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Attendance & Reverence: Being and Learning with Wayne Dodd
An essay by David Swerdlow
Reprinted from the Fall 2002 Ohioana Quarterly
All the pages inside me are blank.
I have not seen strawberries in a high meadow
For how may seasons?
Now the chipmunks are thin
And restless in their sleep.
Friend, what I need today is one clear message
I can send
And receive.
This poem, titled “Letter,” hangs above my desk. Wayne Dodd, the man
who served as my dissertation director, wrote the poem and gave me this
framed copy as a housewarming gift. In the twelve years since completing
the book of poems that served as my dissertation, I’ve glanced up hundreds
of times to see Wayne’s poem, to see and hear its presence on the white wall.
I’ve tried to listen for it - tried to meet it on its way.
It causes me to remember my five years in graduate school at Ohio
University. During that time, Wayne and I met in his office nearly every
week to talk about a poem I was writing, about poetry in general, or simply
to talk. The two overstuffed yellow chairs, in which we sat, did not face one
another directly. We could, because of our arrangement, comfortably look
up into an open space to think or wonder. When Wayne looked toward me,
it was with the power of someone who had learned to dismiss the clutter
that infiltrates most academic thinking. Unlike the voices of some of my
professors, both the competent and the incompetent, Wayne’s voice seemed
to come from a place deep in his body and could fill a room with its intensity.
We rarely spoke of how a poem could be “fixed,” but turned our
attention to how a poem moved, how it came into itself, or, sadly, how it
had come out of itself. Perhaps because Wayne was completely himself, it
seemed natural to speak religiously of these matters. Sometimes, his arms
would raise and turn in a poem’s rhythm.
* * * * *
I liked to see and hear Wayne walking down the hall. It didn’t happen
very often, but when it did I was delighted. Wayne never seemed to be
merely commuting from place to place. With a brisk pace, boots keeping the
beat, he kept his head up as he walked the middle of the hall. He was
looking around, the way a horse can look as it runs an open field. I don’t
recall any of my other professors moving this way. Mostly, I remember their
shoulders brushing the wall as they moved from their offices to the main
office, where the copy machine awaited their arrivals, sweet papers in their
hands, something on their clicking, intricate minds.
Most images of Wayne that I recall are not of him in his office, or anywhere
else in the building where the English Department was housed. Rather, they
are of him at his home on Peach Ridge, one of the many ridges that surround
the town of Athens, Ohio. With his wife Joyce, most any day, he could be
found taking care of his
home and its eleven acres
of woods. I would go there
for instruction. Once I
helped them transplant a
spruce tree of considerable
size. We worked for hours
getting at the taproot,
freeing it from the ground,
bringing it to the surface
intact, without injury.
Though he was about sixty
years old at the time,
Wayne’s 5’6” frame had
maintained the spring and
strength he had developed
in his earlier days as a
lightweight boxer. His
exaggerated groan, when
we were forced to cut
through some of the tree’s
smaller, densely matted
hair roots, was both comic
and tender. He could not
live in this world, I’m sure,
without giving voice to his
affection for it.
* * * * *
His poetry testifies to that love. This is the end to his “Love Poem as
Meditation”:
Or perhaps
on waking, we hear a note
plain through the morning
air. Bird, we say, or Beauty,
or utter a certain name
we recognize each other
by. The moon, let’s say,
holds then the sky
in perfect fullness. Every
word the mouth shapes is someone,
somewhere.
That uttered words are beings-in-the-world, in the Heideggerian sense, is
an astonishing fact in and of Wayne’s life. In the year that saw the publication
of the book, Sometimes Music Rises (University of Georgia Press, 1986),
from which this poem comes, he spoke often to me about the relationship
between poetry and Being, poetry as Being, as existence. Those thoughts are
available in his book Toward the End of the Century: Essays into Poetry (University
of Iowa Press, 1992), which I read often, and in which he writes:
Poems are never merely. That is to say, they have being rather than
meaning. They are their own uses. They are not resolved, they are
entered. Poems are where, physically, our own bodies and the
bodies of words join in reality’s pulse and movement. They are
where, physically and spiritually, our existence is entered, in its
mysterious fullness. Poetry is not a saying: it is a becoming. It is
never an errand, at the service of some other need or value: it is a
journey into. It is existence entered.
To enter into existence’s pulse, Wayne hears its music, and, listening
carefully to the above lines of poetry, one may take the same musical journey.
Stepping down the page as crisp thought, these lines break as alertness
embodied. I love the way the poem hears itself, a tension between the
deliberate and associational motion of the mind: “air. Bird, we say, or Beauty,/
or utter a certain name/we recognize each other/by. The moon, let’s say . . . .”
The alliteration and assonance of this passage cannot be described as contrived
or, even, rehearsed. And I’d hate to speak of it in merely technical
terms. Rather, for example, we might say that Bird finds itself carried forward
into Beauty, which remembers the y sound of say, and both the b and the
y sounds are musical parents of by’s sound, its prepositional complexity. Here,
music arrives as a consequence of attentiveness, at an existential level, to the
texture of language and world, to the moon and the utterance of its fullness.
* * * * *
About a quarter-mile into the woods, Wayne has built a one-room cabin
where he goes to write his poems. He rarely speaks of it. Occasionally, Joyce
will say over the phone, “He’s in the cabin.” In the cabin, Wayne practices
his art as faithfully as possible. When I think about Wayne - writing - I
often remember a passage I love in an essay by the poet Denise Levertov:
All the thinking that I do about poetry leads me back, always, to
Reverence for Life as the ground for poetic activity; because it
seems the ground for Attention . . . . Without Attention - to the
world outside, to the voices inside us - what poems could possibly
come into existence? Attention is the exercise of Reverence for the
“other forms of life that want to live.” The progression seems clear
to me: from Reverence for Life to Attention to Life, from Attention
to Life to a highly developed Seeing and Hearing, from Seeing
and Hearing (faculties almost indistinguishable for the poet) to the
Discovery and Revelation of Form, from Form to Song. (From
“Origin of a Poem” in Claims for Poetry. Donald Hall, ed. Ann
Arbor: U of MI Press, 1988, 263-4)
When I first understood that Wayne’s going to the cabin was a daily
ritual, not an academic holiday, I was awed. Once, I remember thinking that
Wayne was not unlike my grandfather who walked to temple every morning
and every evening of his
life. How could anyone
be that devout, I
wondered. And how
could they not be?
Devotion, it should be
said, never asserts itself
wholly without grief,
without the inevitably of
loss. Wayne knew this
early in his career, and
that knowledge has
carried forward. In the
poem “Essay in Three
Parts: On Poetry,” from
his first full-length collection of poems, The Names You Gave It (Louisiana State
University Press, 1980), he meditates on devotion, loss, and poetry:
Let this be enough. Try not to think of anything
else. Say now the names you gave it
then - the people, the places. And it will be
true. It will have a language you
are at the center of. It will touch all
the places you have been to.
And the saying of it will sound like music,
as sidewalks pale in the moonlight
like something forgotten,
over and over.
Prayerful instructions to the poet at work, this early meditation feels what
the German poet Hölderlin knew to be his and all poets’ great task: being in
the trace of the fugitive gods. In that venture, loss, language and existence in
their most primitive, pure forms become the central braid in Wayne’s epistemological
and ontological venture. To be in the presence of that elemental
perspective made me suspect of any lesser approach to poetry inspired by
what I came to understand as ancillary or secondary concerns. I was on the
lookout for it in my work, and in the voices of others who might affect me.
* * * * *
It is a sad fact that many well-credentialed writers in the poetry industry
never achieve the devotion or the reverence and attention necessary for the
creation of an authentically voiced poem. Many settle for skillfully manipulated
beliefs that form a lesser music. Many of these same writers are not
even on a path toward reverence.
One writer, who seemed governed by academic and poetic trends,
directed another workshop I took while writing my dissertation. One
evening, she gave the class an assignment to write a “political poem.” Born
out of her frustration with the group’s tendency to write poems more
interested in landscape and domestic relations than in the plight of the
oppressed, this assignment demonstrated her willingness to belittle both the
poetic and the political by directing them like traffic. I refused to do the
assignment. Instead, intent on the small ambition of enraging this instructor,
I brought in William Carlos Williams’s famous poem about the red
wheelbarrow as an example of what could be a political poem. She was
predictably livid, accusing me of undermining her assignment, which, of
course, was also her authority. I argued that Williams’ poem was, in fact,
political because the poem’s elegant work allows us to see the wheelbarrow,
to revere it, and to feel it as it stands for itself and for the oft-overlooked
proletariat upon whom, in the poem’s language, “so much depends.” I think
I was right. Still, I was falling into the trap she was setting without even
knowing it. I was trying to make poetry work for me, to make a language I
could use instead of language that opened me to its use. Our faces grew
flushed with superficial blood as we argued, and I left that night with a
sense of having nothing at my core.
The next day I wandered over to
Wayne’s office, hoping to be
restored not by direct treatment,
but by the ambiance of integrity.
He wasn’t there. Soon after that, I
was looking out my window,
hoping for some other revelation,
but nothing came. Another of
Wayne’s poems from Sometimes
Music Rises was with me then,
though, and I remember reading it
many times. Titled “Tongues,” this
longish poem opens with the
following stanzas:
A certain reticence to speak
out into silence may honor,
it is true, the fluent
mysteries that carve
spaces for us out of air.
But of itself such
niceness is nothing more
than finches, carnelian and
slight
against the morning snow.
For a while a small inclarity
of light may any moment
winter
the mind to stillness,
inevitably someone
in the room will start
to colonize the air
with thoughts as swerveless
as bombers. Ships
will declare
to the circumambient waters
of the earth some bold
plan, and entire nations
of people will strike out
along a line as confident as
red sails in the sunset.
meanwhile the tonguetied
brain courses and
courses the narrow channels
of imagination.
The poem’s critique of imagination and language’s misuses cannot be
missed. It not only takes aim at politicians, would-be conquerors and their
speechwriters who can utter such phrases as “the axis of evil,” but also those
straight-ahead writers who, in the guise of poetry, believe they speak the
truth before they have truly listened for it and its complex sound. What
amazes me more about this poem, however, is how its knowledge comes
forth as bodily understanding, as music - and not as discourse, itself
colonizing “the air/with thoughts as swerveless//as bombers.” In 1986, many
young writers, including me, were trying to find a way to permit the
intellect back into our poetry that had, for so long, resisted it entirely - and
not “almost successfully” as the modernist writer Wallace Stevens had so
wisely instructed. We were wanting a way to make statements, political or
otherwise. In Wayne’s poems, such as “Tongues,” I found language on a
curve of flight not as mere intellect, but as saturated mindfulness.
* * * * *
When I first met Wayne as a student in his graduate workshop, he must
have been beginning to work on the poems that would make his third book,
Echoes of the Unspoken (University of Georgia Press, 1990). It is a book of such
great intensity - so astonishingly close to the source of its energy - that Wayne
could not help but breathe it as he lived and taught. I remember being awed
by the man, yet, somehow, comfortable with him. Later, I remember realizing
that in Wayne’s presence I always felt I was before a person working on a
poem at that precise moment. Because this book’s poems have such a concentrated
existence, because they apprehend existence at point blank, they resist
being excerpted - as, perhaps, should all poetry. Given that disclaimer, here is
a brief passage from the poem “O.K. Let’s Suppose the Mind”:
into charts into photographs: see
there it is
the out there
in circles, in grids
all around us the bare earth
makes a sound
we can’t hear: the roar
the hum the scream
It was, and continues to be, the world “out there,” the world “we can’t
hear: the roar” that Wayne wants us to be alert to, to attend to, to be desirous
of. I found that call irresistible. Still do. How to do that, though - near
Wayne, but on my own - became my question, one that continues to call
me, one that I listen for, one that I try to meet on its way, with gratitude.
 David Swerdlow teaches
English and creative writing at Westminster College.
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