Vixen Software
Badomero Schoulund
I first read W. S. Merwin's The Vixen in a contemporary poetry course taught by James Tate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I was a graduate student in the MFA program in poetry. It was either spring or fall, I believe, of 1998. I have, associated with this book, a memory of sad, warm days, but I'm not sure.
I loved being an MFA student, although I was very unhappy all the time, without realizing it. I read poetry constantly and wrote all sorts of poems (on a manual typewriter that used to belong to my mother in high school, which I salvaged from my grandparents' attic), all of them failures. I was lucky enough to have Tate and Dara Wier and the late, amazing Agha Shahid Ali as teachers. All three were calm in their behavior while unpredictable in their interests, and all three were writing with great force and power.
My fellow students were bright and nervous, and we all had the sense that something very important was starting to happen, even if we didn't know exactly what it was. It's probably hard to imagine now, but at the time, we barely thought about publishing in magazines, much less a book. Of course, we wanted to, but that was really for "later." Hardly any of us had published anything, and almost everything we wrote we shared with one another and then changed or threw away or reused for some other purpose. We very much thought of ourselves as experimenters, practicers, apprentices.
My paperback copy of The Vixen is a very light tan color, with what looks like a painting of a fox on the cover. Actually, it's a not a painting or drawing, but a blurry, impressionistic photograph by Minoru Taketazu, presumably from his book Fox Family: The Four Seasons of Animal Life. It is described on Amazon.com with the following irresistible, tragic synopsis: "The life cycle of the Ezo fox, native to the northern islands of Japan, is captured in a photographic essay that follows the fox through the icy winter and birth of cubs in the spring to the family break up in the fall."
When I open the book, I see it's a first edition. I'm sure I must have bought it when it first came out in paperback, at Wooton's, a small bookstore right on the main drag in Amherst, where we went almost every day to lurk and wait to see who else would come in to hang out. That store is no longer there, though its former proprietor, Mark Wooton, is one of the co-owners of the marvelous Amherst Books, right around the corner.
and it takes me just a few seconds to realize these are reminders of times I was scheduled to meet my new analyst, with whom I still, all these years later, sometimes speak (on the phone now from California).
At that time, my unhappiness, which I had always just taken for granted, had recently taken on the particularly virulent, malevolent, self-destructive form of a triangular love affair, composed of me and two of my fellow graduate students, a former couple. The whole thing was typical and destructive and inexcusable and humiliating and just generally a giant, psychologically inevitable train wreck. All the time I was trying to write poems, and I remember being very frustrated, in a poetic sense as well as a personal one. Looking back on it now, I can see, with a little tolerance and forgiveness, that I was just starting to really understand the possibilities of language as material, in the same way a painter might start at some early point to truly begin to know paint. But at the time, I was deep in the middle of many interrelated crises of confidence and couldn't see any way forward, except to thrash wildly in one aesthetic direction or another in the hope something would stick.
Some of my difficulties were inherent to the condition of being a novice. Some, however, were a result of the times. In the late 1990s, it was taken for granted, widely in poetry and especially in many of the top graduate programs in creative writing, that it was unsophisticated, retrograde, even manipulative to sully whatever was "poetic" in a poem with any kind of story or situation. Everyone knew a poet had to relinquish the crutch of narrative to write true poetry and not its mere, sad cousin, lyrical prose. To call a poem narrative was just a euphemism for square, unsophisticated, sappy, self-absorbed, and old-fashioned.
It was therefore a silent article of faith among the students (though not the professors) that any sort of anecdotal narration was by its nature incompatible with poetry. Of course, even a cursory study of poetry from almost any time period would quickly reveal this aesthetic position as patently incorrect. Yet this was an idea nestled firmly in the minds of many young poets at the time, including my friends and me.
When I think back on it now, I remember that this rejection of narrative was also bound up in an idea about who had the "right" to speak. At all costs, we young poets wanted to avoid the possibility of being caught out as writers who took on, unintentionally or otherwise, oracular, superior stances in our poems that made it seem as though we thought we were better than our readers.
Surely it was good and right that we were questioning the role of the speaker in poems. There had been decades at least of American poetry that had time and again fallen into what Keats called Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime," an ostensible celebration of nature, or the world, that was really about praising the poet's own superior qualities of perceptiveness. We still see this today, in those awful, typical poems in which someone goes for a walk in the woods or to a hospital to visit a sick loved one to see something beautiful and terrible that reveals the so-called truth of our existence. These poems have the not-so-secret agenda of holding the sensitivity and emotional depth of the poet (and by extension the reader, who is wise and thoughtful and cultured and emotionally advanced enough to be experiencing this marvelous poem) up for collective admiration.
What we didn't realize was that this stance of the egotistical sublime, however odious, was not inherently related to the use of narrative in poetry. What we wanted was beauty that obliterated all other consideration, that lyricism, that singing that can happen only in poetry. And it was right for us to want that. But we also didn't realize how incredibly difficult it would be, especially as beginners in the art, to take such a rigid and unnecessary stance that narrative could not, because of its very nature, coexist with the lyric.
The mood of The Vixen is elegiac, mysterious, historical. Centuries can go by in a few lines, and in many of the poems, a cyclical, prehistorical time can permeate the modern era. The speaker has bought an old house somewhere rural, in France. He walks and meets people, some of whom seem like ghosts from a different, ancient time. Something in his life is ending ("this time / was a time of ending this time the long marriage was over / the orbits were flying apart"), and there are symbolic echoes, not too heavy-handed but definitely present, of this in the condition of the old house, which must be rebuilt, as well as in the reappearance of this female fox, the vixen, in real and mythic ways. On his walks, the narrator encounters various inhabitants of the rural area where he finds himself. Some of the poems are dreams, some are general meditations about the time of the narrator's life, and some take place in a much older, sometimes medieval, sometimes mythic time.
The Vixen begins with a three-page poem, "Fox Sleep." Like an overture, in its five sections the poem moves through the various times and modes of consciousness that will appear in the rest of the poems of the book. The form of "Fox Sleep" is the same as all the rest of the poems in the book: long lines that extend almost to the right margin, every other line indented, no punctuation.
This first section of the poem is essentially a description of things the speaker and his friend see on trip together in the mountains, particularly an old mill, which has the objects that used to be inside it now "arranged...to wait pale in the daylight out on the open mountain / after whatever they had been made for was over"; that is, they are now antiques, for sale. The grammatical structure and thought movement are, because of the lack of punctuation, fundamentally paratactic; the grammatical structure puts thoughts and events that in ordinary writing are usually organized hierarchically on the same plane, creating unexpected (but also very real) connections. As in so much contemporary poetry, therefore, the thinking is by its very nature associative, moving from one to another related, but not necessarily predictable, idea.
The poem is quick, leaping, intuitive. These qualities are, however, counterbalanced by the anecdotal and narrative: "On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago / I came to a curve on a slope . . ." This narrative grounding situates the poem firmly, which then allows the poet to step out at will and make associations and observations and digressions that are often quite strange but always believable.
It is precisely this generous willingness to establish a narrative framework that allows the poet very quickly to move into a deeper state of perception: "I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream / flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own / echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten." This movement, so natural and strange, is characteristic not only of this poem but also of Merwin's poetry throughout his career. It reminds me of Cezanne, who works in the areas where figuration starts to become abstraction, or Coltrane, who would by grounding his composition in melody be able to bring the listener along with him out into the far regions of chaos and noise and then return.
Merwin's poems have always been mysterious, generous, and clear, knowing in their unknowingness. Often this effect is achieved by means of telling a simple story. In this book, as in much of Merwin's poetry, the combination of narrative structure and associative/paratactic movement together make it possible for Merwin to do something else essential to the effect of these poems: to move quietly and confidently into an aphoristic, truth-telling mode that is somehow full of deep, personal compassion yet also disembodied. These aphoristic moments seem almost to emerge from the natural world as truths as undeniable as animals or weather.
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