South Carolina) in its understanding of space as a baffling, featureless surplus—what is a pair of towns like Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, doing in the so-called real world at all? And yet, only because Keith once tried, briefly, to go to university there, a good many family members get stuck in the homely sister cities seemingly for life—even after the family used car lot is no more (see chapter three, “Discerning of Spirits”). I hate to accuse the narrator Keith Waldrop of anything as banal as a Midwestern trait, but what else, pray (I still live in the Midwest) is that polite hopelessness in the face of an ever receding normal that one eventually concludes was never there in the first place?
The narrator’s voice in Light While There is Light, though it sometimes recalls that of Keith Waldrop the poet, is unlike any other in fiction, and likewise the character for whom it speaks. Always preserving its uniquely Waldropian distance, a sort of Olympian bemusement, quietly affectionate and without the slightest temptation to judge, what it tells, first of all, is the story of a family as it travels through place and time. In a tragicomic way, they are rather a close family—they keep scattering and coming together again, like globules of stale milk in a cup of hot coffee. “Pilgrimage” yields to “Tibet”—though no one in the family goes anywhere near Tibet—as those travels grow stranger and stranger. In a compressed, musically segmented, anecdotal style of his own invention, but with all the building power of narrative, the author recounts each family member’s religious experiences, flights from the law, nuptial pairings, and economic woes. His own troubles fade into the background, once he is an academic with a stable job and a place to live. But we can make out all the same what their youngest member begins to look like to the rest of the family: at once their salvation and their deserter, the one who flew the coop.
Is it wrong for me to love madly and even wish to elope with his one slender novel, more than the entire sagging shelf of his poetical works? Remarkably, Keith Waldrop himself told an interviewer1 in 2008: “I never wanted to be known as a poet. I’m in some ways more interested in writing prose than verse although verse is much easier. . . . Prose rhythm to me is very difficult and it’s something I love. I like Henry James better than any poetry I can think of.”
He went on to air another startling idea in that three-way conversation (Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jared Demick), as one sometimes hears oneself do, in a live interview, to one’s own consternation. Even Rosmarie was taken aback:
Keith: I think of my one novel as my major work. Out of all my work, that’s the one I . . .
Rosmarie: Really?
Keith: . . . put at the top.
Rosmarie: I’m surprised.
Perhaps it was what he had been reading, or eating, that week, but—having talked about books with Keith Waldrop for forty years, I’m inclined to believe he meant what he said. (He may have changed his mind later: There is something about winning the National Book Award, as he did, in poetry, the following year, that warms a writer to the work in question, whatever the genre.)
I, however, was not completely astonished to hear Keith Waldrop speak of Light While There is Light as the best, or most lasting, thing he’s done, for another reason: I have always thought that the soul of Keith Waldrop’s verse, too, is, oddly enough, prose.2 Much as I admire them, I read his books of poetry as something like the collected marginalia of an ageless scribe, somewhat loopy on the fumes of decomposing paper and fermented printer’s ink, who lives in the bottomless vault of a library. Keith Waldrop is, even in so-called real life, a poet who likes to say that he would rather read than write, and most of the books in the Waldrops’ actual library—of which belles lettres constitute only a part—are works of prose. History, archaeology, architecture; epistemology and metaphysics, theology and religion; music; geology, botany, vulcanology; psychology, neurophysiology, the study of the brain and the senses—these are some of the subjects that are well represented on those crammed shelves. They are also a fair sampling of the kinds of books—whether antiquarian, crank or scholarly—whose ghost prose echoes in the poetry.
From his earliest book, A Windmill Near Calvary, which could almost pass for a conventional collection, to his latest, Transcendental Studies, whose avowed modus operandi was collage, Keith Waldrop’s poems often seem to be built of sentences quarried out of faraway prose matrices—used sentences from lost, antique, dog-eared, half-remembered tomes; sentences missing a piece here and there, logical edges not quite flush, patched and interpolated, but never quite losing the character of distant prose—ghost prose, so to speak. Their prose origins linger in part because the poet makes us heavily aware of their periods—not periods in the Ciceronian sense, but in the straightforward, punctuational sense of a full stop. In a Keith Waldrop poem, we hear the sentences as sentences (even when they’re incomplete) because they so definitely end. One ends, and without transition another, probably from some other area of humane inquiry, begins. Medical advice, curious superstitions, Biblical exegesis, aphorism, architectural description, the crusty residue of an anecdote—any of these might get its ghostly sentence in the poem. They lie like cantilevered architraves on top of one another, because that’s how poems are shaped, but still they feel like prose.
This is from “Beauty,” a poem in A Windmill Near Calvary:
According to a newspaper account, maybe distorted
in my remembering (told me, come to think of it, by my
brother, who sometimes lies), a man carrying a shotgun
down Main Street in some town or other
explained to a policeman that an hour before, on the
same block, another man, a total stranger,
spit in his eye and told him it was raining. It is
possible to look, neither at surfaces nor beneath them,
but geometrically, squinting slightly to accommodate
things to our net of vision, robbing raw objects
of their atrocity.
Or, here is “Real Motion,” from Falling in Love Through a Description, the second book of Transcendental Studies:
Keep well in mind that it is strangely possible
for us to oppose ourselves. An illustration: competing
visual fields. The projection room dark. The blue of the
sky would not move us, were it a foot or so above
our heads. Fear drives the body, looking for itself.
Someone lying in the roadway. About pain, we are
all more or less agreed, but reflection is
necessary for such functions as urination, walking,
writing, sexual intercourse. A single, unified
judgment establishes the matter as undecided.
Sweeps of the eye traverse and surmount
something, the traversing and surmounting of which
might, in another way, be a matter of time, toil,
danger—its very height suggesting the
violence of a fall. I am myself, but I develop.
Even before (I think) Keith Waldrop began to identify himself as an artist in collage, his standard operating procedure was juxtaposition, the plane of the page holding, in experimental relation to one another, images or words from provenances many and mysterious. All of his work feels haunted—haunted by shadows, silhouettes, moving veils; by the outline of absence as much as by actual specters, as he says again and again; haunted, you might say, by a literally sensational uncertainty, by a shaky sense of what’s real that often finds its embodiment in tropes of shadow and light. A lot, perhaps most, of his sentences suggest unease (e.g., from “Night Soil,” in Falling in Love Through a Description: “I’m in a bad mood, forever.”3 ) And yet the prevailing temperament of his work—all of his work, including Light While There is Light—is pensive and calm, melancholic yet peculiarly tuneful—I even