The Elegy of Style, The Style of Elegy

“Tragedy’s Greatest Hits” perhaps best summarizes the tone and style I have been describing. Even the title undercuts the surface meaning, allowing the speaker a certain distance, detachment, a spaciousness from which to speak, “stutter,” uncertainly. Near the beginning, the combination of “puddles and tensions,” and then the mention of “cruel boats” produces a somber, though further undercut, tone. Yet, in the next few lines when the speaker mentions “floating” and “barking fetters” in the same breath, the pun on “bark” as animal sound and boat explodes the tension completely, denying the poem’s other senses of doom, fate and confinement. From this perspective the speaker can both share in a tragic mood and counter it with a questioning of its stasis. This is the stance Tate deploys at his strongest, which is indeed quite strong in these poems, a stance which sees the self always in relation to its changing histories, that accepts its limits while expressing in its language an uncanny freedom, an intense and yet muted desire:

I was the stuttering monster who accepted
his doom. But he was coasting
on the past.

Life moves on, where are the miracles?

It’s twelve o’clock, I wish
it were eleven fifty-nine.

This sense of the lonely and elegiac beneath the comic surface is almost overwhelming for its pathos. The comic carnival of style provides the aesthetic distance.

For William Matthews the aesthetic distance comes through irony. Even as early as his book Flood in 1982, we find him confronting the issues of the invisible, the hidden in language, the otherness that controls a good deal of what we think and feel. “On this page no breath / will write. The text is already / there, restless, revising itself,” he says in one poem. Style for him is the glossy surface of the water that “compiles // the erasure of its parts / and takes to itself the local / until all but sky is water.” In a recent interview he says, “What is crucial is the surface tension; once you stick your hand into the water and break the surface, once you enter into language, each disappears. And water itself is in some way made out of the word ‘water,’ a word that changes from language to language.”

In a sense the world becomes language, language the world, and each an elegy to what the other misses. In this style, time — as well as timing (and Matthews’ work is filled with references to music) becomes the question of poetry itself, suggesting that style and elegy, poetry and the elegiac, are naturally linked. He opens “An Elegy For Bob Marley” from A Happy Childhood by self-consciously asking:

In an elegy for a musician,
one talks a lot about music,
which is a way to think about time
instead of death or Marley,

and isn’t poetry itself about time?

The strategy is Matthews’ poem is to deflect the talk, as he suggests, introducing Marley in the subordinate part of a prepositional phrase, then immediately shifting to a larger topic. As it goes on, the poem builds by qualifications — “and not,” “however,” “though,” “only,” and a suppositional mood guide the rest of the poem. There is a casual but deft manner riding the surface of the lines, skilful enough to protect against dwelling upon the fear of death, and mature enough to acknowledge that his protection is about as useful as an insurance policy is in extending our lives — not so much a consolation as a coming to terms. The poem ends —

nor could
the dead bury the dead if we could pay
them to. This is something else we can’t
control, another loss, which is, as someone

said in hope of consolation,
only temporary, though the same phrase
could be used of our lives and bodies
and all we hope survives them.

What is so stunning here is the way the elegiac becomes part of a larger knowledge, a style of thinking and living that is analytically cool, a way of living and hoping. One of the central ways in which this is accomplished is by the same askew movement as the opening lines, a refusal to use the categories of speaking and thinking we might expect. For example, “let the dead bury the dead” is extended to “nor could / the dead bury the dead if we could pay / them to,” the last phrase seemingly inappropriate, almost disrespectful in its insistence on money, yet entirely right in the way it matter-of-factly places the elegiac in an everyday context. What this askew perspective calls for is constant balancing, and indeed the whole book is best read as a long poem whose titles suggest the sort of compensations it attempts: good and bad, right and wrong, sad and happy, sentimental and prurient. Within a poem the same sort of compensation is done by linking phrases. “Bad,” for instance, modulates “bad luck,” “bad budgeting,” “bad debt,” “those gone to rage / and madness, gone bad.”

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