Reining In Chaos: Stevens' Unity, Melville's, Mine Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday morning through Monday morning, July 15-18,2022

"And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity..."
--Wallace Stevens, from "Connoisseur of Chaos"

"An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea,
and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar..."
--Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick, Chapter 27, "Knights and Squires"

All the people
I address in poems,
this dramatis personae,
comprise a loose unity—
Kim, my sons, my mother,
my brothers, nieces,
Karen and others, poets,
real and fictive alike—
Hamlet, Ophelia—
are my juried court.
They enter and exit,
return again, play their parts
on no fixed schedule,
other than the occasion:
something they once did
or said, or some recent
past event becomes the poem.
None need ask permission,
none need speak a password
to enter or depart, for, as
I have written, they comprise
a unity of sorts, one that, if not
wholly satisfactory, lacking
in harmony and consonance,
remains a unity still—mine—
"a baggy monster" if you will,
alike Melville's Moby Dick,
whose Anacharsis Clootz cast
of characters whisper or cast out
their various asides—Ahab's stark
digressions, Starbuck's moral anguishings,
wise Stubb's many taken-all-abacks—
only then to step back in the roll call.
If any wisdom pervades these poems,
it's theirs, and that of one master poet
who attempted to rein in the chaos,
create a new theatre, a new stage,
new actors who performed new roles,
spoke new lines into our minds' ears
as we listened to them, ourselves talk.
He failed. I fail too. But our poems—it's
these most vital words that will suffice.