i
She Bectejt
VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 8
N.C. WESLEYAN COLLEGE. ROCKY MOUNT, N.C.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1977
Roland Flinfs poetry:
A preliminary consideration
This literary historian
thinks the poem “Follow,”
printed elsewhere in this
newspaper, tells us a lot about
the sort of poet Roland Flint
is. It’s the first poem of And
Morning, aside from “Skin,”
which occupies a special place
before the pagination of the
book even begins, and because
of its place in the volume, it’s
natural that it serve as an
introduction to the poet’s
central concerns, his way of
dealing with them, and even
his own sense of his place in
the world of contemporary
poets.
The subject of “Follow” is
the biblical story of Christ’s
calling his disciples from their
everyday tasks to follow Him.
The poet seeks to imagine how
the minds and hearts of these
“ordinary working stiffs” (as
he calls them) can respond to
such a call. The poem
questions rather than
celebrates the occasion, the
key lines being
But how does a man whose
movement,
day after day after day,
absolutely trusts the shape it
fills
put everything down and
walk away?
The importance of these
lines is underlined by their use
of traditional means for
achieving heightened
language; in a poem which
does not make use of rhyme
and meter they are written in
a combination of meters too
complicated to unravel here
and they contain the only
rhyme I have yet discovered
in the poem. But the question
they ask is the heart of the
poem and at the heart of all
Flint’s poetry I have yet read.
The poem itself is the answer
to the question it poses. The
shape it fills presents the
reader with a palpable
working stiff and makes us
feel, first, the miraculous
loveliness in his ordinary
endeavor, and only secondly,
the miracle of Christ’s power
m drawing him away from it.
I offer my own experience
in reading the poem as
evidence of this. It wasn’t
until my third reading that I
managed to understand that
the poem’s subject was
biblical. The figure of Christ is
all but absent from the poem
and the fisherman is at its
center. My response during
the first few readings was
entirely to this figure
a man who -describes the
settled shape
of his life every time his
hands
make and snug a perfect
knot.
And I still think that the
poem means, essentially, to
present us with this figure, to
insist on the miraculous
'oveliness of our ordinary
being.
But the poem also insists
that we consider more con
ventional miracles, such as
Christ’s ability to draw such
men from the settled shape of
their lives. It concludes by
stating a preference for this
sort of miracle over others,
generally considered more
dramatic.
I’d pass up all the fancy
stunting
with Lazarus and the lepers
to see that one.
Here Flint is not just
disti^uishing between sorts
of miracles to be found in the
Bible, but between sorts of
poems to be found in the
s
The poet Flint
FOLLOW
Now here is this man mending
his nets
after a long day, his fingers
nicked, here and there, by
ropes and hooks,
pain like tomorrow in the
small of his back,
his feet blue with his name,
stinking of baits,
his mind on a pint and supper-
nothing else-
a man who describes the
settled shape
of his life every time his hands
make and snug a perfect knot.
I want to understand, if only
for the story,
how a man like this,
a man like my father in
harvest,
like Bunk Mac Vane in the
stench of lobstering,
or a teamster, a steelworker,
how an ordinary working stiff,
even a high tempered one,
could just be called away.
It’s only in one account
he first brings in a netful-
in all the others he just calls,
they return the look or stare
and then
they ‘straightaway’ leave
their nets to follow.
That’s all there is. You have to
figure
what was in that call, that
look.
(And I wouldn’t try it on a
tired working man
unless I was God’s son--
he’d kick your ass right off the
pier.)
If they had been vagrants,
poets or minstrels. I’d un
derstand that,
men who would follow a dif-
ferent dog.
But how does a man whose
movement,
day after day after day,
absolutely trusts the shape it
fills
put everything down and walk
away?
I’d pass up all the fancy
stunting
with Lazarus and the lepers
to see that one.
Roland Flint
MEMENTO
When you make a coat of me
you’ll need to lengthen the
sleeves,
my arms are short, the hands
already gone,
from fait to baize to nothing-
rubbed away,
you’ll have to add the lace,
and pockets,
stitch some emblem on the
breast,
with a legend-anything
except death before dishonor
will do,
cut the legs off at the knees,
and put me on, take me off,
hang me up and say to anyone,
it’s not a great coat (and it
may be)
but it’s a good coat, it will do.
I got it from the poet Flint,
second hand but serviceable.
Try it on-it fits almost
anyone.
At first look you wouldn’t see
the reds
so of course it’s gray--they
were miners
in Wales, West Virginia, In
diana,
farmers in North Dakota,
gray, a little dull.
But he said you’ll find the red
blood coat
of the living man, I promise,
if you remember-and wear it
well.
Roland Flint
contemporary world. For
some twenty years the most
dominant strain of poetry in
England and American has
been the so-called “ex
tremist” or “confessional”
school of poets. It is these
poets - Robert Lowell,
recently dead, is the most
admired practitioner - who
have been received most
enthusiastically by the critics.
These poets seek to show us
the realities of our world by
presenting their own usually
warped psyches as exemplary
of the condition of man in the
contemporary world. This
tradition has produced some
extraordinary poetry, notably
from Lowell, John Berryman,
and most sensationally from
Sylvia Plath, a suicide at 32 in
1963.
The last lines of “Follow”
refer directly to her poetry.
Plath is notorious particularly
for two poems, written during
the last months of her life,
“Daddy” and “Lady
Lazarus,” both of which are
well described in the phrase
“the fancy stunting-with
Lazarus.” Listen to part of
“Lady Lazarus,” a poem in
which Plath examines her
own attempts at suicide. She
imagines herself a sideshow
performer acting before a
large crowd. “Dying is an
art,” she says, and it is one
she has mastered. But, she
continues
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same
face, the same brute
Amus^ shout;
“A miracle!”
That knocks me out.
This is “fancy stunting-with
Lazarus” with a vengence.
Flint’s poem “Follow” asserts
its interest in a different sort
of miracle than this. Let us
listen to a bit more of Plath’s
poem.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars,
there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart-
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very
large charge.
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my
clothes.
For me, though its excellence
is evident, this is really scary
stuff; whether its charge is
electrical or financial it needs
opposing, and Flint’s
“Follow” announces this
opposition. The poems which
follow carry out the opposition
by presenting us with or
dinary things, even ordinary
madness (“His Good Time”)
and ordinary suicide (“Dead
Friend”). And Morning thus
makes a valuable contribution
to the unsettled shape of
contemporary poetry. We
should be happy to have its
author with us.
by Leverett T. Smith, Jr.