By Kylan Rice
A poem with lines is a body of cuts. It’s riven throughout with breaks and caesurae and patterns of stress. In contrast to prose, a poem has shape; it has a body on the page. It owes this corporeality to its brokenness, a violence we emblematize with slashes and double slashes between lines when quoting them. Looked at one way, the breaks in a poem amount to a series of abuses at the hand of the poet in an effort to wring meaning and quicken the mind as the reader’s eye moves from line to line, as if the poet were the wielder of a spear, a scourge, a plaiter of thorns. And so the poem bleeds to give us life, to raise the pulse, to thrill, to scalp us back, as Emily Dickinson would have it. Dickinson penciled little crosses beside words for which she had a variant; the cross in her manuscripts is a symbol of polyvalence and possibility. When I read a poem, I perceive an invisible crucifix in superscript at the end of each line, an asterisk or nth-degree. The cross is like a footnote; it opens the text, creates a zone of exception and addendum, a qualifying New Testament. The eye drops all at once to read the words beneath the words. Dickinson describes this drop, this free fall at the foot of the cross, in “I felt a funeral, in my Brain”: “And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down – / And hit a world, at every plunge / And Finished knowing – then –.” At the end of a line or plank is a step into space, an ekstasis, which means “to stand outside,” to be outside your mind. Indeed, the end or purpose of a poem has always been the end of knowing and reason. We write and read to be ravished, to feel the dancefloor drop, to taste the tab—the wafer-host—of ecstasy. None of this is possible unless the architecture of the poem is rickety, structurally unstable, overextended. Unless it is riddled with cuts and hack marks, with ruptures and discontinuities in history as the history of the poem. Black-swan events. Gethsemanes.
To repeat, a cut is the precondition for the body that a poem is. In lyric poetry, the poem is an incarnation—through laceration and abrasion—of the writer’s most intimate self, which the poet Dan Beachy-Quick has observed is also our most anonymous self. He means that the ordeal of the lyric poem helps us discover and dwell within an infrastructure that all selves possess as epiphenomena of the body in tender, nervy contact with the world. The lyric flays the ostentations of the flesh away to bring to light our strong, shared tendons and bones. It harrows the self not just to make it honest but to make it unrecognizable, the way an anatomical diagram will incorporate bright, primary colors—reds, blues, greens, yellows—to distinguish the interwoven component muscles and fasciae in a portion of the body. In becoming anonymous, a diagram of every self, the self becomes colorful and protean. As a result of his initiation to poetry, John Keats came to feel he had “no identity”; the poet “is continually in for and filling some other body,” even the lowly sparrow that lands outside the poet’s window: “I take part in its existence,” Keats wrote, “and pick about the Gravel.” What I love about writing poetry is the feeling of transcorporeality—the feeling of being a sparrow, a child, a flayed man—that it makes possible within the frame of the poem. Do we not write to be, if just for a moment, in the act of (de)composition, newly embodied, to have the body extended, made whole, made different, the circumference of our limited desires-in-life expanded to broach the wider valences of love?
Crucially, the lesson of the crucifixion and the resurrection is that the renewal we seek is strenuously won. Spring seems easy, but look hard and you’ll sense a raw and rutting inflammation, a cold fever. Christ himself, according to Robert Graves, has his analogue in the sacred kings of ancient Welsh mythology, who were sacrificed yearly to induce the year’s plenteous regeneration in May-time. Assassination eventually morphed into symbolic acts of ritual wounding and near-castration: the thigh muscles of the king were torn to make it so he always limped, one heel always lifted off the ground, as if the king had the foot of a bull; as Graves puts it, “the sacred king was ritually lamed in a way that obliged him to swagger or lurch on high heels.” The mincing, bull-footed gait of the sacred king fulfills the requirement of his death, a murder that shadows the world-regenerative promise of Christ on the cross. In the sacrifice of the king—whether Welsh king or king of the Jews—Graves sees the necessary self-sacrifice of the poet, who is also properly lashed to a wheel of birth and rebirth. Maybe this is why the poet limps on iambic feet and broken lines. Maybe this is why the poet wears high heels. Becomes a crippled bull, a satyr. For the self, these are the ritual, wounding requirements of spring.
I offer this prelude on the torn, sprained bodies of poem and poet as an introduction to three books by Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose religiously inflected poems are strenuous in the sense that they understand the work of poetry in terms of strain. Strain is one word for song. The act of singing puts tension on the vocal cords. When a singer performs with utmost feeling, their face contorts. It almost seems to hurt. I exaggerate only slightly when I extrapolate from the apparent pain of the singer to claim that there is no song without an accompanying contortion. This thought helps us approach the peristalsis of release and tension—or better put, of mercy and cruelty—that runs through the work of Martinez de las Rivas. Floodmeadow especially, the poet’s 2023 follow-up to his controversial second book, Black Sun (2018), proliferates with alternating images of relenting and relentlessness. For instance, we observe in this book many “scène[s] de chasse[s],” which serve as a “primary illustration” of the unrelenting pursuit of human beings by God and fate and death, by a universal power of rigor and rigor mortis that stands in stark contrast to our individual human failings in an age of generalized dissipation. God in his perfect, Old Testament strictness is “the huntsman” who raises “the horn to his lips”; he is “the field- / master in his red coat”—“a silueta // of flame leant over to thrash downwards / at one that dawdled on the line.” God is one who “comes to hunt you / down among the rushes with the bells on his reins // ringing as the wheel turns on its axle.” Throughout, and as is also characteristic of Martinez de las Rivas’s other two books, the zeroed-in desirousness of the hunt is offset with pastoral images of dragonflies, blackthorn in blossom, and soft, towering clouds. What moves me most about the poet’s work is this earnest interplay between insatiable requirement and its relaxation. It moves me because it feels reflective of human experience at its most serious or most grave, when experience is irradiated by intimations of the grave and what, if anything, lies beyond it. Amid these fears, there are periods of inevitable slackening—phases marked by lovely allegros of joy, almost as a guarantee of being in a changeful body. Martinez de las Rivas is like Gerard Manley Hopkins in the sense that his world is dappled and pied and couple-color. Just so, to live in the world is to be racked with the contortions of intermittent hope and fear, pleasure and pain.
The predominating color scheme in Martinez de las Rivas’s work is black and white, which mirrors the dichotomous logic that I’ve begun to sketch out. This logic can be most clearly or most self-reflexively observed in alternating scenes of turning and not-turning that recur throughout the trilogy. Wheels turn; swallows pivot in mid-air; horses and rats glance backward before vanishing; faces are averted in bitterness and shame. In the midst of these small and large revolutions, the imperative to not turn away—“do not turn yr face from this”—repeatedly appears in some form in each book. Turning away is alternately associated with refusal, neglect, and distraction. It is a capacity of the body—the body in contrapposto, braided with sinews, able to twist around, to lash out and to cower—and a reflection, often, of the body’s recreant yielding, whether to pain, lust, doubt, or its own disintegration in time. Generally, Martinez de las Rivas identifies turning with mortal incontinence and contrasts it with a changeless immortality. There is in his worldview a divine eternal “centre” that “does not wither,” regardless of our human prevarications. “In us there is a turning,” Martinez de las Rivas asserts in the second half of “Diptych: At Matfen/Address to My Daughter,” a double sonnet from Black Sun; turning inheres in our “collapsing bodies, in these minds, these hearts / like the swallow switching its aim between / targets, its manifold inconstancies / reaching out in despair to touch nothing / but the world’s own mutability.” Because the body can turn, because the mind and the heart are manifold in their fugues and lapses, we can only perceive what changes and withers. We have no eyes to see eternity.
Sometimes Martinez de las Rivas submits to this fact and even seems to revel in it, multiplying his poetry with intricately wrought images of natural transience, as I have already noted. At other times, he tries to look beyond ephemera, beyond the turning earth itself. For example, “Little Psalm,” from Floodmeadow, reprises and transmutes the image of the swallow, identified in “Diptych” with mortal deviation, into a vehicle for escaping the pull of the planet on its axis:
In “Little Psalm,” that which swerves and switches near the ground manages to rise enough to slip the earth. The image is encoded with a desire for the eventual exaltation of the fearful, faithless body. But it’s worth pointing out that the swallow’s flight illustrates as much as it transcends the bereavement described in the first two lines of the poem. In gaining altitude and approaching heaven, the swallow finds herself “alone in the darkness” among the stars. Renouncing the earth in the hope of drawing closer to God exposes the swallow or speaker to the feeling of being beyond God’s “consideration,” in the exhilarating coldness of empty space. The thought is consistent with the rest of Martinez de las Rivas’s work: throughout, he perceives a terrible emptiness in exaltation. To turn away from turning—which is the body, which is earth—is to turn toward the void, where God is, in the empty space of his withdrawal. Omnipotent and omnipresent, God withdraws in order to make space for creation and separate individual existences. To feel “alone in the darkness / beyond [his] consideration” is to feel God apophatically, and so to approach him, but nearness to God, to that which withdraws to permit my existence, is proximity to the conditions of my own annihilation. Like the sub-orbital swallow, my individuality is most vivid—most sharply and even dreadfully known—when it is most vulnerable to resorption.
According to Simone Weil, the resorption of the self in God is the point of having a self in the first place. Put differently, the apotheosis of the self lies in self-renunciation. Weil writes, “We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I.’ That is what we have to give God—in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish—only the destruction of the ‘I.’” When I read this passage, I can’t help extrapolating a theory of lyric poetry—poetry written from the perspective of the destructible “I”—with potential application to Martinez de las Rivas’s work, given his interest in what it might look like to turn away from turning, and to pledge the self instead to a blinding totality. Adapting Weil to poetic thought, we might say that the “I” shows up on the page, becomes legible, as it gives itself up to a force beyond its control, submitting willfully to the disindividuating effects of the Logos, the Word. The self stands forth in the welter of its disfiguration in language, which in its polysemy is constantly working against the coherence of anthropomorphic figures such as the “I.” The “I” in poetry is a trope, and as the etymology of the word reveals, it’s in the nature of trope (meaning “turn” in Ancient Greek) to shift, to undergo transformations and metamorphoses. To become other than itself, or to stand outside the self—to experience ek-stasis. It isn’t until we have been displaced that we come to know, as if by parallax, where and who we were before. It’s less that the self exists to be destroyed—less still that the Word was enfleshed to be harrowed—and more that the self is realized in its destruction, just as Christ became Christ on the cross.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, the destruction of the self—its Orphic dismemberment—is fundamental to the lyric. The lyric poet seeks an intimacy so radical that it exceeds the narrow boundaries of the historical individual. In Lyric Time (1979), which posits Emily Dickinson as a representative lyric poet, Sharon Cameron attributes to her nineteenth-century subject an impulse that might also apply to Martinez de las Rivas: Dickinson works to renounce “temporal relationships” in preference for the “conceptual harmony specified by the permanence of immortality and the promised completion of a center”—the center which does not wither, the rose that stands in ether, to apply similar language from Martinez de las Rivas. Dickinson worries that “to adhere to the exactions of temporal relationships is to relinquish all hope of the immortality that will replace time itself” and thereby usher in a meridian of time in which transience, loss, and separation are no longer features of reality, in which reality itself, as a phenomenal plane, is rolled back up into the undifferentiated whole cloth of eternity. She turns to poetry, and specifically lyric poetry—which has been conventionally theorized as a monologic form of utterance in which the poet puts off the encumbrances of social, political, and historical context to speak from their inmost self—to approximate the cancellation of time and the hoped-for collapse of self and other, of subject and object, that the lyric broaches by creating a sense of radical co-presence and immediacy outside of history. On the one hand, the poetry of Martinez de las Rivas is replete with instances of temporal renunciation that reflect a desire to leave impermanence behind and cleave instead to the unwithering center, the unwobbling pivot. And yet his work is just as full, gorgeously so, of “exactions” and minutiae, which represent, in a certain respect, a fall on the part of the poet back into the world; they represent in other words, his inconstancy, his intractable proneness to turning away.
“The Blackdown Apocalypse,” from Floodmeadow, exemplifies the fall back into phenomenality that recurs in poems scattered across Martinez de las Rivas’s trilogy. Often, these poems address an estranged lover or partner, making them quintessentially lyric: the speaker—the “I”—desires the restoration of lost presence, a reunification with “You,” and the only way that “I” can imagine that, given our shared and tainted history, “the shit we’ve put each other through,” the real distance that divides us, is to posit the end of time, when our bodies and personalities will slough away, making us new to each other again. These poems directly thematize the kind of totalizing singularity event that lyric poets like Dickinson attempt—and always fail—to achieve in anticipation of a final, obliterating, ecstatic reunification with God on the plane of immanence. No poem can be as blank as the page that it mars; “Blackdown Apocalypse” tracks this failure, this slippage back into the desolate landscape of inscription and individual difference:
The poem, taken from “Titan / All is Still,” a longer visionary masterpiece published in Poetry in 2018, is a single sentence fragment that careens away from its initial premise: the cleansing negations that await the couple in the annihilating fullness of time. In the course of enumerating what the speaker and the subject of his address will lack, what will be taken from them and so too from everyone else, Martinez de las Rivas finds himself caught up in a sensual, cascading description of the world the poem tries to imagine as cancelled. The threshold back into worldliness is the spectral (non)appearance of a sparrowhawk: one day, on the day after the last day, there will be no sparrowhawk—and yet here it is for now, negatively given in the poem, where it “thrust[s] through birches / in the snow toward the wood.” The wood is where God is not—“hé never stepped in a wood,” never walked where he withdrew from to create—and so the hawk’s flight is an ingress away from the totalizing consummation that God represents. The poem enacts and furthers this evasion, lovingly focusing next on harebells in the snow, deeper in the woods, then pivoting back to the hawk, a grey-blue “plunderer” who is simultaneously God’s emissary and his antithesis, a creature and therefore an extension of God that also persists defiantly and godlessly in its individuation. The raptor again becomes a vehicle for furthering: it flies across and the perspective of the poem shifts to the snow as a backdrop for bells, clouds, hills, and headlights. The snowy hills may be “featureless,” may be an earthly image of the nothingness the poem posits at its outset, but they are also the setting of a veritable swarm of existence and existents. Against itself, even as it negates the world, the poem restores and affirms its severe, stark beauties.
In the midst of this restoration by way of apophasis, we’re left, nevertheless, with an abiding sense of abandonment. We feel ourselves consigned to the hawk, the harebells, the snow, the headlights; the hills are blank, and their blankness is somehow more terrifying than the blankness of oblivion. The void is paradoxically full, the way a black hole is full, infinite in its density. Creation, by contrast, is empty for being empty of God. “The Blackdown Apocalypse” salvages the world, but returns us to the condition of turning, of turning every which way—“round & round, side to side,” as Martinez de las Rivas reports of a dead owl swinging lightly from a rafter in “Allegory of the Church/Hanged Owl,” from Black Sun. According to the title, the owl is an image of the Church, presumably the Anglican Church, which exists in the world to mediate between earth and heaven. It “revolves” because it has “strung by its neck in rings / of wire,” with one wing caught in the noose, the other hanging down, and its “gorgeous ruff now mocked with blood.” The brutal violence wrought on the bird represents the desolation of the Church in an age of entrenched secularism, the culture’s neglect of it as a divine intermediary. The Church has been abandoned in some respects by the poet, too—Martinez de las Rivas has described himself as an agnostic reckoning with the sway of religious iconography over his imagination—but the cold pathos of the image suggests a sympathy, an indignation on behalf of the Church, and a feeling of quiet dread over the spectacle of its disarticulation. There is in the poet, in other words, a turning toward and away from the Church that mirrors the residual animation of the owl on its string. He implicitly identifies on some level with the mangled, dissenting dignity of the Church as a historical formation in opposition to a soulless modernity inveighed against in “Culture/Apocalypse,” also from Black Sun. Martinez de las Rivas addresses this latter poem to agents of secular liberalism and techno-capitalism:
These lines decisively position Martinez de las Rivas in opposition to modernity and align him as an atavist with the hanged owl in “Allegory of the Church.” The Church stands for “temples of stone,” “hierarchy,” “old courtesies,” and “mannered, blind, intractable reserve”; these previously structured social and spiritual life. More crucially, they offered existential support. The forsakenness of Christ—that god who “suffers / as we suffer”—is a model for navigating and enduring our own alienations. But the glow of the iPhone has supplanted the aureole, the dark subatomic shimmer that enshrouds the god in his suffering, his condescension. Martinez de las Rivas lends new meaning to the concept of “doom scrolling.” Surely the feed is a maw, a hole. It can be hard to tear myself away and set my eyes on more difficult, more enduring rewards. It can be hard to stop scrolling, to stop and be still, and let the stillness hunt me down and claim me as its own. Against the dehumanizing accelerations of the age (“The age demand[s] an image / Of its accelerated grimace,” Pound wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley), Martinez de las Rivas channels the whole of his energies toward the cultivation of “a studied / artifice in which the image can neither / wilt nor grow, but is fixed like a rose in ether— / la naturaleza muerta: the dead body / we enact our fears & tenderness upon …” The work of Martinez de las Rivas, in other words, is an antidote to the doom portended by the feed. It tries to focus our attentions on an eternal image—the dead body or “dead image on a hill” that is Christ on Calvary, bathed in breaking waves of pure, ahistorical light—light from above instead of light from below, in the darkness of Ubers and blacked-out bedrooms.
What saves Martinez de las Rivas from hubris and stasis in this project is his constant, necessary failure to hold his gaze, falling back into phenomenality instead. He turns his eyes away from the slack-jawed fixations and false images of modernity, but can sometimes muster little more than a lavish attention paid to transient natural occurrences and minor plants and animals—dragonflies, fieldmice, flowers—the conventional image-repertoire of lyric poetry. Often these little creatures are presented as symbols of Christ: the dragonfly, for example, is a jeweled crucifix. But their hyperdetailed transience undermines the poet’s stated aims in the last poem in Terror (2014), “On Stockbridge Commons”: to write a durable, rose-in-ether poem that “bears witness to itself through all time,” that serves as a “recension” of the “original, delivering truth” of the atonement. The poem, which I’ll quote at greater length momentarily, begins by situating Martinez de las Rivas’s project in opposition to Theodor Adorno’s theory of the lyric. Classically theorized, the lyric is the preeminent genre of turning-away. It registers and offsets alienation from contemporary society by retreating into more pastoral terrains, the “ecchoing green” of Blake’s England, for example. As Adorno puts it,
… the demand that the lyric word be virginal … implies a protest against a social situation that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive, and this situation is imprinted in reverse on the poetic work: the more heavily the situation weighs upon it, the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws.
The alienated lyric doesn’t just avert its gaze from the industrial and postindustrial emergencies of modern life, it also encloses itself in a cocoon of aesthetic autonomy, which often translates to interpretive difficulty for the reader. In other words, its demurs from utilizing the “heteronomous” language of daily life, preferring to construct its own pure, intransigent idiom. As Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame it in their introduction to Adorno in The Lyric Theory Reader, the contemporary lyric counters the world as it is when it embraces “the estranged language of the most difficult, most ‘purified’ modern poetry … poetry that seems aristocratic rather than popular, radically isolated rather than common” (322). Jackson and Prins’s diagnosis applies readily to Martinez de las Rivas: not only does his work abound with images of aristocracy and courtliness—often, as we shall see, in connection with his studies of ephemera—it is resolutely mannered and strenuous in its delivery, adapting the high-church, juridical language of Geoffrey Hill while also imbuing it with personal drama and emotional salience (in this way refining Hill’s own project, which we glimpse at its lyric zenith in Tenebrae, from 1978, Martinez de las Rivas’s birth-year, before Hill’s poetry largely descends into a murky intellectualism). My point here is that the poetry of Martinez de las Rivas is in certain respects a textbook illustration of the social and political function of the lyric pace Adorno. And yet, the poet pushes back against the German theorist. Here’s “On Stockbridge Commons”:
Martinez de las Rivas “hopes”that his poetry is not, or not only, a lyric expression of modern alienation, a retreat into transient “illusion,” though he senses or fears that it might be. His ambition, instead, and as I’ve already pointed out, is to achieve a more enduring work—a work in which there is no looking away, the normal gesture of the lyric. He seeks to anneal the sparrow, the mite, the cloud—the objects of the pastoral mind—by alluding to Matthew 10:29: God sees and cares even for the fallen sparrow, lowers it in its lowliness to the ground. The poet describes this infinite circumference of care as “the great economy” and suggests that to exist in this economy—to be set down within it—is effectively to exist forever—a thought that rhymes with the final stave of Spinoza’s Ethics, in which Spinoza suggests that fulfilling one’s conatus, “the inclination of a thing to persist in its own being,” creates the conditions for being able to participate in God’s eternal nature. Martinez de las Rivas mirrors this “putting-down” in his poetry and models it in the second half of “On Stockbridge Commons” when he describes the virtuosic aerial acrobatics of the otherwise transient swallow as it feasts on insects and skims the sedge. Whether he is successful—whether he manages to de-ephemeralize ephemeral beings like mites and children—is an open question, but I’m ultimately less interested in the answer than I am in the evident anxiety reflected in the poet’s account of his own poetics. Martinez de las Rivas is fully aware of the ways in which his mode—the lyric—essentially works against his metaphysics. He strains to reconcile the two and thereby skirt the false consciousness inherent in the lyric project. The strain or vacillation between turning and not turning is the chief pleasure of his work and a multi-book dramatization of an enduring feature of human experience, which is our elliptical oscillation in and out of fidelity, in and out of resolve, sometimes resplendent in our ideals, sometimes abject in our treachery, always noble in the upturned, god-set effort.
Earlier I noted that Martinez de las Rivas literalizes his “aristocratic,” “mannered” lyric sensibilities when he turns his attention to ephemeral phenomena, to the “stately courtesies” and “sumptuous trains” of doves on a sill; to a pigeon performing an effeminate “jeté” as it darts into a covert; to moorhens stepping with “exaggerated delicacy”; seagulls “embonpoint” and “sleek, un- / flustered, proprietary, arrogant”; “the sky’s sudden blue-de-France”; the ermine “opulence and bobaunce” of bodies in general. Note the prevalence of French loanwords, the elision of Anglo-Saxon sensibilities for a decadent Norman courtliness. On the American side, in the nineteenth century, Dickinson was conspicuously drawn to an analogous image repertoire; her bees are chivalrous knights and her birds minor royalties. These images chime with what some scholars have identified as an antidemocratic politics in the American poet’s work. The mincing birds in Martinez de las Rivas’s trilogy might indicate a similar disposition, a crypto-Royalism, or a repression of his own lineage as part of a wealthy Spanish house that extrudes in these moments of avian affectation. Put differently, and in Deleuzian terms, the royalist court animals are a repressed reterritorialization of “the Hierarchy, the old courtesies” on a molecular level. I read these ornamental flourishes as breezy moments of comic relief that indicate a diminution of the old world and its former graces—which were a species of a tyranny to be sure, but also a distinct and fragrant heritage. As always, there is truth in jest; Martinez de las Rivas jests with the somewhat silly image of a pigeon doing a jeté, and yet there is a seriousness, a sobriety underlying the characterization all the same, since it takes place against the backdrop of “the slaughterhouse of capital,” where there are no “temples of stone,” only horizontal, decoded flows of cheap labor and cheaper materials.
Indeed, the poet’s “exaggerated delicacy”—on fullest display in Floodmeadow—could be read as a kind of defense mechanism triggered by the disappointments of modernity, epitomized on one hand by the grinding maw of capitalism and “salon leftists” on the other. This latter group, which the poet reluctantly claims as “[his] generation,” is both insufferably “French with irony” and morally hollowed-out in their Instagram-mediated performances of liberation politics (their “endless profile / updates: me at the march, me at the shoot, / me with a glorious dead light rising / in the eastern sky …”). Martinez de las Rivas’s own Francophilic ironies—his evident and self-critical “taste for the dandified,” as one critic has put it—serve to implicate and number him among the ostentatious contemporaries whom he despises at the same time that they set him apart at an alienated, antiquarian distance. To this latter point, the poet’s mannerisms, his eye for ornamental grace, can be linked to what the scholar Rei Terada might diagnose as his “phenomenophilia”—a gravitation toward light, dainty, ephemeral phenomena as a result of an irresolvable “dissatisfaction with the given.” According to Terada, writers turn with disappointment and powerless frustration away from the world and other people to focus instead on “laciness or diaphaneity,” as in Martinez de las Rivas’s “Floodmeadow in May”:
The presence of “japonaiserie” applied to the dragonfly’s “laciness” calls back to the Franco-British decadence of the late nineteenth century, an aesthetic movement indebted to Japan to which Pound pays homage even as he denounces in it in the earlier-quoted Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. On a continuum with one another, both Decadence and Modernism perform an “antimodern” retreatinto diaphanous aestheticism to resist and offset the pressures of the vertebral grind of the turn of the century. In Terada’s account, diaphaneity—which I would connect with the miniature, glittering contredanse of mayflies and dragonflies—is a less “coercive” modality of the real. Poets like Martinez de las Rivas are attracted to what might be described as instances of “mere appearance”—the flash of light off an insect wing, for example—because “the transient objects typically celebrated by lyric poetry may be experienced as less demanding” versions of the given, “since they can obligate us only for the few moments they last.”
While phenomenality is certainly linked to antimodern dissatisfaction in Martinez de las Rivas’s trilogy, I again suspect that the poet is fully aware of the long lyric tradition of “looking away,” toward ephemeral images and appearances instead, and conscious, too, of its blind spots and inadequacies. As he clarifies in Black Sun, “I do not hate the world.” He doesn’t hate it because he knows it to be “a thin wish that each small thing be restored / to itself in final reconciliation.” Martinez de las Rivas’s investment in “small thing[s]”—for instance, “the swallow at Lullington re-angling her wings / among the dandelions in the yard at dusk” or the dragonfly in its japonaiserie of lace—is less an attempt to alleviate or temporarily postpone what Terada refers to as the “coercion” of the given as it is an intuition of just how radically distributed that coercion is. The world of Terror, Black Sun, and Floodmeadow is a world of pure duress, just at differing levels of intensity. The dragonfly, too, is a fixed-wing thing. Martinez de las Rivas may be disappointed in modernity, but the stratum of reality to which he turns instead is far more “demanding,” far more intent on his submission and fealty. His poetry is an attempt to exchange a lower law—what amounts in fact to practical lawlessness—for a higher one. The higher law irradiates every rung of creation, floods even the meadow. It is less centralized in conventionally or outwardly recognizable forms of authority.
A law is finally what Martinez de las Rivas is after. As the poet Robert Duncan asserted, “Writing is first a search in obedience.” Terror, Black Sun, and Floodmeadow dramatize this search, show how difficult it is to pursue. Obedience presents a challenge not because the human spirit wants to be free but instead because the law is barely audible: “And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: / And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice …” (1 Kings 19:11-12). The lord is in the smallness of the swallow and the rat; the lord is in the drifting cloud. Martinez de las Rivas is less interested in a set idea of who or what the lord is than he is in lordliness, the condition of existing under a superior grace. A poem, as we learn from his trilogy, is the work of searching self-surrender as the ego constantly respawns. The durability of the self is an expression of the grace to which it would bend the knee and give itself but can’t: it is a “high cirrus burned away yet regathering continuously at the notion of his grace, self-generative, unobliterate.” That I say “I,” again and again, and come up short in the task of my self-renunciation, the one free act I can accomplish, according to Weil—that is a measure of my enthrallment and my glory and my debt. A subjectivity after all is that which is subject. The “I” on my tongue is my sacrament. Martinez de las Rivas writes, “Lord, I will stand before yóu when yóu wish / in death’s little house & yóu will eat my pronoun.” In the meantime, until that day, I will try and fail to eat my self myself.
NOTES
1 Dan Beachy-Quick and Kylan Rice, Primer (Free Poetry Press, 2023): 140.
2 John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Harvard University Press, 1958/2002): 195, 55.
3 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1948/2013): 324.
4 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Routledge, 1952/2002): 26.
5 Cf. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” The Lyric Theory Reader, eds. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): 291-303.
6 Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979): 1.
7 Rob A. Mackenzie, “Poetry and Fascism,” The Dark Horse, https://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/Featured/poetry-and-fascism
8 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (The Ovid Press, 1920): 10.
9 Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” The Lyric Theory Reader, eds. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): 340.
10 Betsy Erkkila, “Emily Dickinson and Class.” American Literary History 4, no. 1 (1992): 1–27.
11 Sean O’Brien, “Terror by Toby Martinez de las Rivas review – a symphony of psalms,” The Guardian (1 August 2014).
12 Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard University Press, 2009): 8.
13 Cf. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
14 Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime I,” The Collected Later Poems and Plays (University of California Press, 2014): 8.
15 Toby Martinez de las Rivas, “from ‘Titan / All Is Still,” Poetry, vol. 213, no. 2 (November 2018): 145-151.
Kylan Rice is the author of An Image Not a Book (2023) and Name & Earth (2026). He edits Thirdhand Books and teaches at Utah State University.