a neophyte in fish-garb

I recently had occasion to source a number of my early poems, from the period 1967-1972, a time wherein I was imitating the styles of other poets and attempting to establish my own voice within the community of poetry writers. But my densely-framed, obscure, self-absorbed writings were antithesis to the contemporary scene of late-Beat and Black Mountain poetry of the time.

I lived in a small southern town. Fortunately, there was there a state university, and its library was a source of deep comfort and kinship to me when I was sixteen or seventeen years of age. The old-fashioned rooms with their poorly-lit stacks held links to the Auden generation, the Imagists, and translations of Persian poetry. While all around me pushed towards a bright new age of poetry, I seemed content to drift somewhat aimlessly through the past.

I began to write poems in 1966. I made a point of writing poems most days (usually in the style of Dylan Thomas). I think I wrote about 100 poems from that Spring through into the Autumn. It was then it occurred to me that it might be better to focus my energies on the longer forms. I believed that the Long Poem might provide a more sympathetic forum to my often meandering style.

In the listings that follow, poems that were written in this five-year period offer a clear insight into the progress a young writer made in order to orient himself within the context of a poetic tradition, though in time sloughing the stylistic devices of these same generations.

Lucy East was my school Latin teacher in my first two years of 'upper' school; I think I was 13 or 14 years of age. Under her instruction, I hauled myself through Caesar's Gallic Campaign, and I learned the difference between the oratorical styles of Seneca and Cicero. Sometime after I left school, I heard that she had died. She seemed quite old to me, but I think she was only about 60. She was unmarried, and shared a house with her sister on the other side of town.

I remember some years before, my Mother took me to see her, to 'say hello'. It was some while after I left school, but I can't imagine the purpose of the visit. I think Mother was quite proud of me for having achieved some prize or other, and wanted Miss East to share in the good news. People used to do things like that.

In the following poems, I've reconciled a number of line- and stanza-breaks to reduce the awkward spill of too many words in too little space. In other respects, all the hyphenated flourishes, howling juxtapositions, and adjectival wash, remain as painfully pristine as on the day they were written.

The movements on the paper rose high against her hand,

the symbols of a life retreating.

Out of the single sigh, into the stroke of the quick-wombed cradle,

she rested in the angry grace of an uneasy light.

Justice embraced her every sin,

blasting the heart into its final decline.

With the fear of a second child, a twice-spent, single-edged infant,

she returned to the casting earth

as she had fallen from her Mother's side, unspoiled.

Her hand, from the chalk-dry fingers

to the tumbling felt of her palm, held, like a pursing secret,

her stillborn death.

And the sun became a coiling mistress

before the grief of the second grave.

But even as those last, hooded moments were sung into forgiveness,

evening entered the chapel of her eyes.

And she, a near-old, withered woman, hovering above the antlered wood

like a hawk on fire,

burden-ablaze in the tolling, weathered mouth of age,

was dropped like a lapping sparrow by the clapping wind.

Yet, knelt in the lonely height of the petal-running summer,

dusk fell into the sickled calm,

psalm-sped by the innocence of her passing.

Pain-turned, the leaves of the hay-blown boughs,

fluttering above the re-shaping sheet of wormspun soil,

became as brown and still as the stallioned waters

of her own, sea-pricked limbs,

though the corner-thumbed leaves at her graveworn bedside

raged in wintry silence.

("In Memory of Lucy East", 1967)

My only memory of this poem is that it was my first attempt to write an elegy. Reading it again forty years later, it exhibits little of the simple personal response to death that one would expect of the genre, and too much self-regarding word-play. But then, I was seventeen, and my experience of loss on that level was something less than comprehensive. 'And the sun became a coiling mistress/ before the grief of the second grave' demonstrates that there was at least a measure of thoughtful reading behind the lines. However, their use suggests that I was simply waiting for an opportunity to hang out my wares.

The next poem, "Not Without Anger", is another Dylan Thomas exercise. The sweep of adjectives reinforcing a generic metaphysical ennui is typical of many younger poets. That the inspiration for the poem had been dead for less than fifteen years was a further incentive to provide a further 'witness' to the Late Modern Period.

Not without anger have I watched in silence

the stealthy throb of betrayal rise with a smile

to burn and divide the heart.

Never with malice have I sought

to uproot or undo in sleep

what allied hosts have assisted in upholding.

No longer aroused from neutral rest

by the innocent swell of unrivalled desires,

with vicious regret I bolt to meet and turn

the routing sear and polished thrust of seasoned arms,

seeking an enemy once hailed as friend.

Lured out of breath into a hostile lair,

I must bear and trust a cunning kiss, thrown from faithless lips,

though two masked faces mask a grudge and a wolf in the fold.

Blown out of truce into a grappling retreat,

wrenched to tears in an ambush of embraces,

I stand doubled in a double-crossed lull

until enemy and friend lie in the same blood.

("Not Without Anger", 1967)

The tautology of the line 'Though two masked faces mask a grudge', with the over-burdened alliteration of cunning kisses and an ambush of embraces, offer a warning to all aspiring poets: less is more.

In December,1967, my father died suddenly, and the 'practice poems' of the previous six months paled against the overwhelming grief experienced on the instant by my Mother, my sister, and me. My Mother said, "How could God do this to us?" - at once both sweet and uncomprehending. I remember, I had absolutely no thoughts in support of this conjecture, apart from a determination never to allow myself the luxury of abdicating responsibility to Powers Unseen.

The poem "This is Not the Darkness Given by the Evening" is a straight run at "Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight". This time, however, the writing of the poem was less an attempt to mimic a stylistic master, than a direct emotional response to personal loss.

This is not the darkness given by the evening.

The shadows of this night end more than light of day,

set to rest a sun too frail to halt so great a falling.

The fading day has dropped on to a broken star to die.

Darkness comes where light rushed into morning,

and darkness brings to light what light has toiled to delay.

Should day's end bring only sleep, then dreams have come too late, and to nothing.

Day after day has ended with night, now night without end finds the eye,

night-long in tears, too blind to see the darkness lifting.

Too far and sudden was the lightning, too dark a way to come

to find no kindness in the evening.

The shadow of my father has cast a light too bright to die.

("This is Not the Darkness Given by the Evening", 1968)

It lacks objective correlation, and the notion of a villanelle appears to have escaped me altogether as a required form.

In the same period, I continued to indulge myself, perversely, in the somewhat narrow range of Dylan Thomas subject matter.

After-deaths, feared by drummed deniers,

halt the pride's flames that track and burn

the ticking blindness of the dead below,

the voicless earth rolling above them.

("Do Not Honor the Dead and Dying", 1968 - cf "And Death Shall Have No Dominion")

In a poised taloned spiral over the wilt of birds, slung

hushed in craving dangles, the lone hung stalking kite

flares... over the nestled meadow.

(from a long poem, "Blood Meadow",1968 - cf "Over Sir John's Hill"))

When each day's end again

has met the bray-hooved,

switch-back trails, and with them wound

to the blackberry yard and the stalls...

("Poem to the End of the Day",1968 - cf "Prologue")

Third Reader

The milkcans in the yard, empty before milking,

stand washed in the night's rain.

The ploughshares in the fields lie dew-deep in the sun

and hold with all love...

Second Reader

...the morning.

(except from "Homewood",1969 - cf Under Milkwood)

Effectively, this period marks the end of my homage to Dylan Thomas. There were several further poems published at this time that were stylistically similar to those noted above, but I was beginning to develop elements of a style of my own, and the Thomas itinerary grew less persuasive and, crucially for me as a young poet, less interesting.

In late 1969, I became interested in the New England poet Robert Lowell, and his writing would occupy me thoroughly for a period of about two years. Of course, I continued to read other contemporary poetry. With the enviable reputations of poets James Dickey, James Wright, et. al., whose work was published with such regularity in popular academic journals that readers could be forgiven the view that this spare, somewhat homogeneous verse was representative of the New American Poetry. However, Dickey's watershed novel, Deliverance, literally delivered him to a audience wider than traditional poetry circles.

The work of Lowell enthralled me. Its attention to prosody, and intense examination on a personal level, had a Metaphysical pedigree. It was probably poems from Life Studies, published ten years previously, that gave me an indication of the way the personal could be juxtaposed with historical suppositional sequences, and subverted through delineated narrative. His early poems, first published in the mid 40s as Lord Weary’s Castle, exemplified the cold style that was at once penetrating and remote, fixed in superb technical ability.

I emulated the writing from this ‘Catholic’ period, although usually without the attention to rhyme, as this was a new and difficult requirement, and one that I would not begin to accomplish until I had occasion to study WH Auden a few years later.

In style and subject matter, the poem “Ahab” was typical of my approach.

The years nose forward, pincered for the kill.
We are undone in our voyaging
for nothing by the nothing that is.

(excerpt)

It is Hell’s season,
thick with lobster pots, plumped red and snapping –
red, the blue that lapped up lives
guts its spoil in tidal pools and scrapes it smooth.
And when a bone-pegged shank
would plug the white whale’s spout…

A blue plume sprouts
and splays our breath like scales of fishes.

(“Ahab”, 1969)

In a long poem, “Appalachian Burial Requiem”, purportedly a stylised account of a coalmine collapse in Eastern Kentucky, the language was rigidly formal, and attempted the rhyme elements I had admired in Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, but without the attention to scansion that the poem perhaps deserved.

Here is the opening stanza.

A sunken element of Jehoshaphat,
the judgment breaking black into the fields broke
all breath below, the miners’ backs by the black-
out weighted when heaven of a sudden spoke
through the void in its falling to the coalsack
of Apollyon’s arms. The spoils of the land’s fat
belch and foam to light at the mouth of the pits;
grave portent, foul borne of the hole that emits
but violent ghosts of light from the craw
of its corruption, the shafts choked and raw
with ash. Theirs was half the luck of Jonas: spat
not of the deeps, the hollows of the Lord’s
leviathan, sea-legged upon the strand, but
as the shapeless reminders of Will the gut
of decay rotted to itself. It affords
them no quarter of repentance, for the beast
without favor ever to its black lung hoards
the breath Appalachia offers in the East.

There is certainly a great deal going on in those few lines, with portents foul-borne ever to the black lung hoarded, with other inversions black and belching. At just over 60 lines in length, it was probably my most ambitious poem to date. Once written, it’s likely I would be satisfied with the exercise, with no wish to repeat the experience. However, in Part 3, there are a few lines that offer a glimpse of something more elegant, or at least less ungainly.

The widows of the mines go
by the cenotaph of Appalachia where
no stones cross but those that mock the upper air.
Is it poverty of heart’s light hurts men into
the dark, and their women into black, or is it faith
that makes them blind as moles to a rising wrath?

(“Appalachian Burial Requiem”, 1969)

I mentioned Auden earlier. There is one surviving treatment of his style, based on his poem about Icarus. I think I saw it as an opportunity to attempt the less-is-more theorem. My poem was also about Icarus, you may not be surprised to learn.

And rising of his own accord,
and of waxen plumage rising,
Crete below became but a word
dear once, a place once-been, something

unreal, as shadow reminds one
of daylight, and not of daylight’s
sphere, a remainder of the sun
and vision common to those heights;

and what ploughman, or fisherman
at his lines, being caught up with
his labor, should chance towards the sun
a glance and, glancing, witness myth?

What man would have, having only
labor the darkness reckons and brings
to an end, common as the sea,
as the gulls occasionally
descending there, would have as things
his own suns, and notion of wings?

(“Icarus Descending”, 1970)

Notice, in stanza three, the use of internal rhyme, and the subtle repetition of chance/glance/glancing. The quatrain works reasonably well, and reading this now, I think I must have had a new confidence about my writing.

Reading the early Lowell 'covers' on the other hand, was not unlike receiving the Word from a Hellfire-and-Damnation preacher. However, the poems from Lowell’s ‘middle’ period, which I would also emulate, exhibited an unsettled quality that reflected perhaps Lowell’s own psychological issues in the late 50s and early 60s. Poems from Life Studies and For the Union Dead were benchmark writings for me, in that they retained a rigorous style, but used a space of silence within the poems to communicate to the reader some hidden or troubled world-view.

In August 1970, through the auspices of one of my teachers, Reva Chrisman, who had championed my poems from an early period, I was accepted on a two-week, ‘working’ scholarship to Breadloaf Writers’ Conference near Bennington, Vermont. The ‘working’ element of the arrangement meant that I waited tables in the Conference cafeteria when not attending seminars (I understand that these arrangements are known now as 'waiterships'). My personal tutor was William Meredith. John Ciardi led the Conference as senior academic.

The route into such an esteemed organisation may be more standardised now. Then, there was a rough-and-ready quality about the place, but those of us whose families were not able to pay the fees for the experience were pleased to participate. At the end of the two weeks, John Ciardi announced to a full assembly of delegates and writers, that the waiting staff were in fact writers themselves, and with that we were given the floor to read our own poems to an appreciative audience.

Following Breadloaf, I took the decision no longer to sign my poems with my Christian name, 'Robert Pollock', and begin to use my middle name, Estill –an old family name (also my grandfather’s middle name), probably after Captain Estill, the 18th century frontiersman killed by Wyandot in eastern Kentucky. I made the conscious decision to distance myself from my apprentice pieces and to develop my writing under the new persona, Estill Pollock.

Here are excerpts from the first poems published at the time under my new moniker.

There are vacancies here. The whole
unfurnished, shell-shocked scenery’s for hire.
...
I am nobody, a veteran of this mental block,
unoccupied, and at home in these extremes.

The weathercock’s clacking, metallic flight
sustains this emptiness. From the vane’s
flaked spine, heaven hangs
like a helmet on a stick.

…

What little’s possible
remains beyond these old familiarities.
The winged vane’s greening copper
grows greener as season washes into season.

Accustomed to our climate,
it flies nowhere,
points to nothing, for no reason.

("In Time of War”, 1971)

A car spells out a lifestyle,
conditions of travel, points of no return.
But when our purring hulks burn out
along some unmapped mile of backroad,
pile into trees or passers-by, we find the mechanistic truths
we live by expendable, spent
when our stalled machinery’s dials
tick down to zero.

(“A Spare for Jonathan”, 1971)

It’s all delay,
and between breaths, tight
in this compass case of flesh,
the heart’s needle, that old lie
geared to exile, still whirs
across the face of misdirection.

(“Homage to Gracchus", 1971)

Although a philosophical pose, the poetry begins to open out a little. Admittedly, there was still a box of tricks I found necessary to move from poem to poem. However, in the poems mentioned above, and in others written in this period but not discussed here, I began to assimilate more naturally the required elements that in time would further the development of my poetry writing.

During this time, I wrote and published poems at university, and had poems in the top three placements of The Atlantic Monthly’s national poetry competition in three consecutive years. Other poems appeared in the Wesleyan University Press journal, Alkahest, and one or two pieces in The Harvard Advocate.

It’s important to note that however pinched, harried, or just plain bad the poems can be, there are still editors and readers who recognize and generously allow the poet to make mistakes publicly, with the tacit understanding that the next selection will by stronger and more self-aware in all respects.

After I left university in 1972, I began work on two long poems, “Oz Verbatim” and “The American Book of the Dead”, respectively, and they were published in 1973 and 1974 in Poetry in Chicago, the former poem in the year of its publication being awarded the George Dillon Memorial Prize for Best Poem by a Younger Poet.

The title of this essay, "A Neophyte in Fish-Garb", is taken from a section of the second poem, and is a word-play on my surname, coupled with the idea of the initiate, an idea that appealed to me in that these were the first poems I had written that incorporated much of what I had learned in the previous five years, yet too offered something transitional that could not be fixed to one influence or genre.

For several years, I continued to publish poetry in journals and reviews, but it was not until 1998 that I had my first modest collection published in England as the pamphlet, Metaphysical Graffiti. My first trade-edition collection, Constructing the Human, was published in 2001 by Salzburg Poetry at the University of Salzburg.