Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Samuel Brown Witt’s Everlasting Quail intertwines imagery and narrative, creating a complex world where the walls of reality turn to gossamer mist, fogging the lines between what is real and imagined. In fact, Witt’s work leads readers to a place where such distinctions seem to rarely exist. Everlasting Quail is a collection of Witt’s poetry divided into three parts. The first contains the greatest number of poems and covers a broad category of poems ranging from differing forms (such as “Zeromass Erozmass”) and length (the shortest poem, “Why I Hate the King” is included here). The second contains only four poems, three of which are the longest in the book. The final part, which includes the title poem, focuses on color in many poems, redefining and yet utilizing our own theoretical constructs of what color is to convey meaning.

Outside of this framework exists “The Mortality Tree.” The poem implies both life and death and in a way also embodies the life of the poetry included in the parts to follow. This first poem opens with the first example of the poetry of the imaginary mingling with reality in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The title itself is a classical symbol of life tied to this concept of mortality, the idea that all living things can die. Trees on their own can live for centuries; I certainly have never heard of a tree dying of old age. It dies only when there is nothing to nourish it, or it is killed. Though chopping a tree down is not enough, one must remove a tree’s roots to completely end a tree’s life. The first part of the poem flashes images of death, the trees roots touching the dead in their graves; the shade of the branches overtake the land “like a shady disease” (4). The constant reminders of humanity, mortality, and death are echoed from image to image, followed by a break into a couplet of italicized “under the spreading chestnut tree / I kissed you and you kissed me” (7-8). This pair of lines deviate from the lines above in form, rhyme, and message. It is a couplet, whereas the lines above are broken into triplets; the couplet also rhymes and utilizes repetition, making it seem almost like a nursery rhyme in its simplicity. The lines imply youth, vitality, and romanticism. The lines that follow conjure the stereotyped characters of “Uncle Drunk” (9) and “Great Auntie Nothing” (10). It portrays mortality in a different manner, focusing on the weak human nature, “bruised and hobbling” (9). Great Auntie Nothing is oblivious to Uncle Drunk, as she is “embroidering a quiet, see-through shawl” (12) in a line broken apart from the rest. She is visibly creating her own thinly veiled façade she hides behind. The two lines after are rejecting, they turn away from an affectionate kiss. The excuse “breathing again” (13) seems a ridiculous reason for one’s breath to be “like a skunk’s dream” (14). Again then, we see the same nursery-like rhyme with a twist, “under the wasted chestnut tree / the girl I love is trapped in 1933” (15-16). The change indicates aging; the once “spreading chestnut tree” is now wasted. This implies one of two things: the girl he loves is stuck in the past of her life, or that this girl has changed so much that she is no longer the same person to him. The 7 lines that follow speak of not living up to potential; flowers that instead of blooming are “petal by petal swallowing itself” (17). It seems to also suggest a sexual innocence. To deflower typically means to lose this sexual innocence, but the “shadowy flower neglects to open” (16). It in fact goes even further, folding in on itself, “spreading its love-shades inward” (19). The final line reads “O people, now and forever amen” (22). This prayerful ending seems to validate the rest of the poem of this seemingly reversal of life. In one way, it reads: death, life, birth. The two rhyming couplets, however, are opposite speaking of young love replaced by experienced regret and disappointment. “The Mortality Tree” stays true to the suggestions of the title; the poetic lines beneath reinforcing these ideas of life, growth throughout life, and death.

The first part of Everlasting Quail displays much of Witt’s play with form. Lines begin in the beginning, or often middle of the page, and cascade down. The poet uses different methods to break a poem within itself. He uses brackets, parenthesis, italics, extreme indentations, and line breaks. In “The Nap” he uses repetition to indicate confusion in death in the lines, “[am I not--- / no no not a starling / apant on the cold cold floor / a wing-shadow, passing across your belly, / a stirpe of dust-motes decirculating? / no little thing / asleep in your watching by the bed / in the shadow-pulse / of my temple: ]” (37-45). The poem “Zeromass Erozmass” uses form, molding the words to create this tuning fork shaped object that joins together and then again separates distinguishing which column each originated in depending on the italics of the text. Repetition is again used throughout this poem, which, though noted in the back to be read as a normal page would be (from left to right) still sounds nonsensical when read as the separate columns. When the two merge, however, meaning can be readily derived. Two poems in this section also seem to indicate they should be read together. Sharing a title in a way that would suggest two parts of a whole, “Americana 1” and “Americana 2” are two very different poems. The both speak of familial relations, but in unique ways. “Americana 1” uses an Old English style of language and appears to be set in the past. The recurring images here are most often of bathwater, hair, and the forgotten. The speaker is the brother of Sister here. “Americana 2,” by contrast, depicts a relationship between a mother and son, underlining the poem’s underlying incestuous tones pointedly with the quote from Oedipus Rex, “And through thee, mother, darkness hath fallen on my eyes.” The language is far more modernized than that of “Americana 1,” though it shares similar images of the same forgetfulness, hair, and bathwater.

The poem closing this part is particularly noteworthy as the poet identifies himself as the speaker. Not only that, but he identifies himself using his full name, which does not even appear on the cover of the book (cover reads Sam Witt, as opposed to Samuel Brown Witt). Notes in the back of the book reveal “The Fine Art of the Skull” is a title “stolen verbatim from the cover of a copy of Ranger Rick.” Ranger Rick is a popular children’s magazine, much like a juvenile version of national geographic. In content, the notes say the italicized lines are from bits of Moby Dick. The language of the poem is rich with depth and detail. Green, a choice color in this part of the book, shows up several times. In fact, the line “A man lights his hell on fire in a green living room / because it burns,” (57-58) sums up most of the common images brought up continuously throughout this poem (green, light, and hell). The most striking thing about this poem is its insistence that hell is green. Green is, as mentioned in the Mortality tree, a symbolic color of life and vitality. It begins with “Hell was a green place: a green thought,” (8) and again on line 45 “please, hell was a green place, damp hair underfoot / but I forgot, & woke up just now….” This description defies what we believe hell to be. Hell is red; it is a fiery red, not this polar opposite. Naively though the speaker tells us green, we think red. Tongues are red, hell is red, and flaming hair is red. The grammar of this poem also follows convention for the most part; that is, up until the last line, which states, “They were a beautiful hair. They were burn.” It is also one of only 2 lines that deviate from the triplet-formed stanzas; the other being “who never saw through another’s eyes” (4). If read together, it could be seen as an invitation to accept this, accept that “They” can become singular within the “beautiful hair.” See the poem through the speaker’s eyes, to whom what is written seems to make sense. There is no air of confusion in this poem, though granted some sentiment of the lost soul. “The Fine Art of the Skull” is Sam Witt’s invitation to accept the unacceptable not necessarily because it makes literal sense, but because there is no one to say it doesn’t.

The second part’s most notable piece is “From a Book of the Dead.” This poem is the longest in the book, broken into parts designated by Chapters II, IV, and VII, and breaks off abruptly in a way cutting off the reader’s tether to the world that exists there. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction, taken from parts of works ranging from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Voltaire’s Candide. The content of each chapter is Witt’s reinvention of such writings, as he reworks and fragments lines to suit his poetic purpose. This second section of Everlasting Quail has far more notes per poem than his other two.

The final poem of the third part and of this collection is the title poem “Everlasting Quail.” The name was taken from a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. In comparison to “The Mortality Tree,” the theme of life and living it is present. It begins in what seems to be the middle of something with the line “Then the air was a brutal architecture of sugar” (1). The next reads, “Boys wading to their knees / into a blue carpeting” (2-3). The image says blue carpeting, but combined with the action of wading, it again invokes the image of the ocean. After the ellipsis point, the poem seems to switch to a first person narrative with a speaker who immediately says, “I left my wife in a tall hotel” (8). This appears an implication of marital infidelity on the wife’s part with this supported perhaps further with the following line, “Wasn’t that the room where they grew bigger trees?” (9) This suggests comparison, as in her husband’s trees weren’t big enough for her, so she came to the hotel where the trees were bigger. The speaker implies he is a puppet, a lemming, when he implies he deserves to lose his mouth because “Everybody has spoken through this throat” (16). The speaker demonstrates this putting the next line in quotes, as though they really are the words of another. The scene changes as the speaker describes a woman, “a smudged photo of sleep,” (19) but whether this woman is sleeping or dead is questionable. It appears the next lines suggest death as the speaker “dropped a coin into her mouth / and walked off” (21-22). This could be a reference to the fee paid to the boatman when crossing the river Styx on one’s way to Hades. In the last three lines, the speaker seems to define a pillow and an orphan in his own terms. “Pillow: a naked footstep slapping the pavement. / Orphan: the wind that eats my laughing chest” (24-25). The last line brings together the pillow, the orphan, and the woman: “empty: my laughing chest: my cheeks” (26). Like the woman, the speaker’s cheeks are empty. The Emptiness is within his laughter, within his chest, his cheeks, and his orphan. And at night he calls out to the “naked footstep slapping the pavement.”

In conclusion, Everlasting Quail is a complex collection of often difficult poetry. Words are used in unexpected ways, challenging the reader’s conceptualizations of what our world truly is. This reinvention of language characteristic of Witt’s work is central to his influence as a contemporary poet in his ability to take something old and make it new to the senses. He writes about simple and common themes such as life and death, yet sets them in scenes they’ve never been with a form unpredictable. Witt’s work unquestionably provokes more questions than offers answers. It seems as though his goal is not to tell you the meaning of life, but rather to point out to the reader that this is something desirable to know.

Further Reading

Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Awards . http://www.middlebury.edu/about/pubaff/news_releases/news_2000/bakeless.htm

Reading Report: Sam Witt & Keith Waldrop, 2/25/06 . Bouchard, Daniel. http://unionsquarepoetryseries.blogspot.com/2006/02/reading-report-sam-witt-keith-waldrop.htm

Review . Deaton, Anthony. http://www.cmsu.edu/englphil/pleiades/WittReview.html

Thought-Activated Computing . Durkin, Sean and Sam Witt. http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/23feature.html

Is human chip implant wave of the future? Witt, Sam. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/14/chipman.idg/

Late Summer Fever . Witt, Sam. http://www.newmillenniumwritings.com/Vol-4-Issue-2/1st-place-poetry-sam-witt.html

Thermal Signatures . Witt, Sam. http://www.epoetry.org/issues/spring01/text/cnotes/sw.html