Paper Boats Collected Poems of Daniel Christopher Rifenburgh
Introduction by Richard Wilbur
Lazy Bayou Press 2021
Houston TX
166 pp
Reviewing is a perilous occupation. Reading a book in private, we can think anything we want, and most books are read in private.
Beyond selling books, the review is a reading of a book in public, for the public—and if the review is honest it should behave as if it were a reading in private. This is dangerous.
A private reading is an amateur reading—and amateurs tend to get into fights.
How much public does a book need? If a creed seeks converts, its book dies unless it is public.
The mother reads a book aloud to her child, but once the child can read, reading is mostly a private thing.
No particular book of poetry is read very much, anymore—and the poems which are read, Poe, Shakespeare, Rumi, are no longer reviewed.
Students have no choice but to be a public for a book in school—a book presumably there because it has merit.
The amateur occupation of reviewing books outside the university is a lost art.
The deck is stacked. Poetry is either in the university or professionally sold.
Reviewing is either puff, or not done at all.
When the amateur reviewer meets a book with fine poems, like Paper Boats, Collected Poems by Daniel Christopher Rifenburgh, the only thing to do is quote one before there’s any trouble:
“Skip Tracer” pg. 72:
It’s 11 a.m. and I know what
He’s doing.
He was late at a singles bar
Last night. The women were
Depressing, but the band was loud.
Anyway, the gin and tonic,
And, this morning, the head full of cotton.
At 9 he called my mother’s house
In Florida, pretending to be a friend.
At 10, my last employer, that sod
Who, firing me, earnestly
Recommended God.
At 10:30, the electric company
Which powers that town I last saw
As amber lights in my rear-view mirror.
He’s on his tenth cigarette now,
Punching his thousandth button.
He’s not finding me.
I am in this poem,
Praying a prayer for him,
That he finds himself,
That we all find ourselves,
And can stand it.
Daniel Rifenburgh is hiding in his poem.
This is the most honored tradition in lyric poetry.
Petrarch did it rather obviously—you get the poet/poem together. Some object to this as “self-obsessed” or “shallow” but this objection misses the point. First, as a reader, you get more bang for your buck—you get both the verse and the source.
This is a Renaissance trope. You see it in Leonardo da Vinci—he says, “trust your eyes, not hearsay.” Post-renaissance, we don’t trust authority—we trust the experience of the amateur inventor/poet/scientist.
Shakespeare added to the Dante/Petrarch tradition with a certain slyness, where Shakespeare the man hides in his more complex and puzzling Sonnets.
Rifenburgh is doing this in the poem just quoted.
Rifenburgh’s Collected Poems is full of touchstones; many involve, to some degree, other poets. The third poem in the book is “after Rilke.” Poets are part of nearly every poem. I won’t bother to list them. There is no doubt from the poems Rifenburgh has lived a life, but in his poems a scholarly joy prevails.
The poet belongs in the company of great poets—this is what the scholar-poet (of which Rifenburgh is clearly one) understands; there is an island, and that “stacked deck” we mentioned before (you are either a university poet with a slight chance of fame, or not) drives the ambitious poet towards that island of poets—Neruda, Coulette, Villon, Vallejo, Poe, Milosz hiding in those cliffs in the sea.
What makes the first poem in the book, “To My Opposite Number In Samarkind,” delightful as a letter to a friend, is precisely what pulls it from poetry—the desultory, opinionated, friendly, meandering treasure trove of familiarity and inside jokes hinders what matters: the stand-alone unity of the poetic.
I describe a crossroads which is difficult to comprehend: I will spend hours with you on a walk, or over dinner, but this same quality in your poem—I refuse you. This is difficult to grasp, but it describes one of the most important poetic principles.
The poem “Hawthorne,” (pg. 37) features one of the loveliest and most delicate couplets we have ever had the fortune to read:
To seal the lid,
Lightly, with a period.
Richard Wilbur, in his introduction, mentions the beauty found in the third poem of the volume, “Turf Tract.”
Wilbur:
The poem moves fluently, and with great accuracy of tone, through a sequence of moods (including defensive mockery, irony, slangy idealism, disgust, rueful mimicry), and ends with a poignant lyric vision in which the “fleet hooves” of horses embody the beauty, striving and brevity of life.
They say poems on poems shouldn’t be written.
I say rather these are the best poems, and “Turf Tract” is an example—it uses the last word Shelley wrote, and this holds the whole poem together.
The second poem in the book, “Sestina: My Father’s Will,” has a dramatic clarity as it puts the poet’s father on stage. It is a sestina. No one can resist a sestina. Except me. Nothing prevents the sestina from reading like the plainest prose. An overrated form—even should all the fathers in the world protest.
“LSD & All” pg 18 looks back at the 60s, and this sequence of impressions is fleetingly wonderful:
The musicians die, one by one,
Like birds departing
For new latitudes of the sun.
Those times passed, too, for time
Has such a passing will.
Like great, slow millwheels
The decades roll.
Where the six o’clock chronicles
Appear on the screen and unscroll,
It’s a cooler eye is cast now
And that music
Lies deep under the hill.
The poem also includes an anecdote of the poet getting drafted and blowing up a used car on a tank range; masculine details inhabit Rifenburgh’s poems, which have not only a scholarly air but a sense of adventure and male camaraderie. I occasionally wish the poet would trust his simple, pure, poetic instinct more, the power of which the solemn lines above strongly attest. Not that we can’t have anecdotes of blowing up a car on a tank range. Details are delightful and necessary. And certainly, as Wilbur points out, presenting different moods is something this poet does exceptionally well.
We find this very quality (a strong poetic voice) in his poem dedicated to Wilbur, called “Voice” on pg 33:
Today I am proud of all poets everywhere,
Such is the mix of memory, muscle and air.
For my money, the best poem of the book may be the one on page 60.
Donald Justice Before A Soft-Drink Vending Machine
He’s put his two quarters in the slot
And pressed a button,
Then another
But, nothing.
Again he presses them,
Muttering, putting some muscle
Behind the heel of his hand,
The ire rising in him, finding
Its level, faltering,
Spent finally in a last muted
Jab and last muted curse, the eyeglasses
Edging further along the bridge of his nose.
He’ll not kick the machine
Nor report to the office across campus
For a refund. Upstairs
The students will be reconvening
To their workshop,
Sheaves of sestinas
On the table, their own
And those of past masters before them.
For a moment he stands speechless
Before the looming, mechanical cheat,
Full in the glare of its red-blue lights, there
In the otherwise dark passageway.
The two vertical masses
Front each other, so,
Then the poet turns and heads off
Toward what he can hope to know.
This is a mysteriously great poem, and by mysteriously I mean that it happened right in front of Rifenburgh, we have no doubt, so it belongs self-evidently to life, not poetry—and yet it triumphs as a poem on so many levels that it seems like a gift bestowed either by a higher power or pure accident, and, either way, it makes a mockery of creativity, human will, and even poetry itself—which is the point, I think, increasing by duplication the greatness of the poem.
The befuddled act is lovingly described before the students enter (they, too, are putting something—sestinas—in a slot) and then we go back to the “dark passageway” of poet and machine in their slightly comic, banal, face-off. There is nothing heroic about modern poetry or its workshops, and yet the modern Donald Justice poem (of which Rifenburgh’s poem itself is a glorious example) has an unmistakable poignancy, precisely in the way it is not heroic, except in its quiet, unspoken resistance to the encroaching machine-future.
Sometimes the machine—technology—is preferable. In “Homage to Henri Coulette” (pg 74) we get this stanza:
Poet, they will hand you a shovel,
A gun, a broom
And think it a favor.
“On A Portrait of John Keats” (pg 96) is the next great poem in the book.
It ends:
If you could go
Into his listening,
You would.
After reading “The Dead” on pg. 122 we must come face to face with the fact we are reading an extraordinary poet.
The dead don’t care for us.
They grimace as we file past,
Regretting they were once tender toward us.
They won’t assist us with probating their wills,
Much less carrying their heavy coffins.
Their wax faces are a reproach,
As if we are doing something (what,
We don’t know) quite wrong.
The dead sail on the morning tide
For Elysium,
Tennis racquets in hand,
Accusing us from the deck rails,
Leaving worm-holes trailing through
The pulp of our days, vacancies
We cannot fill with wine,
Nor with remorse,
And, from this shore,
One cannot even get at them
To slap them for their insolence.
No, it’s like this:
The dead repose long leagues from us.
Among golden isles and gentled hills,
Insufferably poised,
Marvelously self-contained,
And impossible to kill.
This poem has as much sublime wit as any poem ever written; with its light touch it mourns, laughs, destroys and resurrects.
Donald Justice (well, a poem of his) makes another appearance in “An Ice Cream Truck Goes By.” (pg 136) Poignancy and wit abound, perhaps a little too self-consciously this time, but it’s a strong poem.
“After Justice” is a rather long elegy for Justice and pulls out all the stops:
The moon tires of being the moon and becomes
A woman in shape of a guitar, a woman
Strumming goodbye at a bus stop, goodbye to the moon
There’s more than enough feeling in the poem, but it seems to miss the mark, because of excess of feeling, perhaps. The poem occurs on pg 154 and by now Rifenburgh has set the bar very high, if one has read the book straight through.
The casual yet poignant Donald Justice deserves the perfect elegy—somewhat casual, somewhat poignant. But there he is, angry, suppressing his anger, standing in front of that vending machine…
As for Rifenburgh, I’ll give Anthony Hecht the penultimate word, who spoke truthfully, I am sure, when he wrote:
“Mr. Rifenburgh’s work deserves wider notice, particularly when so much of scant merit is greeted with acclaim.”
Daniel Ribenburgh is a poet’s poet.
He talks to the great poets.
And is one of them.