`Then and Now’ is poetic music

THEN, AND NOW: SELECTED POEMS 1943-1993 by Theodore Enslin; edited by Mark Nowak. (Includes interview with the author.) National Poetry Foundation, Orono, Maine, 1999, 429 pages, paperback, $19.95.

“Then, and Now,” by Theodore Enslin of Milbridge, represents 50 years of a life in poetry — not the poetry of long, perplexing childhood reminiscences or incomprehensible demonstrations of theoretical babble, but true poetry, which is to say, music.

“For me,” Enslin tells an interviewer, “poetry and music are one art. The greatest compliment anyone could pay me: `He was a composer who happened to use words.”‘

It’s an easy idea to propound, but profoundly difficult to enact. But “Then, and Now” reveals that Theodore Enslin, refreshingly, put music where his mouth is, and spent a lifetime generating, not poems that might be set to music, but poems that are music. The meaning of Enslin’s poems emerges less from the definitions of words than from their sounds. And this is the ancient sense of what a poem is and should be: an interplay of the sound, rhythm and meaning of words.

Poetry written before the 20th century relies on set rhythm patterns — or meter — and sound patterns — most notably rhyme — interworked for their musical effects. But much 20th century poetry uses neither meter nor rhyme, and so for some readers, modern poetry seems to contain no recognizable music at all. When meter and rhyme are absent, some readers instead concentrate on rationally deciphering a poem’s “meaning”; sometimes they concentrate so hard on deciphering meaning that the poem’s music gets lost completely. And along with the music goes the meaning.

Theodore Enslin’s poetry, true to its time, does not use conventional meter or rhyme, but its music is not lost. On the contrary, the music of the words is the meaning, and Enslin’s poetic strains have clear contemporary counterparts: His rhythms parallel the jazz phrasing of Thelonius Monk; his repetitions and dissonances of diction parallel the sonic textures of modern composers like Stravinsky and Penderecki.

Enslin’s titles give clues to this: “Pavane,” “Listening to Mozart,” “A Chromatic Fantasy,” “Motet.” In his poems, images and sound patterns (alliterations, assonances and phrases) emerge as “themes” and are repeated, playfully juxtaposed and developed as “variations,” exactly as in pieces of music. Poems like “Baldwin Head” and “Summer Song” are particularly gorgeous examples of this.

Notice the various kinds of repetition in these lines from the opening of “Summer Song”:

in fields of flowers flower fields fields of tansy fields of asters fields of day lilies fields on fields of flowers tansy asters day lilies

And in “Rondo,” the phrase “If this is music, let it play a bit” opens the poem and repeats variously throughout the poem, as in:

break the tone as if this is music let it play the sound it captures

Theodore Enslin was born in Pennsylvania and schooled as a musician. He began writing in earnest at the urging of a music instructor, then moved in 1960 to Temple and later to Washington County. Throughout his poems, Maine’s landscape and people are evident. “New Sharon’s Prospect” depicts in verse and prose a western Maine logging family, and “Views” offers pictures like crisp line drawings and reflections on inner responses to places. There are views, for example, “from Pemaquid Point” and “from a Bathroom on Mount Desert,” and “A View Towards Indian Island.” This poetry is consistently good-humored, as well. “End of a Maine Winter” reads, in its entirety: “The same fire six months ago.”

Enslin’s literary associations have included figures of legend like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, and poets with Maine connections and roots like Denise Levertov and Gary Lawless. It’s no surprise that his selected poems are published by the University of Maine’s National Poetry Foundation, which maintains strong national and international affiliations in literary criticism, but also preserves a tradition of extending beyond academic vogues and offering poetry as an enrichment of life rather than as material for assembly-line analysis.

In fact, “Then, and Now” is proof that academia, despite a 50-year effort, has not been able to kill off poetry by industrializing it. True to the poet’s claim, poetry and music are one art, and anyone interested in tuning his or her ear to the music modern poetry was meant to make will do very well to start with this selection.