Hypnagogic Poetry

by Annie Finch

Published in Agni Review, 1998

Review of:

Review of M and Other Poems, by John Peck, Northwestern University Press, 90 pp. paper, $12.95.

Based on my informal surveys, John Peck is one of the few contemporary poets to have earned a true cult following. Although too difficult to appeal to an audience of general readers, he is a crossover phenomenon, his work respected and enjoyed by poets from wildly differing aesthetic schools. His voice is opaque enough for some Language poets, accessible enough for some "mainstream" poets, and conspicuously structured enough for most formalists. At a time when formalism and language poetry are commonly believed to occupy opposite ends of the poetic spectrum, John Peck's combination of experimental and formalist poetics is most distinctive, providing a much-needed model of how a poet can use form without sucking the individual life out of language. After studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford in the 1960s, Peck trained as a Jungian analyst and has maintained a private practice as an analyst ever since. Perhaps his unusual juxtapositon of educational experiences explains how his poetry came to combine humble dedication to traditional craft with a stubbornly idiosyncatic density of meaning.

Peck's new book, M and Other Poems, includes 29 middle-length lyrics as well as the thousand-line meditative title poem. Though the lyrics vary widely in imagery, structure, and occasion, they are so unified by an underlying concern that each could be read as another section of the title poem. All of the poems embody or describe the quest for spiritual oneness and epiphany. Whether one regards such thematic unity as heroic or as sentimental, it adds a level of universal accessibility to this difficult poetry. Most readers will find it a challenge to maintain focus throughout one of the briefer lyrics, let alone the thousand wandering lines of the title poem. Moments, threads, riffs of lucidity, passages of description, explanation, sometimes even anecdote, appear and recede from the long shadows of the language, fragmentary meanings emerging and then disappearing as you look at them more closely:

And there was a pelt from the solar scavenger,

its blond mane tossing with your workings, turning

catastrophe to triumph, lion crud

strewn now on waves, coat of the charger burning

obsidian cobalt platinum and mud

in craters of thaker and avenger.

This poetry may prove more demanding than language poetry in the long run, because Peck is stretching conventional logic rather than breaking it; perhaps we might call his a postmodern rather than an avant-garde sensibility. When Harriet Monroe, considering publishing Hart Crane's "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry, complained that it did not make sense, Crane provided a cogent and ingenious defense of the logic of each word. It's easy to imagine Peck doing the same for any one of these poems. Like Crane, Peck makes syntactical sense, though at a different frequency from conventional language. In fact, in his passion, music, and his poetry's effect of intimate closeness to the unconscious voice, Peck may well be one of Crane's most authentic successors.

Peck's early books, Shagbark and The Broken Blockhouse Wall, presented fragments of history, memory, and perception carried along on a dreamlike, hypnotized and hypnotic language stream. In the poems of M and Other Poems, the sleep is not as deep, and some moments of consciousness rise out up clearly of the stream. There are passages of apt lucid description, almost, it seems, fighting against the tendency to be pulled back into the confusion of the humming background:

Democracy of effort,

then aristocracy of poise

achieved, both mount this cruel

crest of blossom bobbing

past a day's sheen

to court attention and cajole joys.

--"Night-Blooming Cereus"

On the other hand, there are also disconcerting moments when a momentary clarity produces, not the shock of accurate description as in the above description of the Cereus flower, but a kind of letdown, as at the end of the same poem:

Carries the whole hell-bent

on high and breathes the heights low-borne--

and what my rank is matters

not very much where such

strangeness reaches

and sap of light floods both ways torn.

The echoes of Hopkins, though lovely in the last line, and the inverted syntax are not enough to defamiliarize the platitudinous observation about "rank." There are not many such moments in M, but their occurrence suggests that Peck's obscurity is as capable of masking banality as profundity. ccasional cliched generalizationssuch as "quintessence of India":

pouring the last tea

of an evening, dark amber

alive, breathing in quintessence

of India . . .

or oversimplifications, such as "if they really knew" or "I've got to be":

If they really knew what history is,

even though they're in it up to their necks,

they'd feel it, the tug, the cold tilt. . .

But how much smarter is that? How am I better?

It is that log I've got to be. . .

give the odd feeling that the poet is waking out of his dreamy state to lecture at us, or at himself. Paradoxically, Peck might benefit by allowing his didactic voice a little more light and air, so that it could develop beyond the quick platitudes that dedication to the lyric mode encourages.

The combination of high lyric sensibility and extreme obscurity is not all that Peck shares with Hart Crane. Like Crane's, Peck 's poetry also shows distinct formal mastery. This aspect of Peck's work raises some interesting questions since, for a contemporary poet, formalism and linguistic difficulty make a much more bizarre combination than they did during High Modernism. Traditionally, formal poetic conventions, such as meter and rhyme, lend denseness and strangeness to conventional language, making it memorable. Without the rhyme, how often would we return to "Oh western wind, when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down can rain? / Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again?" For that matter, without the reversed elegaic meter (six beats in the first line, five in the second), how often would we return to, or how easily would most people remember, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro?". The language in these poems, while lovely, is ordinary in diction and in level of density; the conventionalized patterning of accent and rhyme-sounds makes it bear continual recitation and rereading.

But John Peck's language is already rendered conventionalized, unnatural, and presumably "poetic" by its semantic density and near-impenetrability. So what can his formal skill add to the work? For most readers, the need to figure out what's going on will be these poems' most urgent claim, and Peck's rhymes, for example, clever and sometimes blatant as they are, will lurk in the background during the first half-dozen readings--rather than inciting the subsequent readings as the rhyme helps to do in "Western wind." One is tempted to wonder, given how much else is going on in the poetry, why Peck bothers with form. I would guess that the rhymes and meters are as much for his own benefit as for the reader's--that formal structure lends Peck a sense of direction as he navigates through the gigantic and heavily populated space of the collective unconscious. The astounding tour-de-force rhyme scheme in "Romanza" (sixteen words rhymed on the same sound) seems, as much as anything, to be the force that leads the poet rather arbitrarily from Burgundy to chanty in the following excerpt:

She has found that part of Provence or Burgundy

in which ghosts abandoned a sunk dwelling,

and has posed herself on the chalk doorsill, twenty

horses champing within her thighs, and has cleared that rung

into, not space, not landscape, but their minty

lavendery cloud-mongering sandstone-levering

bed of forcings in the backmost band of mind, plenty

nor scarcity categories there, but emergence, ringing,

her elbows maintaining elevation while flinty

shoulders mass over wrists

from which everything

whatever its modes pours with cobalt coherence, chanty

or chorus. But there is no naming it now, only following.

There are other passages in this book, however, that the rhyme and the beat render delightfully memorable, almost addictive, with the inevitability of the great formal poems of our tradition. Every reader is likely to find favorite examples; two of my own follow:

Horrors as underbelly to winning this

human life, its treasure my master.

This, then--but not its bazaar,

horror and chintz, styrene and alabaster.

-- "Soundless Tune in the Jewel"

Not quite the god who lies back in milk's ocean

out of whose reveries curdle the worlds, not, then,

like island hands breaching then sleekly gone . . .

-- "Ave"

Such tensile structural memorability is so rare in contemporary poetry that the fact that M contains such passages at all makes me consider it a valuable book. But they are scattered sparsely throughout like rays of light in a tunnel; more often, Peck's rhymes, painstaking and subtle as they are, are overpowered by the language's density rather than working in harmony with it.

Peck's meter, often very skillful, is also sometimes overpowered by a dense rush of prosaic language rhythms. But, like his rhymes, it can work almost inaudibly to strengthen the poetry. In the title poem Peck uses a kind of sprung pentameter, actually more of a dactylic than an iambic line. Because dactylic meter is so rare in serious poetry, and because of Peck's tendency to pile on initial unstressed syllables and to use unusual feet such as the paean, these lines might read like free verse to the unwary. In fact, Peck's lines scan metrically more often than not. Here is a sample passage:

Steadily without thrusting, wind penetrated what joy,

forceps steadily forcing wide the heart, drew open.

Such air feeds no outburst, cascade, or whelming surge:

While the passage could be scanned as a five-beat accentual line, that would not do justice to the ingenuity and consistency of the meter. The best way to make metrical (and rhythmical) sense of the passage is to scan it as dactylic pentameter with several sophisticated variations. Peck uses all the common techniques of varying dactylic meter: trochaic and spondaic substitution ("forceps," "heart drew"); the truncated final foot, as in "joy" or "surge"; and the initial unstressed syllables (which I term a "running start"), as in "along." In addition, not only does he substitute other trisyllabic feet (such as the antibacchius, as in "air feeds no"); he also substitutes occasional five-syllable and four-syllable feet ("Steadily without," "forcing wide the"). This variety of falling feet contribute to a prosodic effect very much like that of Hopkins' sprung rhythm. Peck has so much control over this meter that he can maintain it even in combination with more prosaic diction and syntax, as in the following passage:

Living in her father's wheatfield, only eight

and so about to inherit the glasses her oldest sister

would hand on when leaving New Hampshire, Alvine

tried to disperse the weight of a dream. In it she

herself was the oncoming wave of lifetime after lifetime,

slowly working out the substance of each passage,

melting across a membrane and then being recomposed,

details fading from that sequence, but existence . . .

One of the great joys of Peck's unusual combination of formal technique and experimental language is his disregard of the usual contemporary imperative to make language seem "natural" or transparent. I can't think of another poet, other than rankly naive amateurs, who uses such devices as archaic syntax or the exclamation mark with Peck's delightfully unselfconscious abandon--not in order to deconstruct or mock the language, but simply to make use of what's there. We get two exclamation marks within eight lines of each other in one poem, and the irrepressible phrase, "crammed shops / smeared muddy in Arno, Firenze!" in another. As for syntax, Peck indulges in the kind of archaisms that teachers of poetry-writing routinely try to beat out of their students, from "Ah, but then" to "paving stones night-wet" to "gleamingly deep is night."

These archaisms seem appropriate expression for the strange inclusiveness of Peck's world. Having spent some time in Jungian therapy, I'm tempted to say that his strangely vivid cast of characters from history, dream, and fantasy conveys the wondering feeling of wandering among the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Peck mentions, often in passing, figures from a great range of times and places, many evoking mid-twentieth century Europe: "a Tyroler," "the Gascon," "Richter," and "Herr Doktor Professor Jung" appear along with "Hoplite Sokrates,"' "the Inupiaq elder Igruk," "Bonaparte," and "Vishnu," not to mention Bartleby, Trotsky, Chekhov, and Augustine. Countless other allusions to events, stories, and poems are woven into the poems as well. Such erudition seems at times almost campy; there is something high-modernist about it, reminiscent of Pound, who is included several times in the cast of characters. Since Peck's allusiveness is so earnest, and often so unobtrusive, the references seem an authentic part of the poetry's texture, in contrast to those of some other contemporary poets whose manifold intellectual allusions can come across as pretentious or forced. Nonetheless, Peck's layers of allusions can seem tiresome, and he does not altogether avoid the dangers of elitism and self-indulgence.

Thinking back on my experience in Jungian therapy, I like to imagine that it is Peck's belief in the seamless flow of the collective unconscious into and out of our individual minds--rather than a Poundian desire to expound--that encourages him to allude so broadly and seamlessly. Such an approach would harmonize with the way Peck handles meaning, diction, meter, and rhyme. All of these aspects of the poems of M are like waves washing in from an ocean, part of them perceptible, part of them not, but each contributing a sound to the distinctive murmur. For Jung, the ocean was associated with the unconscious in all its aspects. If M and Other Poems seems to speak from the unconscious, it is reminiscent less of full dreaming sleep than it is of the hypnagogic state, that half-awake, dusky time just surrounding sleep when we are able to be startled, and enlightened, by archetypal images and unexpected insights.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch