Richard Meier. Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. Wave Books, 2006.

Review by Kathleen Rooney

Richard Meier is an architect. Richard Meier is a poet. Richard Meier won the Pritzker Prize in 1984. Richard Meier won the Verse Prize in 2000. The architect is known for “his rationalist designs and use of the color white.” The poet is known for his Late Romanticism. The two Richard Meiers are not the same guy; they’re not even related. But the latter Richard Meier—Richard Meier the poet, the author of the collection Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar—builds his poems as though he were an architect, experimenting with his materials, carefully structuring them to build layered, formally vigorous poems like the abecedarian, “Doing Things,” crafted line by line, letter by letter:

A woman is an abstraction

but Lady

Chatterly runs around naked in the rain and goes

down on the gamekeeper and

equally he her eagerly.

Finally, they separate, only to become farmers and lovers. (82)

Richard Meier the poet also landscapes. He is a landscape architect, setting up his bucolic scenes just so: “Summer of the time when things didn’t happen,/ the grass lay down beneath the horses. A crown of water/ crowned the trees with crowns of motion, / skirts raised and shaken. There are the clouds I mentioned” (14).

And Richard Meier the poet decorates his own interiors. “If you stand on the bathtub, the tree in the courtyard,” begins the poem “Post Hoc” (20). He puts in a mirror, he hangs a beaded curtain, he sets the sun “at the other end of the couch this evening” (16), and he places “a plate with a flower painted on it” on the “dirt floor of an abandoned house” (24).

He takes familiar details and makes them feel strange, almost anachronistic, by juxtaposing urbane sophistication with rural simplicity. In doing so he has built a second book that is as lovely and mysterious as his first.

As “Doing Things” indicates, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar is indeed a book about “farmers and lovers”—rows of crops and fields of flowers. But as the title suggests, with its allusion to poetry and music, Meier’s collection is as much about art as it is about nature. References to “frost on the leaky uninhabited farmhouse window,/ with busted pipes and rotting antiques” (24) are crosscut with references to the sublime and contemporary psychiatry.

It is a book about the arts as well as agriculture. In “Song of Innocence,” for instance, he writes:

A building rises from the brow of every hill and animal,

you included. We live in this invisible building, you can see it,

a room to correspond to every part of the body. (85)

Here and elsewhere, Meier invites the reader to contemplate the action of humans on the land and its creatures, as well as to compare this action—a desire to build, to create, to impose an artificial order, to bring forth something new through a combination of vision and effort—with the action of human imagination. Time and again, the poems in Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar seem to conjure comparisons between the act of, say, looking at a blank field and imagining crops and looking at a blank page and imagining a poem. And this is perhaps the most interesting, or at least most central, argument made by the book, if it can be said to argue: that there is a fundamental connection between culture and cultivation.

And not to imply that these poems are confessional, or even autobiographical—they are much more formally innovative and dreamy and non-narrative than that—but some insight into this interpretation can be gained if the reader superimposes just a bit of Meier’s biography onto the work (something readers have been doing since as far back as the days of the book’s Romantic namesake, and even farther than that). If you read the brief biographical note on the jacket, you will learn that Meier has lived in a place called “Orfordville” in addition to numerous other more familiar—Chicago, Brooklyn, Paris, Pittsburgh—towns and cities.

If you are familiar with Wave Books, Meier’s publisher—or if you just Google Orfordville and Meier’s name—you will discover that Orfordville, Wisconsin, 110 miles north of Chicago, where Meier teaches creative writing at Columbia College, is the home of the Wave Books Poetry farm, a “12-acre (uncertified) organic fruit & vegetable farm […] open to poets willing to work for four good hours a day in exchange for room, board, and a new environment in which to write.” The work on this farm “is hard, physical, monotonous, and dirty,” warns the site, and this dirty physicality—as well as its beauty—is reflected in the poems in Meier’s second book. The reader gets the impression that Meier has put in the time and labor to earn himself equal facility in alluding to phlox and fescue, aspens and daises lying “single-eyed on the grass clippings” (66) as to Mary Pickford and Patsy Cline, Vladimir Nabokov and Percy Bysshe himself.

Meier writes with authority and an eye for surprising detail about the sinister and touching actions of nature. “The yellow jacket took the injured/ yellow jacket back to/ the tree” begins the poem “The Miracle of Sun and Shadow,” before adding “to eat it” (96). This blending of idyllic vistas with honest assessments creates the impression of antiquity and seclusion, but also modernity and exposure.

Like the architect with whom he shares a name, the architecture of Meier’s poetry is postmodern. It is also elliptical. Many of the poems are like buildings with the support beams left showing and staircases that don’t quite go all the way to their landings so you have to hop a little to get there.

In addition to farming, Meier’s book has a preoccupation with novels and the crafting of stories, and like a good postmodernist, he seems to argue—both in his fragmentary form as well as his content—against the myth of the grand narrative. He writes in “The Pursuit”:

I had at long last come into my maturity, the book reads,

though I already knew it would never be received; it is not

that sort of novel, or life, this being a biography, lines which

embody the subdued and limited desires of my maturity,

opposite citation, the pustules about to burst,

and daily life with its fictions… (77)

Here and elsewhere, he uses agricultural imagery to illustrate notions of growth and growing and growing up, the creation of crops being compared to the creation of the self or a work of art: a serendipitous and puzzling combination of organic occurrences and mindful corrections and revisions.

In this way, Meier calls attention not just to the subjects of the poems, but also to the subject, the speaker, the I. He calls attention to the work he, as the poet, is doing, as in “What Tomorrow Looks Like” when he explains: “I crossed out all the other letters, / the sound between the thunder and the lightning,/and the names of things on the page, like pilgrims” (19).

Meier gives his audience the sense of the poems as created objects, but also encourages us to contemplate the way in which the poems might have been created, through the action of an extremely sensitive and highly perceptive self seeing and writing and reporting back. The result, sometimes, is a willful overload of the senses. For while he is often called a Late Romanticist, the interiors of his poems are sometimes baroque, with words words words working as though to overcome some innate horror vacui. At times, he deliberately crams his lines as full as can be, and makes them almost coltishly, awkwardly long: “Wildflower honey, bouquet, fish water, melon/ in the hoop house, seed and seedling doubt/ teach, and three days the puckerbrush/ the minor plum into oblivion casts. It would be sweet/ to die until tomorrow, plum, crumble/ soil block with weed, footnote out the senses,” (22) he writes in the poem “Proposal.”

The actual Late Romantic period was one of blossoming self-expression, and so is this book, full as it is of lots of blossoms, lots of self. Mostly, we think of composers when we think of the Late Romantics. We think of music, and there’s lovely music throughout this book.

One of the original Shelley poems after which Meier’s book is titled is “To Jane,” one of several lyrics Shelley wrote to the young Jane Williams, common-law wife of Edward Williams, the man with whom Shelley would drown in July of 1822 in Italy, where they were all living at the time. In that poem, Shelley writes, “The keen stars were twinkling, / And the fair moon was rising among them,/ Dear Jane./ The guitar was tinkling,/ But the notes were not sweet till you sung them/Again.”

Meier seems to create echoes of this in his own poem, “Wander Hammer,” which ends, “It was so unfair. The sea walked backward,/ a new frontier was lowered into place, the usual sunset,/ the little shells went twinkle twinkle” (70).

Shelley’s poems and Meier’s are tinkly/twinkly, and these little echoes are part of what makes you want to return to them again and again.