Knotting for Suggestive Unity in The
Net by Daniel Tobin
by Michael Todd Steffen
In one of several echoes of the beacon
image of his new book, The Net, Daniel Tobin gives us a laden six-line
poem, here quoted in full:
WRIT
IN WATER
Language
is a net
In
which the world is caught
Skittery
in its scales.
In
the Book of Nought
All
lines are marked stet.
Is
prevails.
The simplicity of the lyric makes it
verbally palpable, even as the second tercet falters in word difficulty,
abstraction and truncated meter. Because of the necessary stumbles of the
second tercet, it falls short of, yet gestures at, forging a word-thing for
memory, like The Lord is my shepherd…, To be or not to be…, Jack be nimble
Jack be quick, My country ’tis of thee…, or We all live in a yellow submarine…
Because in our time memorable lyricism in written poetry is looked away from,
for singsonginess, oversimplicity, Tobin crumples that second tercet with its
intellectual challenges of the Book of Nought and the editorial Latinate
trade term stet (also okaying
“Nought”), its meter scuffing.
The thing about construing a really good lyric for readers of poetry,
which Seamus Heaney understood so well, is to beset the surface simplicity of
the language with riddlesome meaning or suggestions. Why in the world would
Jack jump over a candlestick? (We seldom ask, because the rhymes convince us of
this improbable performance…) Buried in our psyches, Freudians might argue, a candlestick
is anatomically deep-seeded, archetypal: every kid already possesses it in
their consciousness of joy and trauma. All it as an a priori phenomenon needs
are the words of the nursery rhyme to light it up in our minds. It signifies
not just any concentration point, but an isolated, passionate, possibly
dangerous one, holding fire, being consumed—yet giving off light, illuminating
the darkness.
Tobin’s net is also archetypal: in this poem nothing less than the
world is caught in it. Yet to temper the compass of that statement, the
poet succeeds it with an amusing description, Skittery in its scales,
reminiscent perhaps of Dr. Seuss, Roethke’s The Lost Son or one of
Wilbur’s children’s verses. The word “scales” ties in with the idea of an
ordinary net for fish. Yet with the word’s association in “the scales of
justice,” that language is the net here begins to make its sense.
Jesus, one associated with ultimate judgment or justice, we remember, told his
seafaring apostles that he would teach them to be fishers of men. There is,
further, in the Book of Revelations reference to a Book of Life, in which the
names of the blessed are enrolled, and this book may lead us in Tobin’s poem to
think about what this Book of Nought might mean. Yet in this book conjured by
the poet, all lines have been edited to be deleted, so they have to be
reconsidered again to be marked not to be deleted: stet. Tobin’s Book of Nought makes
sense as, not the biblical Book of Life,
but as the observed Book of Actuality, of everything that is, whether it’s been
affirmed by writing or not. No such book exists, of course. Though we have
heard of such books before. I wonder wonder who, who who who who, Who wrote
the book of love? The Monotones sang the question. Loftily Henry David
Thoreau, condensing the figure of book to poem, reflects:
The
true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem
not
printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped
in
the poet’s life…
then the saint of Walden offers a summary
couplet:
My
life has been the poem I would have writ,
But
I could not both live and utter it.
(Walden
and Other Writings, Henry David Thoreau, The Modern Library, New York,
2000,
p.
440)
It is the poem, or back to Tobin, it is
the book not of ideals or shoulds, not of considerations of morality or taste
or of trends, but of one sole editorial reflection—stet, let it stand—the
real thing, wonderful beyond, more terrible than, inconceivably just as things
are, where (whatever) Is prevails.
What kind of “book” could this be? A set of encyclopedias? But no bound compendium
keeps up with time where Is prevails.
Only the human mind keeps up, haltingly and protestingly albeit, with day by
day, minute by minute reality. No single human mind does this, though
collectively we sort of do by talking with one another, reading news articles,
listening to the radio, observing birds, watching television. Still, to keep coincident
with the production of things, we would need to communicate almost
everywhere simultaneously. The only possible correlative for Tobin’s Book of
Nought, though evocative of something profound, eternal, perhaps ancient, has
actually only been available to us for the last three decades or so, and it is
inscribed in Daniel Tobin’s book title: the (Inter)net.
James Merrill in his epic The Changing Light of Sandover liked to
exchange terms in a catchy phrase to describe his undertaking: the poem of the world and the world of the poem. The inverted
phrases in this sequence have the effect of building tension (how read, write
or even conceive of the poem of the world ?) and relieving that stress: the
world of the poem, okay. There is a sifting, back-and-forth interaction
between them, maybe at the origin of a lot of poems. You read and read a poem that
captures you, you absorb its world and language. You look around yourself at
the present ongoing world, with the poem’s world in your mind, and the two
worlds begin to strike a deal. If you’re lucky, you write an original poem,
maybe slightly echoing the poem you’ve been reading, a new poem between a
poetic tradition and the individual talent and that talent’s time.
Seamus Heaney saw that riddles were a
traditional way poets drew interest in their works. With his characteristic
turn of mind, Heaney applied the notion of a riddle (enigma) to a sort of tool
or utensil also called a riddle, a large sieve used to separate soil or compost
particles, or to separate soil from vegetables. But depending on whether you’re
using the riddle to purify soil or to separate dirt from radishes, what you’re
using the riddle for poses the riddle itself:
You
never saw it used but still can hear
The
sift and fall of stuff hopped on the mesh,
Clods
and buds in a little dust-up,
The
dribbled pile accruing under it.
Which
would be better, what sticks or what falls through?
Or
does the choice itself create the value? (The Haw Lantern, page 51)
A net like a riddle separates. It takes
fish (and other strange things) from the water. Empty nets to fishermen are
omens, when nothing’s being separated from the water. And a little ominous is
Tobin’s first personal reference to a (fishing) net, in the opening poem of the
collection “The Jetty,” a wonderfully patient meditation between ebb tide when
this basin wall “reaches, a stone sentence, across the bay” and some lost time
later
while
the tide sounds
the
length of this transit, susurrant
fountain,
a summoning from under,
and
all of it gone by evening.
In a sense, crossing the jetty, “a stone
sentence,” is a metaphor for writing poetry, with its required sense of
displacement, venture and curiosity,
its
jigsaw syntax entered like hopscotch
from
Lands End,
entered the way wrens
step,
step on sidewalks, crushed shells
looking for seed,
as if unsure of earth—
until
it feels natural to be outside
the
known scope,
and you follow
the
jumbled puzzle out farther
than
you first expected, toehold
by
toehold…
In an interview about the new book with
Doug Holder earlier this year, Tobin comments on his approach to poetry, of
being thus wooed by the poem, with its other mind:
I
allow my form to lead me to a broader perspective. I let the poem lead.
I
follow clues it gives to me. I see the poem as a path beyond the self. The poem
wants
something from you. (The Somerville Times,
July 9, 2014, p. 23)
But allowing oneself to be led out and
out, as on a jetty susceptible to the tide, can bring you woefully to that
fine, fine line between curiosity or faith and one’s gullibility. If the tide
starts covering the jetty before we make it back to the shore, and this is a
kid’s meditation on a kid’s adventure, the situation could get dire. And it is
this sense of quiet despair and endangerment that is conveyed by the speaker of
the poem when, among
shallows
of moon snails, welks, skate eggs,
these
currents like sandcoils redoubling
in
pools where shucked pilings, scarified
granite,
brace to colonies of rockweed
that
flail in sediment’s plangent ooze…
Tobin spots the book’s title image and
leitmotiv in a state of abandonment, an image of the poet’s identity:
you
are an earthstar tumbling in spores
into
the living waste,
the
risen pleroma,
your
name a net caught in the hollow
between
stones…
Language is a net In which the world is caught, the short
lyric has told us. Our names, also language, are nets. To see one’s name
“caught in the hollow between stones,” though the stones are not personal
enough to name, say, Chelsea and Charlie, magnifies the poet’s identification
with an imperiled object and the feeling of ungovernable helplessness at not
being able to disentangle this “net” for its ordinary beauty and use again. It
is a moment of doom perceived.\
The true longing of such a moment is for
the moment to pass, for the grace of time, a longing that inspires the prayer
that forms the title poem, “The Net,” found about midway in the book.
God
of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You who parsed chaos with a net from the
day:
Unfasten your knots, let the swells
replenish
From
subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
Here again the individual body, “the
seams of flesh,” is extended through metaphor to the “subtlest channels” of the
earth’s waterways parsed with chaos in a creation myth, we are told by the
poet, Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet, no longer even
belonging to history, since the tablet is lost, but to human consciousness of
eternity, ongoing time with its arrivals and departures.
More often than not, books of poetry are
organized with a lot of grace for topical coherence. With exceptions, we read
poetry for its unrestrained delivery of concentrated expression, for its
surprises and odd persuasions, its advocacy for the easily forgotten or
condemned. Maybe for something like 95% of collections, coherence is an
afterthought. It gets invited to the Prince’s ball in the eleventh hour and,
without a tailored gown or suit, throws itself together with intuition and
serendipity from odds and ends. Readers don’t necessarily expect more. Some
books of poetry for their thematic rigor fall too easily into predictability.
Sequence and feel, rather than topical or argumentative order, are key in
building resonance within a collection, so that beyond individual pieces, poem
to poem, the book as a whole bears further amplified meanings that make it
unique in its binding to have and to preserve, as a separate thing, not just a
content nested in fragile software to light up on an anonymous screen.
This new collection by Daniel Tobin achieves a generous balance between
suggestive unity and thematic laissez-faire. He uses the “net” in a very wide
cast or broad sense indeed, almost like glossers of Dante, at the four levels.
The net as the thing itself, literally a fisher’s net. In its contemporary
historical sense as the Internet. In its metaphorical sense as language, the
elusive knotted mesh of our convictions, and of our delusions like Othello’s
entanglement in Iago’s net of lies. And anagogically, cosmically—intimately?—we
are bound in the net of our being, by every limit we knock against and at which
we are refused or constricted, in Ea the god of the first water’s net.
I set out in this article with so much to say about other poems in the
book. I wanted to mention the progress of our romance with technological media
to habit-forming, sleepy ritual traced in “Ovid in the Age of Tin.” I wanted to
say something about Tobin’s vatic warnings for our society’s presumed vast
stranglehold on events in “A Starry Messenger” and in “And Now Nothing Will Be
Restrained from Them.” I loved being weirded out by “Parasitical” with its
Kafka-esque epigraph, and the comparison of the German pronunciation of “Rilke”
with the guttering kickstart of a motorbike. Along with the haunted music of
“The Turnpike” and the combining of intelligence and feeling cultivated from
the 16th- century metaphysical poet John Donne, a good variety of
formal poems and observer poems, the amplitude of pertinent and poignant
thought delivered by Tobin’s language make The Net one of those rare
books of poems that easily endures re-reading after re-reading, plays its own
protean slip on our want to grapple it into this or that. It both invites and
frustrates that effort. The book attests to Tobin’s patience, to so much
volleying with the stubborn, intimate yet blind and unpredictable raiders of
our psychological territory, which poetry vigorously defends against settlement
or ownership.
