GRACING THE TEMPLE OF SUBVERSION:

THE DEDICATIONS OF MICHAEL ANANIA

by

Joe Francis Doerr

In the Spring of 2003, when the poet Ken Smith was still in an east London hospital battling infections brought on by his bout with Legionnaire's Disease, his wife, the poet Judi Benson, sent a request to many of their poet friends. She asked for short contributions to a collection of poetic "get well cards" honoring Smith, his long writing career, and his illimitable commitment to poetry. Benson explained that the call for poems was the brainchild of poet Tom Pickard, one of Smith's oldest acquaintances, and that the collection was not only intended as a tribute to Ken, but also as a way of keeping his mind engaged during his long convalescence. The hope was that Smith would find in his light duties as editor-in-chief of the project—a reprise of sorts of his days as co-editor of Stand—a palliative to his tedious, if not bleak, condition. Confined for months to bed, unable to speak for the necessary tracheotomy and the accompanying tubes fed down his esophagus for feeding and respiration, communication on his part was reduced to scribbling on a slate with a piece of chalk. Still, Benson hoped that she might keep Smith physically present and intellectually occupied by having him prepare for publication the works of the many comrades who wished him well. In spite of the best of efforts, Ken Smith died on 27 June 2003, but not before he witnessed the amazing outpouring of compassion shown him in the poetic offerings of his friends. I had the honor and pleasure of reading two such offerings before they were sent off: John Matthias's "For Ken in an Apocryphal Midwest," and "Objects in a Row" by Michael Anania.

Matthias's poem speaks of old adventures, of Smith in his American phase as the wayward writer-in-residence of Slippery Rock State College (where Smith taught from 1969 to 1973) trying to make sense of the big, disorderly continent he called home for a while by digesting of it what he could:

The old Sauk trail, they say,

still runs under U.S. 12

north from Niles to Detroit.

U.S. 20 takes it west through

Rolling Prairie to Chicago.

You can drive a car that's named

for Cadillac up U.S. 12

to Ypsilanti, turning north

at 94 to a port named for the Hurons.

You can even drive

your Pontiac to Pontiac.

But only trickster Whiskey's brother

Chibyabos back in

Eddie's other life

ever drove in a Tecumseh

to Tecumseh.

The short poem is a revised excerpt from the second of Matthias's long poems in A Gathering of Ways (1991) called "Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest" which happens to be dedicated to both Smith and Anania. Pared down to card-sized, with an extra line and a slight adjustment, the new poem is a response to and acknowledgment of a long cycle by Smith found in Wild Root (1998) called "Eddie's Other Lives." In that poem, Smith tries to imagine what might have become of "Eddie," his American alter-ego, had he stayed on in America instead of returning to the UK some thirty years ago. One could read "Eddie's Other Lives" itself as a response to Matthias's original poem; such a notion would imply that a poetic conversation had been taking place between these two poets. The following lines no doubt grew out of "Eddie's" experiences in Matthias's apocryphal Midwest:

It's always this aching hour of the night

in some place called French Lick

or Mud City Indiana, the connection

half a day away to some unhappy town

where the furniture is made of neon

and sings in praise of K-Mart and the 7-11.

(from "Noises off")

Matthias's revision of "Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest" not only seems to be a response to "Eddie's Other Lives" but also a newly contextualized reiteration of the original with an accentuated specificity of sentiment. There is a purpose behind such specificity that is, of course, bound up in the spirit of the occasion—to wish Smith good health—but there is something more as well. What that something more may be is hinted at in the lines from a poem that follows later in Smith's sequence in which Eddie clearly has grown weary of the world if not of living:

I am moving away down the long corridors

of abandoned trolleys, the closed wings

of hospitals, rooms full of yellow bedpans

and screens and walker frames, fading out

into nothing and nothing at all, as we do,

as we all do, as it happens, and no one

can talk of it. Here, where the heart

dies, where all the systems are dying.

(from "Here")

Matthias's revision could be read as a measured response to Smith's ruminations in this poem; one that emphasizes what was initially written with the dialogical intention of rousing Smith from his troubled state. The poem attempts to conjure a more optimistic, even healthier aspect, persona, or spirit of Smith who, it is hoped, may be strengthened by this summoned "other."

Michael Anania's "Objects in a Row" is similar in this respect in that its simple dedication, too, serves as something more powerful. It is a kind of emphatic prodding intended to rouse or "heal" its dedicatee by recalling better times. Thus, the dedicatory epigraph, "Ken Smith, Reading," is indicative of a Ken Smith who is not lying in bed "where all the systems [including the voice] are dying." In light of this, the following poem becomes an invocation of Smith the poet standing up and using his voice and his own powers of invocation to bring into being a world of unprecedented possibility:

three stones, one blue feather,

a piece of polished driftwood,

thin and white as bone, two

shells, convex and dark at their

centers, like eyes lifted out of

the sea; each thing accounted for,

named, then set down along

the front edge of the table, stone,

driftwood, feather and seashell

horizon; his palms opened out,

everything, that is, shown,

given up to table, sightline, speech;

pages lifted into the long reach

of breath in flight: "birds, trees,

men & women," what small sound

cupped and lifted to the ear's driftwood

plate, "the world declaring itself"

landscape moment distance whole

Anania's gloss on his recollection of Smith surrounding himself with these natural talismans prior to a reading he gave years ago at UIC produces an image of the poet almost as moving as the beautiful "Objects in a Row." He recalls that after introducing Smith on that occasion "he scrounged his pockets and his book bag for rocks, feathers and bits of wood, then read the rock gatherer poems." In a very real sense, Anania's poem is a response to a sentiment expressed in all of Smith's rock gatherer poems: that these gathered stones are intrinsically valuable in that they mark the stations of experience and plot the shape of the space of one's life. Hence, in "The Stone Gatherer," one learns that "when a stone gatherer dies his collection is dumped, stealthily, and returned to the beach." "Objects in a Row" is an entreaty to Smith, a prayer of sorts that he might literally keep his stones gathered about him and go on living.

As I looked over the two "get well" poems written for Smith, I was led to consider the long tradition of the use of dedications and epigraphs in poetry. Each constitutes a kind of dialogue between the author and the dedicatee that is almost telepathic in nature. Furthermore, once both poem and dedication go public, the reader, too, is invited to participate in the conversation, effectively completing the circle of dialogue. When an author places a dedication at the start of a poem, a type of language that straddles exposition and insinuation is produced. For the reader, and perhaps sometimes for the dedicatee, the relationship between a dedication and the text may produce an opacity of language that is at best provocative, and at worst vexing. Given their traditional placement between title and text—the door and the room, so to speak—epigraphs and dedications essentially act as informational inscriptions, signs bearing the name of the sanctuary's inspiration. They are secondary portals into a celebratory aspect of the poem that must be deciphered before they can be opened. It might be that dedications and epigraphs are just the sort of "difficulties" John Matthias speaks of when he claims that "some kinds of difficulty function like a tool—a means, oddly enough, of obtaining access to certain kinds of experience that resist entry otherwise." To this end, not only is it possible that epigraphs and dedications may serve as ways into certain poems, but in a related sense, they may be paths leading out of them as well. They may, in fact, be the most difficult paths through certain poems in that they lead into the lives and relationships of the parties involved. More difficult still is the proposition that relationships of this sort are unique in that entire aspects of them, facets of association unbound by the order of convention, seem to exist solely in the space of poetry.

It is not necessary for the reader to know that the Anania-Matthias-Smith connection began when Matthias edited Twenty-Three Modern British Poets (1971), which includes a clutch of poems by Smith, and which was published by Swallow Press, the Chicago publishing house for which Anania had gone to work in 1967 as an editor. Nor is it of the utmost importance for one to know that this connection led to the publishing of Smith's second book, Work, Distances / Poems, by Swallow Press in 1972, but when a reader becomes aware of this or any such link, the reading experience is enriched. One begins reading with a greater sense of awareness and appreciation until it might be said that one enters the defined "space" of the poem or, in this case, the many poems in question, effectively completing the circle of dialogue.

Much has been made recently of poetry as occult practice. There is a growing interest in the notion evidenced by a number of current works dealing with the subject. In a series of contemporary studies, Ann Skea has dealt with Ted Hughes's use of the occult and his belief in the "magical" quality of poetry as a means of "making things happen the way you want them to happen," to cite Hughes. She suggests that much of Hughes's poetry following the death of Sylvia Plath, in particular The Birthday Letters, is not only dedicated to Plath but is an invocation designed to lead her troubled spirit to peace. The existence of this circle of dialogue between poet, dedicatee and audience is implicitly evident in a poem like "The Dogs are Eating your Mother" (BL 195). Here, Plath's children, as well as the readers of the poem, are told to imagine her journey out of the underworld and on towards the sun. Hughes asks them to help conjure an earlier, healthier aspect of Plath; quite literally, to "think her better." Skea's study compliments Devin Johnston's work in Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice. Johnston considers the role of telepathy and Freud in H.D.'s later poetry, Robert Duncan's practice of "dictation" in the composition of poetry, the influence of the Ouija board in the creation of Christopher Merrill's Changing Light at Sandover, as well as the ways in which contemporary poets Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe have continued Romantic and counter-Enlightenment approaches to poetry.

Anania himself touches on poetry as occult practice in his article "John Matthias's Bucyrus," in which he suggests that Matthias's employment of found material in "Poem in Three Parts" constitutes a kind of "spelling" through the use of fragmented incantation. Such "spells" essentially expose the "veins and stress lines" of the language of political authority and oppression. He suggests that Matthias's use of "magic and incantation…is political not just because of its various topical applications in the poem but because of its effort to employ the craft of language to penetrate the bonds between language and socially and politically authorized pathology," (WP 25), i.e., "the language of the courts, which chants within its own closed circle" (WP 24).

To this end, it may not be too incredible to consider poetry as being a variation of the kind of "strictly defined sacred space" the classicist Brigitta Bergquist identifies in her study of Greek cult practice, but one that is not bound by the physical limits of the intramural, peri-urban or extra-urban temple, because it is primarily an internal space and therefore portable, elusive, and ultimately subversive. As Anania suggests in "On the Conditions of Place," poetic space loiters "at the edges of ceremony" frequently as "indistinct as water is in water," though it is the space that primarily "shapes our memory." One may also be justified in producing dictionarial evidence of the link between poetic space and the sacred or occult through the very word "dedication," which is defined in part by the OED as "the action of dedicating, the fact of being dedicated; a setting apart and devoting to the Deity or to a sacred purpose with solemn rites." It may be equally credible to suggest that Anania's dedications serve a similar purpose, one that is both devotional and ritual. His dedications are devotional in the sense that they specifically address a beloved, and ritual in the sense that they, like Matthias's "spells," seem to mark the location of the veins and stress lines of the laws governing nature and language. Deciphering them is, to use Anania's own analogy, "similar to the sculptor's practical sense of geology" (WP 24), itself subversive in that it calls for defiance of the natural state of stone. The sculptor's defying stone produces the shape within. We call this shape sculpture. This is likewise true for the poet's practical sense of language: the defiance of language yields the shape it obscures. We call this shape poetry.

In the introduction to The Necessary Angel Wallace Stevens may be found quoting himself, saying "[In the poetic act] the real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal. …[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock" (viii). Clayton Eshleman suggests in the introduction to Juniper Fuse, his collection of poetic essays on the art of the Paleolithic ice caves of the French Dordogne, that the "place" evoked by Stevens is quite possibly also that which Rilke discovered upon leaning against a tree in the Duino Castle garden. He was suddenly overcome by "the most delicate of vibrations" which he attempted to explain by suggesting he had "reached the other side of nature." Eshleman proposes that the "place" described so eloquently by Rilke and Stevens is the same "place" from which Cro-Magnon people must have looked out on the world. He proposes that this

would suggest that the locus of [Cro-Magnon] projection was sensed as inside the material the surface of which was being painted or engraved. Of course they must have had an intimate relationship with the surface of a wall to be able to pick up, by a flickering flame, the contour that implied the potential presence of a figure. Such people could be said to have seen from the "other side of Nature" as well as outwardly, to have had no fixed boundary or "reality principle" within the fluidity of the imaginal and the observational. (xxv-xxvi)

I would like to suggest that one gains access to this "place"—the source of both the artistic and the ritual imagination—when the natural laws governing time, language, and substance are challenged. Once this space is breeched natural law is overturned and replaced by something other, something persistently disobedient to the natural order. Resistance of this sort is inherently present in a variety of human emotions—desire, hope, aspiration—employed as means of averting the inevitable. Thus healing, "spelling," and rituals of all kinds tap into such resistance, and the most enduring outward sign of this subversion is the work of art. Art is a product of resistance. It might be understood as an alternative to the "reality principle" as it suggests a sense of otherness within the ritual space it occupies. Likewise, dedications may be thought of as invocations gracing the temple of subversion—charms, perhaps, designed to conjure mystical aspects of those being honored for inspiring new sanctuaries where natural law might be subverted and then converted into a manifestation of otherness.

As Anania is as prolific a dedicator as he is a poet, it would take a far longer and more comprehensive study to examine in depth the relationships he has with all of his dedicatees. Even so, the ensuing list—in reverse chronological order—is not only impressive but important to this study as a whole. It indicates Anania's willingness to accommodate a multitude in the space of his poetry, and it precedes a brief look at a few of the dedications I find to be especially relevant to this essay: those associated with poems clearly exhibiting an evocative element.

The dedications in In Natural Light (1999) express remarkable scope, they range from one to a former director of the Program Department at the UIC Student Center, Pat Nelson ("October Evening") to Robert Creeley ("Apples). Other poems are dedicated to the Bronx poet Reginald Shepherd ("Somewhat Gray and Graceful"); the Mississippi writer and poet of the blues Sterling Plumpp (""And This Is Free""); poets Peter Michaelson and Marilyn Krysl ("Things Aint What They Used to Be"); the experimental composer David Mahler ("Sequence Composed on Gray Paper"); poet Ralph Mills ("Bell Sounds"); the painter Elaine Galen ("As Though"); the cultural essayist and poet A.K. Ramanujan ("Incidental Music"); poets Reg Gibbons ("After a Drawing on Papyrus"); Barbara Guest ("What Are Islands To Me Now") and Kenneth Koch ("Fifty-Two Definite Articles"); and the "extreme dancer" Elizabeth Streb ("Out of Dazzlement").

The gathering of previously uncollected poems that concludes Selected Poems (1994) contains dedications to the East German poet and novelist Johannes Bobrowski ("Five Proper Nouns"); poets Charles Simic ("Seven Pieces for Unaccompanied Voice"); Denise Levertov ("As in a Pourtract"); Rosemarie Waldrop ("The Darker Colors"); Mac Hammond (" "Not That Fair Field" "); and Gilbert Sorrentino ("Factum, Chansons, Etc."); as well as one for the painter and printmaker Ed Colker ("Pochades"). The Sky at Ashland (1986) features dedications to the printmaker Antonio Frasconi ("Le Jardin de Claude Monet"); and poets John Matthias ("The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale"); Ralph Mills ("Borrowed Music") and Ken Smith ("Constructions"). Riversongs (1978) has dedications to poets Eugene Wildman ("The Judy Travaillo Variations"); John Matthias ("News Notes, 1970"); Anselm Hollo ("Four Postulates"); to the African-American novelist Leon Forrest ("King Drive"); and one to Anania's daughter, Francesca ("Pine Trees with Child").

The Color of Dust (1970) contains dedications to an old friend of Anania's from his childhood in the projects and his time at the University of Nebraska, Ted Mallory (who died, December 1963) ("A Journey"); David Bahr ("The Park Above All Others Called, Riverview"); Douglas Dickey, Pfc. U.S.M.C. ("A Second-Hand Elegy") who, one learns in the accompanying note "was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously [in April, 1968] for throwing himself on a hand grenade during an engagement with the enemy in Viet Nam"; the lead singer for the rock group Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick ("Lines for Grace Slick"); Jo and Harry (Harrison Hayford, the great Melville scholar of Northwestern University and his wife Josephine who taught for many years at Kendall College) ("October Triptych"); Ezra Pound ("For Ezra Pound, Old"); Durrett Wagner, a social science professor and academic dean at Kendall College in Evanston, and the former co-owner of Swallow Press ("Avant Courier"); and finally, two for the self: one appearing in section II titled For Myself and for August 5, 1964 and another in section III November Requiem to Ourselves.

It is arguable that all of Anania's poems featuring dedications exhibit an evocative element. Often what is brought to mind in celebratory fashion is the space of poetry itself, the space in which individuals may communicate using the language of artistic imagination. For instance, "Apples" (1999), the poem dedicated to Robert Creeley, seems intent on conjuring and entering this space, eluded to in the line "perhaps it is always true that each / occasion is its own center." The poem might be understood as an act of poetic communication between Anania and Creeley, an "occasion" in an artistic conversation that has been taking place between the two since they met in the 1960s. Any poet who heeds Creeley's advice and becomes "peculiarly aware of making language," as Anania clearly has, would understand the necessity of following the speech act or "occasion of language" to its own center where it might be subverted and transformed into poetry. A similar conversion of the natural into the artistic is celebrated in "As Though" (1999), the poem dedicated to Elaine Galen, the artist, painter and sculptor. The poem commemorates a moment experienced by Anania during a visit to the home of Galen and her husband, the artist Ed Colker, in which Anania witnessed the construction of a ritual space as he watched Galen at work

as though the pine sap

smudged into your fingertips

mattered, you scrub at it;

blue spruce branches piled

at the culvert, bright November

air, yellow strains of maple

along the drive;

Her arrangements of rocks on the slope outside her window, the plants and branches she moved around before using their resulting shapes and textures in various drawings were intended to produce connections more implied than represented. The poem alludes to these connections, connections between the arrangements and her drawings, between reality and the imagination, between the natural and the artistic, and between herself and Anania, the eyewitness to her act of creativity who saw that

things

begin, endings, for example,

like sleep, one thought

and then another, darkness

chilling your arm, memory—

Things opposed to one another, like beginnings and endings, are united in thought, or more appropriately, in the progression of thoughts, "one…and then another." The progression of thoughts between individuals constitutes conversation. Memory facilitates the progression of thought, and makes possible a continuity of dialogue and fluid conversation:

and in a slow instant,

like a radio switched off,

still playing—what is

remembered as forgetfulness.

It might be said that poetry is produced in that "slow instant" of which Anania writes, since that which is remembered as forgetfulness is frequently precisely that which poetry seeks to reconstruct.

The desire to reconstruct the inefficiently forgotten through memory seems to be the primary source of art's evocative element. This desire, along with approaching at an angle what is discovered within the memory, seems to lie at the heart of the poem Anania has dedicated to Kenneth Koch, "Fifty-two Definite Articles" (1999). Anania has explained that the poem seeks to answer a question Koch once asked of him: "How is your poetry different than mine?" The two poets happened to be standing by Koch's piano which inspired Anania to answer obliquely "You play with a lot more right hand than I do." Pleased by this response, Koch insisted that Anania write a long essay explaining himself. The result was "Fifty-two Definite Articles" which Anania describes as having, among other things, "a lot of right hand." Perhaps for a poet, playing with "a lot of right hand" implies writing a poetry that privileges multiple perspectives of the inefficiently forgotten, as opposed to a methodical baseline approach that seeks to surround memory with tones that are purely fundamental though having the capacity to carry all other "right-handed" or tangential perceptions through implication. In experimenting with "right-handedness" Anania appears to be investigating the nature of the poetic space, especially when he writes

the space in an angle

marked by denial, as though

these intervals between sounds

were sounds and this span

of bare canvas was space

Perhaps the question is whether the space of poetry is created as it is defined, or whether it is preexistent and waiting to be discovered through the creative act. This is echoed in a later stanza:

the face in the window

or merely, perhaps, a blank space,

something to hanker after, a smudge

that seems to stare back at us,

a black hole, so much of nothing that

it keeps everything it has to itself

Again, the nature and origin of the space is called into question: does it come into being when it is perceived and given substance, "a face," through artistic engagement; or does it already exist as "something to hanker after"? Perhaps the only resolution Anania offers is merely intimated in the "the absolute stanza" in which he writes that such a statement of perfection can only be experienced between two, or perhaps more, individuals who "soar like a bi-plane / through its sentence together." In other words, like the adage about prayer, only where two or more are gathered in conversation—the antithesis to mere statement—can ritual space be experienced.

Conversation as the defiance of statement produces a multiplicity necessary to completing the circle of dialogue that defines the ritual space of poetry. This is a recurrent image in Anania's work. It appears most elegantly in "Incidental Music" (1999), the poem dedicated to A.K. Ramanujan, in the reference to Ramanujan's image of the dragonfly hovering above falling water. Anania likens this image to that of a stylus moving over the dark vinyl of a moving record, "onyx spun across shale," in the shared space of a used record store in Chicago's Hyde Park. The image seems clear, even Poundian, in its simplicity: "one thing and one thing" produce a multiplicity. Multiplicity completes the space of dialogue. It occurs earlier in "Borrowed Music" (1986), a poem dedicated to Ralph Mills that concerns itself with the poetic space that had evolved between Mills and Anania, and how the poetic episteme argued in the poem deals with the issues set aside by or merely not noticed by Objectivist poetics. Objectivism would become increasingly at odds with imagism and its notion of the image as vortex into which ideas are constantly rushing, preferring instead Williams's belief that Objectivism would provide an "antidote…to the bare image haphazardly presented in free verse." Anania describes "Borrowed Music" as his part "of what could have been the second half of [his] dialogue [with Mills] on imagism and its outcomes...not a reproach [to perceived flaws in Objectivist poetics] but an extended 'A-hem.'" The question, roughly put, is how does one account for the complexities exploded, exuded, extracted, or exfoliated by the very process of image-making if "one thing and one thing," according to the Poundian principle, produce a multiplicity? The figure of Bernini's Daphne, from the sculpture "Apollo and Daphne," is reprised from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly." For Pound she appears "with her thighs in bark" struggling both into and from the tree—“into” in the sense that the narrative of the myth is depicted in the sculpture, and “from” because the marble from which she is cut is yet veined with marks of the vegetation compressed within it at its making. For Anania she is the "fugitive" sheathed in laurel bark, her

thighs

grown rough and darkening, sinews tendrilled,

the first twig vibrating from her finger,

or found in the fault lines of the stone

itself as mere stone was cut away, stipule,

some quirk of vegetation caught in the slow

press of centuries she struggles into and from.

Bernini uses the veining in the stone to vein her feet and fingers and vein the tendrils and twigs of the emerging tree she is struggling into, and Anania uses this to convey his belief that imagery is constantly spawning new perceptions in art's ritual space. Hence, the lines

One thing in relation to one thing, quickly,

or a sense of loss, as though the field you paused

in once, slow river slipping under exposed

roots and memory's dire complexities,

revolved around you. These bits of time spindle

and turn, each numbered shard coded to the arc

it shares with a probable amphora.

The image of the museum bins full of shards of unassembled jars are numbered and fitted to the numbered circles on a template which predicts a probable amphora. The restoration of the broken pottery occurs in a space analogous to the ritual space of poetry, and the progression from jar to shard and from shard to a probable jar suggests that everything is progressing in two opposite but harmonic directions (like the coincident Brahms in the preceding stanza). The space then becomes a place of struggle in which the work of art or the poetic dialogue struggles, like Bernini's Daphne, in two opposite but harmonic directions to become something other than what it naturally is.

The figure of Daphne finds a correlative in "Out of Dazzlement" (1999), the poem Anania has dedicated to Elizabeth Streb, the dancer and choreographer. Her dance pieces are full of referential, though not representative action—bodies in flight, bodies hurled against barriers, bodies pushed through transparent but impossibly small spaces. The lines Anania has written for her seem to trace some notion of the sentiments expressed in "Incidental Music"; i.e., movement progressing in two conflicting but congruent directions.

Two notes unevenly

played as shore and sea,

the trim lyre curled across

sight lines in salt spray

sporting lapis amid foam,

sounded Okeanos

briefly held, wave after wave,

sunlit droplets struck like forge

sparks, the air ringing.

More directly, the poem addresses one of Streb's most successful works, a suite called "American Heroes," in which key features of a body are compressed into a brief stage action—someone going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, for instance, is represented by a body moving wildly inside an unmoving barrel. By putting Streb in what amounts to a classical, H.D.-like setting reminiscent of "Oread," Anania reveals Daphne as a notion of choreography simultaneously bound and unbound by history and working backward—but also moving forward—from myth to dance.

Anania's fascination with Streb's dancing figures struggling against barriers is profoundly indicative of his interest in undermining the natural order of things to reveal the space it conceals. This is patently obvious in the poem that is most evidently familial, the one he has dedicated to his daughter Francesca, "Pine Trees with Child" (1978). It is possible to proceed from the dedication into the poem and occupy a ritual space in which the order of time is being subtly eroded. The undertaking, like the effect, is almost Orphean. While Francesca herself is no potted Persephone (she is thirty-three years old at the time of this writing) her image in the space of this poem remains nonetheless that of a child, preserved in memory like the poem's perfect day when a father and his young daughter shared an experience of simple revelation. Even so, the poem's two figures experience this revelation on their own terms: one is acutely aware of the progression of time away from the cherished moment while the other is innocently naïve, aware only of "some span / of this day's moving." It is in the figures' sudden awareness of time's vulnerability that the poem becomes acutely, though occultly, defiant of chronology. The subtle defiance of time is evident in the first stanza as the water of the lake near which they loiter

curls over

and, sounding, falls

under spread branches,

green haze, blue eyes,

the child I hold up

into the sunlight,

thinned and shifting,

nymph flies spinning by

Here, time seems bound to the rush of water that moves below the figures of father and child who appear in a kind of suspended animation above it all. "We begin to forget ourselves," Anania writes in the second stanza, and in forgetting oneself the authority of time is defeated.

Here I would like to return to the dialogic connection between Anania, Matthias and Smith and the earliest indications of it in print: Anania's dedications to both Matthias and Smith in The Sky at Ashland. The poem dedicated to Matthias, "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" (1986), is an oblique reference to Smith's misgivings about the domestic situation Matthias was forging around the time the three poets began their friendship. In 1967, upon returning to America after a year in London as a Fulbright Fellow, Matthias relocated to South Bend, Indiana for what he thought would be a single year of teaching at the University of Notre Dame (an appointment that has long since become permanent). He brought with him his future wife, Diana Adams. As the daughter of an aristocratic family from Suffolk whose contributions to the political and cultural landscapes of Britain are of great significance, Diana's well-being in the rough-edged American Midwest apparently became the subject of great concern for Smith. Anania recalls with humor a conversation he had with Smith about the latter's concerns for Diana, and that it must have been the same year Smith began his post at Slippery Rock, 1969:

Ken was in the US on one of his Greyhound bus passes (not exactly Eur-rail but that's how he treated it). He had been at Iowa City to see [Jon] Silkin [the English poet], then bussed to South Bend for a reading and a couple days with John and Diana. John had put him in touch with me. I knew the poems, even owned a copy of The Pity [Smith's first book], so brought him up to read at UIC and he stayed a couple of days with us. All Ken's stays had a motif. That one was about Diana and how “MA-thee-us” could have put a girl like that in a place like South Bend. It was oddly courtly—Ken the swain and son of swains tying to protect the aristocrat, the fair maid, I guess.

"The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" might also be said to be indirectly dedicated to Smith as it takes as its inspiration his apprehensions. Furthermore, the poem wryly echoes Smith's misgivings about the kind of place he supposes South Bend to be, while prefiguring the "unhappy towns" of French Lick and Mud City in "Eddie's Other Lives." "In the Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" Anania writes

The stone, she thought,

the river and the sea,

the dale just past the treeline,

places you visit or recall

in conversation, somewhere

you plan to pass through

or avoid, the grass there,

flowers and sharp brambles,

the slant of one hill and then

another, how accidents like

these require a name and names,

in turn, accumulate a place,

and this place or that, as far

a you can see, a dale modestly

confirming itself with leaves

agitated or still, the circle we

make of what surrounds us, words,

like waves, defining the shore.

South Bend, though it remains unnamed, is almost certainly implied here as one of those places "to pass through or avoid," one of those dreadful places Smith imagines "where the furniture is made of neon / and sings in praise of K-Mart and the 7-11." Echoing the sentiments expressed by Matthias in "Poem in Three Parts," Anania suggests that those who find such places unbearable may best manage them by weaving a "spell" of words. The implication is that words of praise for what one finds insufferable may deactivate, deconstruct and redefine negative perceptions such that the intolerable can be endured: "the circle we / make of what surrounds us, words, / like waves, defining the shore."

"The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" is a direct situational engagement of John Matthias to be sure, but it may be additionally understood as an oblique engagement of another important aspect of his work. Matthias's poem "Double Sonnet on the Absence of Text: 'Symphony Matis der Maler', Berlin, 1934:-Metamorphoses" (1975) is frequently used by Anania when teaching Matthias's work as a way of emphasizing the presence and importance of the text everywhere else in it. Being what he has characterized as a "lost Medieval poem," "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" could also be read as Anania's response to Matthias's conception of a work of writing done in the absence of a guiding text. Anania claims, somewhat paradoxically, that "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" is a poem "written in the presence of an absent text." This is a statement that begs the identity of the missing text in question. Given that Anania's dedication of "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" to Matthias implicates Smith as well, the poem could also be read as a response to Smith's trepidations. The dislocation Smith cultivated in his own life and work seems to have been a source of anxiety for him when it threatened to surface in others he deemed, for whatever reasons, unequipped to deal with it. To this end, the reader may justifiably conclude that the absent text in whose presence "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" appears to have been written is the one that addresses it most directly: Smith's "Eddie's Other Lives," but this is a poem that would not appear until 1998—twelve years after the publication of Anania's poem. Thus, from the reader's perspective at least, Anania's poem has a dichotomous, albeit antithetical function: it anticipates Smith's absent text, answering it while simultaneously acting as its inspiration, and the only indication of this function would appear to lie in Anania's dedication to Matthias, who likewise wrote a poem that does precisely what Anania's does. "Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest" was dedicated to both Smith and Anania, and may well have been an inspiration, like "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale," for Smith's "Eddie's Other Lives" well before it became a response to it in a card-sized excerpt.

Ten years prior to the appearance of "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale," in a poem called "Nostradamus" (1976) from the sequence titled "Six for Michael Anania," Matthias writes, not only as if in acknowledgment of the circle of dialogue he shares with Smith and Anania, but as though addressing quite directly the circle's conspicuous absence of either beginning or end, "The act occurs as it is seen the act occurred." This line, like the poem itself, deals with the divinatory. It suggests a space in which time is destabilized, in which events may both prefigure and complete themselves even as they are happening. If this notion may be applied to the poetic conversation between Anania, Matthias and Smith it might suggest that poems such as "Notes for an Apocryphal Midwest," "Eddie's Other Lives," and "The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale" may serve simultaneously as motivation for and response to one another. In such a case the order of call and response, as it is perceived by an audience, is subverted when the responsorial anticipates the initial event and dialogue becomes fluid. Such is the nature of Nature's "other side" inherent in the space of poetry; the reader brings to the Anania-Matthias-Smith dialogue an additional dimension that effectively completes the circle of subversion without ending it.

To complete the circle this essay traces it bears closing with another dedication to Ken Smith. "Constructions" from The Sky at Ashland begins with a dedicatory epigraph: a line of verse from Smith's own body of work: "A place you would be / familiar with." "Constructions" is comprised of twelve numbered sections each consisting of three three-line stanzas. One could think of these short vignettes as the very "constructions" referred to in the title. Each is certainly a construction in and of itself as surely as any poem is, and there is a cumulative effect at play such that each progressive stanza seems to emanate from the opening lines of the first section

This is how the lines run,

like the uncovered beams

of an old porch, flaking

until what remains is a completed edifice of words surrounding a space in which reside some of Anania's most delicate and elegant images: "the music goes round and round / like fingers tracing picked over / patterns in white chenille"; "It might have / had its own shape, / the philodendron, or the space / the painted radiator gave up to it"; "An iron bed in the front / parlor, white hair wisped / into its spoked headboard"; "There are not enough leaves / to cover the girl stretched / out on the lawn…She laughs a little at being dead"; "Yellowjackets, the last / of the mud-daubers grazing / for spiders under the eaves." But section XI discloses the provision that the careful reader may already have intuited: that the power of poetry to conjure "otherness" in its ritual space is only as potent as the reader's willingness to defy the natural order of things and allow the uncanny to surface. Because of this provision one discovers that words are ultimately restricted to what they can achieve. Anania suggests precisely this in the following lines:

We have talked for so long

about the limits of words,

all that they can not touch,

how the song fails us even

in its delight

But in the final stanza he offers a tonic to the provision contingent upon a change in perception.

Think of it as a path,

the thread of common use.

Occasional footsteps gather

into a line like strands

of loose fiber, carded

and spun. These things

happen: the old woman waking,

the girl's shape left behind

in a scattering of leaves.

This acknowledgement that images are ephemeral, that they fade and fall apart, links their impermanence with the very language used in every effort to capture and contain them: poetry. But it also contains the possibility that as images fade they are replaced by others: the old woman waking rather than sleeping, the shape of the girl left in the leaves rather than the girl herself in the leaves. And because a link between image and language has been established in "Constructions" it may be said that the poem bears the suggestion that language, too, leaves behind an impression or "shape" long after it is initially uttered.

Anania recalls that Smith saw "Constructions" in manuscript form years ago during one of his stays in Chicago, and that when he had studied the dedication he began to laugh and then said to Anania, "I took that line from you." In truth, Smith's line was a refashioned borrowing, but one Anania has pronounced the completion of "a lovely circle, anyway."

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