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Reviewed By: |
The Soul's House
The Buried Houses by David Mason. Story Line Press, 1991 The Country I Remember by David Mason. Story Line Press, 1996 The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry by David Mason. Story Line Press, 2000 Arrivals by David Mason. Story Line Press, 2004 Ludlow by David Mason. Red Hen Press, 2007 |
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Since his
earliest collection, The Buried Houses (1991), David Mason has been
making poetry out of his family roots. Mason grew up in Washington state
but his ancestors were from Colorado, which is where Mason lives and
teaches now. His latest book, the verse novel Ludlow (2007), is a
dramatization of the Colorado coal miners’ strike in 1913–14 and the
massacre of strikers and their family members by the coal company’s
hired thugs and the state militia. As Mason explains in the afterword to
that book, the idea for writing the Ludlow story had been in him since he
was a boy visiting the area with his family: “What excited me about this
story was not any political agenda, but the elements that have always
obsessed me—family, landscape, immigration, language.” Or, as he puts
it in a narrator’s aside in Ludlow: “this story hooks into
desires / I’ve always felt to know the land I come from.”
Mason’s writing often suggests something along the lines of what
Wendell Berry has called “accepting a place properly human in the world
as it is.” As Berry has said, place is a form the way a sonnet is a
form; we work within the limits it sets, and if we are lucky we give it
new life and receive a bit of new life in return. Mason’s collection Arrivals
(2004) opens with a version of Cavafy’s poem “The City,” which is
about the uselessness and futility of the geographical cure for chronic
dissatisfaction: “Now that you have decided you are through / with this
place, you’ve wrecked your life everywhere.” And as Mason has his
character Maggie Gresham say in his long poem “The Country I Remember”
(1996), “I saw how fragile love is, / how easy to uproot from my place,
/ how hard to plant again.”
Mason has done pretty much the opposite of what Maggie describes
here, re-creating his life and art by an ever-deepening return to places
and their stories, including the stories he himself invents about them. In
The Buried Houses, Mason was still finding his legs; the technique
is sometimes awkward or indecisive and subject matter often has more to do
with a sense of displacement—the displacement of ex-pats in
Greece, where Mason has spent considerable time and which comes up often
in his writing, or that of the author himself, in his poems about the
breakup of his first marriage: “It’s strange what we can make
ourselves believe. / Memory saves; recrimination uses / every twisted
syllable of the past” (“Disclosure”). He came into his own as a poet
with his second collection, The Country I Remember, three-quarters
of which is taken up with the long title poem, a first-person narrative
told in twelve alternating sections by two of Mason’s ancestors: Lt.
John Mitchell, who fought in the Civil War, and Mitchell’s daughter
Maggie Grisham. Mitchell, who tells his story retrospectively, in 1918,
recounts his experience at the Battle of Chickamauga and his role in Union
soldiers’ escape from Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Maggie Gresham
narrates her own story in 1956, when she is old. She describes how she
eventually escaped from being an unmarried daughter who took care of her
aging father and mother, running off and settling in L.A. While Mitchell
was a man of action, Maggie is introspective and reads poetry. Her words
about herself could apply to Mason: I learned that I must first talk to myself, retelling stories, muttering a few remembered lines of verse, to make the earth substantial
and to bring the sunlight back. She
is “here to be a voice.” It seems that writing this long poem was
concurrent with Mason’s discovery of his roots and the consummation of
his apprenticeship as a poet.
Anyone who knows Mason’s writing knows that he loves Greece, its
language and culture. Modern Greek poets such as Seferis and Cavafy have
been important to him (witness the Cavafy poem quoted above). And
there have been many poems set in Greece, especially in Buried Houses
and Arrivals. It is interesting that Mason, whose family roots are
so central to his work, should have this other side—a wanderlust, even a
bit of the pull toward the uprooted ex-pat’s existence. Apparently, for
Mason, Greece represents a different kind of rootedness. Greece in
Mason’s poems is both Epicurean and Homeric; it is an image of intense
sensual presence and unreflective vitality—part of his drive to “feel
more alive in [his] own skin,” as he puts it in Ludlow. One of
the main characters in Ludlow, Louis Tikas, is from Crete, and his
Greekness and that of others in the miners’ camp is a main feature of
the story. Mason expresses his attachment to Greece through Tikas: he missed the sea, the tears of an eternity of men, the peacefulness of swimming under water. He missed the smell of grass in autumn rain, the sacks of dripping goat cheese hung from rafters, the words like thálassa and ouranós that
felt to him much weightier than English. The
poem in Arrivals called “Kalamitsi,” which is about Mason’s
return to where he lived in Greece several years earlier, avoids
nostalgia—”nothing but private memories, after all”; “it wasn’t
the loss of time or friends that moved me / but the small survivals I was
here to mark,” such as a plank bench under a cypress, “only a small
plank bench, but quite enough”—enough, because needs were few and
simple. Mason’s Greece is intense but unadorned, like the lives of his
ancestors in the western United States.
Greece for Mason is also a source of the ancient tradition of the
craft of poetry. In a poem called “The Session,” in Arrivals,
the poet responds to a psychotherapist’s advice to socialize more and
write less: I almost founder on his solid fears, until uplifted by the undertow of
voices whispering for three thousand years. Mason’s
verse technique is Anglo-American; his aesthetic, like his image of
Greece, eschews abstraction. He doesn’t dazzle with technical
flamboyance—his language is a steady surface, energetic as all poetry
must be, but contained. Like his mentor Robert Frost, Mason’s style is
characterized by artful plainness; he brings meter to life with American
speech rhythms. He is not often perfunctory in his approach to form but he
is conscious of participating in an ancient tradition of prosody. Unlike
many poets associated with the New Formalists (surely an outdated label by
now), he does not write many sonnets, villanelles, or other fixed forms.
His staple is iambic pentameter, but he also uses shorter metrical lines
or (rarely) free verse. Mason’s poetry essays and reviews, some of which
have been collected in The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry
(2000), offer judicious, jargon-free takes on the art and its
practitioners, usually American poets but sometimes also English or Greek.
Mason doesn’t assume literary postures: he is inquiring and searching,
serious about the questions he asks, intellectually austere, conscientious
toward the language and the craft. It is easy, then, to trust the
integrity of his vision.
Another recurrent theme in Mason, related to the theme of
uprootedness and roots, is memory and duration. Clearly events and people
do not last very long, but memory and memorials—stories, in short—do
last, at least relatively. Many of his poems reenact the fluid interplay
between perception of the present and the ghosts of the past: “The
furnace blows a warming reverie / where I drop anchor somewhere in the
woods / with a girl I haven’t seen for twenty years.” But there is the
awareness that memory’s prolongation of time and experience is itself
ephemeral, vaporous: “The years slow down and look about for shelter /
far from forests and far from summer ponds: / the mind ghosting out in a
shoal of stars” (“The Pond”). And as Maggie Gresham puts it in
“The Country I Remember”: The lamplit face upon the swaying glass was all that I would ever know of truth. When Mama snuffed the lamp, my other face retreated
to the land of passing shadows. Ironically,
memory is more knowable than the knower. The self disappears in mutable
phenomena. It seems likely that Mason’s concern with memory and
rootedness—his sense of urgency about it—is related to or intensified
by the trauma of losing his older brother to a climbing accident when the
brother was only twenty-eight years old. As Mason wrote in “Small
Elegies,” in Buried Houses: “My hands still felt, from earlier
that day, / the tension of my brother’s weight on the rope.”
Mason has written many poems, as well as a prose memoir that was
published in The Hudson Review, about his brother’s death. Mason
and his other brother and his father returned to the scene of the oldest
brother’s death and cremation that had taken place a year earlier: Yet after the year of weather tiny pieces of my brother’s bone still lay in clefts of rock. We found them under our hands, cupping them once again in wonder at
what the giants left us. (“A Motion We Cannot See”) With
an experience such as this, it would be impossible not to be aware that
memory and roots themselves are ultimately transient (“time flows down
the mountain like the ice, / a motion we cannot see, / though it bears our
blood almost forever”). As Wordsworth says in “Essays on Epitaphs,”
we erect tombs to prolong memory of the dead, even as we are aware that
the tombs themselves won’t last. Mason’s trauma of losing his brother
heightened his sense of the impermanence of things, and of the
phantasmagoric quality of memory that preserves the dead and the fleeting:
“A second nature rises from the past, / just like the first in that it
will not last, / and grips you as it slips free of your grasp” (“The
Picketwire”). And the memory of that life is too subtle and protean to
be captured in language: I live in a world too full of elegies, and find no compensation in these lines, nor can they map where memory begins its
restoration under winter skies. (“Letter to No Address”)
Mason quotes Darwin in the epigraph to his poem “New Zealand
Letter”: “Nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the
level of the crust of the earth.” The poem depicts how “this
metamorphic world” travels like the traveler himself, so that even in
moving across the earth’s surface, in this age of mass tourism, where
“the spillage of spoiled empires everywhere / rumbles ashore like the
redundant surf,” in our frenetic movement we might forget that the earth
itself is also moving under our very feet. Earth is “the sort of matter
that endures / by changing.” Consequently, as Mason says in the poem
“The Dream of Arrival,” we are “always preparing to arrive.” In
this poem, which alludes to Cavafy’s poem on journeying to Ithaca, the
speaker describes his journey back to Ithaca, archetypal place of return,
only to realize when he does arrive that he “did not know the land.” Always preparing to arrive, I suffer the deaths of many friends, survive, surprised to be alive. My
story’s told, but never ends Mason
intentionally omits the closing punctuation; as in Cavafy’s poem,
inconclusiveness is the nature of the journey.
So, Mason pays attention to what lasts beyond the individual’s
life span but acknowledges that even on a larger scale forms mutate and
pass on. The Country I Remember has a poem about a river in
Colorado near which his ancestors settled (the same river appears also in Ludlow):
“My people’s time beside the Purgatoire / was brief—far briefer than
our scattering.” Even long-term settlements were once founded by people
who had wandered there. In this case, the Spaniards who had been at the
location before the coal mines attracted other settlers are now remembered
only by the river’s name, El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio,
the river itself being an image of time’s inexorable flow: No one recollects where the Spaniards died. A rescue party found their armored bones, thought their souls estranged from the love of God; so the river was named and flowed on past, bearing no knowledge of its wandering spirits, cupped
to baptize newborns in the valley. This
theme has been present throughout Mason’s work: “Much is known by now
about the buried houses, / less about the people who uncovered them”
(“The Buried Houses”); “The past I would recapture is a land / whose
contours changed the further I moved out” (“Letter to No Address”).
Mutability is obviously a perennial, inevitable topic of poetry;
the response to it is one of the defining characteristics of a poet. I
have already mentioned that part of Mason’s response has been to pay
attention to the continuity of mnemonic forms: memory of the bonds
between people, including their stories; memory of nature; memory of
languages and poetic traditions. Yet all these forms are subject to loss
and forgetting—a fact that for Mason has been especially palpable since
losing his brother. From this it is a short hop to identifying with those
who know no permanence, whose lives are haunted by a sense of not
belonging anywhere. Many of Mason’s poems identify with people who are
dispossessed in one way or another. As he writes of a beggar in India:
“What roll of the dice made me the healthy one / placing a rupee on his
left arm’s stump?” (“A Beggar of Chennai”). And another poem in Arrivals—a
ballade the craft of which is worthy of Mason’s former teacher Anthony
Hecht—identifies with tramps, schizophrenics, and other outsiders: A Dunkin’ Donuts denizen, Phil diagrammed conspiracies in which the country had a plan, contrived by top authorities, to generate our mass malaise. When I would ask him why or how, suspicion flickered in his eyes. I
don’t know where he’s living now. (“Ballade at 3 a.m.”) As
these quotations demonstrate, Mason does not choose these subjects to show
off how compassionate he is or because of middle-class guilt. He uses the
craft to give these experiences a name and a voice.
There is every indication, in any case, that these subjects
actually choose him. I have already mentioned that Mason was drawn
to the Ludlow story since he was young. The two main characters of Ludlow—which,
by the way, is a thoroughly engrossing read from start to finish—are
Louis Tikas and Luisa Mole, he an immigrant from Crete, she the daughter
of a Welshman and a Mexican woman. Tikas is a historical figure, killed by
state militia during the Ludlow massacre; Luisa, an orphan from age twelve
who is taken on by a middle-class family as a helper and nurse, is
Mason’s invention. Mason has written novels and has worked in film
production, and his sense of character development shows it: both these
characters make a vivid impression. Such outsiders and immigrants inhabit
Mason’s poetry like personas for his own sense of loss: How long, O Lord, how long must
one man journey till he finds his home? And: Their lives are part of my life’s inventory; my role grows smaller when I glimpse the whole. Today I pocketed a lump of coal. These
are the facts, but facts are not the story.
This drive to use poetry to explore human lives on the margins, or
simply people without a voice, has been in Mason’s work since the start.
In The Buried Houses, for instance, there is a poem about a
disillusioned middle-aged divorcée from Chicago who lives in Greece and
is a tour guide for American students. The poem depicts her loneliness in
contrast to the students’ hopefulness and camaraderie: “Why should
they want to know / one’s hair grays, one’s husband leaves, one’s
tongue / turns to stone?” (“The Nightingales of Andritsena”). She is
uprooted, dissociated from the traumas of her past: “I do not think I
have let myself be young. / I am a woman whose father committed suicide /
in Chicago in 1939.” “The Collector’s Tale,” an eight-page
narrative poem in Arrivals, is about Foley, an American Indian
drunk and seller of Indian artifacts. The story is told by another
collector who has known Foley for just two months. Foley shows up one
night at the narrator’s home, drunk, having just bludgeoned to death
(with a souvenir buffalo bone) another dealer named Rasher. He tells how
he hated Rasher for being a white guy who sold phony Indian artifacts: “The
stuff is fucking new, / pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.”
Rasher had shown Foley a horrific item: “a black man’s head with
eyes sewn shut— / . . . a metal ashtray planted in the skull”—
and Foley became so enraged over it he went to “some Yuppie bar /
that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon,” where he got riled
up even more. Mason’s method here is typical of his narratives: out of
Foley’s speech he creates a convincing character, backed up with
naturalistic description. Here is Foley from the outside: I still see him, round as a medicine ball with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks. I see him searching through two empty packs and casting them aside despite my scowl, opening a third, lighting up—he careens into
my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks. These
rhymed stanzas of the narrator are interspersed with Foley’s blank-verse
speech, a strategy that works well for this poem since it sets off
Foley’s speech as a drunken rant.
Mason has included longer narrative poems in all his volumes to
date (Ludlow is one long narrative poem, with no lyrics). His
penchant for this genre was evident in The Buried Houses, which
includes four narrative poems of three pages or more: “The Nightingales
of Andritsena,” mentioned above; “The Next Place,” which is about a
traveling charlatan who sells bogus remedies and beauty lotions and is run
out of town; “Spooning,” about a small-town old man, who relates his
memory of a girl who became a famous actress; and “Blackened Peaches,”
in which a western pioneer woman tells her story of hardship and loss,
including the death of her husband. These all show clear signs of
Frost’s influence—Mason has stated that Frost is his favorite American
poet. Narrative poems after this first book, while still indebted to
Frost, are more clearly Mason’s own.
Interestingly, all of Mason’s narratives are in the first person,
until Ludlow, which is told in the third person. His lyrical
voice—and Mason at his best is as accomplished at lyric as he is at
narrative—is often melancholic, nostalgic even, qualities that contrast
or clash with the storyteller’s extroversion that should be evident from
the quotations I have already given. Like Frost or Robert Browning, Mason
often discovers what he most wants to say by being someone other than
himself. I have already stated that the sense of personal loss is a
central force in Mason’s poetry. The restrained (yet deeply felt) tone
of much of his lyrical poetry may be a way to balance the pull of
nostalgia. In the longer poems, through which Mason enters the lives of
others, he escapes this.
Mason and other recent poets have written in defense of the verse
narrative; the afterword of Ludlow has something to say on the
matter: “Narrative verse is not inherently harder to read than narrative
prose. In the right hands, verse actually has more clarity, drive and
economy than prose, and it can offer literary pleasures of a sort
unavailable in other genres.” It seems obvious that there are advantages
to stories in verse—to me the wonder is that this would have ever come
into question. Maybe the paucity of verse narrative in recent decades has
had something to do with people no longer reading aloud to each other. As
every poetry lover knows, poetry isn’t static print: it is a vibrating
column of air. Our lungs resuscitate the words on the page. I read Ludlow
aloud to myself, the better to enjoy the interplay of number and measure
with the literal story: From the naked bed of a Denver whore named Alice—weazened and tubercular— Ilias Spantidakis moved back in to his American skin and his new name, from leading man in Greek to character in English who confused the tenses, lost the proper names for abstract principles and
left some articles to faith. Mason
tells his story in a naturalistic manner (there are remarkably few
metaphors or similes in his narrative poems)—with the blend of American
speech rhythms and blank verse that he has mastered. In the process, he
demonstrates why verse is still an excellent medium for telling stories.
His role in resurrecting the genre is his most distinguished achievement
to date, and Ludlow is the peak of that achievement.
This is not to say that long verse narratives don’t have their
own aesthetic pitfalls. Mason himself points out in the afterword to Ludlow
that such poems tend to sag, that they cannot be keyed to the steady
intensity, verbal or emotional or both, of lyrical poems: “The truth is
that it falters on occasion, just as prose novels have their peaks and
valleys. Rising and falling language, like rising and falling action, is
part of the experience of the longer work.” One risk of long blank-verse
narrative is that the author is likely to resort unintentionally to
metrical filler; for example, “he felt the air / darker than any burial,
gone dead / like air unfit for healthy men to breathe.” How can air be
“like air” unless there is an extra metrical foot to fill in? And,
sometimes, line breaks or stanza breaks in Ludlow are arbitrary,
not really serving the function of setting off verse lineation against
syntax: “I took a bullet for the cause. We lost // because they sent
militia with their guards”; or “By the time he drove / across the
rusty railroad tracks at Ludlow // everyone he saw was soaked to the
skin.” Is the stanza (Ludlow is divided into eight-line stanzas)
really a meaningful container when it leaks like this?
Drama is supposed to present conflict arising from a clash of
characters, paradoxes of characters’ temperaments; it should define the
conflict also by emotional mood, and show how conflict is resolved. Mason
does this well. In Ludlow, the gradual transition from the initial
introduction of the main characters; to the establishment of their various
story threads; to the slow buildup of tension between the coal company and
the Baldwin-Flats security agency on one hand and the strikers on the
other—while the individual stories, especially those of Tikas and Luisa,
continue to spin out against the larger background—all of this is deftly
and unobtrusively handled. The reader is drawn into the collective story
of the miners’ strike and the personal destinies of the characters,
convinced of the connections.
Ludlow combines historical fact with personal destiny in a
way only fiction can do. Mason’s identification with and interest in
outsiders and immigrants, which I discussed earlier, has born its best
fruit so far in the creation of Ludlow’s two main characters,
Louis Tikas and Luisa Mole (Mason perhaps chose her name to echo
“Louis,” so that she represents the invisible face of his more public
existence). Tikas’s real name was Ilias Spantidakis. He is an immigrant
from Crete. He lived through a civil war there. He is intelligent, knows
how to read, and works at a coffee shop in Trinidad, Colorado, reading the
newspaper to customers. He is in America for economic reasons, not because
he really wants to be. Only when he visits the prostitutes does he feel
truly alive; otherwise he is “uncertain of his skin.” The narrator of
Ludlow, who occasionally steps out of the story to reflect, offers: What does it mean—nation of immigrants? What are the accents, fables, voices of roads, the tall tales told by the smallest desert plants? Even the wind in the barbed wire goads me into making lines, fencing my vagrant thought. A story is the language of desire. A journey home is never what it ought to be. A
land of broken glass. Of gunfire.
Luisa Mole’s story runs parallel to Tikas’s—they meet only
toward the end and in passing, close to the time the massacre takes place.
Her father, John Mole, has died in a mining explosion, and her mother died
before that. We follow Luisa as she goes to live with the Reeds, a
middle-class family with five children she helps care for. As already
mentioned, long narrative poems rise and fall in intensity. Mason has good
timing; he knows how to heighten the intensity when it’s called for,
such as this scene, when Luisa Mole is newly adjusting to having lost her
parents. She is living with a miner and his wife until she is taken in by
the Reeds: Out of the rockfolds, the scrub, the deep sky, out of the junipers that loosed the dark when the sun crept over the mountaintops, out of the mouths and tipples of the mines where men still worked, inquest or no inquest, where coke ovens glowed a stone inferno, out of the train that wailed to Trinidad and back to Denver with its load of news came the sound that was not a sound, a muted scratching
for life. At
the end of Ludlow, the author fantasizes over what might have
become of Luisa, imagining her still alive in the 1970s, sitting alone in
a coffee shop, not really belonging anywhere. She never had her own
family, remaining la huerfana, the orphan, to the end: “She could
give and give / and make of giving something of a home . . . . / all she
knew for certain she was good at ever.” What gives people a sense of belonging? In Luisa’s case, though it wasn’t enough in the end, it had to do with feeling needed. Friendship, family, community—all three are ways to it. There is also tradition (that bugbear of pluralistic society) including the language tradition one uses for everyday communication. I. A. Richards called poetry a “house of the soul”; people who are drawn to poetry live in it. At midcareer, Mason is still building his particular house—narrative rooms with lyrical windows. It’s a house built on the family plot, with side doors to Greece, and—unlike a lot of the poetry-houses on offer these days—it’s livable. |
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