Lifting a collected poems is a satisfying exercise in promise, but one can feel weakened by its heft and queasy at the expectations of the reading challenge. There’s the chronology to consider; titles to remember; the separate poems in separate books; and the poems misremembered in one book actually rediscovered in a different book. And then, for me, there are the original books, cherished, recommended, and worn, well before the idea of a collected was a passing thought of a mid-career poet. There is also a brief season to consider for the review of a newly published collected during which the rush of other considerations might push it off the periodical page. What other writer impatiently lingers to replace the writer in question? This is what I asked in a recent review as the collected Larry Levis is now in the offing. And to ask the blunt question of time in the reputation of a poet: How many now know the fabulous poems of Stanley Plumly even these very few years after his death, except his most dedicated readers and friends?
Will the stage lights of Levis leave Plumly in the shadows? How many will ask themselves again, for this can be the irrationality of literary history and its wan fame, about his ex-wife, the poet Deborah Digges, and her sad end? When Plumly died in 2019, I soon remembered the sharp image of her in my car, she, almost late for a morning flight, toward which we drove, as I had been asked to give her a ride after a campus reading; and how, too, for this is also how memory unfolds, my late friend Penelope came to mind, who was close to Deborah from their Missouri days. And more, for these were my own Salt Lake City days, this: walking upstairs in the classroom building with Larry Levis during the break of an evening class for him to loan me the 1983 book Summer Celestial, with the second poem of the book still so striking as it concludes (“After Whistler”):
Even the painter’s mother is staring into the future,
as if her son could paint her back into her body.
I was lucky. In nineteen thirty-nine they still
believed blood was family. In a room real
with walls the color of buckwheat she would sit out
the afternoon dressed up, rocking me to sleep.
It would be Sunday, slow, no one else at home.
And I would wake that way, small in her small arms,
hers, in the calendar dark, my head against her heart.
That was the day I became a reader of Plumly, then ever after eager for any new poem, pleased to discover one in The Atlantic or The New Yorker or The American Poetry Review. He was not of the New York School nor of the Beats nor of the West Coast; he was not by any quick glance of any experimental school. He was not a Southerner; but as a man from a particular experience of plain-spoken poverty in his South-adjacent Ohio River Valley, coal country. His childhood was marked by a family having to make ends meet and by the conflict between his parents over the father’s alcoholism and simmering violence. These are themes for later, but in the Whistler poem we see the unabashed grip of the family upon the Plumly poem, shut here by the powerful emotional click of its conclusion, as if by Tom Stoppard’s trout upon a fly.
Plumly was born in 1939 and became an award-winning writer and a prominent professor of creative writing in one of the heydays of such programs. Six years after his death from cancer, David Baker and his co-editor Michael Collier, both highly accomplished poets and editors, guided to publication these collected, but not complete, poems. They worked with Plumly for many months, using his typed-up table of contents as a list of newest to oldest to strike through or add to what he thought best. As well as the masterful introductory essay by Baker — What Our Feelings Are Without Us — readers new to Plumly will want to read the Editors’ Note for clarifications of method, especially as a few new poems conclude the volume, even though the expressed method is newest poems first; oldest, last. From his ten extant books, from which I exclude in this count his New and Selected: 1970-2000, the editors gather 286 poems, plus nine new poems. The addition of new poems is always a risk, which the new Levis book accounts for with much success, although the recent Seamus Heaney book may not be as well-served where the sheer number of poems and notes muddy the record to create a somewhat unapproachable tome — an arguable point, but see Heather Treseler’s in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the instance of Plumly, the new poems may add up to a bit of tinkering, except for “Spots of Time,” which includes a revision of his powerful “Sonnet,” represented twenty-five pages later. Now the book’s first stanza regards the loneliness and isolation of children of an alcoholic parent, depicting young children left in a running car while the father drinks in a bar:
Like a light coastal rain, with its sadness,
the windshield spotted with it, wiped away,
the wipers like a metronome, an hour maybe,
my sister and I waiting in the truck, the motor
on to keep us company, and the dark coming on
at any minute. . . .
Emotion aside for a moment, one note on Plumly’s Collected — the individual books and dates of publication are not discrete units in the Contents but are identified in the end matters only. This textual strategy does not exactly erase the slim books that always seemed a good fit for a small pack or the zippered sleeve of a suitcase, but the lack of a comforting chronology can be disorienting at first. Many readers who know his work will want Plumly’s titles and their dates, a common way of placing ourselves in how we first came to know the work; here, however, the conception of the Collected is that of a new book, without, in this one way of intervening titles, the mitigation of parts.
Presciently, in one of Plumly’s poems (“Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems”), he uses the occasion of this odd but wonderful little “essay,” in the form of a poem, to observe the English poet’s “thirteen hundred and thirty-seven pages, including notes and index” to compare it to Larkin’s Collected, which is “a thousand fewer pages,” and then in a new section/stanza discusses the same in Lowell “with prose,/appendices, revisions, notes, et al . . . .” The poem moves on to a consideration of Delmore Schwartz, but first asks: “What,/precisely, does a poem weigh versus all the poems/ together?” A question we might ask about one book’s weight against its collected and here, again, on the question of who might be “remembered more or less, the worn-out book/of his body [which] lay unclaimed for days in his last hotel[.]” Obviously, the nature of fame, time, and a poet’s best work were on Plumly’s mind, as he signals previously in the Introduction to his extraordinary study: “I could not help, over these last years of writing Posthumous Keats, but think of my friend William Matthews, whose own posthumous life has barely begun.” Here he is, introducing his masterpiece work of prose on one of the Romantic greats, yet calls to the table the ghost of a late friend as if the work on Keats is an elegy for Matthews. True, in its way, Plumly would venture.
More than the emotions of his own family recollected in tranquility, as Plumly is as much a poet of the nineteenth-century and its profoundly important lyric influences on him, he is in fact an elegist of other artists, including Constable, Turner, Whistler and, especially, the heretofore Keats, whose life is monumentally remembered in his Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. This is one of four significant forays into prose the poet Plumly accomplishes and one which forces us to recognize him also as an important art historian. Found in this collected, too, is the lyric entitled “Posthumous Keats,” and which reimagines Keats’s friend Severn gathering flowers and walking beside his carriage on their way through Italy:
By the time they reach Campagna the wind
will be blowing, the kind that begins at sea.
Severn will have climbed back in, finally a
passenger, with one more handful to add
to what is already overwhelming.
We can list his poems about other writers and artists, not to mention actors and directors, which include “For Gerald Stern at Ninety-Two”; “With Deborah in Amherst” (a moving poem about his ex-wife); “We Insomniacs” (about Galway Kinnell); “Red Brick” (about Louis Kahn, the architect, and Plumly’s father, a bricklayer); “Paul Guest Addresses His Apple with a Stylus” (the writer made paraplegic from a childhood accident); “A Moment for Maurice Sendak”; “My Lawrence” (about D.H. Lawrence); “Meeting Mr. Cole” (about the poet Henri Cole’s father); “November 11, 1942 — November 12, 1997” (about William Matthews); “Kunitz Tending Roses” (about Stanley Kunitz, of course); and, additionally but not exhaustively, “The Paintings of George Tooker” and “For Seurat, 1859-1891.” Fellow poets will be attracted with guilty relish to the poems about other poets for their dishy reflections but, in a telling editorial judgment, will miss the quip ending of his Jack Gilbert poem, from Against Sunset, which has not been included in this collected and which, I am guessing, was dropped as there seemed a hint of meanness to it, uncharacteristic of the large heart of Plumly’s work. Additionally excluded is a poem about him “crashing” at Bill Matthews’s New York City apartment after a night of booze and poetry talk, where we miss the wonderful image of the two poets passing each other in the hallway in the night-gloom of an old apartment. Both poems are worth revisiting in the original book. Still, even more work is omitted as the earliest collections have fewer and fewer poems reprinted, especially in his second book Giraffe, 1974. Not uncommon in a collected that is winnowed closer to the grain of a selected, not every poem is a keeper over time.
We also notice, not unexpectedly, that the earliest books often have shorter lines and stanzas less densely textured than his later syntax will establish. In his introductory essay, David Baker is particularly strong in his analysis of Plumly’s metrical style:
As he measures the structure of a poem, Plumly also measures
the structure of a line, sometimes in explicit quantities and not just by visual design. His work is a reminder that the music of a poem is partly a matter of mathematics, and the pressure exerted by regular measurement provides a tension that serves as powerful companion to a poem’s narrative tension. Plumly rarely writes in accentual-syllabic measurement; he prefers the more subtle, less audible practice of syllabics. A syllabic line offers the rigor of measurement but also the flexibility of rhythmic variety.
It is not just the Plumly sound and the layer upon layer of phrasing that are so seductive in the method of his lyric encounters, which can have an oneiric effect, but Plumly’s varied subject matters attract us, too, again to his affinity for painting, e.g., which broadens our understanding of his work as we recognize him as a poet who experienced visual art deeply. Unlike other mid-century writers, however, it is not Abstract Expressionism that pulls him in but the landscapes of the English countryside and the emotional reverberation that come to remind him, perhaps, of his own rural Midwest. Of course, we cannot be too quick in assigning generations of writers solely to particular schools of painting, as John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” will instruct us — in one of the most significant turns in American poetics —where he unfolds the surfaces of Parmigianino’s important wedding portrait. As for Plumly, here he is on Constable, contrasted to Turner, from his poem “Middle Distance”:
Millionaire Turner evolves into near abstraction, asking light to be sunlight purely, fire from within nothing but what he calls a landscape. Besides, he traveled, an antique traveler in antique lands. But I love C’s local Sketch of Tree Trunks, with a Figure, more oil on paper, seven years after Horses.
I wonder if I am alone in wishing that Plumly had written the paragraphs of an exhibition catalog for his beloved Constable, as this practice would place him, not so unusually, alongside similar efforts of a Frank O’Hara. Besides the syntactical layering and the dream-sound of his sonorous phrasing, there is also the Plumly of prose poetry, a good example being the accomplished “Germans,” which remembers, as he is so often a poet of childhood, a vivid story from his youth. Here, it’s the homefront during World War II when prisoners of war have been sent to Virginia to help out with local logging operations:
Why do I remember horses, large plow horses, instead of only tractors or bulldozers? Horses like the horses at my Great Uncle Hub’s farm. Memory is a romance with the past or something you bury as deep as or deeper than a hole in the ground. Why go to the trouble of using horses?
In his highly detailed verse-paragraphing of prose, he summons the very figure of poetry as if the ponderous and muscled bodies of draft horses shuffled from the half-light of sleep’s imagination: “But I remember them even if they never existed.”
All poets have their particular social backgrounds, some privileged (see James Merrill) or those more hardened and circumscribed by life choices and an outsider’s existence (see Minnie Bruce Pratt), but in Plumly we cannot overlook what biographical notes have often referred to as the coal and lumber region of his upbringing where his father gave him a hard life of near ruin; more than the Germans POWs of the forties we see in the poem above, who are merely strange and peculiar to the young boy (and still somewhat distant from us in his prose), Plumly’s memories of his father rankle with knowledge. In the two-stanza poem “House,” the poet acknowledges his father as a failure, a man who works with his hands but is unable to square a doorframe. In this poem the doorframe can be seen as a picture frame or a cocked window into the past:
A man standing before his children with
nothing in his hands, the angst coming
down like air the weight of gravity through
the whole length of his body, a lifetime
of falling and slow settling like night fog
or soft rain, as if there were a lake inside
him and above that the cloud-float of
a mind, until a day, like now, the water
rises to the limits of its form: and
it does no good to say that fathers are
the fathers of their own misery, it does
no good to take it all to heart, when
all he is doing is standing there, alone,
in silence, disappearing into himself.
If there is a constant dream-world and billowing curtain of foliage and cloud through which Plumly has us see his world, he is precise in depicting the sharp pain of the family. This is further exemplified in “With Deborah in Amherst,” a poem that remembers the bottomless grief of his ex-wife and of which, like the image of his father’s emptiness in the poem above, he is unable to forget its emotional impact upon him, even as the poem tries to ease it by a sudden interlude about Emily Dickinson:
Out of the blue, out of the marble blue
of her eyes, the sudden tears–we’d be talking
about dinner, where to go, already driving,
the forsythia burning sunlight into evening,
passing–of all possible places–
Emily Dickinson’s house and what was once
The Evergreens, where Austin and Sue Dickinson
wore a daily path back and forth.
From the now-deceased spouse, the tears were sudden and from “a hard cold year”:
Where does it begin–long suffering sorrow?
It builds a house and over years begins to tear
at it, brick by eaten brick, as ice eats
the ground, and the ground turns back into a field.
Of course, biographical poems about former wives are contested grounds, as we know from Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes. Yet for Plumly, the idea of how nature will overcome human memory provides him a solace, even if this wish does not provide his readers with the emotional dirt that Lowell and Hughes themselves reveal, whatever the facts may be in the bad faith of their own telling. What we know again and again from Plumly is that the heart is messy and its stories vexed and occluded by the lens of the lyric poem. His “Love Poem” is excruciating in its evocation of love’s anger:
Someone in the driveway taking your name in vain.
Someone in the dark in the driveway taking your name in vain.
Someone is the middle of the night in the driveway
taking your name in vain. Someone whose voice carries.
Driven by a Bishop-like anaphora, this pain continues “until first light” when we hear nothing more but will see, in a familiar step of lyric’s displacement of emotion, a swirl of leaves and birds.
Nature is foreground and middle distance in Plumly’s work, a layering of familiar landscape and the hum of its atmosphere. But, like Keats and Wordsworth, he remains a poet of emotion, even when, for example, he understands his mother’s loneliness and frustration more than he can or will express insight into his own marital woes. There is no contract, of course, for sharing the confidences of pillow-talk or the reconstruction of the exact language of failure the way that Robert Lowell crafted poems about his marriage. I recall David Baker once saying that with the digital age the letters of Plumly simply ended, that there were no more on the record, on or about exactly when we do not yet know; but now with the Collected Poems and his own critical work a selected letters would be instructive but perhaps not necessary, or even wanted, if there still remain a few good New Critics. Regardless, Baker and Collier’s work is a granite step laid down toward our understanding of Plumly and of why the clarity of his lyric vision (I can hear David Bottoms repeating the word “clarity,” especially now.) is so defining of how experience is both vividly expressed and also understated by the murmurous language that is the mind’s reshuffling, through these stanzas, of loss, anger, guilt, and remorse.
For those of us engaged in contemporary American and English poetry, and the long ripples of its waves, we are in the midst of a golden age of collections that shape a poet’s lifetime work. I have mentioned Larry Levis (2026), but not too long ago we had Louise Gluck and the summation of her life achievement (2022). Mark Halliday says, with some lightheartedness, in an essay published a few years ago in Literary Matters, that Frank Bidart’s complete poems (2017) is too heavy to bring to the coffee shop. And, yes, I have signaled above how much I always love the slimmer books, but my wish to stop or bracket time misses the point of how a complete or collected or selected shows the development of a writer. Plumly is a mighty voice. His contributions include how lyric phrasing can form a poet’s language and how the resulting surface trembles in the subtle wind of the poet’s voice passing through it. His sound stands somewhere between Keats and James Wright, who himself wrote in an August 10, 1976, letter to Galway Kinnell that he was “letting the book grow into its own life . . . ,” as Plumly and his two dedicated editors have done in this important volume. Plumly might also be our most sensitive poet of what is overheard or glimpsed between a father and a mother, which a child never wants to know (“Infidelity”):
One of those moments we give too much to,
like the moment of acknowledgment of
betrayal, when the one who’s faithless has
nothing more to say and the silence is
terrifying since you must choose between
one or the other emptiness. I know
my mother’s face was covered black with blood
and that when she rose she too said nothing.
Language is a darkness pulled out of us.
But I screamed that day she was almost killed,
whether I wept or ran or threw a stone,
or stood stone-still, choosing at last between
parents, one of whom was driving away.
Fellow writers, cousins, kin of any stripe, we are made to listen to Plumly’s heart.
