I write as one who thinks that a poet who doesn't use an occasional
ampersand is so timid and conventional as to be of no interest. Tho it is
not in itself sufficient to interesting writing, it certainly is a common
enough feature. (I take as my example of one who used it well: Robert
Duncan).

Nonetheless, the question of centering and linebreaks that wove out of that
thread is interesting, if only because these are surface features that can
make all the difference in the world in a text IF they are used well. And it
is certainly the case that lots of readers do not "get" it when they are
not. Sort of like the folks who think Louis Zukofsky's great poem is called
A instead of its full name "A".

I present as evidence of how bad it can be the following column excerpted in
its entirely from last Sunday's Washington Post online edition. There Rita
Dove introduces a poem by Barbara Hamby that is an excellent little machine,
but to appreciate just how mangled it got in the printing process, you have
to read Rita's comment at the end.

Once you are done, you can go back and reconstruct the "real" text.

I've preserved the Post's linebreaks, which is more than they did for Hamby.

Ron Silliman
------------

Poet's Choice

By Rita Dove

Sunday , July 9, 2000 ; X12

Two years ago this week, the actor Roy Rogers died. Barbara Hamby takes on
this icon of popular culture in a flippant, chatty poem whose
tongue-in-cheek delivery belies its deeper core. The poem's flashy style is
a stay against chaos, against all-consuming grief.

So Long, Roy


Apropos of nothing, it seems, I burst into tears on reading

"Roy Rogers Est Mort," or maybe it's

because I'm living in Paris and homesick or more likely that

Roy looks just like my dad, who's had

cancer three times and lives in Hawai'i and I'm ten thousand

miles away, and the last time he called, my

dad, not Roy, he sounded tired and confused and not at all

like the tall,

elegant guy I remember from childhood who erased that

image as soon as he opened his mouth, speaking

fractured French and making goofy jokes, and I think it must

be the Cherokee blood

giving them both that heap big handsome cowboy look, but

what made him laugh after going through

hard knocks right and left, the Depression, dead father,

careless mother?

Is that why they both turned to religion, stopped calling on

Jack Daniels, switching to

Jesus? Who wouldn't after seeing a world gone mad, the

camps, a crazy

kamikaze pilot hitting a ship in my dad's convoy, and him

watching it sink into the South Pacific,

looking on as almost everyone aboard died, most of them still

boys yanked from factories and farms,

men burning to death or drowning because other men

wanted to rule the world,

not that any of them succeeded, and after the war my dad was

stationed

on an island in the Philippines, and because he didn't play

cards began to read

poetry, memorizing great hunks of it, which he recited as my

bedtime stories,

quoting "The Shooting of Dan MacGrew," and still doing it

over the telephone, asking how my students like

Robert Service, and I not having the heart to tell him I don't

teach

Service but a bunch of feel-bad moderns like Eliot and

Pound, great lover of Mussolini,

two wretched anti-Semites, who suddenly I see through my

dad's eyes, which are growing dim,

unfocused except on the past, where he's still a young man,

his life an adventure, ups and downs,

victories and defeats, moving from Oklahoma to California,

singing in bands. Go

west, young man, go west to Alaska, Hollywood, Hawai'i,

marry decent Christian women, pretty women,

excellent women, buy suburban bungalows, father children

entertain them with your stories, your poems,

your shows, but for God's sake don't die and let them see your

photograph in the newspaper, le journal, die

Zeitung, so the whole world can remember your smile and

how great you looked on a horse.


I had read this poem several times before noticing its technical
tour-de-force--that each line begins with a sequential letter of the
alphabet!


"So Long, Roy" from "The Alphabet of Desire" by Barbara Hamby. New York
Univ. Press, 1999. Copyright 1999 by Barbara Hamby.


© 2000 The Washington Post Company


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