Revolutionary Road's Frank Wheeler Fills Out the Facebook Valentine's Day Survey

 

Frank Wheeler, the author of this piece

(editor's note: Scholars of the work of Richard Yates recently found the following tucked into the back of a drink recipe book in the archives of a bar in midtown Manhattan. It appears to be a section Yates edited out of the final draft of his classic mid-twentieth-century novel Revolutionary Road. In this section, main character Frank Wheeler fills out a Facebook Valentine's Day survey about his relationship with his wife April Wheeler. It is the great privilege of the EG Revue to publish such an important literary artifact.)

How’d you guys meet? At a party in Morningside Heights. I was four whiskeys deep, which helped. I’d never really been with a “first-rate” girl before. I’d dated a couple girls in New York, but one had “unpardonably thick ankles” and the other had a “tendency to mother me.” Anyway, April’s “shining hair and splendid legs had drawn me halfway across a roomful of strangers.” I thought she was a girl named Pamela, but she wasn’t. She was April, she was a first-rate girl, and she laughed at my jokes.

First date? About a week later we went out, and somehow by daybreak there she was, “lying miraculously nude beside me in the first blue light of day on Bethune Street.”

How long have you been married? Well, Niffer is about to turn seven. So seven years.

Who was interested first? On the aforementioned night on Bethune Street, she told me that I was the most interesting man she’d ever met. Inasmuch as I am interesting, it would follow that she was interested.

Who said I love you first? Not sure. April was definitely the first one to say “I love you when you’re nice.”

Most impatient? I’d say April. She’s always been impatient to get to Europe. That was our plan before she got pregnant, and even then, she was impatient to, um, deal with the situation before I convinced her to keep the thing. That was when I got the job at Knox Business Machines, which, trust me, is not a thing I take seriously. Anyway, now April has this plan to work as a secretary in Paris so I can have time to find myself because--and this is her talking--”it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a house he can’t stand in a place he can’t stand either, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things.” So I’d say she’s more impatient.

Most sensitive? Definitely April--she was training to be an actress before we met. That’s how she got mixed up with the community theater performance of The Petrified Forest that turned out to be such a shambles. I should have known better than to let her get mixed up with that damned thing.

Most stubborn? April. I keep telling her she needs to go into analysis. She’s too stubborn to really love someone, it seems to me. It’s hardly her fault, with that absent mess of a father on top of all the usual penis envy that all the medical journals apparently say that all the women have. But it’s a hell of a time getting her to go.

Falls asleep first? It depends. How much have I had to drink?

Cooks better? I definitely opened some cans of beans and so forth in my Village bachelor pad days. But it’s 1955. Who the hell do you think cooks better?

Better morning person? Probably her. I don’t really perk up until I’ve had my second martini.

Better driver? Me. April never wants to do anything in a car.

Best Sense of Humor? That’s a tough one. I have insights, I think, into some of the degrading nonsense out here in the suburbs, but I feel it’s important not to make absolutely everything a joke. On the other hand, April doesn’t smile very often, except for when she gets on one of her hysterical laughing jags.  

Where do you eat out the most as a couple? If by eat you mean drink, then it’s definitely Vito's Log Cabin, where we sometimes go dancing with the Campbells. There’s a little jazz combo, and they get a good mix of people from Revolutionary Estates. It’s awful.

Who is more social? For Chrissake, who even wants to be social out here? How many conversations can you have about schools and picture windows and sedum (whatever the hell that is)? That said, it’s probably me. Back in college everyone said that Wheeler’s really got it going on upstairs.

Who wears the pants in the relationship? April put on some pants one morning not too long ago--the Saturday after her performance in The Petrified Forest, actually--and went out to mow the lawn. I’d been meaning to do it, but then we got into it after the play was such a disaster, and so I’d had a few and I didn’t exactly spring out of bed if you know what I mean. But there she was, out there on the damn lawn with her slacks and the mower, practically begging for Mrs. Givings to drive by and start snooping around with her questions about whether I was sick. I know what she’s really thinking, not that I give a good Goddamn.

Who hogs the remote? What the hell is a remote? Oh, it’s for the TV? That’s definitely one of the ways you know the world is going to hell; the kids with their cartoons and no one anywhere even cares to so much as think about what it might mean to get some actual culture in this country for once.

Post a picture of you and your valentine:

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19427697

Which Characters are the Worst Human Beings in The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises? A Ranking of Jerks

Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Creators of Jerks

I recently read a message board comment where someone asserted that the characters in The Sun Also Rises might be shittier people than the characters in The Great Gatsby. After I read this, I thought to myself, “man, in spite of my many robes, degrees, and learnings, I have no idea how to decide that one.” 

And so, as part of my enduring quest for knowledge, I have produced this, the EG Revue’s rankings of the most awful people in the LGGANU (Lost Generation Great American Novelistic Universe). Their particular sins are noted in parentheses.

1. Tom Buchanan (accessory to murder; accessory to manslaughter; racism; infidelity; domestic violence; went to Yale)

2. Daisy Buchanan (vehicular manslaughter; shirt fetish; was probably drunk the whole time she was pregnant)

3. Mike Campbell (defaults on debts to friends; terrible restaurant patron; is more anti-Semitic than his friends, which is saying something)

4. George Wilson (straight-up murders a dude; amazingly this only gets him to #4 on the list)

5. Lady Brett Ashley (relishes producing chaos; selfish in relationships; leaves the bloody ear of a bull in the drawer of hotel nightstand for maid to find; probably didn’t tip)

6. Bill Gorton (shit-stirrer; uses a lot more racial slurs than you remember)

7. Jay Gatsby (oversees vast criminal enterprise; fails to respect boundaries with neighbors; has spent nearly a century being a bad influence on Lloyd Dobler types)

8. Robert Cohn (infidelity; assault and battery; writes mediocre novels)

9. Owl Eyes (symbolically linked to distant indifferent God; judges people by the contents of their bookshelves)

10. Jake Barnes (enabler; betrays the ethical code of bullfight aficionados; wastes the valuable time of a Parisian sex worker)

11. Myrtle Wilson (infidelity; fails to respect rules of the road)

12. Jordan Baker (cheats at golf; tells long-winded Kentucky-based anecdotes)

13. Meyer Wolfsheim (fixes the World Series in such a way that it is won by a team from Ohio)

14. Nick Carraway (finance bro; went to Yale; is “Minnesota nice”)

15. Pedro Romero (tortures animals for a living)

16. The Green Light (launched a thousand tedious term papers)

17. Frances Clyne (has a point; won’t let it go)

18. Montoya (kinda judgy)

19. Klipspringer (leaves shoes everywhere)

20. Count Mippipopolous (honestly, the Count seems like a good hang)

In conclusion, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway are important works of American fiction which contain many jerks. This has been demonstrated first with an introduction, and then with a ranking of twenty jerks. As I look back at the list, I see that four of the top six are from Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s classic has the higher body count (well, human body count anyway). So I guess The Great Gatsby contains worse people than The Sun Also Rises. 

Seven Poems that Should Have Been Read at Presidential Inaugurations

The reading of poems at Presidential inaugurations is a relatively new event in American history. A couple weeks ago, Amanda Gorman became only the sixth poet invited to read at a Presidential inauguration. Five of these inaugural poems have been presented in the last 28 years, with the only exception being Robert Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.

There’s probably an essay to be written about why inaugural poetry might have emerged at this late date, at least among Democrats, as a nascent tradition. Is it just Kennedy’s charisma still looming over his party? Is it an example of a secularizing country (or party) looking for a non-religious means of solemnifying a civic event? Is it a perverse joke wherein a three-minute poem is rolled out to atone for denigrating the arts and humanities at all other times of year? 

As someone who teaches students about the history of poetry, I have a more speculative question: what might inaugural poetry have looked like through the years if it were a longer-standing tradition? What poets and poems might have appeared? The obvious truth is that if poems had been read at every inauguration ceremony, most of them would have been milquetoast work from poets long-forgotten. Such is the nature of art placed in the service of decorum. It’s not like anyone with actual power would ever let Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, or Danez Smith anywhere near that dais. 

But since inaugural poetry has, through most of American history, been a thing that never happened, I’m free to daydream about what might have been especially good poems for the occasion. I thought about going truly nuts and proposing a poem for literally every inauguration since 1789. But since I have an actual job which currently presents me with a maze of brush fires, I limited myself to picking a handful of poems from the early-to-mid twentieth century that might have been particularly powerful commentaries at one of our core civic ceremonies.

1925: William Carlos Williams, “It Is a Living Coral”

There are a lot of Williams poems I could choose, since few major poets outside of Whitman have been so inclined to take America itself as their subject matter. But “It Is a Living Coral,” Williams’ celebration of the Capitol building, feels especially poignant after January 6, so we’ll assign WCW the task of dignifying the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge.

Williams’ poem, which first appeared in 1924, turns the solidity and mass of the Capitol into a living, lovely thing: “a dome/ eight million pounds/ in weight/ iron plates constructed/ to expand/ and contract with/ variations/ of temperature/ the folding/ and unfolding of a lily.” Williams then spins into a giddy catalog of the paintings and sculptures that fill the Capitol dome, and the poem starts to feel like a not-quite-orderly montage of American history. With his pure energy and capacity for slightly irreverent awe, Williams makes this “archaic” building a metonym for a nation he hopes can be as flexible as it is massive.

1929: Marianne Moore, “England”

Despite the title, this poem is primarily about the US; it just takes Moore a few lines of epigrammatic takes on foreign country countries before she settles into her main topic, America, “where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions,” and where “letters are written/ not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/ but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” It would be fun to watch Senators and Justices try to puzzle out whether and how much this is supposed to be funny, and to what degree the joke is at their expense.

I hope that someday a Republican invites a poet to read at the inauguration, as inaugural poems have thus far been a strictly Democratic affair. Moore would have been honored to read at the 1929 inauguration, as she came from a pro-GOP family that held Herbert Hoover in great esteem for his WWI-era relief efforts. At the end of her poem, Moore insists that if culture is hard to find in America, “must one imagine/ that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.” It would also be nice to imagine that poetry needn’t be confined to one party.

1933: Sterling Brown, “Strong Men”

In an alternate universe where poems had been read at every inauguration, it’s safe to assume that the list of poets would have been exclusively white for a very long time. I’d like to believe that a person of color would have been chosen as an inaugural poet long before Maya Angelou in 1993, but if I’m being honest, I also suspect that inaugural poetry’s color line would have endured longer than Major League Baseball’s.  

So I very much doubt that Sterling Brown would have been selected to read at an inauguration in 1933. But in an alternate universe where a black poet could have read at FDR’s first inauguration, Washington D.C. native Brown, whose best poems are deeply democratic and American, would have been a fantastic choice. 

“Strong Men'' in particular is a perfect poem for public performance, and not just because it sounds amazing. Brown celebrates the cross-generational resilience of African-Americans in the face of slavery, violence, and segregation, but he is also optimistic about the future: “Strong men keep a-comin’ on,/ Gittin’ stronger.” And surely, in a year as difficult as 1933, such a statement of optimism would have been a powerful thing.

1941: Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead”

“The Book of the Dead” is the final section of Rukeyser’s long poem of the same name, which appeared in 1938, and combines poetry, interviews, and documentary research to tell the story of the hundreds of workers who died of silicosis as a result of shoddy safety practices at a West Virginia mining operation. Of all the poems I’ve mentioned, this is probably the least likely ever to be allowed to be read at an official American political ceremony, not only because of its topic, but also because of Rukeyser’s politics, which were well to the left of Roosevelt.

But that said, the individual poem “The Book of the Dead,” which is a much more traditional lyric poem than most of the rest of the book, has long struck me as one of the great poems about what America is, and what it could be. Rukeyser writes the poem in Dante-echoing tercets, which is fitting for a book about workers descending into an industrial hell. But within that form Rukeyser crafts a sprawling Whitmanic travelogue through the American countryside. Indeed, much of the poem is very pretty, though Rukeyser avoids Whtiman’s tendency to float up from the soil to the ether, and instead challenges the reader to support the workers crushed by their nation’s quest for progress. Near the end, she implores us to “Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,/ to photograph and to extend the voice,/ to speak this meaning.” 

1957: Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them”

If I just describe what this poem is about, you’ll wonder why I chose it for such an august occasion. The speaker wanders through midtown Manhattan, checks out some construction workers, contemplates lunch, window shops, looks at billboards, thinks about movie stars, eats a burger, and remembers a few of his recently deceased friends (one of whom is Jackson Pollock). All of this unfolds over a couple pages of loose, chatty, enjambment-propelled free verse. O’Hara conveys the energy of a pleasant nothing of a day, but like all great art that alchemically captures something so ephemeral, it also feels poignant. Perhaps it feels especially poignant nowadays, when the pleasures of strolling aimlessly through a crowd are denied us.

Whatever else America is, it’s definitely Times Square and cheeseburgers and getting lost in the bustle. Inaugural poems needn’t all be stuffy; we’re not British, after all. And so we’ll let O’Hara, poet laureate of the everyday, take the hypothetical stage.

1965: Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass”

An inaugural poem for 1965 surely should have celebrated the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. Hayden’s poem about Douglass, which had first appeared in The Atlantic all the way back in 1947, packs celebration, prophecy, and challenge into a mere fourteen lines. Hayden imagines a day when freedom “is finally ours,” when it will be as instinctive as “brain matter, systole, diastole,/ reflex action,” and become something more than “the gaudy mumbo-jumbo of politicians.” When that day comes, we will finally be worthy of being from the same nation as Frederick Douglass, “this former slave, this Negro/ beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world/ where none is lonely, none hunted.” 

I should stop quoting it and you should just go read it. Recited at a presidential inauguration, Hayden’s poem would elevate the occasion rather than the other way around. 

1973: Jay Wright, “The Homecoming Singer”

It’s safe to say that no poet would ever be invited to Washington to “respond” to the President, but since this exercise is entirely speculative, I’m going to imagine Jay Wright reading at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Wright’s 1971 poem “The Homecoming Singer” is initially full of energy, as the speaker travels across a Nashville “livid with lights,/ as if the weight of all the people/ shooting down her arteries had inflamed them.” But the poem gets quieter and more contemplative until eventually concluding with the speaker in a dream where he hears a woman sing a sad, operatic song that “brings up the Carolina calls,/ the waterboy, the railroad cutter, the jailed,/ the condemned, all that had been forgotten/ on this night of homecomings, all/ that had been misplaced in those livid arteries.” 

In the middle of the Nixon era, Wright dreamt of a song for those who are actually silenced, actually forsaken; not a silent majority but a silenced reality. In all of its sadness and anger, Wright’s poem is also a meditation on what “coming home” could mean for those swept aside, or for the poem’s lonely speaker, or for a nation where displacement is a way of life. It is, in a sense, a poem about the realities that are hidden by traditions, which in a roundabout way would make it perfect for the occasion.

Super Bowl Poetry Prop Bets, from the EG Revue

538 reports that Vegas is taking bets on the poem Amanda Gorman is scheduled to read as part of the Super Bowl festivities. 

I'm not gonna lie: the idea of gambling on a poem about sports combines three of my six or seven favorite things, so I am intrigued. But the betting options on offer strike me as not all that interesting. For instance, I'm baffled that "neither" is not an option for which team name Gorman uses first. I would bet every penny of revenue generated by this blog on "neither."

So here, for your home amusement, are the EG Revue's wagering proposals for the Super Bowl poem. Note that I don't know how to balance odds correctly, as I am not an actual bookie, so the number are rough.

1. The first end-rhyme in the poem will be:

A. Masculine [last syllable of rhyme stressed; i.e. shade/wade] (-130)

B. Feminine [last syllable of rhyme unstressed; i.e. inherit/repair it] (+110)

C. There will be no end-rhyme (+1000)

2. Over/Under on usages of the word "field" (this includes "field" embedded in compound nouns, like "battlefield"):

A. Over 1.5 (-110)

B. Under 1.5 (-110)

3. Which of the following words will appear first in Gorman's poem:

A. Charge (+160)

B. Light (-150)

C. Brigade (+1000)

D. None of the Above (+120)

4. The primary denotative meaning of the first usage of the word "Montana" will be:

A. The state of Montana (+250)

B. NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana (+800)

C. Al Pacino's character from Scarface (+30,000)

D. The poem will not use the word "Montana" (-350)

5. Which will be longer:

A. The length of the poem, in seconds, with the timer starting when Gorman speaks the first word of the poem (+220)

B. The length of the first scoring drive of the game, in seconds of elapsed game clock, as recorded in official box score (-200)

The Age of Innocence Turns 100

Long, Long Ago, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The 2020’s are going to be a big decade for literary centennials. Over the next few years, hundredth anniversaries will be celebrated by stalwarts of the high school canon, epic modernist masterpieces, foundational African-American poetry, and essential feminist novels. Also Mein Kampf. It seems trite to point out that the literature, art, and culture of the 1920’s had an outsized impact on the century that followed, but get ready to hear that basic point repeated quite a bit in the not-too-distant future.

To my mind, the biggest literary centennial of 2020 belongs to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.[1] It is a fitting kickoff to a decade of big anniversaries, because Wharton’s novel is obsessed with the passage of time. Specifically, Wharton writes about the ways that an era can leave traces on the future even as the specific textures of the present are constantly erased. Time in The Age of Innocence is imagined variously as geological and ephemeral, as characters are weighed down by cumulative layers of tradition while the most important moments of their lives vanish in a glance.

Wharton also thinks about time in a much more obvious way: The Age of Innocence is a period piece. Wharton set her book roughly five decades in the past, and her rendition of the 1870’s is nostalgic, but also exasperated with the styles and strictures of New York high society. Modernity lurks implicitly around every corner of the book, as Wharton can’t resist the occasional knowing quip about impending changes in American life.

Like many a Gen X cinephile, I was introduced to Wharton’s novels through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. On its surface, this still seems like an incongruous pairing of director and text. But Scorsese at the time pointed out that the novel is filled with “brutality”[2]—it is about a rich, powerful family deciding how to address violations of its codes of behavior. Characters in the book surveil and maneuver behind one another’s backs, and one misspoken sentence can upend a character’s world. Perhaps the transgressor gets shipped to Europe rather than frozen in a shipping container, but the effect is nevertheless chilling.  

In this tense, mannered world, our main character Newland Archer is earnest, oblivious, and a bit of a dork. While his social circle goes to the opera primarily to gossip and be seen, Newland legitimately enjoys the theater. Most of the men in the book share a carefully calibrated omerta regarding one another’s philandering, but Newland idealistically daydreams about life with his bride-to-be May Welland. Even when he develops feelings for another woman—the Countess Ellen Ollenska—it mostly takes the form of an “emotional affair.” There’s a small moment in one dinner party scene where one of the other men in the novel, aware of Newland’s split affections, comments that neither May nor Ellen are particularly good looking. There are a few ways to read this, but one way to take it is that, whatever else you want to say about Newland, he is actually attracted to inner beauty.

And yet. Like most self-understood “nice guys,” Newland is more than a little entitled. Some of this is inevitable—he’s an absurdly rich white man in the nineteenth century whose job is to be his firm’s token attorney from a “good family.” It’s no wonder he’s surprised when the world doesn’t bend to his will. But he also seems to live so thoroughly in his own head that he has trouble empathizing with people. At multiple moments he expects Ellen to drop everything, even sick relatives, to spend time with him. With May, he assumes he’ll be able to transform a society girl with a penchant for horses and tennis into a serious student of poetry. Poor May tries her best—she reads Robert Browning, for God’s sake—but Newland finds her opinions so insipid that he ceases reading any poetry in her presence, lest she decide to ask him about it.

I’m making him sound worse than he is. He is always at least a little myopic, and the innocence mentioned in the title belongs more to him than any other character. But without that innocence, he might lose his genuine curiosity about the world, his aesthetic susceptibility, and his desire to live a life defined by real human connection. In a society of rules, codes, and narrow traditions, he wants to live authentically. His love for his family is deep, but there are moments where it seems that the only way he can be true to himself is to cast them aside. Wharton manages on more than one to occasion to make you root for infidelity in spite of the fact that the wronged spouse is a likable character. As she explores the twists of Newland’s story, Wharton is marvelously attuned to the ways that life can sometimes seem terrifyingly free, only for the shackles of fate to click shut a moment later.

Newland’s desire for freedom is constantly hemmed in by convention, and as such, there’s a good case to be made that the famous characters from other novels who most resemble him are women. The Age of Innocence is a riff on the adulterous love triangle novel, but Newland resembles Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina far more than he does any of the men in those books. Perhaps Wharton’s cleverest expression of male privilege is that Newland is allowed a happier ending than his predecessors.

And it really is one hell of an ending. I won’t spoil it, but the last chapter is a favorite of mine, and it is why I prefer The Age of Innocence to The House of Mirth, a novel which has an indelible protagonist, but also a boatload of third-act problems. The last chapter of The Age of Innocence contains one of the few paragraphs in any book that reliably makes me tear up every time I read it. After a life in which luck, family, and society have so often undermined Newland’s ability to determine his own path, Wharton presents him in the final pages with a choice that is entirely his to make.

The choice he makes tends to infuriate my students, though they sometimes talk themselves into it by the end of the class. It might not be the right ending for every romantic hero, but it’s the right ending for this one.

A hundred years later, The Age of Innocence remains easy to get into simply because Wharton herself was already looking backward when she wrote it. She finds the quaint habits of old New York as charmingly silly as we do, and as she wrote this novel she, like us, was living through a period in history when a story about a quaint, charming era must have seemed like a welcome respite from the present. Anyone old enough to remember the late-twentieth century has probably felt at least a momentary pang of nostalgia for it while living through the escalating calamities of the twenty-first, and in that, our perspective echoes Wharton’s. That said, the novel is also a reminder that nostalgia blinds us. In particular, the lives of many American women were almost certainly fuller and freer in 1920 than they had been in 1870, and Wharton shows quite powerfully that unchecked patriarchy could stifle the development of a man like Newland as well. And so, ironically, the lesson of looking back on Wharton’s brilliant backward glance is that we shouldn’t let ourselves get too seduced by the pleasures of looking back.

---

[1] I’m hardly alone in this belief—there’s been lots of good writing in various places on the hundredth anniversary of the novel, including Wharton scholar Sarah Blackwood’s introduction to Penguin’s newest edition of the novel.

[2] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-age-of-innocence-1993

Carl Phillips' "Archery": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 3

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Jenny Molberg pointed out that the July/August issue of Poetry magazine has quite a few excellent poems (also excellent, btw, is Molberg’s new poetry collection Refusal, which is one of the best things I’ve read in 2020—in fact, go read this poem now). Jenny specifically praised Rosebud Ben-Oni’s excellent “Poet Wrestling with Blood Falling Silent,” which is one of the first published poems I’ve read that deals with the Covid epidemic. There’s plenty of other good stuff in the issue as well, including a poem I particularly liked by Erika Meitner that uses the image of a gilded mammoth skeleton near the receding coastline of Miami as the centerpiece of a reflection on climate change and geological time.

The piece I keep coming back to, however, is a poem by Carl Phillips called “Archery”.[1] It is at least in part a love poem, and like so many love poems it is also (and perhaps “really”) about time. Like so many poems about time it is pulled gravitationally toward thinking about death, and like so many poems about death it considers one of the oldest impulses of lyric poetry, which is to imagine aesthetic perfection or permanence as an alternative to or end-run around mortality. That description, though, makes “Archery” sound like a rehash of a Renaissance sensibility, which it definitely is not—the speaker is too skeptical for that, too aware that a poem can’t be at the center of the universe any more than we can, even if a poem can be at the center of one or a few of our own little moments.  

The first stanza (of six) is the only one that actually talks about archery, most notably in this sentence: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.” This jumps out for a few reasons, not the least being that it is surrounded by sentences that are filled with commas and parentheses. The sentence with the arrow, though, flies directly to its conclusion as it describes a breathtaking moment when some well-calculated action is performed “perfectly,” and thus seems to freeze time.[2] Then the next line mentions a lover, which implicitly brings into the poem the idea of cupid’s arrow (another version of breath taken, time frozen). And so the idea of momentary perfection is introduced, and will eventually be echoed near the end of the poem.

But the center of the poem is far more vexed. In the second stanza time becomes murky, as a new lover mumbles in half-sleep things you would expect to hear from an old lover. Phillips echoes this murkiness in a shift from past tense (“meant”) to present continuous (“he’s mumbling”) even though we are (I think) in the same scene with the same two people in those sentences. Then, the third and fourth stanzas widen to a more panoramic scope:

     All those hours spent trying to outstare the distance

of what the days must come to,

and pretending a choice to it: now the shadow-script

that willows and hazel trees mark the barn’s western

face with; now the wind-rippled field, like a lesser version—tamer,

tameable—of the sea, for movement (same infinite

pattern, and variation; randomness and intention; release;

restraint—that kind of movement) ...

If Phillips stopped at the colon (after “choice to it”), this would still be incredible stuff. Those three lines powerfully evoke the effort it takes to ignore how little control we have over the end-points of our lives’ trajectories. But the next five lines are the heart of the poem. They give concrete imagery to Phillips’ decidedly metaphysical concerns, yet they resist becoming some symbol that lets us pin down the poem. One way to read everything after the colon is that the two clauses beginning with “now” are the options in the choice we pretend to have—specifically, a choice between shadows on a barn or ripples in a field, which is arguably no choice at all. But perhaps there is some solace that the choice we pretend is between two beautiful things, and arguably even two meaningful things (one is “shadow-script,” the other might have “intention”), though again, that meaning might be something we project. Does nature signify, or do we see what we want? Phillips doesn’t posit an answer so much as he makes us experience the question, in lines that catch and sway like the oceanic field he describes.

There is, though, another way to read those two “now” clauses—not  that they are options (“on the one hand this, on the other that”), but that they are two points in a temporal sequence (“now it is this, and now it is that”). In this reading, the speaker is elaborating not the choice we pretend, but the “distance” we try to “outstare.” And if these lines are about trajectory across a distance (as so much of the poem has been), the trajectory leads from something relatively human-scaled—the barn and the trees—and out into the field that moves in “infinite/ pattern, and variation.”[3] The field is more “tameable” than the sea, but at the extreme edges of our vision, it becomes pure motion, an abstract suggestion of nature’s grandeur, or even just the grandeur of physics.

In any event, the poem pulls back to shorter, tighter phrasing after this. Phillips is loose with grammar throughout the poem—there are more fragments in it than complete sentences—but that is especially true in the last two stanzas, where the clipped statements read as the speaker trying to get things under control after the sweep of the fourth stanza. This is apparent in the statement “To sing a song/ of water, and not drown in it,” which perhaps nods to the way that the poem itself sunk into abstraction right after it mentioned the sea.

But if you can sing of the sea and not drown, you’re onto something: “Some calling that/ a good trick. And some calling it// mastery.” Phillips undermines the authority of the word “mastery” a bit by putting it right after a rather abrupt stanza break—certainly he’s setting the word apart to make us think about it. But these lines are also reminiscent of the lines about archery from the start of the poem. One “good trick” is a perfectly aimed arrow, and another is the trick of the artist able to dabble in danger, to think hard about darkness, but then execute an escape and not dwell there permanently.

The last three lines of the poem execute their own elegant escape, and they’re beautiful in a way that I’m reluctant to tread upon with some reading of what they’re “about,” though surely they’re about love, death, and a dream of renewal. I’m struck by the degree to which archery and the image of an arrow color my thinking all the way through the poem, even though Phillips only actually uses the word “arrow” once, in the very first line. Yet it is a powerfully resonant image across the text, able to call to mind love’s arrow, but also time’s arrow, and perhaps even the arrows of Artemis, goddess of the moon, “mute arbitress of tides.” Which is to say you can make archery represent time moving forward, or time cycling, as you see fit. But ultimately, Phillips uses the image of the archer to reflect upon the probably naive, possibly pyrrhic effort a poet makes to create a focused, time-pausing moment amidst the sway and muddle of life: the trick of propelling some piercing phrase along a perfect line.  

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[1] I suppose I should note, in the interest of full disclosure and humblebragging, that Phillips was one of my professors at Wash U twenty-plus years ago when I was a floppy-haired English major. He was an excellent teacher, but completely apart from that, his poems always floored me. Judging by his wikipedia page full of awards, I’m hardly alone in that judgment.

[2] The line breaks here are impressive, and impressively varied: ending on “arrow” propels; ending on “for a moment” urges a pause in tension with the enjambment; ending on “kind of” builds tension via interruption.

[3] There’s a comparison to be made here to Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” which also moves in a trajectory from the human-scale to something much larger. Indeed, one hesitation I have about my reading of these lines in “Archery” is that I worry I’m just superimposing Dickinson over Phillips.