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The Falling Hour
David Wojahn. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997.

Joe Francis Doerr

The title of David Wojahn's fifth collection of poetry, "The Falling Hour," is derived from dance marathon slang for that moment of utter exhaustion or "marathonitis," when the mind of the dancer is especially subject to hallucinations which are visited upon him just prior to his body's simply giving out. The speaker in these poems, who does indeed appear to 'dance' between his own past and present to a gritty blues dirge for the length of the book, is a kind of modern Orpheus whose Hades is contemporary, urban, and very American. In his quest for lost inspiration in the underworld of thought & memory, he visits the stomping grounds of Howlin' Wolf and Hubert Sumlin, listens while a ghostly Louise Brooks laments having gone "Hollywood," and, like a latter-day Odin, brings back the story of alien runes found on a scrap of wreckage in Roswell, New Mexico. Wojahn seems to welcome the onset of marathonitis, finding in it an occasion for transformation. For while the book, dedicated to his late wife, poet Lynda Hull, who died in an automobile accident in 1994, is undoubtedly a monument to loss and a requiem of grief, it is something more as well. It is a celebration of the resilience of life and of human connection; a gravid drum roll filled with promise; that split-second between dirge and Dixieland when mourning becomes electric. Wojahn is acutely aware of the possibility of poetry as a vehicle for transformation. The epigraph he has chosen to introduce his work is from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", X which reads:

And sang in harmony, "O founded powers
Who rule the underearth, this life of ours,
This mortal life we live in upper air
Will be returned to you. To you, therefore,
We may speak the whole truth and speak it out
as I do now, directly."

"The Falling Hour" is arranged in six untitled, though thematically self-contained, sections displaying the range of Wojahn's writing, the style of which has never been stronger. Many of the poems contain the image of a man or male creature who finds himself suddenly without a partner, suddenly at the end of the family line; a tortured creature who must descend into the depths of sorrow and near-dementia in search of some shred of sanity embodied in his now lost muse. Perhaps not surprisingly, the beginning of this journey, a clinical, though quasi-ceremonial, 'male-milking' (for captive-breeding purposes) of a sedated tiger named Rajah, is set to the apocalyptic strains of Nirvana before giving way to Jimmy Cliff's Rasta-man take on the nature of "Babylon." If all goes as planned following the "dry-ice burial" of the tiger's sperm, Rajah will be resurrected "in the wild" as may the Orphean poet if he survives the cold and bitter knowledge of Ovid's underearth. Very much on cue, Wojahn advances towards Hades in "Hey Joe," in which a night of drinking and the Jimi Hendrix jukebox hit provide the tools necessary for the excavation of memory and the discovery of the 'gateway' to the underworld. In this poem, the television over the bar of a seedy tavern is stuck on Court TV and broadcasts coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial. While the jukebox plays, Nicole Brown's dog takes on the image of Cerberus, the guardian hound of the infernal regions, as it

[...]circles and barks, manic panting against
the shouts. The leaps, the choke chain loose
against the reddened slick cement,

falling back each time until his flank
is lathered and drenched, circle and wail, his slippery
paw prints to be mapped and measured, circles

in circles, tightening, his howl against ensanguined cries,
until it seems he turns to us, his muzzle
pulsing huge from every screen, the click

of his nails as he paws at the nether world's gates.

In "After Wittgenstein" Wojahn chronicles the aftermath of a drive-by shooting, arranging some twenty-two lines in strata stacked and separated by single dingbats as though they were geologic striations. The descent has begun, not only into Hell itself but into language as well. Wojahn is strip-mining both and laying bare their features: "And here's the Gorgon's seething head, the snarling face." / The world is everything that is the case." Wittgenstein's game has been engaged. The object is to approach language as though it were constructed of an assembly of reminders arranged for a particular purpose. Wojahn's purpose appears to include the exploration of the visual arrangement of words and their connection to what he insists must be most important for all of us: human dignity. The truth of dignity's absence is represented in this case by the stark image of senseless violence: "The girl is bleeding from the shoulders and the face / and writhing on the ER table." Wojahn urges the reader to keep both eyes open so as not to be blinded by this increasingly familiar image. He wants us to be appalled by it, and he wants us to question our own easy acceptance of it as an inevitability. In drawing so many parallels between the story of Orpheus and his own journey, it would appear that Wojahn has acknowledged a belief in what George Steiner calls the "topology of culture," those "invariants and constants underlying the manifold shapes of expression in our culture." Wojahn realizes that if society is subject to such a template, then it too may have begun a preordained descent into darkness as real and as numbing as his own. In "After Wittgenstein" he wonders whether there may be some way out of such a template's confining dimensions.

Sections II, III, and IV find Wojahn attempting to break out of the confines of cultural topology. In these sections, which read like a catalogue of encounters in the world of the dead, Wojahn is back to the game of exploding the "fascist form" of the sonnet, an old trick he perfected in his second book of poetry, "Mystery Train". The fourteen-line structure is maintained as is a rigid slant rhyme, but lines are broken in half and allowed to dangle, giving the appearance of an inflexible form that has been purposely dropped and fractured, or perhaps beaten from the inside out. In section II, these sonnets introduce us first to a series of feral children undergoing institutional rehabilitation and then to a tortured father-figure, also institutionalized after what appears to be an attempt at suicide. The sequence moves through a series of hospital vignettes and comes to rest at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in St. Paul, Minnesota, but not before reminding the reader exactly where he is in "VI. THE SHADES: AENEID, BOOK VI":

Even here in hell, the strict Virgilian grandeur,
the cellblocks of the dead in fluent hexameters,

Cocytus and Styx, Tartarus and the Vale of Tears,
and here Aeneas meets his ghostly father

Wojahn's "Virgilian" guides are many; they come and go without warning but leave lasting impressions that serve as beacons in this labyrinth of words. Shades of Geoffrey Hill, for instance, color the start of section III in Wojahn's tongue-in-cheek political poem "Social Realism: Ceausescu Ode":

Great Hero Great Guerrilla Fighter, Barehanded-
Slayer-of-the-Fascist-Horde, Wehrmacht helmets

cobbled beneath Thy feet Homeric.
Suliman Darius Cyrus Offa, the Mighty Impaler Vlad.
To sing not of the partisans, stopping to reload

Klashnikovs, having videotaped Your groveling demise.

The hilarious but ominous "Before the Wine and Cheese is Served" is vintage Wojahn, a distillation perhaps of the first few pages of his very fine essay "Ferality and Strange Good Fortune: Notes on Writing and Teaching" which appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of Shenandoah magazine. In the essay, Wojahn muses over his position in academia as a teacher of creative writing, and the institution's insistence that as a faculty member of the English department he concern himself with "social commodity reification and eudemonic valorization" rather than the simple exposition of human dignity. In its irreverence, Wojahn's sonnet is somewhat reminiscent of Bob Hass's "Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan." It reads like a writer cum faculty-member's worst nightmare, or perhaps the aftermath of a particularly painful external review:

The chair himself will introduce the speaker, his eyes
reptilian on the crowd.
The Foucault toady shuffles papers

while the chairman notes we're "undertheorized."
Our Foucault minion's flown from Yale. He chatters

about "power" awhile. Chaucer and power. Marlowe
and power. Dryden, Khomeini, and film noir

and power.

And most disturbing:

Sixteen tweedy sleeves fly up in unison
like footage caught by Leni Reifenstahl

to prove we are not undertheorized.

Wojahn finds himself and other "institutionalized" poets moving through an academic underworld in which, lamentably, power has taken precedence over literature. In his essay, he likens the modern poet to an endangered species living out its life on a preserve: "although we greedily accept the hay bales, horsemeat and quick-frozen mice, we like to believe that the deans and chairs think twice before they place their heads inside our jaws." He admits to having "a kind of feral relationship to literature" as a maker of objects of beauty which may indeed be perfectly useless but have linked him to an "endlessly long literary tradition whose uselessness has nevertheless been an essential aspect of all human culture." Ironically, it is this "uselessness," he values above all else.

In the haunting final sections of the book, direct references to Lynda Hull surface more and more frequently in poems such as "Ghost Supper," "Dirge and Descent," and "Oracle." Wojahn churns out image after image of Lynda or "L" in photographs, on videotape ("her final reading"), or in his own thoughts. Orpheus is quickly approaching his prize, but Wojahn seems to understand that memory and its companion, poetry, combine to make a kind of "gaze" as detrimental to the prize as the gaze of Orpheus was to Eurydice. He explores this dilemma in what is perhaps the most haunting of all these later poems, the sonnet "God of Journeys and Secret Tidings," which begins "Eurydice is better off in hell. / Isn't that what Rilke says?" This seems to be a turning point in the work, and two distinct images dominate afterward: the mythical Enkidu, and the practical cormorant. In "Gallery IX: A Carved Bone Ring of Cormorants," a neck-ring which could "fit almost perfectly your lover's wrist" becomes the objet d'art for an exercise in ekphrasis in which a parallel between the questing poet and the diving cormorant, harnessed and used by Edo period fishermen to retrieve elusive, underwater prey, is drawn. In the lines "I will circle and return to you, my neck snapped back, / dark water and the twitch of silver in my mouth" one almost feels that Orpheus will succeed in bringing back his Eurydice after all. It is the final poem, "Before the Words," however, which dashes these hopes entirely, but leaves one with a profound sense of unexpected triumph. In the "Epic of Gilgamesh," Enkidu, the best friend of Gilgamesh, is a wild man molded of clay who lives among the beasts of the field. He is condemned to death by the gods for his part in slaying the storm bull of heaven. Gilgamesh undergoes a journey not unlike that of Orpheus to bring his friend back from the land of the dead. The final poem in "The Falling Hour" addresses the fate of Enkidu, and, by extension, drives home the central theme of the book: the impossibility of a successful Orphean journey. However, Wojahn does not concede failure entirely, he sees the possibility of a very different kind of success engendered by such a journey: metamorphosis. His book ends with these concluding lines, a sure sign that at least the poet will persevere in a new guise:

And the lamentation selah fills the pages,
fills too oh lord the vaulted caverns of the world

below. The companion Enkidu is clay.
Selah selah selah. The tablets have been broken
and the tablets now shall be restored.

I, for one, can't wait to see what happens next.