Jon Woodward. Rain. Wave Books, 2006

By Heather Green

Jon Woodward’s poem “And the Leaves Were On Strike,” from Mister Goodbye Easter Island is one of the most oddly affective poems I’ve ever read. A few years ago, a friend read the poem to me and it followed me around for months. The poem inexplicably begins with “It was all because those racehorse clouds / trotted out my mouth in that ice air,” and then moves on to the stunning image of a person reaching up into the air, pulling a thread, and getting buried “under a pile of red unraveled songbird.”

Next, the narrator retells the scene in a different way, and in the second rendition, “20,000 birds, starlings” were “howling” and “boiling” and then suddenly quieted down. I always think that poem ends with the line, “and then it just stopped,” but in reality it ends with this: “When they made up their mind to stop, all at once, / I had nothing to do with it. Somehow.” The speaker’s analysis of his own role, or lack thereof, in this moment when noise gives way to silence is what makes the poem break hearts. The poem ends on a low note, fades out, which leaves the earlier images resonating through. The mechanics of this poem are so well hidden, it looks like magic when Woodward pulls it off.

Naturally, I bought Rain as soon as it came out, and for a few months I flipped it open and read a poem here and there without really finding a way in to the book. Then finally, I began reading from beginning to end, and the book all but exploded in my hand. Dropping in here and there, I hadn’t picked up on the formal rigors of the book. If the poems in Mister Goodbye Easter Island were like the contents of a jar labeled “This One Makes You Bigger,” the poems in Rain work in a viral way, infecting each other and the reader’s thought with replications of a capricious syntax inside a formal cell.

In the table of contents, there are six sections, and the first line of each page is listed in brackets by way of title. With few exceptions, each poem is made of three five-line stanzas, and each line contains five words and uses no commas or periods.

In the first poem “[in spite of which it’s],” I was stuck by the radical enjambment pushing the sentences together across the lines to create a kind of discomfort that fractures even the tiniest micro-narrative, like here, as the speaker receives a cheeseburger:

. . . the decay

of what world we’ve got’s

not exactly what I’m afraid

of not now the woman

brings the cheeseburger I ordered

The language in this opening poem is full of concrete object/images like “pinkflowering / dogwood” and jukeboxes but in this condensed form the short lines and the aggressive line breaks mid-phrase perform a kind of democratization on the parts of speech: even articles and prepositions are noticeable. Instead of letting too much space in the poem, Woodward uses this effect to create a kind of flat or cubist tableau, where different angles of the same moment can be displayed together. Woodward seems to consider this very apparatus in “[are we to understand that],”

the first man in front

of the bull and the

second man behind the bull

and the third man in mid

leap are all the same

man that what is being

depicted is the leap itself

and in the end he decides “yes can / get you up over the / charge of the outstretched bull.”

Throughout the first section, “Spring (Comprising Further Music,)” Woodward continues to explore the ordinary: the speaker goes to see Spider Man, worries his neighbor can hear him masturbating, and exchanging songs with birds until finally, in the final poem of this sequence, something strange happens: the speaker has a psychedelic moment while contemplating a strawberry. Its seeds become eyes, “each winking open brings / a world into focus funnels / in it through each tiny opening.” Like in Tristan Tzara’s Approximate man, where “the eyes of fruit watch us closely,” this strawberry is the catalyst for some heavy paranoia, and a departure from a realist mode into something playful and dark, where things from the mundane world are infused with tiny sparks of energy. The image of these robotic eyes coning out from the sides of a strawberry, though totally absurd described here, is stunning in the poem. Some lines later, the speaker asks:

listen do you hear the

eyes crying out no they

can’t cry out of course

not the silence is pure

and at I knew that the book would go deeper into the territory of the weird as it progressed.

Just when I thought Rain, despite of the presence of plenty of birds and eggs alike, had departed completely from the “red unraveled songbird” that had obsessed me some years ago, the third section of the book, “Attempt,” opens with a poem, “[but the house sparrows are],” that is like the inside-out version of “And Because the Leaves Were On Strike.” Instead of starlings “howling and boiling” on bare trees, here sparrows are mating, “so / immodest and indiscriminate with each // other. . . like some voltage / is making them do it.” The turn at the end makes this poem rise above animal voyeurism, and I didn’t see it coming:

and you don’t see them

screaming in pain unless that’s

what all that chirping is

we meanwhile couldn’t have asked

for all our free will

No suburban or pastoral bird images here, just the violence of procreation coolly noted. Instead of “and then it just stopped” or even “I had nothing to do with it” (Woodward’s actual ending of “And Because the Leaves Were On Strike,” which distances the speaker from cause and effect in the poem, untying him from the birds,) this poem pulls back from the sparrows and shakes its head at us humans, leaving question marks hanging in the air.

Throughout Rain, Woodward constantly plays line against sentence to hold a magnifying glass to stories, to splice them together, to open them up and chew on their seeds. He does that each time in about 75 words, and without any periods or many proper nouns. The run-ons alternately evoke the urgency of a voice too deranged, emotionally or mentally, to separate sentences and a childlike “and then, and then, and then” belligerence. For example, this fragment of conversation from “[it’s okay when a mammal]”:

. . . I said hey you

wanna go to Gloucester and

look at how the tombstones

and fishing boat masts are

raised irregularly against the sky

he said nope I don’t

Each section of the book has its own implied narrative arc, and in each, as the tension rises, due to a character’s impending death or the narrator’s struggles with sanity, the clauses get harder to parse out, and as a reader it seemed best to relax and let them run together, let the occasional word belong to the phrase before and the phrase that follows.

The New England landscape, the dark heart conversing with songbirds, and most strikingly, the syntax and wit of this book seem to evoke and honor cummings’ work, particularly in the rare instances when Woodward breaks from his form. These subtle poems seem somehow less angry and less hopeful, respectively, than cummings’ blackest or most sugary poems. The rain does not exactly have hands in this book. Instead, Woodward works procedurally, like here in “[this weather’s the actual God]:”

nothing could compare to getting

rained on together the slick

of rainwater converts each thing’s

outside to an image of

inside. . .

If I had designed the cover, I would’ve put a dewy closeup of a very ripe strawberry, because every time a strawberry appears here, something exciting happens. But thankfully, I did not, as the cover actually matches up with the precise nature of the project. A yellow field of color grows gradually lighter in the middle, like a sun, which, incidentally, is described in the book as the “only object without / a soul,” seen through mist. The image also evokes a kind of reverse egg, a harbinger of all the eggs and birds contained inside. The poems have and bright and simple diction, feel earthbound at first, but as you stare at them and work through the syntax, this light appears.