Book of Mysteries

I DON’T HAVE TO close my eyes to imagine David Huddle as a lanky boy with stringy, grease-spun hair. There he is — one of us — grabbing the electrified stock wire until his shoes steamed the dew. And outside McCloud’s General Store, a man named Frankie White daring him to eat a whole raw onion. “Eat an onion, and I’ll let you have a watermelon.” And Huddle says sure, and Frankie pulls out this two-pound onion. None of us ever saw one so big. And Jesus, for a skinny boy Huddle sure could puke. And riding to town in the bed of a dark green pickup. And snagging a brown bullhead catfish in the New River — the only one in America that flows south to north. And there he is moments before supper, showing his hands to his mother to prove he’d washed them. And still she bends her head to sniff them for soap because looks can be deceiving and her boys are full of tricks.

Okay, okay. I made all that up — about the onion, and the catfish, and puking, and the pickup. But it’s nearly impossible to read David Huddle’s recent poetry collection Dream Sender without wanting to invent the accompanying biographical minutia. Most new poets feel compelled to exploit their personal experiences, and turn negative capability on its ass. Although Huddle isn’t new (this is his 19th volume) this brilliant book of mysteries — achieved without reference to a previous body of work (no pop quizzes here) — reads like a debut collection a lifetime in the making.

What do I mean by mysteries? Huddle writes more about what isn’t there than what is, so that the familiar becomes ghostlike and restless, “jittery words agitating to line up / direction not yet clear destination / mostly unknown.” His poetry is deeply personal, yet devoid of the details of the earthshaking and even the everyday; and his narrative threads are a series of engagements and revelations rather than plot points. In this, he pushes back against most of today’s writing. As when, in “Meditation,” he tells us:

This is not about pleasure, which is nothing
special nowadays anyway. A sunbathing girl
once fell off the roof of that building
and broke her arm, and I’m glad I didn’t
see that. I just want ordinary twilight,
somebody picking a guitar in the distance,
maybe a gray horse if there’s one available.

In other hands, this might have become a poem chiefly about a sunbather who Icarus-ed off the roof, titled, “Did She Jump, Or Was She Pushed.” But if that kind of trauma ever mattered to Huddle, now he’s keen on getting it out of the way as efficiently as possible in order to access the hundreds of microwounds and microwants that might not otherwise have a chance to breathe — to “dispense ecstasy and suffering / in equal measure,” as the speaker in the eponymous “Dream Sender” chants.

About running away from his own biographical details, Huddle writes in “Against Auld Lang Syne”:

I flee
my past not for the crimes or even shame but
my fear it’s out to steal my future.

Writing these lines is one thing, but writing them at a time when American authors seem obsessed with the painfully personal is quite another. We are, as a culture, fanatical about concrete reality and positive capability. It’s almost as if in their quest to be genuine, writers have forgotten that the wonder of art is that it need not be genuine at all. Huddle, who was bred in Ivanhoe, Virginia, at some 2,000 feet above sea level, doesn’t seem to give a damn about being genuine. For him, writing from a place of doubt and not-knowing is more thrilling than writing from a place of hard-won experience or faith. You don’t have to be able to fly to write about a flock of geese, he seems to be saying (in “The Call,” in which he actually focuses on the “random perfection” of one lone vulture). Neither, it would seem, must one die in order to write about death.

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Dream Sender is divided into three parts: “Domestic Strange,” “Dream Sender,” and “The Bat,” which should not be read like three separate chapbooks. Each section corresponds to moments of disorientation, moments of myth, and moments of orientation, or how one goes about finding oneself in the absence of reference points. In the final section, the poet identifies with a bat trapped inside a house. First, the people try to kill it, then, sensing its panic, desperately fling open doors and windows to help it escape. The blind poet, like the blind bat, is trapped inside a house of biography and must escape, and does, into the May night.

One of my favorite poems, “What is Unknown,” commences the second section. It consists of 17 prose stanzas which originate quite possibly from an offhand remark and migrate through nine circles of absurdity:

When I tell her I’ve fallen for What Is Unknown, my mother’s face brightens. “She’ll be a good girlfriend for you,” my mother says. “Not stuck up like that trashy Well Known. Not boring like that awful Perfectly Well Known. Bring her here for spaghetti on Wednesday night. We’ll see what your father thinks about her.” Then she turns to me with a shy smile. “I wonder what your children will look like,” she says.

In the second stanza, Huddle and What Is Unknown drive from Ivanhoe to Lexington. This had to have been before the completion of the Eisenhower Interstate system of highways, which would have meant weaving and climbing and descending on old Route 11 for hours and hours — at the very least there was probably a basket of cold fried chicken involved. But Huddle’s genius here is to create profound tension without anything much actually happening:

In the car she doesn’t have much to say, but she smiles at me every time I glance over at her. I get a notion to reach over and take her hand. My thought makes me start imagining that’s exactly what she’d like — me to reach over there. I want to. I can almost feel her wanting me to. I raise my hand and will it over toward What Is Unknown. It doesn’t make it that far. It settles on the console between us. It taps its fingers.

The hesitation of the gesture towards What Is Unknown perversely echoes the purple majesty of driving 280 miles on a first date. Virgil seems to be having a hand in this poem, but mercifully without epic consequences. Ostensibly, that date was to visit the Confederate graveyard. The local Confederate horsemen had repulsed the Union advance there, so maybe the rebel underworld was a source of local interest to the couple disguised as Orpheus and Eurydice.

Whatever. The point is that the dramatic tension in Huddle’s poems is not based on conflict. We see this most clearly in his relish of the sonnet, a form that some spirited academics have called “a golden cage.” Although formlessness might more aptly describe what Huddle is up to here, since he uses so many constructions, including four tercets and a couplet, or a pair of seven line stanzas, and even a paunchy one with quatrains on top and bottom and eight lines in the girth. Huddle’s sonnets are not arguments so much as ladders between platforms. They more or less adhere to 14 lines, even if some require step-down enjambment or feel a little pinched. His transitions are key here, like fencing between pastures. We want the horse to run free but we don’t want him to get loose. Stopping just short of total freedom prevents a rant from taking over the art, as in his sonnet “Okay #2” about how he “never loved anybody I didn’t / also not love.”

The tension Huddle manages to create is based on the shift within a poem that propels it from being one-dimensional to three, as happens in “My Father Breathing,” which begins with a simple observation of how his father walked from the road to the door. Huddle studies this move, and pesters it, and brings in some medical science, and ultimately worries over it as he realizes that the sonnet is not about his father at all, but about himself, about “that involuntary song / our hearts and lungs make, one breath to the next.”

Speaking of music, I should mention that while reading these poems I listened to several Bach inventions, various Schumann movements, and the most streamed artist on Spotify, Lana Del Rey. It’s that blend of classic tradition and contemporary melody that resonates in Huddle’s work — and he seems implicitly aware of music all the way through. There’s a drummer here, a guitarist there, a mention of Teddy Wilson in a grumpy poem that lands a few hits at the Best American Poetry editor David Lehman. There’s even a terrific poem of being in a school band: “When that man lifted his baton, / we obliged him with the ridiculously gorgeous / noise of our growing up.” But apart from Emmylou Harris dropping a line there isn’t any bluegrass, and only the occasional bird squawk. And besides that “odd joyful ruckus” (“The Call,” again) most of Huddle’s poems are so quiet they seem to have been written among the stacks of his public library. Even his frequent use of blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — is only in the service of settling down his lines, not to enliven them. It’s a way of speaking “carefully, as nowadays / men must do who aren’t looking to argue.” (“Gun Notes”).

When it’s all about the revelation, pace means everything, and, as is evident in a poem like “The Call,” Huddle is a master of the slow build, and the slow release:

[…] It’s about
that half an instant of standing alone

under a sky the blue of my infant dreams,
among the trees gone yellow and orange, the still
air clear as a soprano’s hitting and holding E

above high C with the day just begun and the whole
raw world summoning me to step through a door
I can’t even see.

Yes — “It’s about that half an instant.” It fascinates me that Huddle’s poems against experience should occur at a time of the Alt-Lit scene which is also very much against experience in favor of imagecentric subtle impressions (because feelings). While we live in an era when a lot of people wearing cowboy boots have never ridden a horse, it’s refreshing to think that although Huddle probably doesn’t wear those stylish Ariats or Justins he might be quite comfortable throwing his leg over a 1,200-pound beast. This is the gift of poetry that comes from a life lived long without forming conclusions, of having judgment without being judgmental. It’s poetry as if the author just happened to be there to write down the poem that was already living in the wind.

Since I train horses for a living, I tend to view all poets as horse trainers. There are good ones and bad ones, patient ones, and those who take short cuts. But that’s only a third of the story. The rest of it has to do with finding and developing fast big-hearted horses to put in your barn, and having a system of some kind but also knowing when to deviate from what has worked for you in the past. David Huddle is a lot like the trainer D. Wayne Lukas. Lukas had just turned 63 when he won his fourth Kentucky Derby, with Charismatic. He was asked if he would be retiring soon. “Are you kidding?” he replied. “I’m just starting to figure out this game.”

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Barrett Warner is the author of My Friend Ken Harvey and Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?