November 8, 2010 Issue

The only test of a poem is that it be unforgettable. David St. John’s “Guitar” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978) easily passes the test. Since reading it in the magazine thirty-two years ago, I have not been able to listen to an acoustic guitar or even look at one without recalling “the swirling chocolate of wood” contained in its exquisite penultimate line. What a ravishing poem! Nineteen rhythmic, sensuous lines rippling their way down the page, moving from one gorgeous image to the next, delightfully combining data (car radio speakers, gypsy cascades, stolen horses, castanets, stars, Airstream trailers, Charlie Christian, “the floors of cold longshoremen’s halls”) never before combined. “Guitar” is on my mind because this week in the magazine there’s another poem by St. John. It’s called “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued.” It’s much different from “Guitar”; it's enigmatic and sombre. It shows St. John responding to an unexpected piece of evidence of something “asked of me [by a lover?] / Across the years & loneliness.” St. John says that his response was “the same barely audible / Silence that I had chosen then.” Indeed, “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued” could be interpreted as an attempt to enact that “barely audible silence” in words. How different this is from the music of “Guitar” – “the music I love scaling its woven / Stairways … the swirling chocolate of wood.” It’s hard to believe that the two pieces are by the same poet. What has happened to St. John “across the years & loneliness” that has turned his poetry from rich, resplendent strumming to “barely audible silence”?

Second Thoughts: Sometimes a musician can let a note slide from sound “to the breathing just below sound.” I’m quoting the great jazz guitarist Jim Hall. Maybe that’s the effect St. John is after in “Without Mercy, The Rains Continued.”