“All writing is stylistic extravagance, no matter how simple the writing might initially appear to be.” That simple, extravagant sentence appeared a little over a decade ago in “My Ulysses,” an essay by the poet and literary critic James Longenbach, and I have not forgotten it since. Longenbach was a professor at the University of Rochester from 1985 until his death in 2022. Alongside his courses on poetry and creative writing, he taught an undergraduate seminar on Ulysses. He realized fairly quickly that in order to make James Joyce’s novel “available to young and often inexperienced readers,” he needed to articulate his own “most basic notions about writing.” Drawing on his understanding of how poems make meaning by turning against their own best discoveries, Longenbach focuses in his essay less on the inner and outer lives of the Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Bloom’s wife Molly and more on the elaborate verbal confection that is Ulysses.

His argument is that Joyce’s novel makes itself strange through the painstaking reformulation of what is plain, which is constant and impossible to ignore. The realm of language is one of sound, stress, rhythm, pattern and repetition, and with those resources a poet can also conjure vibrant worlds that seem real even though there is nothing natural or inevitable about them. While in daily life we may speak strange words with stubborn sounds that are for the most part practical and clear, there’s something uneasy about that resolution. A life without poems or novels made from strange words and stubborn sounds would be a life “without the possibility of being mistaken,” Longenbach stressed. It “would not just be a life without the possibility of freedom; it would not be recognizable as human life.”

Writing that is extravagant can sound spare: “Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else” (James Joyce). Writing that is spare can sound extravagant: “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (Emily Dickinson). Were eight successive one-syllable words ever more enchanting and strange? Lines that speak to you today, that convey selfhood at its most powerful and most tenuous—“All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born” (Yeats); “Half thought thought otherwise / loveless and sleepless the sea / Where you are where I would be / Half thought thought otherwise / Loveless and sleepless the sea” (Susan Howe)—might sound placid tomorrow.

“We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony,” wrote Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. He was thinking of how coming to know another person is a continuous process of surprise, transition and adjustment. I knew Longenbach for more than three decades, first as his student and then as his editor and friend, and I am still discovering peonies in his poems where I thought there would be peacocks. For Longenbach, Proust’s visceral sense of the incremental passage of time could have been a description of lyric poetry: how during the process of writing or reading a poem, the logical and the arbitrary can seem to converge, coloring each other, changing each other in unforeseen ways. It is “foreign to my thought, Firmament to Fin,” Dickinson told her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson after he had suggested that she postpone publication of her poems until they had been purged of unruly rhythms and rhymes. Lyric poetry, which always threatens to be unruly or restrained, offers us a way to feel intimate with what we do not comprehend. To remember or to look at one thing is to think of another; to write one word is to transition to another. We are in two places at once, and in that moment the fruitful tension between flawed words and stubborn sounds is a linguistic achievement and a mysterious power. Or then something else, thinking taken to distraction, small talk shared over toast and tea.

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“Change is Louise Glück’s highest value,” Longenbach wrote 26 years ago in an ambitious review of Vita Nova, Glück’s eighth book of poems. Its title was an allusion not only to Dante’s essay about courtly love but also to the new creative direction Glück had taken after a failed marriage. “Throughout her career,” Longenbach explains, “Glück has often shown how the future runs on rails that are laid down not only in childhood but in lives preceding our own.” She had been entranced by what she called an “inflexible Platonism,” by mythic archetypes and seemingly immutable patterns of experience. Yet the title of the new volume hinted at more than a shedding of old habits. In Vita Nova, Glück realized that “imagining the future is contingent upon the act of reimagining—rather than rejecting—the past,” Longenbach stressed. Because her book “does not represent a ‘swearing off’ of the past,” Glück “accepts the notion that truly meaningful change must inevitably be partial change—complicit, incomplete.” The leaf you turn over is mottled with compost.

Glück’s newfound commitment to change not only avoided an ideal of purity but also quelled “a fear of irrefutable memory”—of the likelihood that, as had often been the case in her work, “we are permitted to look at the world only once.” Having come to accept that the past is never over or certain, Glück writes within a constant sense of adjustment to memory and the present moment. The movement of her poems “feels end-stopped and manifold rather than end-stopped and oppositional,” Longenbach explained. Although many of the poems have the same title—“Vita Nova”—none is identical; each seeks new discoveries without pursuing a telos or snapping shut. The stuff of the poem is in motion. Change is its ethos as well as its story: “Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.” So much depends on that hanging “yet.” Tenderly it springs the next line into spring.

Change was Longenbach’s highest value too. Threshold, his first volume of poems, published in 1998, made this clear. The title signaled a fascination with exploring boundaries and passageways, those moments when one feels “the mooring of starting out,” to borrow a phrase of John Ashbery. In the book’s first poem, Longenbach admits to being “on the lookout / For the bone, the skeleton half buried / In leaves,” with “the face / Disheveled and no stranger than my own.” What impressed was his use of gentle iambics to convey crisp observations about pain, risk and fear. In “The Grace of a Witch,” James the schoolboy and some friends encounter a young woman whose wrist had been etched with the name of a lover. The boys see in her something from central casting—“In a movie she’d have been the Nazi wife / Who overwhelms the beautiful French soldier”—but the cliché and the boys’ naivete are exposed in the concluding lines: “We asked her at the swings—it baffled me— / If she would scrape the scar away. She said, / I’d need a razor. Can you get me one?” Not only is the woman challenging the boys, but the boy who became a poet is also challenging himself. In retrospect, it’s clear that in the Vita Nova review Longenbach was explaining to himself not only what he had been trying to realize in Threshold but also that change is viscerally painful and hard to comprehend.

In Longenbach’s next two volumes, Fleet River (2003) and Draft of a Letter (2007), his art is more delicate and severe. Unlike “The Grace of a Witch,” poems do not neatly snap shut, nor are change or stalled transformations reduced to something like the boys’ bewilderment. Austere statements and phrases are tempered by agile line breaks—“First rule: no one / Is speaking. The second is / Follow the sound”—or wry humor: “If you say the word death / In heaven, / Nobody understands.” On an earthly journey imbued with spiritual significance, Longenbach asks if it is possible to fall in love with the world repeatedly, as if it were always for the first time. If the self is changed during the journey, it must account for that with changed language: never the same way twice. Otherwise, to feel always at home in language and the world “is to have eradicated the desire for infinitude,” and that would induce stasis. Deprivation is not only a challenge but also a muse.

What Longenbach’s poems ask of a reader is the curiosity and patience to weigh unresolved tensions. Here are the opening stanzas of “The Gift,” from Draft of a Letter:

Sparrows at the feeder.
Rain in the leaves.

From the deepest darkness to
The lesser I emerged with the words

I don’t believe

Immediately in my mouth.
I didn’t speak.

Here are the concluding stanzas:

For twenty years I lived in the present.
Then, in a single night,
I became a shade.

Books, paintings
On the wall,
Words in my mouth but no

Memory, no need.
I listened

To the sparrows.
Happiness without reason.
Yellow leaves.

Why did the speaker not believe the words that remained unspoken? What happened during those twenty years? How did the speaker become a shade? Despite the narrative gaps, the poem feels complete—located, concrete, precise—thanks to its tone of unruffled control. The syntax is perspicuous, the diction precise. “The Gift” encourages us to live in the time in which we think and breathe, when we are everyday bundles of accident, clarity, will and incoherence. The poem seems to have gone nowhere, circling back to the sparrows with which it began. Yet it wants us to feel the incomprehensible distance between what we once were and what we have become. Often “we expect to be the master of the poem we read,” Longenbach writes in The Virtues of Poetry. He then changes direction, stressing that mystery “is a far more human condition than mastery.” The reason is that “mystery, which depends on clarity, is the opposite of confusion.”

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As a poet and a critic, Longenbach was drawn to Kenneth Burke’s notion of “a questioning art, still cluttered with the merest conveniences of thinking, a highly fluctuant thing often turning against itself and its own best discoveries.” Burke’s idea isn’t that every poem must negate itself or its predecessor. Rather, a questioning art avoids settling into the stocks and bonds of set beliefs; it is alive to thinking without having the appearance of thought. No book of Longenbach’s turns harder against its predecessor than The Iron Key (2010). In Draft of a Letter, the language is distilled, charged, often koanlike. In The Iron Key it is prosaic and often flat. Not anti-poetic but unpoetic. Both kinds of language appear in “Knowledge,” the book’s first poem:

Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.

 How the sun brings day by spreading light across the sky,
How night covers the earth in darkness
To reveal the stars, the planets

 In their courses fixed
For eternity—

Here, what’s left of the lost book On Knowledge ends.

Where was I born?
Where was I when my mother fell?
When Gail died?

Convinced
Of the gods’ existence that
These wonders were their handiwork—

New Jersey.
Asleep.
Asleep.

With its blend of lyric utterance and narrative fragment, the poem sounds unexplained yet weirdly specific. In many poems in Draft of a Letter there are cascades of enjambed lines; in “Knowledge” and elsewhere in The Iron Key there are often successive lines that end with a full stop, almost like a catalogue. In “Knowledge” the three successive questions aren’t immediately answered; when the answers come, they are specific yet unresolved. Longenbach once said that for the reader, a poem “is these little black marks on the page.” In “Knowledge” his arrangement of those marks into words, lines and stanzas is his means of conveying the meaning and pleasure that might be found in detours of syntax and opaque allusions. Who is Gail? “Knowledge” finds consolation in unknowingness, in vicissitudes of doubt.

No less unassuming is the prose poem “Archipelago,” which begins: “A plain of calcareous mud, covered by the sea at high water to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, but divided by an intricate network of narrow channels from which the sea never retires.” The languid tone of the sentence’s last three words reinforces the poem’s mood. But what is this archipelago, and where? “To feel the eruption of wonder convincingly, we need to feel an equally convincing lack of wonder,” Longenbach writes in The Resistance to Poetry. Sometimes we need to have the familiar made strange, again and again. In “Archipelago” the eruption occurs in the fourth section, which begins, “Nothing on the facade of San Marco is indigenous.” Abruptly we learn that the anonymous plain from which the sea never retires is Venice, a city which Longenbach loved and returned to whenever possible. The flatness of the statement about San Marco is also its revelation: it explains nothing yet reawakens us to what Longenbach called “our pleasure in the unintelligibility of the world.” Like the city that rose from the calcareous mud, “Archipelago” seems unheralded. That mood is realized in many poems in The Iron Key through an endlessly reticulated, restrained arrival at something almost said. Longenbach is ringing changes on an idea of Elizabeth Bishop’s: “A constant process of adjustment is going on about the past—every ingredient dropped into it from the present must affect the whole.”

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“Which is more mysterious, more inexplicable, dying or staying alive?” This sentence appears in “The Harbor,” in Longenbach’s fifth volume of poems, Earthling (2017). The sentence is spare, calm and graceful, alive to the question it asks. Because of the repetition of “more,” there is a lilt of suspense and a slight pause before the concluding clause. Had it begun “Which is more mysterious and explicable,” it would have sounded like a quiz question rather than the existential query it is. It is brief, honest with itself, honest to whomever reads it.

The sentence is also a refusal of romance, and when read in context it is not at all the rhetorical question it sounds like in isolation. Here is the complete stanza in all its limpid clarity:

Which is more mysterious, more inexplicable, dying or staying alive?
Which makes more sense, each cell in your body
Servile, following orders,
Or a few now liberated not to care?

Longenbach has been diagnosed with cancer. His body is changing in ways that are threatening, and the physical stakes are obvious. For a poet who thinks that change is his highest value, the existential stakes are all too clear: “Often I’m asked if I’d return to where I came from, / Resume the life of the person I once was, / But the answer, any answer, / Implies a narrative / About the purpose of suffering.” In these lines from “The Harbor,” Longenbach does not sound like George Oppen—no poet does—but their manner embodies a quality of Oppen’s poetry that Longenbach honored: “a music of deference—an unwillingness to dominate the world by virtue of having understood it.” The enjambment of the first and second lines creates a heavy stress on the word “Servile,” an effect that compounds the word’s weighty first syllable. Together they make a music of restraint laden with a connotation about illness that is hard to ignore. Oppen would have thought it to be true poetry because Longenbach is testing his language in a way that also tests himself. Can he bear the weight of his diagnosis as steadfastly as the line does? Should he?

In “The Harbor” and elsewhere in Earthling, it is himself whom Longenbach continues to remake in his poems as his body is changed and tested by matter beyond his control. Here is how “The Harbor” concludes:

He might have wished for another season, longer or later, winter or summer,
It wouldn’t matter which.
Hadn’t he worked harder, harder than anyone?

The boats come in, the boats go out.
The docks are paved with starfish, which the fishermen discard.

Can there be any day but this?
Look, there is the sea, and there is the sky.

These lines are neither woeful nor naïve; they are not the terrible cry of their occasion. There is gravitas and lightness. There is parataxis—“The boats come in, the boats go out”—which Longenbach uses not infrequently in Earthling to create the feeling of a continuous present. The lines echo the opening of “The Harbor”—“Slowly the harbor fills with fishing boats”—yet the repetition signals not nostalgia but a love of beginnings. Buoyed by the imperative that begins the final line, “The Harbor” ends on a note of strange, unsentimental joy about the beautiful tenuousness of human life. Like other poems in Earthling, “The Harbor” suggests that Longenbach’s life is a series of self-transformations, of moments of loss, recuperation and discovery, but not a series that can be known exclusively from Earthling, just as the poems in Earthling cannot be understood exclusively as a consequence of Longenbach’s illness.

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Longenbach’s final work, Seafarer, published in July, is a collection of three books. The volume begins with Seafarer, the last book written, and ends with Earthling, the first written, with the ironically titled Forever in the middle. This is no standard collection. The volume’s chronological beginning is the end, the chronological end its beginning, a paradox that recalls not only Yeats’s notion of gyres, which represent the combination of opposites in a person, but also T.S. Eliot’s meditation on time and eternity in “Little Gidding”: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.”

Alongside the presence of these ghosts, in Earthling, Forever and Seafarer there is a refusal of romance, a poignant, comic wariness on Longenbach’s part about making more of his situation than what it is: “We all exist at the edge / Of the grave, yet I want to own / The neighbor’s cottage—mattress  / Tied to the car roof, / Children waving goodbye,” he writes in “Two and a Half Odes.” In a different vein, there are allusions to the account of the destruction of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamentations; to Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, with Ulysses wrapped in a shroud of fire for his ruse at Troy and longing to see more of the world (“until the sea closes over us again”); to the deaths of dear friends; to unforeseen political change in the United States: “I never thought I’d see this moment in my lifetime, says a woman who’d grown up in Mississippi: the legislature voted to change the state flag, removing the symbol of the Confederacy.” In Seafarer the book, Longenbach himself appears as two figures, the young boy James and the grown man Jim, and their respective rambles through a seaside town and literary history recall the wanderings of Leopold Bloom through Dublin and Clarissa Dalloway through London. Like them, James and Jim are shadowed by death, and during their odysseys they discover balm for their gloom while also encountering painful reminders of it.

What Longenbach once said of Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is also true of Seafarer, the book as well as the volume. Each series of poems is driven by or: “a doubleness prevails, driven itself by time, like life and death.” We think we have encountered permanence—heaven, peace, friendship, love—but we have not. Our lives are driven by repetition yet utterly unpredictable. It is because we live in time that things become different from themselves, that doubleness and change prevail—until we have no more time for bidding farewell. To not accept this fact, and the range of joy and sorrow it encompasses, is to court failure, which Longenbach depicts as a hectic mix of disorientation, restlessness and incoherence:

A boy was scaring away gulls
The old-fashioned way,
With a flintlock. Going off half-cocked,

A flash in the pan,
Lock, stock, and barrel!
The trigger was turned

To the half-cocked position, the flash-pan
Sprinkled with powder, the rest
Stuffed down the barrel.

Seagulls, terns, more gulls
Ripping the sown ground,
Tearing it, the water in sight—

Longenbach was fond of Cesare Pavese’s belief that “the source of poetry is an irrational mystery, never to be reasoned.” One mystery of this poem is the boy’s unpredictable, terrifying behavior—a trigger half-cocked—and a string of explosive clichés: “Going off half-cocked, / A flash in the pan, / Lock, stock, and barrel!” It seems that language alone is driving the lines. What makes them feel explosive and unsettling is the abrupt shift from the past tense—“A boy was scaring,” “The trigger was turned”—to the continuous present—“Seagulls, terns, more gulls / Ripping the sown ground, / Tearing it, the water in sight.”

Yet one thing does not tear itself apart: the poem. All of its narrative and sonic chaos occurs within a continuity of tone: the repetition of the word gull, the rhyming of “sown” and “ground,” the off-rhyme of “Tearing” and “water,” of “it” and “sight.” Vexation will not be the record of Longenbach’s being in the world. As for the boy with the flintlock, I see him as a distant relative of the gruesome figure whose appearance brings down the curtain on Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”: “There lurches past, his great eyes without thought / Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks, / That insolent fiend Robert Artisson / To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought / Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.” The boy and Artisson are menacing; both poems are wary of the verbal cacophony and disorder they embody. In their presence many ingenious lovely things are in danger of being gone.

Longenbach wrote often about Yeats, Eliot and Ezra Pound during his forty-year career as a scholar and critic, and his knowledge of their poetry and prose cautioned him against its psychological and symbolic excesses. (His final essay, “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World,” delivered as an online lecture in January 2022, is a spirited account of Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”) In Seafarer, Forever and Earthling Longenbach is thinking about his family, about illness; about art, the war in Ukraine, a global pandemic. Yet his poems are neither apocalyptic and self-pitying like parts of The Waste Land nor monumental and megalomaniacal like stretches of The Cantos. Seafarer the volume is his epic, and its vivid portrayal of a range of experiences (a happy marriage, art, isolation, beauty, parenthood, various kinds of violence to the human body) calls to mind Yeats’s The Tower, though without that book’s sense of political disillusionment. Just as Longenbach’s collection is not an act of self-aggrandizement, neither is it a refusal of the art. If there are hovering ghosts, they are not only Yeats but also Oppen and Marianne Moore, whom John Ashbery once praised for giving us “the feeling that life is softly exploding around us, within easy reach.” Longenbach has joined them in heaving toward a heaven—a continuous present tense, which in his last book of prose he called “the lyric now.” He once described it as a “state of constant mutability [that] feels mythic, always happening, always having happened.” He knows that the lyric now cannot exist forever but for a poet’s longing, effort and art, which for a moment seeks to make it so.

The heaving can be hard, as in Longenbach’s translation of the first six lines of “Seafarer,” a long poem in Old English spoken by a man describing the hardships of life at sea. Recorded in the tenth-century Exeter Book, it is among the oldest poems in English:

Mæg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan,
siþas secgan, hu ic geswincdagum
earfoðhwile oft þrowade,

bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe,
gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela,
atol yþa gewealc—

I can tell a true story about myself,
Speak openly of my travels, how in long days
Often I’ve endured hardship,

Abided bitter heartbreak,
Known on shipboard the embrace of sorrow,
The terrible reach of waves.

The heaving can be lyric singularity—the poem is what it sings:

Right above our heads
New stars are born.
New words occur
To us, whole poems.

What’s a dipper? It’s
A kind of spoon.
Above our heads
New stars are born.

Why live by day? In a blaze
Of sunlight everything
Above us fades.
I’ll show you stars
Above your head.

In the book’s final poem, “Now Then,” the heaving is not tragedy but Shakespearean comedy.

Were these gardens spacious
As on the mainland, this
Would be the largest borough in the world.
Old people are sitting on benches,
Young people running—
What shall we do? Originally
Fishermen raised these houses
As the land allowed: together let’s sing
The prettiest marriage song—
Here they are! May Leto, guardian of children,
Provide beautiful children,
Aphrodite ensure you love each other
Equally, and Zeus give you riches.
Instill in each other more
Than affection, but remember
That the rooster lifts
His neck to sing, too. We’ll be
Here when the water says I’m here.

That is Jim, I thought.

For there he was.

 

Image credit: “Double and single paeony,” engraving by Hopwood, c. 1802, Wellcome Collection.