John Witte
The Hurtling
Orchises Press
2005
____________________________________________________________
Reviewed by Gina Myers
“Soloist,” the
first poem in John Witte’s new collection, describes a musician and the
movement of his bow–how the opening phrase rises and breaks through him, how he
labors bearing the weight of memory and longing, how the face appears through
“this pushing and hurting this bringing forth.”
This action of pushing and hurting and bringing forth bearing the weight
of memory and longing—the act of creating—mirrors the force of the poems in
this book. Each poem consists of
three-line stanzas that largely lack punctuation. The lack of punctuation combined with Witte’s
unique treatment of enjambment creates great momentum to the poems—the poems
rush forward, hurtling through space and time in a hushed breathlessness.
One of The Hurtling’s major themes is the loss of innocence: children appear throughout this collection bearing
witness to horrible everyday acts. With
the child-as-witness, the cruel acts of the adult world become all the more
criminal. “Guillotine” describes a
lithograph of children standing in the front of a crowd to watch an
execution. The poem asks several
questions: after seeing this, do the children return to their games? did we want to show them death? did
we want to leave them with the image of the head rolling? why
do we let them see us like this? The act
of the execution is not being condemned here; it is inconsequential. What is being condemned is the exposure of this act to children. Thus,
the dichotomy emerges: consistently, children are portrayed as innocent whereas
adults are grouped together as the practitioners of evil great and small. An evil that comes from
experience, no one being free of it.
“Jury Duty,” implicates everyone: “we are all of us guilty.” “Bestiary” again implicates us in the horrors
of the world: “we have come this far together / we have written the book
describing each animal and closed it.”
While acknowledging
horror and our involvement in it, the poems also say that this is just the way
things are. In “The Tide,” the speaker’s
daughter compares the dying goat she cares for to a tide going out. The speaker thinks no:
it’s like a tide coming in
the ocean slipping higher clasping making us run the sand
mushy
underfoot
swabbing
the shore gathering back
the bits
of flesh there’s no stopping it no telling it no.
Again and again
these poems thrust experiences upon the speaker, or the various characters that
appear, creating a sense of helplessness, of one hurtling through space aware
of what is happening, but having no control—no
stopping it no telling it no. In
“One Way,” the world is described as only seeming at rest, though no rest is
evident: “the pond the trees the rowboats hurtling through space at…sixty-six
thousand miles per hour around the sun each year.” The poem inhabits the same space as the
interweaving motions in A.R. Ammons’ “
Mortality is
another theme that arises throughout the poems in this collection. Like William Stafford’s famous poem
“Traveling Through the Dark,” Witte also travels through
the dark. In “So,” a driver (you), with
his/her (your) daughter asleep in the passenger seat hits an animal and drags a
ribbon of blood down the road. It is only appropriate that the innocent child
remain asleep, unable to witness this animal’s death. Throughout the book animals
reflect human behavior/human experience, the intrinsic relationship between all
things with life. In “Pig’s Ear,” a
woman goes to a butcher shop to get a treat for her dog. While looking at the bloody ear she comes to
understand “we will vanish.”
Except in the faces
of children, Witte continues to find darkness as he travels through the
landscape of experience and memory. The poems
are weighted with the knowledge of an uncontrollable evil in the world. However, knowledge doesn’t equal
acceptance. The movement of the language
indicates a restlessness. The territory of the poems is unsettled and
unsettling. The uninterrupted flow of
language often follows the freedom of thought, matching the slipperiness of
memory and allowing for reinterpretations of events. “Landfill” is another poem interested with
mortality, describing what has been discarded and claiming “none of us wants to
die.” However, the poem ends with a
reinterpretation of the final image:
…the white
birds stepping
down out of the sky or else
climbing it may be the invisible ladder to heaven it may be
the house of light
they may be angels this may be
the dreaded place and the time the end the beginning of days.
The combination of
wonder and dread captured here is characteristic of Witte’s work. There is a wonder at seeing and experiencing
the world in all that it has to offer.
In these poems it becomes evident that “hurtling” is how Witte
experiences the world—everything rushing past in a blur, memory and time fluid
and able to reverse themselves, as in “As if” which describes birds flying into
the chimney at an abandoned school:
hurrying
down now like smoke billowing back into the chimney
as if
smoke
could
return to its fire
the wood
to its tree in the sun on the hill as if flesh returned
wheeled
back
through
the locks and chambers
back into
its clothes onto the crowded train backing away.
In “Less,” a
prayer, an opening gate reveals a path “all the way back to childhood.” While these
poems offer examination, they do not wish to offer answers, just the hint of a
way back. They are observations on the world that the poems inhabit: a world
ripe with uncertainty, lack of direction, and mortality. But also a world of wonder
and amazement.