Johnson, Brian

English

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© Providence College  The author(s) permits users to copy, distribute, display, and perform this work under the following conditions: (1) the original author(s) must be given proper attribution; (2) this work may not be used for commercial purposes; (3) the users may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; (4) users must make the license terms of this work clearly known for any reuse or distribution of this work. Upon request, as holder of this work’s copyright, the author(s) may waive any or all of these conditions.  The Prose Poem: An International Journal is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) for the Providence College Digital Commons. http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoems/ THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL  Volume 7 | 1998 Jon Davis’ Scrimmage Of Appetite Brian Johnson  Jon Davis. Scrimmage of Appetite. Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press,1995. 102 pp.According to one view, a writer’s mission is to ask questions, not toanswer them. The more difficult and painful the existence, the more relevantthis axiom seems to be. It is not surprising that Edmond Jabès, the well-knownFrench poet whose work dwells on Jewish experience and the incomprehensi-bility of the Holocaust, entitled one of his collections The Book of Questions.For we live in a century that contains more dark matter than light, and the taskof the poet may no longer be to create beautiful objects, but to lead a relentlessand unflinching interrogation of history—even if the interrogation fails toproduce answers, but instead yields more questions and a deeper despair.In his book of poems and prose poems, Scrimmage of Appetite, Jon Davisis alternately haunted, chastened, and appalled by the past—his own andAmerica’s. In one of the central prose poems in the book, “The Bait,” Davismeditates on his brother’s death after eleven years have passed:An attempt, one might say, to come to terms with his deathas if there were somewhere to come to, as if there were terms. Butthere is nowhere to come to; there are no terms. Just this spewingof words, this gesture neither therapy nor catharsis nor hope-lessness nor consolation. Not elegy but a small crumb. An offer-ing.To Davis, poetry is a modest but valiant attempt to create wholeness;even when words fail to return what is lost, the poem seeks understanding andhealing. The collection as a whole embodies the impossible task of staringdown history (El Salvador, South Africa, the L.A. Riots, Vietnam) while remain-ing open to the pleasures of nature. To accomplish this task, Davis adopts adual persona. At times he is the poet of solitary epiphanies: “Once, I wasdriving in Vermont and a hawk hung briefly over the hood of my car. It wasbeautiful—the hawk, the road, the sunlight after clouds. I have written aboutthat hawk, about seeing that hawk [ . . . ]. ” Yet he also writes as a historicalobserver: “And weren’t you always moved by the poignant damage? Thechild clutching at the woman’s dress while the soldiers march through thebomb-torn village.” Indeed, Davis is unusually ambitious in his efforts to com-bine “art” and “scope,” to marry the delicate vision of a lyricist to the morecommon postmodern voice of the detached, ironic, but frequently bitter wit-ness. Davis struggles to make this uneasy alliance work, a struggle that isreflected in the formal boundaries that mark the collection, which is evenlydivided between free verse and prose poems. Several of the free verse poems(“In the Sleep of Reason,” “In Privacy,” and others) are long-lined incantationsin the tradition of Whitman, though considerably darker and less buoyant intheir overall effect than Whitman’s poems.  In contrast, the prose poems mixstraightforward addresses (“In college I took a course in the philosophy ofscience”)  and notational strings of imagery (“Kept sliding back down. Poster,papers, incense. Stoned and adrift on the water bed. Wine in a paper bag.”)Although Davis’s subject matter is consistent across forms, the direct-ness and earthiness of the prose poem—its ability to keep from inflating it-self—works to his advantage. For Davis’s grasp occasionally exceeds hisreach; he strains to make the grand philosophical statement, resulting in re-peated attempts to define “Americans,” “the twentieth century” and “history.”Like most poets, Davis wants to write important poems.  Unlike many, however,Davis wants to reach an audience. He admits, “I don’t want to be alone in myseeing.” This loneliness is accentuated in the prose poems, where Davis ismost successful in exploring the past as a personal inheritance as well as acommon bond. The drama in Davis’s work rises out of his willingness to adopta conversational tone, addressing the reader as he addresses himself. And therange of his questioning is impressive. In “Turtle: An Eccentric Ode,” he posesthe overarching question that recurs throughout the book: “What if the past isinescapable?” In “The Bait,” he confronts his own poetic motives: “But whyam I telling you this? Because I want you to love me?” In “The Sixties: TwoScenes,” Davis recounts the desperate appeal of a sixties survivor: “Hendrix,he’d whisper to the spinning record, what do you want from us?” In “TheWheel of Appetite,” he queries nature itself: “What do the birds mean, huddledin the eaves as the wind stretches its story over the yard?” Davis’s fiercequestioning gives Scrimmage of Appetite an intellectual and moral urgencythat is lacking in much recent American poetry. His poetic stance is closer tothat of witness-poets such as Zbiegnew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, whosework merges the lyric impulse into a disciplined examination of European (morespecifically, Polish) history.Davis also bears a resemblance to Rilke, whose Duino Elegies begins withthe famous question, “If I cried out / who would hear me up there / among theangelic orders?” Although Davis is not a religious poet, he shares Rilke’squest for union; in both cases, the quest results in arresting shifts of voice,even within the space of a single poem, between first person singular (I), firstperson plural (We), second person (You) and third person (He). The result is arange of utterance that is alternately self-disclosing, prophetic, accusatory,and detached. Finally, however, Davis dispenses with the boundaries betweenpronouns not because he believes in transcendence, but because he seeks anawareness that only multiple points of view can provide. At this point inhistory, such an awareness is partial, momentary, and far from glorious. Davisconcedes the limitations of human ambition in “Café,” which ends with theauthor and a friend staring into their cups, then raising their heads to surveythe world:   We watched people passing through the streetlight’s hazeto enter the all-night bookstore across the street. Out of whatmurky depths they kept coming to be touched by such blurred,inadequate light.In Davis’s view, humans are lost and the world is nearly lost, a situationthat is suggested by many of the poem’s titles (“The Year 2000,” “Oblivion’sMouth,” “A Letter to the Future”). Davis positions himself as an end-of-the-millennium poet. His major theme, of which individual poems are more or lessbleak, more or less tender variations, is that we live in a state of desperation,searching for meaning wherever we can find it. He concludes that peoplenowadays “live by a kind of corrupt economy, turning to sex the way a dyingplant turns its last energies to producing a single flower.” Our common desireis to find pleasure as quickly as possible. It is a post-Romantic world, in whichthe guiding voice is not “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” but “Get laid.” Itis also a post-Cartesian world, for our existence is no longer led by thinking,but by “the wheel of appetite [spinning] like a gyroscope in our groins.” Davispresents this appetite as part of human nature, neither inherently good norinherently evil. In America, however, the wheel spins too quickly, creatingexaggerated desires and a singular inability to distinguish nature from artifice.We have evolved  “From the first apple to the glittering Porsche.” Our freedomhas “inadvertently liberated us for cable TV, / The National Enquirer, amuse-ment parks, lottery tickets, / and Madonna.”  We have achieved a life of “easeand continual delight.” But Davis is too much the witness to overlook the realhorrors of the American dream, and too much the poet to believe in this artifi-cial grace. Indeed, as the title of the book implies, we have yet to enter a worldthat is meaningful and true. We are still trapped in the practice session, the“scrimmage,” where members of the same team fight it out against themselves,but cannot escape sadness or loneliness. In the end, Davis is a tragic poet. Heoffers no salvation, no hope that our appetites will one day give meaningrather than take it away. Our only redemption is in the work of a disciplinedmemory. Thus, Davis’s statement in “Fish Magic” serves as the guiding spiritof the collection: “Death wants its skeletons revealed.”Brian Johnson

Jon Davis\u27 \u3cem\u3eScrimmage Of Appetite\u3c/em\u3e

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Jon Davis\u27 \u3cem\u3eScrimmage Of Appetite\u3c/em\u3e

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