(from “Underneath (9)”). 

Yes, this is very cutting-edge in style.  Yes, it is daring.  But it feels like some heart of subject matter, connection to the inner and outer worlds, has been lost.  It’s like the camera is taking pictures of itself instead of the outside world.  I think this kind of deterioration of style might reflect a gradual alienation from the landscape around (and in) this poet.  The poem feels too abstract, too gauzy.  The parentheticals might in theory be markings of a superior authenticity on the part of the poet, indicating explicitly her second-guesses, her questionings – but is it a pleasure to read?  And before you say “that is a vulgar test for a poem, whether it gives pleasure,” remember, I got that test from Wallace Stevens.  The poem feels if anything too urban, urbane.  It is strung out up in some stratosphere of post-post-everything sophistication.  It smells too bookish.  At the same time, while it looks at the land, it does so in a contextless way that is too abstract.  It gives us glimpses of outer landscape that are only like photos of blank dirt, blank sky.  The poems feels at once too close and too far.  One might argue that she has somehow become alienated from the middle-ground of her own life, the life around her, and so she is focusing too much on stuff she has read in books, and images seen through books, through the eyes of other authors.  There is no solid comfortable middle-focus, no clear scene of her family life, her daily life.  She is recording an authentic existential state, no doubt; but is it fun to read?  (In the Stevensian sense).  My sense is that the collapse of her marriage to Galvin is somehow related to the problems we seem to find in her later poems.  It will be interesting to see how her style changes now that she is living back on the east coast, teaching at Harvard. 

The breakup was clearly intensely painful to Galvin.  Unlike Graham, who may have been, as I speculate, in some way misplaced there, the Iowa and Wyoming region is Galvin’s home ground and where he has lived his whole life.  That landscape is without a doubt the right place for him to be and a natural source of subject matter for his own writing.  Which means the marriage may well have been more organic, more of a “right” situation, to him, right up to the end even, than it may have been to her—because she may have been more displaced from the landscape.  This also means the breakup might have hurt him and shocked him more than it did her.  Indeed, to discern from the poems below, she was the active instigator of the rupture.  It comes as no surprise that the poetry book, X, he wrote after the breakup, shows searing personal marks of loss and anguish.  The effect is like Clint Eastwood in a grizzled cowboy role, when some tragic thing finally touches him too deeply and he finally opens up, softens and breaks down with raw, nonironic emotion:

So out of love with life am I
No future will have me.

. . .

Where once I was not alone, now each
closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like
shadows at dusk,

. . .

You are in love with
someone else

. . .

Now I don't care what you do.
I've seen your worst at its best.

. . .

How many times did you kiss me
Without meaning it?

(from X). 

Ouch!  This is a remarkably direct breakup-voice.  It hearkens back to James Wright in its rawness, its refusal (or constitutional incapability) to become shielded behind irony.  It also reminds us of the poems of Donald Hall when he lost his wife Jane Kenyon, not to divorce but to death.  The tonality in Galvin’s grief is different, obviously, because the circumstances of the loss are different, but the bluntly direct and simple tenor of his expression is like that of Hall when Hall wrote such lines as:

Back home from the grave,
behind my desk I made
a gallery of Janes.

. . .

Your presence in this house
is almost as enormous
and painful as your absence.

. . .

we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkened when months did

(from “Without”). 

Whether mourning, reminiscing, or raving, the spectacle is amazing, and similar, in both Hall and Galvin as you watch two very craft-attentive, experienced poets confronting a loss-void that is so large that their craft and experience starts to sear and crumple as they approach and enter it.  Craft and voice get stretched to the breaking point, but because both of them go against the void in such a brave, straight-ahead manner, the results are brave and straight-ahead, regardless of whether the voice makes it through the fire with its form intact, or gets destroyed on the shoals of uncontrolled, formally unharnessed feeling.  With James Wright, for example, yes, sometimes he goes down in a blaze of sentimentality, mush, gush, maudlinity, howling, etc.  But you still respect his bravery.  I have the same respect for the efforts of Hall to confront the loss of his wife and of Galvin to confront the end of his long marriage.  The risk-taking is inspiring, as they try to write their way through the emotional chaos, even if, as each might say, it is not bravery because they had no choice.

In any event, in X, all revolves around the elemental subject matter which is the end of the marriage.  Each poem represents an effort to embrace the following paradox:  how to be true to the emotional situation which is uncontrolled, and at the same time, somehow show formal control.  It is, in a sense, just a more extreme example of one of the basic situations of poetry, since poetry always tries to show raw flux in frozen form.

The process can be therapeutic.  As Galvin said in an interview regarding X, “Most art springs from anxiety in the artist,” however, “If you take some source of anxiety and formalize it, it makes it more bearable, not less bearable.”  In the same interview, Galvin also explains that X is “a book about getting to a certain point in my life when I realize many of the things I believed in turned out not to be true.”  You can hear the pain and anger still simmering in his comment. Then he adds, regarding the title of the book, that is concerns “the cancellation, the mathematical unknown, the betrayal.”  Here, you can see his mind trying to formalize, capture in form, in language, the emotions.  (This is typical of good poets, that even in their casual speech, you can see their poetics at work).

Poetic form is necessary in order to bridge the gap between writer and reader.  Although I may have powerful feelings inside of me, because you are a separate person, if I am just standing facing you, you may have no sense of my feelings.  To get my feelings (or my intuitions, or my thoughts), over to you, I must use language, communication.  That language is an agreed-upon code.  Form is the laws of that code.  More generally, poetic form is the laws that allow me to capture and transpose the feelings within me, out onto neutral turf, out onto the white slate of the poem—where potentially if all goes well, you can come along and read it and feel those feelings in you.  This space between me and you, where the poem is, is exceedingly mysterious.  My self has ended there.  I am dead there:  it is dead air, past my being, past the limit of my self.  Somehow, though, form gets the job done.  Form does not make the poem a living thing in itself, but does make it an artifact excreted by my life, which your life can pick up on.  Poetic form is thus a vehicle for the movement of messages between two lives, through the entire abyss of nothingness and death.  This might help explain the pull of poetry for some of us:  every successful poem, whether it’s one you write or one you read, is a movement of life across death, a reincarnation of sorts.  But form is necessary to make this transference possible.

Galvin appears to agree with the traditional notion of poetry as a communication in this way.  He says in one interview, “The idea of writing poetry is making a connection with others or nature that starts from a personal place.”  Ideally in his poems he seeks a double connection.  His best poems connect both with the raw landscape around him, and with us, the readers, fellow humanity, at the same time.  His best poems have two directions in this way.  It is again a traditional poetics, which certainly can be seen in the Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who sought to connect both to nature and other people.  Galvin adds, “Love is a part of nature and it is often a reflection of nature. . .”

So in a poem such as the following, we see the double movement, toward the landscape, and toward other people:

A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house.
Two stories, seven rooms in all.
I built my love a home.
Our
daughter was in orbit in the womb.

(“Depending on the Wind”).  

There is a connection here between the poet and the “hundred pines” which make up nature; and, a second connection, between the poet and his wife and coming daughter. 

In another poem, he sings a lonely cowboy lament, the “cowboy poetry” sense of the piece enhanced by the throwback form, with its ballad a/b/a/b stanzas:

What did you expect
Threadbare me to do
With nothing to deflect
The gale of your remove?

The scanty sacred secret
Tries to thumb a ride
Through drubbed, irresolute,
And famously slippery light.

Like a spooky spark from an anvil
The sun makes a teary streak
Across the almost tranquil,
Which is the almost bleak.

What is threadbare me to do
When wind cleaves your summer dress
To almost all of you?

(“Dear Nobody's Business”). 

I think what makes a poem like this inherently dramatic is the sense that what we have here is the spectacle of a man who would rather be reticent, spilling his guts.  Since he has always been a poet who mines his subject matter from his own everyday life, he has no choice but write about the breakup.  To avoid the subject would be to betray his own poetic.  But in a sense he’d rather not talk about it, it makes him uncomfortable, because the content is so private.  He has no mastery over the content:  she left him, not the other way around.  And, since he does not use irony, he cannot deploy that most basic of emotional shields.  So he is left vulnerable and exposed, but at the same time, his basic character is that of a pretty tough, self-reliant guy.  So in these poems it is fascinating to watch this dramatic dynamic unfold:

Stars leak mixed feelings
Over sheet lightning’s weft of echoes.
You, I can’t get over your shoulder blades,
Like music from the center of the earth.
I want to live happily.
You can have the ever and the after.
You are quite life-like, but you can’t fool me.
I know the unearthly when I die from it.
I’m not talking about the body’s mutable components—
I’m not talking.
Look— wild irises, like every spring,
In the salacious green of Dirty Woman Creek

(“Wild Irises on Dirty Woman Creek”). 

Here, the vanished and remembered lover-figure mixes in with and unites with the surrounding landscape.  The poem could be viewed as a rumination on how place names come to be.  The tone and thought-direction shifts in every line, reflecting the stress of the form fighting its way through rough feelings, “mixed feelings,” as the poem says.  The voice changes registers from one moment to the next, from the common talk idiom of “you can’t fool me” to the highfalutin sound of “the body’s mutable components.”  The voice here and elsewhere combines a kind of cowboy plainspokenness, with weird words and vectors one imagines have been picked up over years of kicking around the U. of Iowa English Department.  The tone is somewhat spooky because the more highfalutin effects sound like echoes of Jorie herself, of his long immersion in her mind, looking at drafts of her poems, etc., over their long marriage.  Again, there is nary a whiff of irony.  He protects himself through break-off and change-up.  The roughness of the emotions causes the learned mind to react by going back down to basics and elementals in an effort to figure it out, resolve and get through it:

Being in love isn’t about being happy.
Here’s a good idea: let’s live some more.

After bad things happen we always live
A little more. Good timing, bad timing,

The people against me were probably right:
You can’t step in front of the same bus twice.

From here on out, honesty’s its own
Intelligence, which may, or may not involve

Philosophy. Try to understand
The world, and leave the mind to darkness where

It thrives. Werner Herzog, for example, says
The mind is a room, better dimly lit

For livable ambiance, some lively music
For habitability — than floodlit, mute

For self-knowledge — a bogus notion, anyway.
According to the quarterback from Cedar

Rapids, Iowa, Jesus is a
Football fan, without whose intervention

The Rams could not have won the Super Bowl.
Aren’t you ashamed at refusing love

Like an hors d’oeuvre (outside the work — which was?).
Love’s not love until it’s lost, and then

You write a corybantic poem about it.
That’s what you think. What I think — what do I think?

I think the house we lived in wept itself
All the way down. I think forgiveness mirrors

Facetious animals at play: horseplay.
Horse-sense, more what we aspire to —

Remains the province of the horses, no?

(“Winter Solstice Full Moon at Perigee”). 

The poem here reads like a direct address by the poet to himself which then morphs into a direct address to Jorie, especially in the line, “You write a corybantic poem about it” followed by “That’s what you think.”  (By the way, the dictionary definition of “corybantic” is “wild; frenzied; uncontrolled”).  The string of particulars in the poem shows a poet who is very efficient at using and in a natural way true to the data of his daily life, i.e., what one would expect to be the stuff of the day-to-day life of a ranch nut who also happens to be a writing teacher at Iowa:  remembered quotes from the German arthouse film director Herzog and the local quarterback on the sports page.  This mix of high and low is appealing and feels American, in the best sense, melting-pot, unstratified.

It is interesting to compare the poems in X to some examples of poems from other times in his life.  For example, consider the pellucid metaphorical musicality of this one:

You can't step into the same
River even once,
And why would you want to? You can't
Lie down without turning your back
On someone. The sun slips
Like butter in a pan.

The eastern sky arrives
On the back stoop in its dark
Suit. It draws itself up
Full height to present its double
Rainbow like an armful of flowers.
Thank you, they're lovely.

I step outside where the wind
Lifts my hair and it's just
Beginning to rain in the sun,
And the earth silvers like a river
We're in, I swear to God,
And you can't step out of a river

Either. Not once.

(“Testimony”). 

This poem is much less directly autobiographical.  It is happier, more calm.  It is the kind of poem one can imagine a man writing who is not in doubt of his marriage.  And here is an example of his handling of a more tragic subject:

These afternoons seem to occur more
In geologic time than in one's life.
Under the blue fresh snowfall,
Sandstone outcrops generate heat.
I count fifteen kinds of tracks,
Like runes, and nothing living.

Drifted snow, an ethered gauze,
Muffles the land, creaks under my skis,
Animals sleep among the roots,
Without doors, without dreams.
Seven miles for a phone
And even the wires have gone under.

Another day knowing nothing more
Than when I last saw you,
That stainless-steel shadow
Vigilant over your bed.
It followed you down the hospital halls,
Arms hung with surgical fruit.

I slide down the last drift to the house,
Slap my skis together.
A small avalanche, shaped like a continent,
Drifts off the roof and falls into a heap,
And some chinking falls from the eaves.

We each inhabit our own
Small flesh, our tract.
Each tries to keep his own
Doors from creaking, like news,
As each night slams shut, and each dawn opens
Like a sudden flow of blood from the mouth.

(“News”).  

Once again, the double connection:  to the land, to the other person.   The sense of nature captured in the first stanza above is truly remarkable.  We have also witnessed it in John Muir, Gary Snyder.  It is a sense of the otherness of nature, its vastness beyond all human dimensions, and the oddly liberating feeling that comes along with this.  The “count tracks” notation is very much like Snyder, and relates directly back to how both poets are naturalists, used to camping and hiking around, “reading” the wilderness like a hunter-gatherer.  I wonder if one might say that the way that Galvin or Snyder read a natural landscape is like the way that O’Hara or Ashbery read an urban one or the way that Jenni or Lynze read a suburban one.  Each group seems equally at home in its respective environment.   

In another hospital glimpse, Galvin gives us a sense of where he gets grounded, where he finds release from doubt, and a sense of peace, where he holds on tight:

Something has to be true enough to be
Taken for granted.
In the hospital I saw
An old man
Caressing the face of an old woman.
This same man, young, caressed her face
In just that way.
That's the stillness
At the center of change—
A sadness worth dying for, I swear—
There is no other.

(“Dying into What I've Done”). 

This is very much like the late poems of James Wright.  Both find a beautiful glow in common humanism, in the immanence of simple human compassion.  It is at moments like these in both Galvin and Wright’s poems where we see the unique power of a nonironic approach. 

Let me finally offer a longish quote from Galvin as he seeks to explain to readers why he wrote his prose book, The Meadow, a semi-factual, semi-fictional book which is a recollection and a memorial for the unspoiled American West and the people who lived there.  In this quote, we can see his continuous effort at double connection, to other persons and to the land; and we can see him addressing the things I have referenced above that make him different from city dwellers and city poets.  He is speaking here of the main character in the book, a man named Lyle Van Waning, who lived in the area for half a century.  Lyle was one of those good and pure people we sometimes find in the country, the kind of man who cooked extra pancakes to feed the sparrows on his windowsill:

[The Meadow] was intended to be a simple record, for my daughter, Emily, of a landscape, a way of life, an environment, an ethic, I saw disappearing. She was four when I began the book. It was Lyle's last year on earth. I wanted my daughter to know, when she grew old enough to understand, that these extraordinary people had existed, that the land had once been unspoiled and dignified by its human guests. I wanted to describe, while I could still remember clearly, the deeds, the stories, the utterances of these people I had known. I wanted to paint the landscape-in-time before it became a real estate development. I wanted to preserve the cadences of speech and the rhythms of weather and seasons. . .

Like everyone, I grew up thinking that the place I lived in and the people I knew were given, unremarkable. I had to leave home to discover that I had been raised in an unforgiving paradise, a place very different from the hell of indulgences and permissions our society desires America to be.

The sheer dimension of the Western landscape, the Western sky, the razor of wind, the unpredictable climate, have a humbling effect on the people who live in it. It puts them in their place. City dwellers often come to think of reality as essentially human.

Lyle was not only a genius possessed of a penetrating intellect, total recall, powerful imagination, and fierce morality, he was properly humbled by his surroundings. He knew the land to be un-ownable, that, indeed, it owns us. He lived in harmonious and reverent conversation with his surroundings. . .

Lyle taught me that the principle character in our life's drama is the land. We are just another kind of weather blowing through.  

I think this quote sums up the ethic and outlook of Galvin.  We now understand why he clings to the landscape so fiercely and insists on spending his time, when he is not teaching, out in a handmade shack without electricity:  the vast land around him gives him his opportunity to lose himself, to become deconstructed, if you will—to free himself from ego.  Out of this deconstruction of self comes freedom, which is also an ethic, one “properly humbled.”  Renunciation becomes an immense bestowal, a finding.  It is really beyond interpretation, this mystical sense of being “weather blowing through,” and every person needs to figure out which inner and outer landscape is best for them to feel this.  For Galvin, it’s an ascetic cabin in the desert of the plains.  We have seen this ethic before, through the eyes of early Christian mystics in the deserts of the Mideast, who well knew the inner truth of “properly humbled”:

Humility is the only thing we need; one can still fall having virtues other than humility—but with humility one does not fall.

(Elder Herman of Mt. Athos).

God descends to the humble as waters flow down from the hills into the valleys.

(St. Tikhon of Voronezh).

Likewise, through the eyes of the old Zen monks in their shacks and caves, who felt something arrive as they disappeared:

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.