EDITORS' CHOICE

Jack Crawford. I Explode. New York: Helios Press, 2006.

Jack Crawford, a post-modern prophet of ecstatic and synesthetic joy, reminds us that we contain all and nothing. In I Explode, Crawford detonates and defuses imagination's time bomb: its impossible "music of silence," its unseen "moon in a black night," its proverbial ship passing in darkness ("Only the motion. Is it imaginary?"). In Crawford's mind the tree falls heard and unheard; his reality folds into unreality. As he writes in his characteristically bardic voice:

I hear the sounds of viewless caravans
Lost in whispers of invisible wind.
I pick my way in darkness through the sand.
("Camels in the Smoke")

Obviously, Crawford is not interested in landscape "measureless to man." He travels deserts where he can hear what he cannot hear and see what he cannot see, measure what he cannot measure—those caravans where sounds lost in whispers are perceived.

These paradoxes and ambiguities often arise from syntax. Notice, for example, the just-quoted phrase "Lost in whispers of invisible wind." What does it modify? Lost caravans? Lost sounds? Lost poets? Seemingly, all three as Crawford loses and finds his images. Similarly, in "There Is a Blue Wolf," Crawford poses an ontological problem in what at first seems a syntactical lapse:

Standing beside a window in a warm room dreaming
Of blue wolves in ice forests, a dog
Passed in the silence of the street.

The English teacher in us cries, "Dangling participle—it's the poet, you idiot, not the dog standing beside the window." However, as the poem continues, it becomes clear the dog is the poet is the dog in the poet's imagination is the child the poet was. The dog passes out of the speaker's brain, "out of me through blue doors" into the blue cold, the opposite direction of Ted Hughes' fox trailing a poem from outside his window into the poem. Nor does the dog in Crawford's poem leave tracks as Hughes's dog does, just an incompletely remembered coffin where

. . . She lay,
He did not know how they picked her dress—whose Fingers whispered among the coathangers.

Crawford can still hear the fingers, but what else? The memory yields the whisper, nothing more. When Crawford later in the poem repeats himself—

Standing beside a window in a warm room dreaming
Of blue wolves in ice forests, a dog
Passed in the silence of the street.—

we understand his dog is both there and not there, revealed and hidden. The poet / dog has "[p]assed across/Four glass panes, curtained with net." He has gone and come and gone again. Crawford seems peculiarly interested in this knowing of unknowing and conversely the unknowing of knowing.

Such explosive containment of paradox leads Crawford to subvert his form. His free verse often echoes Whitman in thought, rhythm and prophetic voice. When Crawford writes—

I explode! Fragments of me go in several directions. . . .
The door is dislocated. The ceiling slants.
I was never here before. I was always here.
I never left. I never arrived although
On my way. The shadow throws me down.
I throw my shadow against the sun.
("I Explode")—

we hear that old lover of paradox: "I contradict myself. Very well, I contradict myself." When Crawford writes—

In morning I shall wake from deep
Dreams of horses. They
Shall walk all day with me. Their grace,
Their incredible fact. Their long, bony face.
As much magic in the day as in the dark of sleep.
("There Is a Stamping of Horses")

we again hear Whitman and before him, the Psalmist. However, Crawford does not break his lines as Whitman did. Just as night cancels day, and sleep cancels waking, Crawford seems to deny Whitman in his line breaks while he affirms him in rhythm, voice and subject. Whitman would write:

I will open all the closets!
I will pull the house out on me!
I will begin!
I will remember!

Crawford writes:

I will open all the closets! I will
Pull the house out on me! I will
Begin! I will remember! I will turn knobs,
Smooth in the palm, go through doors into rooms . . .
("I Will Open All the Closets")

Crawford's ending I will's transmute Whitman's easy assumption of power into insistency on agency.

In the same manner Crawford affirms and denies Whitman as one of his influences, he also affirms and denies formal verse (especially that of Yeats and Blake), much as e. e. cummings did (that is, by using conventional iambic rhythms, rhymes and ballad stanzas but denying conventional stanzas breaks). In "I Am Terribly Helpless" Crawford echoes Blake's "Tyger, Tyger," but subverts the echo by delineation:

It happened. What makes the lid come down
To wink an eye? What muscles and how small,

Pinned to what bone, pull the dimple round?
Or tighten the brows between the eyes. And what
Are eyebrows planted in! In what anatomy?

Such subversion allows Crawford to try his hold on the strangeness of existence. Or as he says in "Sleepwalkers":

Years in their black
Curve bitter bright back.

What is not here is here. Light rushes into the black void. Sigmund Freud has a slightly different take on what is going on in Jack Crawford's work. He says in "Creative Writers and Daydreaming":

Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject's major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish is fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of a wish. What it thus creates is a daydream or fantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread that runs through them.

Freud's description works for most poems in the Romantic tradition from Wordsworth to Billy Collins and Mark Doty; it works for some of Crawford's poems, for example the memory of his daughter when the doorbell rings ("The Goddess of the Doorbell"). However, Crawford would probably not agree that Freud thoroughly understands. As he says in "There Is a Stamping of Horses":

But this is not intended as history, beginning
With origins, with the small, dawn horse,
But with the stamping of these horses here
In a pasture of earth, sod racked with heavy
Hoof-hard leg-stamping as they chew.

It is magnificent, rude
With wonder: the way the special skin
Folds back for the green mass, to press the crude
Stuff out. Falling in heavy lumps. I don't mean To be facetious. Brilliantly done.
To extrude—then its supple folds
Reassuming repose.

Absence always creates desire, and in Crawford, desire returns to rest. As Crawford writes of his daughter's red tricycle, so might we say of his poetry: "Its stillness hums."

Lois Marie Harrod