Daniel Tobin
Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World is Made,
co-winner of the 1998 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, Double Life (Louisiana State
University Press, 2004), and The Narrows (forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2005),
as well as a book of criticism, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in
the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and numerous essays on poetry. Among his awards
are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award,
the Greensboro Review prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, and the Robert Frost Fellowship. Widely published in journals, his
work has been anthologized in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets,
The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Hammer and Blaze, and elsewhere. He is
presently Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson
College in Boston.
The Invisible and the Embodied
It almost goes without saying that what is left out of a poem in the process of
composition is nearly as important as what remains when the poem is finished, or at least
finished enough to be abandoned into the world beyond the poet’s notebook and
computer drive. From my poem "The Sea of Time and Space" I cut the following
line, rather late in the process: "creation hieratic in its web of incarnation."
I did so largely because it sounded portentous but also because it said too much. The
poem’s embodiment of its details both rhythmically and visually ought to bring the
reader to some felt intimation of the poet’s concern more than any theological or
thematic declaration. After all, such declarations speak more to sources in personal
experience and sensibility than to a poem’s success in making them available to
others as matters of compelling dramatic interest rather than as beliefs the reader denies
or to which he gives assent.
Yet, if a poet has pursued the leads language, experience, and the art have afforded, and
brought the fullest possible measure of intelligence and emotion to bear on the making of
the poem, then something may become clarified out of the nexus of what Yeats called
"accidence"—the heart’s foul rag and bone shop—and brought to
form beyond their origins in personal history or some wider historical circumstance. I
admire poems that take seriously so high-minded a sense of the art, but which also ground
themselves in the tangible world. Yeats’s own poems have that virtue, despite their
at times esoteric "triggering subjects," and have the further virtue of being
eclectic in their formal embodiments, another ideal I aspire to as a poet.
I also think of a poem like Bishop’s "At the Fishhouses," so patient in its
portrayal of the physical scene that its very physicality transports the reader almost
imperceptibly to a plain of existence at once "above the world" and so fired
with gravitas that it could make a hand ache. Water is at once water and an
"element bearable to no mortal." Bishop’s "gloaming invisible"
has become embodied, just as the already embodied world has become transfigured into the
poem by the poet’s remarkable selection of detail, her shaping intelligence, the
subtle rhythm and cadence of her lines, the rich sonic textures, and perhaps above all her
indomitable felt regard for the world and our limited attempts at knowing it.
Such compassion that refuses a latter day Gnostic impulse to deny the world’s
embodiment in poems by passing off obscurity as sophistication and wit, cold irony as
edginess; and refuses also the temptation of being merely accessible, as if knowledge
beyond the personal had no place in the poem. I prefer to either the true liminal edge of
Bishop’s equinoctial shore, at once serious and playful, and mindful of something
just beyond our ability to say but for which we long to find adequate speech,
embodiment—the world standing invisibly behind the poem, the poem embodying in its
own transfiguring terms both the loved world and the poet’s desire to transcend that
world.
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