the whole poem, indeed all of Akhmatova’s work where the rapid sequences of associations constantly call into question each prior image and the direction of the whole movement. Are these images from the “malevolent” past as the images earlier were? Are they linked with a real person, the person elegized? Does the “us” in the last fifth line suggest a consolation in community? Should we emphasize “sunstruck” or “tatter”? Does the mirror at the end turn everything around and make the poem an internalized drama? an elegy, then, for a lost self? Surely the figure is meant to be an image of bright consolation, but it is just as surely an image that is questioned, and so at least partially fails as a protection. Perhaps all these questions underscore what Brodsky calls the note of “controlled terror” in her poems; the victories, the protections, are always provisional, always about to dismantle themselves as rapidly as the lines have constructed them. It is this dizzying dance, eluding perhaps great consolation, but also eluding great disappointment, that is Akhmatova’s victory, the grace of her interrogative mood, her style.

It is this dizzying dance, eluding perhaps great consolation, but also eluding great disappointment, that is Akhmatova’s victory, the grace of her interrogative mood, her style.

For John Ashbery, as I have suggested, the problem of style is the problem “Of all that gets lost in the telling,” as he says in “Gorboduc.” When a story is completed it has a “largely ceremonial relation” to the object of narration: with time, the referential basis of the story becomes further diminished. And yet stories are how we must understand the world and when they become ineffectual we seem lost: “the story blows away? And what can you do, howling without a script?” This is the basic doubleness, the basic paradox of Ashbery’s work. “I talk two ways,” he says in “Unreleased Movie,” “first as reluctant explainer, then as someone offstage / In a dream.”

“Double inscription,” as Derrida would call it, this deconstructing and reconstructing within stylistics, explaining the past yet dreaming of the future in language, puts into play a process of continual revaluation of metaphor, phrasing and vision. “Fall Pageant,” for example, ends:

The tone here is a complex one, counterpointing “formlessness” against the “shape” of a “monument” or the poetic forms that “didn’t work out as planned,” the religious sense of anointing against the “robbers” who seem rather tame. Everything is slightly askew in a world where opposites are not quite opposite, and as we can expect the forms of the rondel and villanelle, however the appear, to be radically changed. Indeed, much of Ashbery’s work is filled with references to poetic and narrative forms: fairy tales, cartoon characters and situations, stories of earlier writers. Ashbery’s “report” of these “monuments” reveals just how much the originals must be deconstructed in later ages.

“Amid Mounting Evidence” provides a succinct account of this process whereby the “contexts” for truth become lost in time so that the significance of any true “text” also becomes lost:

Here, the introduction of “games” as opposed to “truth” suggests a redefinition of truth based on the idea of poetic play. The hope of the poem is that the language games allow the poet enough room to negotiate a new truth “amidst mounting evidence” of a declining world headed towards entropy. The hope is that the poet can find what Bakhtin calls a “carnivalistic” style filled with changes of diction and direction, references that run the gamut from high to low culture, and a pluralistic voice: the “persona / Is off running parallel somewhere,” he says in the poem. And there is always the voice of the other that each says the same thing twice, in two different voices, each slightly shifting the terms of the story, further undercutting the myth of the simple, clear statement. The procedure, then, is to find a “disparate account” rather than a unified and referential one, even at the risk of discovering an essential incoherence, a sense that “something / Enormous, like a huge canvas, is happening without one’s having the / Least suspicion.” If everything becomes simply blurred by the carnivalistic style, too “enormous” to understand, the poet runs the more serious risk of lumping everything under one label and reducing it to “the same old stuff of imaginative / Speculation as it was before.”

At the heart of Ashbery’s work is a passionate search for an always evasive truth, for what Milton called an “answerable style.” Each story or version is always an elegy to its own passing, but an elegy in the traditional sense that it leads to renewed hope. Part of the poet’s task is to act as analytic filter: “will they come back, on what day, and will I know the truth / Then, and so be able to accept them as mere painted / Portents of what each of us wants to know?” he asks. In “Winter Weather Advisory,” he also questions, “what have we proved? That we didn’t have one idea / Worth having, that all else is beneath us, / If within our grasp?” But it is that which is outside his grasp that is worth having, so that after immersing himself in detail, he can later look up from it in the poem, from inside the carnivalistic experience of language, as opposed to an over-simple and detached “generally accepted notion of what history consists of.”

Each story or version is always an elegy to its own passing, but an elegy in the traditional sense that it leads to renewed hope.

This “canceling” is opposed to the deconstructing that always leaves a trace of the past, however reconstituted, as an act of “responsibility” to history. The poems are not at all “confessions” in the sense of a confessional school of poetry, but they are confessions in the sense that they reconstruct a past in order to construct a future. A look at the first and last poems of the book will help us summarize. “Vetiver” describes how “Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay” until all experience becomes “distilled in letters of the alphabet.” Well after any beginning, time seems to be “Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward / The conclusion.” But the point is, since vétiver is a French/Tamil word for root, that the sinking is a double movement in time, towards a beginning that embraces the conclusion, the roots. Thus, when “someone examines his youth” he is also examining his whole life, his future. In the end, “the crying / In the leaves is saved,” an allusion to Yeats, and to the future blooming of leaves, suggesting that the roots for any future, the terms of all vision, are in a reconstructed language, a style carnivalistic enough to hold past styles.

In “April Galleons” the poem begins in medias res — “Something was burning,” and with a sense of surprise that a simple verification has at last been reached. But that simplicity soon begins to unravel: “And where do the scraps / Of meaning come from? Obviously / It was time to be off, in another / Direction.” From there, the narrator is unsure if things only “sounded as though they existed,” whether it is only a question of getting to “know our names only in a different/ Pronunciation.” Perhaps, he argues, everything, all possibilities, “all trees seemed to exist.” The final stance of the poem, and Ashbery’s work in general, is a painful and realistic one. On one hand, the speaker does not want the image of a past “golden age” to “vanish” except for a paltry image of a “beggar girl… incomprehensibly weeping,” yet also does not want our “unsatisfactory honesty” to be make falsely golden image by allowing the past to be “colored” over. He opts finally for an affirmation of the always distant, for an ironic detachment, for a sense that arriving at a knowledge of what is burning is not as crucial as the elegiac struggle through the evidence, the details, the unsaid.

One of the major problems facing the contemporary poet, then, is how to take her or his own language.

This whole notion of the unsaid, of language’s dialectic relation to the absent, recalls Jacques Lacan who writes in Écrits that “the function of language is not to inform but invoke. What I seek in speech is the response of the Other.” By focusing on the otherness in language, Lacan downplays the common notion that language marks and brings forth a full presence. The result is that the referential function of language becomes less important than the power of language to conjure absences, other voices, metamorphic changes. Language then comes to mark our own otherness, our strangeness in the world — the kind of experience, say, Wordsworth goes through in the famous “Crossing the Alps” episode in The Prelude where nature is suddenly seen as alien, transformed, even threatening when his naive sense of mastery over it is exposed for what it is. Since the time of the Romantics, this has been an essential, almost primal experience, for a poet — and in our society of subtle and not-so-subtle discriminations, the position of the woman poet is certainly one of the most legitimate and productive perspectives through which to evaluate this experience of otherness. One of the major problems facing the contemporary poet, then, is how to take her or his own language. Derrida cites Condillac in The Archeology of the Frivolous, “You often speak your own language without you yourself understanding what you say, or that, at best, you almost understand yourself. However, there is enough for you and others, since they pay you with the same money.”

To build a poetics upon that notion is to construct a poetry of “paradoxes and oxymorons” (the original title for Ashbery’s Shadow Train), a poetry whose figures of speech endlessly contradict themselves, qualify and redefine their own meanings by returning to them with supplementary variations. This process of return defines the pacing and timing, the very impulse of Ashbery’s rhythm, the way the poems project, emerge, as it were, out of their own pasts towards an open-ended future. It is more than curious, then, that the word paradox comes from the Greek that means “conflicting with expectation,” implying a sense of self-questioning movement towards a future. And the Greek ancestry of “oxymoron” suggests a “sharp foolishness,” the sense of the carnivalistic playfulness inherent in Ashbery’s vision. The two words together suggest the blend of the serious and the comic, the visionary and the debunked, the carnivalistic vision that so defines Ashbery’s work.

Ashbery describes his technique most fully in “Description of a Masque,” one of the centerpieces of A Wave: “Then we all realized what should have been obvious from the start: that the setting would go on evolving eternally, rolling its waves across our vision like an ocean each one new yet recognizably a part of the same series, which was creation itself. Scenes from movies, plays, operas, television; decisive or little-known episodes from history; prenatal and other early memories from our own solitary, separate pasts; events yet to come to life or art; calamaties or moments of relaxation; universal or personal tragedies; or little vignettes from daily life that you just had to stop and laugh at, they were so funny, like the dog chasing its tail on the living room rug.” This passage is an important one for illustrating Ashbery’s desire to convert, as Parmenides did, the tragic into the comic by subsuming the “decisive,” the “universal or personal tragedies” in an evolving catalogue of perspectives that wittily undercut each other. And there is also, by the very diverse nature of the list, an implicit desire to include everything in a Whitmanesque gesture that seems denied by the understated tone the passage projects on the surface. Yet the seriousness and the desire to be inclusive remain muted. The problem is that the speaker often exists like “an empty pair of parentheses” — the narrator may become isolated, cut off even from his own history:

The range of emotion is astounding here: and it is given stylistically by the way in which the downward, sideways motion that defines each movement (nearly every verbal gesture) is disrupted by such contradictory connotations suggested by “carnival” and “clenched fist,” self and other, passive drifting and the holding of the throttle. The simple, formal principle of containment that attempts to center the poem in a certain direction of consciousness is exploded so that the passage seems to include more than it wanted or intended.

What stands out in this process is a radical decentering of the self, a gesture that many Ashbery poems make in addressing a “you” who is simultaneously the focus of the poem and the consciousness specifically excluded from its resolution. “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” for instance, begins by cajoling the reader:

The first stanza is intent upon a process of identification that climaxes in the last line of that stanza; the second stanza then begins a process of denial and questioning in which the “you” is nearly forgotten amidst the machinations of the “I,” the identification of inner and outer. By the time the third stanza emerges, the self and other are lost in “the stream and chatter of typewriters.” The last stanza is itself a sort of “tease” —

The repetition with a “different attitude,” the frustration of being set down beside the other by a poem that is and is not that very other, produces an uncanny effect: self, other and poem all merge at the same time they disperse. “What attitude isn’t then really yours?” Ashbery had previously asked.

The decentering of the self, the discovery of the self in an essential otherness that is inherent in language (“The poem is you”), accounts for the discursive, often chatty quality of Ashbery’s style. In As We Know this otherness was most manifest in “Litany,” a parallel text in two columns spoken by “A” and “B.” The two columns each have their own voices but are interdependent: narrator A mentions topic X before or after B does, or perhaps never mentions it at all. The white spaces between and within the two columns act like threatening silences, as if the speakers had to talk in order to exist. To remain quiet is to be content only with the self, to remain static with no sense of expanding horizons. The vision undercuts a more progressive, more narrative movement; in critiquing the simple linearity of time, the columns subvert history, narrative, the evolution of the self.

As Ashbery’s poetry evolves, it becomes more novelistic — a novel whose characters, places, even plots, emerge from a collision of languages and parodies of styles. This explains the increasing allusions to plot and character, the increasing flirtation with narrative. Though the tone is radically different, Dostoyevsky’s method of allowing his characters their say, however it contradicts him or others, is a useful model for the dialectic between narrator and narrative in Ashbery. “The Path to the White Moon,” for instance, in A Wave, originates in a story fragment that includes something that “looked like farmhouses yes” and proceeds to tell not a story per se but a narrative of the speaker’s attempts to discover a plot, a series of propositions, possibilities, with references to probable pasts. As the setting expands geographically, the “you” grows in consciousness: “And then the space of this behavior, the air, / Has suddenly doubled / And you have grown to fill the extra place.” The drama involves the “you’s” desire not to repeat things: “once you have seen a thing you have to move on.” In this context, “time unfolds like music trapped on the page / Unable to tell the story again.” But the poem does not hold out a specific teleology; the “you” and so the “we” (self and other-you) can only move away from an origin, can only fragment itself. The result is that the resolution of time, history and the self, as well as the resolution of the whole poem, become a sort of fraying of the narrative and dialogic threads:

In fact, the first poem in A Wave — “At North Farm” — introduces the importance of the kind of Other encountered here. It begins, “Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you” and the rest of the poem, indeed the rest of the book, can be seen as a sequence of gradual, cumulating definitions of the other, always tentative. The poem ends by suggesting that a specific identification may not be as important as the effect the Other has on the self:

This focus on the paradigmatic rather than the specific — a mythic impulse, really — emphasizes narrative (the author’s evolving relation to the unfolding text, tone, nuances of meaning) rather than plot (the scheme of action of the character[s]), or story (the bottom line of what occurs in plot):

I am arguing for a notion of style as a sort of double writing, a kind of erasure, as Derrida would say, that, like a blackboard erasure, leaves behind traces of the threatening knowledge it would erase. And I also argue that, as Bakhtin suggests, a carnivalistic style holds a number of possible and often contradictory visions in balance, providing an incredible richness of vision. James Tate’s work provides an further extension of this idea. Tate’s poetry showcases a mobility in style, double writing at an extreme of the imagination: “I would / have to disagree with me always, / miss a train in my head,” he says in “I Got A Little Flat off 3rd & Yen.” In “The Human Eraser” he writes: “My one minute stands up and salutes / a monument of startled glass.” The moment/monument, the life, gradually contains the whole of human history that also contains it. The meaning of things becomes “a terrible message that has stopped / searching for the perfect night.” Such an overplus of language, a surplus of meaning, reveals, in the end, the role of indecision and playfulness in Tate’s work:

The “subject” of Tate’s poems is precisely the way our limited language behaves when confronted with a world that means always more than language can know.

For Tate, this does not suggest chaos, but rather that he must be engaged in a continual revisionary process, as in “The Horseshoe.” It begins with the speaker examining an old scrapbook:

Eventually he stumbles across “the heart-rending detail / of the horseshoe found propped against the windowsill.” And it is precisely the details, or more correctly the “Years of toil to find the right angle,” the right perspective to see the details, that becomes most crucial. And yet each detail also “sinks” away and the meanings, the pencilings, go under erasure, as Derrida says, or into a system of double writing:

Finally, the poet’s reading the past becomes, like his shaving which is so casually introduced, a way of scraping the past away to write it anew:

In the end, the poet’s strategy is revealed as a way of discovering a self, a history, a record of the self’s struggles to read and rewrite a past. The moment, the poem, becomes one of continual interruptions, “a constellation / of my own bewilderment,” the record of unravelings, of life “in the heart of the periphery.”

How, then, does the poet begin in the midst of all these unravelings, where everything is always already a rewriting? For Tate, the poetic act includes an act of recovery that involves a desire to understand how the past is “constantly pressing on the present” and also to understand how the future, as a sort of “destiny,” leans at the same time back on that present. The focus is always on the elusive present, the moment where there is “everything / at stake for that instant, and not on some simple nostalgia for the past nor a wistful hope for the future. Tate’s is a poetry at once attached to and detached from larger structures of understanding, larger contexts of time, at once filling and emptying its moments, voiced and anonymous —

Just how unsettled and precarious the poetic moment is in Tate, how bleak the “wounds” against which its style struggles, how intense the “homing instinct” is, becomes apparent in two poems from Constant Defender. “Tell ThemWas Here” narrates the journey of the speaker back to an ancestral home where, he finds, “no one was home.” And so he begins to brood —

Rumors, whispers, the myths of the unsubstantial, these images that haunt Constant Defender, and to some extent the earlier work, are all the self has to go on. In response, the narrator, as poet, can only inscribe his name:

The signature — “Green” — possibility — scratched out, written over — a double writing — the identity of the self is given in the very process of attempting to write, to discover (even by covering, scratching over, and uncovering) the self as something more than a reference to the fixed past of “unreliable ancestors.” The self becomes whoever who writes in this active, dynamic sense.

An even greater spaciousness and the role of the self in it becomes the drama of the “mystic Moment.” The narrator begins his meditation “from the window of a Pullman car” not with a linear analysis or description, but with a haunting set of images that produce an overplus of associations suggesting a lush world and imagination: “a plush and velvet world / with plugs of tobacco / outside a jelly factory.” Yet this world is also one of intense deprivation, a desert where “mountains had long ago crumbled away, / erased by some soft artillery on the radio.” (It is worth noting that Tate’s images usually have a very realistic base: in a way, radio waves do “flatten” mountains just as they “narrow” distances.) The complex of opposites in texture here helps support the sense that the self is confused between two worlds, one passing by the window, the other above in a “swarm of burnt out stars,” the invisible ghosts of lost worlds. The sense of loss is climaxed in the poem when the narrator confronts a reflected other:

And yet, in spite of such violence against the self, the self persists, in the tracings of the language. Note the way the second line in the passage above, as a single unit, underscores the identification of the “I” and the “he — the “I” both reaches and is outside, “drowning.” In this way the self always also occupies another place, becoming, by its very amorphousness, what Tate calls “a nameless representative of humanity.”

It is the unseen, then, that holds the fragments together — like the cipher — that needs to be unraveled in language, that necessitates the mythic vision, that suggests the undercutting of simple visual images, simple presences and moments.

The speaker becomes, as Tate says in “Blue Spill,” “the fatherless son and the sonless / father,” in a place and time always elsewhere “where his new life / begins quietly in the eyes of a wakened animal.” In “If It Would All Please Hurry,” the speaker also begins the narrative by going inside to go to sleep, to be alone: “I do not wish / to share the cliffs with anyone.” He feels a loneliness, then imagines an other: “I feel you are in it [the bed] too.” The poem is an attempt “to get into the habit of realizing you are real” and ends with a prayer — as if reality and realization could be made coincident: “Hold tight, squeeze.” This sort of process — making the self by expanding the realm of the moment, goes on endlessly; the end is forever deferred, the poems deny simple closure.

“Look back, what life has become: the sky / is clearly alien, amazement, / star of my night blasts the subtle shifts / of mood,” the speaker exclaims in “Heatstroke.” What the poet as stylist does within the predicament I have been describing is to become a mythologizer of the imagination. The woman described in “Heatstroke,” for instance, becomes a “myth squeezing itself,” the product of “need.” Any dismantling, as we saw earlier, is also a process of reconstruction, of myth-making: “tear them down / and build them up — it’s one motion.” It is from this impulse that poems like the mock romance “Three/Missionwork” emerges. This prose poem in ten parts concerns Klingbat, a captain and several others in a parody of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a parody that leaves the central and disturbing issues intact. And this mythic impulse is the source of a poem like “Riven Doggeries” which dramatizes loss comically and grotesquely (a dog has leapt, no been abducted by police helicopter from a 7th-storey window), and just as tongue-in-cheek reconstitutes a mythic creature — “the ideal pet, however, / is unrecognizable when it arrives/ in the river awash with the land afar.” Riven — river — revive; doggeries — doggerel — dog; the poem’s myth originates in the play of language itself, a language of loss and diminishment, not an outside source. The poems become as Tate suggests in “Spring Was Beginning To Be Born” “disguises,” “murmurs,” “splutterings,” bits of language coming together:

In “To Fuzzy,” a sort-of seduction poem set against a backdrop of Pharaohs, thaumaturgy, the Nile, and other exotic contexts, the speaker reveals a dream that admits his own predicament as writer:

It is the unseen, then, that holds the fragments together — like the cipher — that needs to be unraveled in language, that necessitates the mythic vision, that suggests the undercutting of simple visual images, simple presences and moments.

“Tragedy’s Greatest Hits” perhaps best summarizes the tone and style I have been describing. Even the title undercuts the surface meaning, allowing the speaker a certain distance, detachment, a spaciousness from which to speak, “stutter,” uncertainly. Near the beginning, the combination of “puddles and tensions,” and then the mention of “cruel boats” produces a somber, though further undercut, tone. Yet, in the next few lines when the speaker mentions “floating” and “barking fetters” in the same breath, the pun on “bark” as animal sound and boat explodes the tension completely, denying the poem’s other senses of doom, fate and confinement. From this perspective the speaker can both share in a tragic mood and counter it with a questioning of its stasis. This is the stance Tate deploys at his strongest, which is indeed quite strong in these poems, a stance which sees the self always in relation to its changing histories, that accepts its limits while expressing in its language an uncanny freedom, an intense and yet muted desire:

This sense of the lonely and elegiac beneath the comic surface is almost overwhelming for its pathos. The comic carnival of style provides the aesthetic distance.

For William Matthews the aesthetic distance comes through irony. Even as early as his book Flood in 1982, we find him confronting the issues of the invisible, the hidden in language, the otherness that controls a good deal of what we think and feel. “On this page no breath / will write. The text is already / there, restless, revising itself,” he says in one poem. Style for him is the glossy surface of the water that “compiles // the erasure of its parts / and takes to itself the local / until all but sky is water.” In a recent interview he says, “What is crucial is the surface tension; once you stick your hand into the water and break the surface, once you enter into language, each disappears. And water itself is in some way made out of the word ‘water,’ a word that changes from language to language.”

In a sense the world becomes language, language the world, and each an elegy to what the other misses. In this style, time — as well as timing (and Matthews’ work is filled with references to music) becomes the question of poetry itself, suggesting that style and elegy, poetry and the elegiac, are naturally linked. He opens “An Elegy For Bob Marley” from A Happy Childhood by self-consciously asking:

The strategy is Matthews’ poem is to deflect the talk, as he suggests, introducing Marley in the subordinate part of a prepositional phrase, then immediately shifting to a larger topic. As it goes on, the poem builds by qualifications — “and not,” “however,” “though,” “only,” and a suppositional mood guide the rest of the poem. There is a casual but deft manner riding the surface of the lines, skilful enough to protect against dwelling upon the fear of death, and mature enough to acknowledge that his protection is about as useful as an insurance policy is in extending our lives — not so much a consolation as a coming to terms. The poem ends —

What is so stunning here is the way the elegiac becomes part of a larger knowledge, a style of thinking and living that is analytically cool, a way of living and hoping. One of the central ways in which this is accomplished is by the same askew movement as the opening lines, a refusal to use the categories of speaking and thinking we might expect. For example, “let the dead bury the dead” is extended to “nor could / the dead bury the dead if we could pay / them to,” the last phrase seemingly inappropriate, almost disrespectful in its insistence on money, yet entirely right in the way it matter-of-factly places the elegiac in an everyday context. What this askew perspective calls for is constant balancing, and indeed the whole book is best read as a long poem whose titles suggest the sort of compensations it attempts: good and bad, right and wrong, sad and happy, sentimental and prurient. Within a poem the same sort of compensation is done by linking phrases. “Bad,” for instance, modulates “bad luck,” “bad budgeting,” “bad debt,” “those gone to rage / and madness, gone bad.”

In Foreseebale Futures, the language becomes more clipped, the speed at which a wide range of references and compensations emerge becomes faster, and the apparent discrepancy between surface speech and what Bakhtin calls inner speech becomes greater. “Caddie’s day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio,” for instance, opens with a description of the Mondays when caddies played for free until the poem suddenly yet matter-of-factly announces — “That’s any Monday but / the one Bruce Ransome came up / from the bottom of the pool / like a negative rising in a tank.” The image, though justly accurate, emphasizes the unreality of the scene, and almost seems inappropriate. A little later, the speaker says:

What the reference to the naive and always puzzled Babar does is at once diminishing the realm of death, consigning it to an item in a child’s book, and reminding us, by its bizarre inappropriateness of our lack of understanding: “Our ignorance lay all around us / like a landscape, ” he says. As the poem develops, it is only luck, as in the seemingly random references, that explains death, revealing how much we wish to avoid its presence. The poem ends:

Memory, finally, must pass things on, like luck, which is not at all to pass on feeling. The reference to “death-rinsed Bruce” at first seems callous, but in these last few lines the insistent detail about death, the use of parallelisms and suspensions culminating in one sentence, the direct address to the reader, and the fact of recalling the death once again, all intensify the feeling, deny what they want to say on the surface. Death rises anyway, like the negative, awkward, inappropriate, always premature, always as wrongly present as our words for it. And this, in a paradoxical way, makes the style impressively appropriate.

The question of style as we have been exploring it turns eventually into a question of “Aesthetic Distance,” as Matthews suggests in a poem by that title. The poet in the poem writes only to his craft while outside the poem he is writing, various tragedies occur. Yet the narrator of the poem is aware of this double perspective. In fact, he draws the reader in as a “you” who undercuts aesthetic distance by his intimacy with the poem’s problems and underscores distance by his ironic overview. The poem opens with the poet writing, as we learn:

In a way, the poet’s situation is reflected by the narrator’s as the narrator goes on rather coolly analyzing all the ironies available, including what the mothers of the dead might do. But at least the narrator is conscious of the situation: “Our mother is drinking / mediocre sherry and we’re making fine distinctions.” As it turns out, the poet’s and narrator’s concerns about style, transforming and changing words, has a great deal to do with what goes on in the outside world:

The poem ends with the several strands not tied together but rather arranged in a sort of parallel structure:

As it turns out, “love is fierce” is probably one of the central themes — or styles. “The phrase must be changed” as the style must always be in flux, the insistent conditional here suggesting both the impossibility and necessity of achieving its hope: the poem simply ends with all its strands dangling. For Matthews, ironies pile up upon ironies, and the most troublesome events are given an ironic undercutting, as if the speaker were saying to himself that it is all right, that the pain is something given, that the language is something we can give. This is precisely the tone of his Blues If You Want, the title itself suggesting a sort of undercutting that perhaps finds its source in the inventive lyrics of the blues. In one poem, for instance, Homer’s seeing eye dog tells us the comically dim side of his master in street talk. Matthews has found an Horatian middle style, and indeed, Horace, especially the Horace of the epistles, is an important influence on the urbane, witty and finally deeply moving style Matthews balances between pain and laughter.

If every style is another world, as Wallace Stevens implies, then every good poet partially makes the world over again in the likeness of his or her own style.

I might have called the poets described in this essay language poets. Of course, I am aware that there is a group of poets who assemble under that rubric, but my sense of them is that they tend to reduce a rather complex engagement with the relationship between language and its referents in Derrida, Barthes, Bahktin, Lacan and others to a surface disturbance of style to the detriment of referentiality altogether. The stylistic strategies we have examined do not destroy referentiality, only rethink how it is presented. We would do well to remember that there has been a continuing crisis in the history of Western thought concerning the status of poetic style and feeling based on metaphor, and a certain autonomy of language. This goes back as far as Plato’s distrust of the written word as opposed to speech in Phaedrus, and his desperate, failed arguments against the arbitrary nature of meaning in language in Craytalus.

Poets exploit the crisis in order to manipulate images and metaphors that call into question the neat philosophic categories for truth and feeling. For Plato, they are as dangerous as the sophists because they remind him of how much we live in a world of words. Politically, he had no choice but to either ban the poets from the Republic or to relegate them to the realm of the nearly unconscious rhapsodes who barely understood what they uttered as mouthpieces of the gods. Centuries later, Descartes in his Discourse on Method, feared that metaphors interrupted his desire to begin purely, to see the world as if for the first time, since metaphor refers to what has already been there. Pascal revels in the uncertainty we suffer when we apply language to feelings, images and objects, opting for what he calls a “wise ignorance.” Later still, Nietzsche asserted that truth is simply a “mobile army of metaphors, anthropomorphisms,” a tenuous concept that itself seems to be the function of poetic metaphor. The problem of language, the problem with language is what draws philosophy and poetry together under the name of style. It is an issue that needs further exploration, especially today with the influential theory of deconstructionists and so-called “language” poets, our attention to problems of translation, and the increased attention to political concerns in poetry. If every style is another world, as Wallace Stevens implies, then every good poet partially makes the world over again in the likeness of his or her own style.