The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Nine): Richard Stull [by Angela Ball]

COUNTRY MUSIC

There’s really nothing to see inside.
The austerity that once numbed the rooms
Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows
Of the few trees left on the lawn.
You can stare through the windows all you want,
Nothing inside will be broken, the guests
The dogs and stray cats will never appear.
But something keeps me here. Maybe it’s
The old man who whistles through his teeth.
He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle
Is covered with dust. Birds listen from the barns,
Wait for their big chance. Maybe it’s Upstairs
Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold.
Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep
Under the ground where they’re passing their lives.
They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away.
They have asked me to step back and drift off
Through the suddenly softly falling snow,
Launched into the future, my hands thrown up,
So we can all disappear from my mind.

                                                                  -Richard Stull

Richard Stull was born and raised in Mount Gilead, Ohio. He lived for many years in New York City, where he worked as an editor and a freelance writer. He now lives in Newburgh, a small city on the Hudson River, about fifty miles north of New York. He has been a resident at Yaddo and was awarded an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Sal Mimeo (edited by Larry Fagin), and Blazing Stadium. He is the author of several limited editions. These include A Walk With Jane, Drugged Like Mirrors, Canal, and The Adoration of the Golden Calf.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Nine): Richard Stull

Richard Stull’s “Country Music” begins with a compelling disclaimer: “There’s really nothing to see inside” and moves on to a brilliant matter-of-fact personification: “The austerity that once numbed the rooms / Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows / Of the few trees left on the lawn.” This poverty, natural and human, is the source of country’s music’s tortured falsetto and gravelly base—anguish and comfort in one. The house has nothing to offer—even its unofficial guests, the strays, stay hidden. Then the poet/speaker says, “But something keeps me here,” and posits “it’s / The old man who whistles through his teeth”—a carnivore’s music.  The man seems more dead than alive, like a photograph of someone once living: “He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle / Is covered with dust.” “Birds listen from the barns, / Wait for their big chance.” What this means is mysterious, made even more so by the arrival of “Upstairs / Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold.”

Suddenly we are in the realm of myth—incongruous in this cornpone setting, but somehow right. Think of Loretta Lynn—was she not a kind of Iphigenia? In shadows of gold from the glittering costumes that surrounded her?  I am far afield, but the poem invites that, I think.

It takes us next to an underworld: “Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep / Under the ground where they’re passing their lives.” “Passing their lives” manages to suggest so much while at the same time withholding it. “They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away.” What is the tale and why is it scented?  Because of an Attic breeze—not from under-roof storage, but ancient Greece? Like all of us, the children wish for things to be different. Maybe scentless.

The word “Maybe” in the poem keeps us at the threshold of reality, the house we don’t need to enter.

What happens next astonishes—the poet has heard from the children. The poem opens wide,suddenly, with the poem’s words addressing its maker. These are not quoted, but summarized--“They have asked me to step back and drift off”—and suddenly it’s snowing—the same prophetic snow that covers the end of James Joyce’s great story, “The Dead,” and we are carried on its drift along with the poet. The poem’s astounding ending violates and remakes the rules of personification: “So we can all disappear from my mind.” How to parse this statement? As opaque and teasing as Arthur Rimbaud’s “’I’ is another,” it says all this is fantasy—straightforward enough—but also violent. The poet’s posture is like someone shot, pushed over a cliff, powerless: “Launched into the future, my hands thrown up.” The casualties include the shotgun codger, the strays, the birds, and—most heartbreakingly--Upstairs Helen. If the poem said “so they can all disappear” we would witness a familiar poetic desertion, like the one in Keats’“Ode to a Nightingale,” when the poet must return to his “sole self.” That’s not what happens. Instead, we “all disappear,” “launched”—shades of Helen—into an unknowable future that is decidedly non-mythic. The inclusion of poet and reader in the disappearance makes magic--and in this moment, the poem, like breath, is knocked out of us. Yet something reverberates in reverse: a willed poverty, a Keatsian surmise. - Angela Ball

Comments

[Karen Cissel]

Loved the poem and the incisive exegesis! Thank you, Angela Ball.

[Jill Newnham]

Fascinating and compelling -- both the poem and the commentary. Thank you.

[jim c]

Rick Stull has always written like an angel. When I first met him, he was nineteen, and I thought he WAS an angel. Good job, Rick, as usual. Merrill Gilfillan would be proud! (private joke). Thanks, Angela, for bringing Rick's work to BAP, and for your insights into the poem.

[David Schloss]

Somewhere between Sodus and Gomorrah(NYC), Rick Stull has been writing lyric poems for decades in the best true Ashberyan spirit. Angela Ball's fine exigesis complements the evocations of RS well.
What a welcome surprise to see Richard Stull represented here, as well.