The recipient of the 2011 Richard Wilbur Award was Robert W. Crawford, for his sonnet, "The Empty Chair." The poem is the first in the eponymous, hard-bound book of fifty poems published in 2012 by the University of Evansville Press. But that has nothing to do with why you should read it.
You should read it because here is a contemporary poet who takes a poet's commission seriously and applies all the fine tools of his craft to mirror our times to us, his readers. Crawford's poetry is allergic to vague, escapist abstractions; he does not prescribe solutions to the problems of existence. He turns a hard eye on the realities of our world and our environment and finds sharp metaphors to help us probe our situation more deeply. Like all of us, he is attracted to the temptation to create order from an essentially chaotic existence by naming things, archetypally Adam's great commission in Eden, but he also suspects that consolation of hope is just that, mere consolation, and that chaos, Blake's invidious worm, lives on.
Naming, in fact, is the subject of two poems in this collection. In one, "The Truth About Discoveries," he takes us into the world of ancient astronomy for his metaphor. During the day, our hunter/gatherer ancestors saw the world as filled with light in the sky and action on the ground. But at night, it was reversed; the terrestrial world was cloaked in darkness and all the action happened overhead. From this, he draws a little allegory about the social misfit (I read: poet) organizing the night sky into a parade of men and animals, reporting his discovery to the authorities. (I always remind myself that "discovery" means "to uncover something that is already there.") After deliberation, the authorities ridicule it in the light of their own, committee manufactured, system. So, the poet names it one thing and the authorities another; and the authorities are "right," by definition.
Crawford examines the same archetype, creating order through naming, in "The Naming of Lights." After making a quick bow to the reader's expectation, the poet suggests this poem is not about naming the heavenly bodies of light; it is about naming the earthly bodies of light. It is the very stuff of medieval philosophy, to see the universal in the specific. From his mountain top vantage, he looks down at night and names the city represented by each cluster of lights below him. (Surely, we've all done the same with night photographs of the earth taken from space.) Then his attention turns, as the ancient astronomers' did, from the fixed "stars" to the "wandering stars" (the meaning of the Greek root for "planet"). In his cosmology, these are the cars that define the highways and roads between the cities. But Crawford goes one step further. As night progresses, the number of "wandering stars" decreases until there is just one left. In the concluding couplet of the poem, "A single light drops down the mountainside: / a hot white tear, or slowly falling star." The tragedy of entropy; the pity and horror of knowing that everything that is, that is "named" into the realm of truth and existence, will cease to be.
Another way Crawford examines the problem of existential ambiguity is through word choice. Like the famous double entendres of Marlow's Edward II and Shakespeare's Hamlet, a seemingly innocent word compels the reader to snap back to reality. In the case of Marlow and Shakespeare, the exonerating commands are to assassinate the king, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, respectively. Crawford selects the `best word' to create factual ambiguity in a world in which we are compelled to act on logical certainty in our everyday lives contrary to our existential knowledge that nothing is certain.
The concluding couplet of "The Empty Chair," holding the place of the Shakespearian apotheosis or moral, is "They save a central place for what might be-- / A certain absence, looking out to sea." One could be forgiven for reading the word "certain" as "absolute, assured," perhaps referring to the invisibility of the Divine Hand as proof of the existence of the Divine Hand. On the other hand, "certain" may mean "vague, unspecified"--the poet does not force one or the other reading--in which one is compelled to read an empty chair as just an empty chair, the vacancy of the invisible, the essential orphan state of all creation, its gaze fixed on a vast and featureless universe.
Elsewhere in the book, in "Irreconcilable Differences," Crawford turns an observation--how few men wear their wedding bands while traveling--into a reflection on the clash between the rational impulse to fidelity at home, as part of one's artificially ordered universe, and the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" anonymous surrender to physical hunger of the open road, the essential, potentially inconsequential chaos of the universe. It is archetypal, the great theme of Homer's Odyssey. Crawford's key word, again, is in the final line. "The one who loved you first of all, / Can't sleep with you alone." In the first reading, this simple pair of quatrains suggest a simple vow of fidelity: "Other guys mess around when away from home, but I can't because I love you." But "alone" can mean both "knowing that you are by yourself, without me" or "you, exclusively." In the first case, "we can only `sleep' when we're together," in the second case, "I can't `sleep' only with you; I must have other people to `sleep' with."
Mind you, I am fairly certain how Crawford, whom I know, thinks about these subjects personally, but I think he is doing his poets duty to leave space in his poems for the reader, for all readers. At bottom, the poet is simply asking that you pause a moment and reconsider what you think you already know.
There is much more that can be said in the hope of compelling you to add this volume to your library, but I think I'll conclude with a short appreciation of Crawford's devotion to formal poetry. I identify Crawford as a member of "The Rhyme and Meter Gang." I jokingly refer to them as such, as if they are some sort of sheriff's posse out of a old, black-and-white, western, thundering out of town in search of the outlaw poets who follow the "Wanted--Dead or Alive" examples of Whitman or Ginsberg and ignore the formal elements of their writing, while still pretending that what they commit to paper is "poetry." I said "jokingly." I know that the Apollonian impulse is as strong and sincere as the Dionysian and that classical restraint is as valuable a rhetorical tool as ecstatic excess, as needed and when applied by the right artisan.
Crawford is one of those artisans. First, he devotes himself to reading the work of others. Second, he is in constant practice of applying what he is learning from his reading to his art. And third, he has done both with such commitment and for such a long time that he has passed through the marathon racer's "wall" of dogged persistence, plagued in lesser authors by the clatter and clang of relentless rhymes or the maddening, tell-tale heart--lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB--of incessant iambs. Crawford can, and often does, write formal poems in which the last thing the listener realizes is that it is "formal."
One of my favorite examples among these poems in this anthology is the love poem, "Kitchen Remodeling." In this, the antagonist (I love the fact that the author achieves universality by not specifying the gender of either of the actors in this poem) is downloading detail after detail on a kitchen-remodeling project in situ. The protagonist's attention is so swimming in facts that it sublimates from the factual to the affectional, surrendering to a fantasy of what so much "unfinished" counter space might be used for, before it is cluttered with the functional and mundane. It is a 14-line tour de force of such transparent simplicity, it can only be achievable through the creation of hundreds of lesser poems in the course of decades of practice. Crawford has it--and you should have it too.
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