Subject: Reply to "Reply to Comment (very late) on J.M. Smith's review of Dewdney"

March 13, 2005

Dear Danforth Review:

I wish time permitted a detailed dismantling of Smith's original review. It is, after all, a classic of its kind: the gumming and nibbling of a poet by a pedagogue in full spate. I had intended only to highlight the worth of his critical response by one well-chosen example, not to substitute a review of my own, but he is calling aloud for more, and I shall oblige him.

Here is the passage that he challenges me to defend, along with his comments (the Times Roman type below is a quotation of Dewdney, the rest is Smith):

A cephalopod washes up on a grey Silurian
beach. There are no land plants and little
oxygen in the atmosphere. On the sandy
riverbanks pebbles of edible beige
limestone are frosted with fossil crinoids.
The sand granular orange from ant
excavations sliding, drying in the sun.

The lazy non-parallelism of the second sentence dismays: “There are no land plants and little / oxygen in the atmosphere.” The sand is “granular orange” but it does not have these qualities because of the ant excavations, we can presume. The ants have caused the granules to slide and dry in the sun. The writing, from sentence to sentence fragment, is just not very careful or accurate.

The critical issue, it seemed (and still seems) to me, is precision and power, not grammatical correctness.

What is left, above, is a vain attempt to grapple with literal meaning. And he's not even close, so that appeals at this point to notions of "precision" and "power" come a little late to save him.

Let me begin, then, with that literal meaning, and perhaps I can underline a point or two about "precision" along the way. Anyone who has spent time in the country can bring to mind those little hills produced by ants in fields and along roadways. They often appear somewhat lighter than the surrounding soil because they are composed of grains of sand. This precise observation here becomes two lines of poetry: Dewdney notes the piles of granular orange sand that come from the excavation of ants, sand that is "sliding, drying in the sun." Here we have another very precise observation, for, as the sand dries, it does indeed "slide," grains moving in tiny showers as the piles dry out. Smith simply misreads the lines in question.

But now to his challenge: 

I’d be extremely interested to hear what you think is good about the long passage from which you chose that one sentence. I wrote that it reads like the prose in a low-grade museum display, and then I pointed out the qualities that made it seem that way to me.

I dislike words like "good" in serious criticism, but I let myself in for it by using "ruggedly," so I'll let that one go. Instead, while Smith is mired in the literal and (still, despite his protestations) the grammatical, I would emphasize the sheer power of suggestion in Dewdney's lines.

Dewdney is fascinated with limestone, a "slow oracular fountain of compressed millennia" as he puts it elsewhere, and the past that it contains. His work mimics that compression: he conveys, in a very few words, the presence of an alien world millions of years ago, but this is our world, this past is here and now. A nautiloid washes up on an ancient beach; by flowing rivers today, you can pick up fossil crinoids "frosted" on pebbles of "edible beige limestone." Ants are busy excavating. The sun--the very sun that shone on that cephalopod--shines now on their labours.

There is nothing new, of course, about compressing time in poetry. The trick is to do it well. Dewdney does something in these lines akin to what Basho achieves in his suggestive haiku:

Old pond.
Frog jumps
in--
Water sound.

There are lesser infelicities in the passage too: what, for instance, is the relation between 'humid' and 'cobalt'? Her face is 'vigilant' against it ­ this implies the touch of wind on skin. 'Humid' instead leans toward the element 'cobalt' as if to melt it.

Good grief. Has the man never experienced a summer storm, the deep blue (cobalt) darkening of the sky, the warmth, the humidity? He murders to dissect. Dewdney deploys adjectives, not to describe something (mere versifiers are often impaled upon their adjectives) but to create something, in this case the feeling and presence of a summer storm. Indeed, his rapid-fire style succeeds brilliantly in immersing the reader in the lush atmosphere of creation--for those who allow it to build, rather than fuss about which adjective goes with which.

In closing, I am pleased that Smith has withdrawn the word "lazy." Perhaps he will do the same, this time, with "supererogatory." That was a bit much.

Sincerely,
John Baglow