I would have gotten more pleasure out of the quaint and curious new film The Raven if the writers had not promised something much more serious and informed than they delivered.  The movie opens by reminding us of the mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe’s delirium and death in Baltimore during October of 1849 and promising us a sequence of possibilities that might explain Edgar Allan Poe’s last days, which many attribute to heavy alcohol consumption while “cooped,” or wagoned-up and hauled from poll to poll to vote often and fraudulently in local elections.  The whirligig which the film offers up instead I won’t expose, but the filmmakers keep throwing the implausible at their audience, refusing any credible paths.  One most puzzling miscalculation (which I suppose is meant to be an inside joke) is that a murder victim

early in the story is identified as Rufus W. Griswold, a critic who had a running ink feud with Poe.  If there’s any other mystery in Poe’s life story equal to that concerning the cause of his death, it’s why he named Griswold (who outlived Poe by a decade) his literary executor.  Griswold set out to savage Poe’s reputation, and it was a long time before the name of Poe shed the taint of Griswold’s hand.  So, if we’re to take the movie with even a grain of salt, how can we reconcile this counterfactual tidbit (one of many, but the easiest to identify and expose) with anything like a viable theory of Poe’s death?  In truth, the writers and producers have honeydipped from Poe’s biography, omitting most information that would interfere with his role here as a sympathetic protagonist (for instance, his sad but sick penchant for tubercular women, or his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin).  It would not be impossible to present an admirable Poe with deep flaws and strange appetites, primarily imaginative, but that would have been a movie with less of the Keystone Kops and bodice-ripping romance and more of a character exploration.  Not the kind of spring/summer fare that makes the box office cash register ring.  I only hope this zany-and-gruesome-but-occasionally-serious (and sometimes quite clever) outing from those eager to cash in on the current splatter craze will not prevent a more serious biopic, which would provide distraction and stimulation for those who are curious about tell-tale hearts and mysteries of the soul (not to mention hoaxes, speculative stories, cryptography, philosophy, feline interment, sibling interment, premature interment, spousal interment and various stripes of disinterment) but which would still not be deficient in shock and awe.  Perhaps we have the new and goofy Sherlock Holmes extravaganzas to blame for this effort, but to raise the interactive level, I offer this little trinket: when the detective asks Poe if he has ever written a story with a sailor in it, before Poe can say he hasn’t, cry out, “The owner of the dangerous ‘Ourang-Outang’ in ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ is a sailor.”  [By the way, John Evangelist Walsh's attempt to put the Poe demise mystery at rest in Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe isn't much more persuasive, and you have to pop the corn yourself.]

     “TELL ME A STORY,” says the child yearning to delay the darkness and the withdrawal of parental comfort as the dream world draws near, and all the better if the story features recognizable characters and patterns, if something important is imperiled in the narrative, then rescued,  and if the tale is, in the end and almost against expectation, soothing.  In an era of so much poetry with fractured syntax— fragmented, elliptical, dissonant, cryptic – I sometimes grow restive and wonder who really has a story to tell and who is just feigning it, juking about, confusing obscurity with profundity, but then I recall how startled and frustrated I was on first encountering the shifting planes, altered pitches and bold, jigsawing parallelisms of Robert Penn Warren’s poetic sequence Audubon: A Vision (all its sections together at last in a slim volume from Random House in 1969).  And I also remember how spellbound and awe-struck I was, like the child hearing some tale of a dark forest and its shadows, how I could truly say, as Warren’s narrating persona does in the final movement, “I did not know what was happening in my heart.”  Forty years after the poem first found me, I am still in awe of it.

     Why was the discovery of that poem so word-altering and world-altering for me?  Operating by turns as agent of historical narrative, allegory, meditation and lyric – Warren had a song as well as a story – Audubon brought back into relevance the frontier, the haunting natures mortes of the great artist/ornithologist and my own questions about both my source and destiny, as well as a reminder of how – despite all the faux pioneering, adventure vacations, taming and “cultivating” – the Other of the natural world confronted deliberately could provide direction and amplitude to the search for identity, a context for essential epiphany.

     The poem is a bench mark for not only Warren’s own vision and work but for Americans willing to admit to shortcomings like pride, greed and pretentiousness always marbling the virtues that lead a person to flee civilization with its (as Merwin puts it) “ruth of the lair” and risk the indigenous perils and destabilizing self-revelations lurking in the wilderness.  And the poem dramatizes both Audubon’s and the author’s attempts to reconcile romantic idealism and pragmatism, to outreach both isms and discover one’s own unclassifiable core in a realistic realm both mysterious and flat-iron factual.

     The shape of the poem is not simple, yet its seven numbered parts signal to readers that its design is near-symphonic, if rife with elements of fugue and aria, riff and outburst:

I/ Was Not the Lost Dauphin (a lyrical introduction to Audubon in the natural environment, aware both of “How thin is the membrane between himself and the world” and how strong that membrane is.)

II/The Dream He Never Knew the End Of  (thirteen subsections – comprising the core of the poem – that recount a gritty and grotesque frontier story of attempted murder, disturbing concupiscence, rough justice and the protagonist’s discoveries of  joy and beauty emanating from the central grotesqueness of a murderous and somehow alluring crone.)

III/  We Are Only Ourselves (a brief statement of acceptance, or an attempt at acceptance.)

IV/ The Sign Whereby He Knew (five sections sampling and disclosing Audubon’s forays into civilization and domesticity as he acts and observes, seeking to understand fate and envying the creatures who do not require self-consciousness and the favor of “great men.”)

V/ The Sound of That Wind (a brisk survey of Audubon’s life, conveyed in part by phrases from his journals and rehearsing his struggles with respectability.)

VI/ Love and Knowledge (a page crystallizing the artist’s complex engagement with birds – “he slew them at great distances .. he put them where they are, and there we see them:/ In our imagination,” leading to the revelation that love is knowledge.)

VII/ Tell Me a Story (a memory of the narrator’s boyhood epiphany, as “there being no moon/ And the stars sparse,” he hears “the great geese hoot northward” in “the season before the elderberry blooms.”  The poet makes a plea, asks to be told a story “of great distances and starlight,” named Time, but that name unuttered, “a story of deep delight,” a phrase surely enlisted from Coleridge’s interrupted dreamer speculating on “what deep delight ‘twould win me,” if only he could reenter the dream.

     The glory of this poem is, in part, its boldness: by turns imagistic and elliptical, in part philosophical, it combines episode, summary and conclusion (as a short story might), but refuses mechanical continuity, employing tonal overlap and emotional resonance instead.  One almost wishes the poem were printed on large panels instead of pages, as its scale of cosmic engagement (the dawn is “God’s blood spilt”) invites a three-dimensional apprehension, while its central episode in which the painter/hunter is rescued from goblin-like outlaws who would slit his throat over a gold watch, is riveting in its naturalism, yet offering a troubling chronicle of the inevitability of horror.

     The two aspects of this poem which most haunt me are the grim story which unfolds at dark in Part II; “On the trod mire by the door crackles the night-ice already there forming” provides the threshold of a “dark hovel /In the forest where trees have eyes,” which he (probably Warren here, through Audubon) retains from childhood.  The deliberate pace, accumulating suspense, the imagery of dim light, a one-eyed Indian, the “whish of silk” as the grotesque hostess hones her knife on a spat-upon stone – it’s one of the great episodes (mostly extrapolated by Warren from Audubon’s journals) in our literature, but when I first encountered it, despite the meticulous enumeration and arrangement of blocks of text within the poem, I kept wondering if Warren hadn’t led me away from what I wanted poetry to be and back towards a peculiar kind of prose, maybe something William S. Burroughs would approve.  I have grown to understand that he had, instead, led me to experience poetry as language sculpture, architecture, without sacrificing the thematic weave, satisfying patterns and echoing, reinforcing sounds, which in Understanding Poetry he had called “the tangled glitter of syllables” and which I went to the well of poetry in quest of.  Once I recovered from my shock at the formal appearance of the poem, I began to learn my way around it, weaving through biography, history, metaphysics and folklore.  I had not expected any poem to quench and nourish me the way “Audubon: A Vision” had.  Although I had long loved “Prufrock,” it was always an objet d’arte, distant from my own central concerns, elegantly foreign, but Warren had diminished the dense allusive component of Eliot’s accomplishment and brought the quest for self-knowledge out of the parlor, away from the pitiful paralyzed man and set moving in my imagination a distinctly American quest accepted by a man who in some vital ways represented our national hardships and achievements, their romantic distractions and their roots in the understory of the forest, where power and access, beauty and apprehensiveness are steadily negotiated.  In short, Warren had made it personal in ways I could neither ignore nor deflect.

     I was living in Watauga County, N.C., up in the Blue Ridge when I first found a copy of the volume Audubon bound in a slender volume (the poem deployed with liberal spacing on substantial paper, itself an artifact) in the teaching assistants’ bullpen at Appalachian State University, and its words often sent me walking into the woods along Winkler’s Creek or up Howard’s Knob in morning fog and rain, at sunset or mid-day, wrestling with the question of what a man, besides his passion[s], might be.  Everything else began to seem secondary, and on good days, I believe this hierarchy is the one I should live by.  About twenty-five years ago I actually gave that volume to a friend who loved Warren and kept saying he was going to become a writer but also said he was too ignorant so far to begin.  He never did write, and for many years I had the poem only in various versions of selected Warren poems, crowded in, caged.  (I did, however, long ago memorize the final section as a talisman, a tune to whistle in the dark.)  Recently a good friend found me a copy of the 1st Edition, complete with the dust jacket pictured above, and I won’t be giving it away.

     A year and a half after the book came into my hands, Warren visited Appalachian State as a guest writer, and I spent some time conversing with him, sharing a flask of bourbon (but only after five) and sometimes chauffeuring him about.  How young was I?  One afternoon I asked him, “Mr. Warren, what kinds of things interest you specifically as a poet?”  I got the soundest and probably most obvious answer, but in a soothing tone, his eyes twinkling: “Why Rod, only those things which interest me as a man.”  I could almost hear “the great geese hooting northward” and knew I had a long climb ahead of me, that it would take a lifetime to become both a poet and a man, to  find and taste Coleridge’s “milk of paradise.”  Nevertheless, the poem, more than anything else I’ve ever read, still delivers that “deep delight” (now in a gift from another friend, the first edition copy of the board-bound book, including the dust jacket pictured above, a powerful object, almost a fetish).  It’s my twenty-third Psalm,  a poem (or sequence or suite) which promises that wonders are possible, comfort is accessible, restoration achievable, perhaps even for me, if I keep the blade sharp and learn to cut clean on the joints as, “in this century and moment of mania,” I try to tell a story myself.

     A couple of years ago I ambled into a field on the property of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and sat down on a bench incorporated into the shelter of a tall stacked- slat structure with elegant lines and a satisfying prospect of woods and meadow.  The summer sun encouraged me to lie down for a spell, and soon I had dozed off.

     I didn’t realize that I was, as I appreciated the shape and then availed myself of the shelter, in tune with the builder’s intentions – merging an aesthetic experience with a practical one.  The construction was a product of the imagination of Craig Pleasants, and Tuesday evening I had the opportunity to see slides of more of his artful vernacular habitats and to hear him speak about the political and soulful nature of what he calls an “aesthetics of necessity.”

     A veteran of the post-modern reassessment of what constitutes art, Pleasants has designed and built many site-specific pieces and engaged in performance art, as well as traditional genres.  Many of these – from rookeries to a re-telling of the “Three Pigs” tale from folklore, can be found at his website: http://www.craigpleasants.com

     For two reasons I recommend Craig Pleasants’ new art, even for those who are unable to visit his current exhibition, “Volume,” in the Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee.  First, his art, which my vocabulary doesn’t do justice to, is arresting, provocative, surprising and beautiful, and a two-dimensional acquaintance with them is inadequate.  The gallery exhibit concentrates on a free-standing tent constructed of red shirts of many sizes and styles, all sewn together.  Ancillary to this centerpiece are ink and watercolor drawings and sketches related to the tent.  To walk through the show is to re-open questions of dwelling, home and sanctuary.

     The second aspect of the show, demonstrative of Pleasants’ activism, is a statement we’re to imagine is being sent from George Washington, whose own sympathies exhibit more than one dimension.  On the one hand, Washington donated canal stock worth $20,000 to the struggling Liberty Hall Academy, which later became Washington College, then WLU.  On the other, Washington while president sympathized with Haitian slave-owners whose chattel were rebelling against them in 1791.  Pleasants has produced a document which channels Washington (in fact borrowing from his prose style and habits) suggesting that Washington and Lee donate $20,000 for housing materials to the current generation of Haitians left homeless by recent earthquake and storm.  Such a donation would be, the artist says, an act of atonement for “an act that seemed to me to sully his otherwise stellar reputation.”

     Although I admire Washington, recent scholarship has already demythologized him, made us see him as a man with virtues and shortcomings, but Pleasants’ humanitarian impulse and the art arising from it serves to remind us of the complexity of our culture and of our own often unconscious engagement with questions of what is shelter, what habitat, sanctuary, home, that “aesthetics of necessity” that permeates this artist’s work and reminds us that “art for art’s sake” has probably never been a very meaningful phrase unless it’s accompanied by a sense of “art for heart’s sake” and “art for mind’s sake,” both of which are in play with Pleasants’ creations.