"Disobedience" by Ryan Wilson

Text of poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Literary Matters

-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

-Buy Ryan's books, including his new collection, "In Ghostlight,"  here

-"L'Estraneo" by Ryan Wilson

-"On A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" by Richard Wilbur

-"The Gardens of the Villa D'Este" by Anthony Hecht

-"The Venetian Vespers" by Anthony Hecht

-"See Naples and Die" by Anthony Hecht 

-The concept of the labyrinth

-"The Stones of Venice" by John Ruskin

-The Baudelairian method

-The Wordsworthian child archetype

-Venice has its reasons

-Strategic narrative distance

-In a satanic world, rebellion is godly. 

Transcript

Versecraft 6-1: “Disobedience” by Ryan Wilson

            Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the sixth season of Versecraft. Thank you so much to all of you for listening, whether it’s your first time here or whether you’ve been listening since the dawn of the show. It’s been such a marvelous experience making this thing for you over the past year and change, and we’re still going strong. I’d like to kick off this season with a poet whom I consider to be absolutely central to the contemporary poetry scene, a ventricle of its beating heart, if you will, a tireless leader and rigorous craftsman around whom much of the best work currently being produced seems to orbit. I am speaking of course of Ryan Wilson, who is not only the editor-in-chief of one of the very best literary magazines, Literary Matters, but is one of the finest poets and translators writing today. 

            Before we dive in, I’d like to remind you as always that if you enjoy this episode, please do consider leaving a donation or becoming a member of Versecraft, which you can do at my link in the show notes. You can also purchase your very own Versecraft t-shirt at my merch store, which is not only a handsome sartorial choice but is guaranteed to start lots of interesting conversations. Thanks so much! 

            Ryan Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia in 1982 and raised in Macon, just a stone’s throw away from Flannery O’Connor’s farmstead home of Andalusia. His mother was one of the first scholars of O’Connor’s work, and Wilson grew up in a household saturated with the love of literature, Southern literature in particular, of which Wilson has since become a devoted advocate and scholar. Despite this milieu, Wilson originally aspired to be a lawyer— that is, until he was exposed to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in his freshman year at the University of Georgia, whereupon, enthralled, he switched his major to English and determined to become a poet. Following graduation, he as well as his school chum, one Matthew Buckley Smith, attended the prestigious Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating, Wilson swiftly enrolled in yet another prestigious Master’s program at Boston University, where he had the opportunity to study with Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, and Rosanna Warren, the last of whom proved pivotal in turning him on to the pleasures and art of translation. Wilson has since expressed the view that the practice of translation is what truly taught him how to read and write poetry, and moreover, how to develop his own style. 

Following his studies, he threw himself furiously into the study of languages, brushing up on his high school Latin as well as teaching himself Greek, Italian, and French. Through translation he determined that his poetic guiding lights ought to be Horace, for his elegance and Classical serenity, Dante, for his spiritual depth and range, and Baudelaire, for his psychological acuity and dark, modern themes. In his own poetry, Wilson fuses these and other influences, notably Robert Frost and Anthony Hecht, to create a contemporary idiom that is simultaneously rustic and gothic yet always geared toward the discovery of transcendence in the grim minutiae of life. Wilson recently described his poetry as “haunted,” and by this I take him to mean that his work is not only inhabited by the ghosts of memory, history, and myth, but also the Holy Ghost, the divine presence which pervades even the most horrific aspects of life. Indeed, Wilson’s ardent but understated Catholicism, in the vein of O’Connor, is key to understanding many of the themes of his work, including our poem for today. 

Having undergone a long and thorough apprenticeship, and now equipped with dazzling erudition, Wilson truly came into his own in the 2010’s, and applied himself, his talents, and his gargantuan work ethic to an astonishing number of aspects of the poetic sphere. His monograph on the philosophy of poetic praxis, “How To Think Like A Poet,” won the 2015 Jacques Maritain Prize and was later published by Wiseblood Books in 2019. In 2016, Wilson became the editor-in-chief of Literary Matters, and singlehandedly transformed it from a small e-newsletter into the spectacular, taste-making online journal that it is today. In 2017, his first collection, The Stranger World, won the Donald Justice Prize and was published by Measure Press. In 2021, Franciscan University Press released his cornucopic volume of translations, Proteus Bound, and just last month, LSU Press released his long-awaited second original poetry collection, In Ghostlight. On top of all this, Wilson is also a professor at The Catholic University of America as well as at the MFA program of the University of St. Thomas-Houston. He is without a doubt one of the most hardworking men in American letters, with learning and brilliance to match. His is a hard, gem-like flame. For those of you who are new to his work, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of his new book, In Ghostlight, from which today’s poem comes, and which I’ll link to in the show notes. 

Today’s poem, “Disobedience,” was originally published in Modern Age by previous guest James Matthew Wilson, no relation. It is a wonderful poem not only on its own merits but also because it displays many of Wilson’s signature strengths simultaneously—gentle but trenchant satire, atmospheric description, dark imagery, historical allusion, and sensitive theological thinking. In its sparkling Italian setting, it not only calls back to an earlier dramatic monologue of Wilson’s, “L’Estraneo,” but also to a rich tradition of post-war American poets who, inundated with travel fellowships, often wrote about experiences in Italy, a tradition which includes such touchstones as Richard Wilbur’s “On A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” and numerous pieces by Anthony Hecht, including “The Gardens of the Villa D’Este,” “The Venetian Vespers,” and “See Naples and Die.” Wilson, who in many ways is of a kinship with these poets, asserts in this poem not only his own vision of the American-in-Italy poem, but his membership in a pantheon he admires. The poem goes like this:

Disobedience

Piazza San Marco

Here at the labyrinth’s heart, I find the air
 Is scintillant, just like the postcards show:
 A dream of light and strict geometries.
 Where the lagoon’s receded from the square
 Gray stones are dazzled with a blinding glow,
 And crowds wait, wincing, in the shimmer’s frieze

Like marble waiting for some word or spell
 To conjure limbs to life from lifeless stasis,
 Or nomads, stunned to find a sudden well
 Amid the endless sands, or an oasis.

I feel it. Nightly angst, ennui, and gloom
 Refine the human need for some perfection,
 Some otherwhere outside routine’s dark delves,
 And here we are in “Europe’s drawing room,”
 Napoleon’s choicest spot. Sun-glare’s reflection
 In café windows, we can’t see ourselves

At all, which is, I guess, why we worked out
 Ways to scrounge up cash, made the plans, and took
 The flights. We’ve dreamed the us we’ve dreamed about
 Awaits us here. But no, not here. See, look:

The old clock’s broken, Venetians flee en masse,
The ones stuck here hawk trinkets. For a coin
Tourists go chattering by St. Mark’s bones,
And maybe stop a second, as they pass,
Thinking of their rivals back home in Des Moines,
To snap some well-posed selfies with their phones.

Outside, a blizzard of chivalric white,
 The sea-gulls swarm, whirling in clean white air,
 And then descend, like jagged shards of light,
 To peck to death a pigeon in the square,

Removing flesh until, pink as a tongue,
 The innards show. The passersby ignore
 The bird, the wound. But there’s a girl with bread,
 One not too busy being rich or young,
 Crouched in the square, small, casting morsels for
 The living ones. A saint, I almost said—

It is illegal here to feed a pigeon,
 Yet she does, quietly, sure that the law,
 Which holds the bottom line’s the true religion,
 Shall not expunge this world’s dark, winged flaw.

This iambic pentameter poem is comprised of eight stanzas, in alternating sestets and quatrains. The sestets rhyme ABCABC, while the quatrains rhyme ABAB. Interestingly, though formally split into sestets and quatrains, the sense of the poem tends to be organized into 10-line units, with sentences spilling over from one stanza to the next. We can think of stanzas 1 and 2 as a unit, 3 and 4 as a unit, 5 as a standalone, 6 and 7 as a unit, and 8 as a standalone. 

Metrically speaking, the poem is mostly regular, and the rhymes are true. Indeed, this poem is a masterclass in how, through the use of punctuation and rhythmic modulation, a succession of metrically regular lines can all sound richly different from one another. That being said, we do see something happening which we’ve seen before: the first section of the poem runs orthodox and tight, while latter sections, while still mostly regular, become much more liberal in their substitutions. If we are cynical, we might chalk this up to writer’s fatigue, but what I suspect is actually the case is that once the emotional and conceptual momentum of the poem has truly gotten going, Wilson becomes surer of what he wants to say, and therefore forgives some metrical laxity here and there in order to channel his vision faithfully. 

Other than the mild and elidable anapest in the phrase “Napoleon’s choice,” in line 15, the first major instance of substitution we encounter is in line 18: “Ways to scrounge up cash, made the plans, and took.” I honestly don’t think we’ve ever seen this rhythm before on the show. There are multiple ways to scan it, but I think the best diagnosis is that it is an acephalous, broken-backed line of iambic hexameter—in other words, a line of iambic hexameter with the unaccented syllables of the first and fourth feet omitted. One might suggest that the chaotic scrambling of the line, enhanced by commas, reflects the scrounging and logistics planning described. 

In line 21 we have: “The old clock’s broken, Venetians flee en masse.” Here we have a case where you could either scan a second foot amphibrach or a third foot anapest. Because of the caesura after “broken,” I think the amphibrachic reading is more appropriate. We also note the heavy iambic movement of “clock’s broke” as a dynamic use of rhythmic modulation. In line 25, we have another funky rhythm: “Thinking of their rivals back home in Des Moines.” THINKing, of their RI, vals BACK, HOME in, Des MOINES. Trochee, anapest, iamb, trochee, iamb. In line 28, we have the unusual choice of a third foot trochaic substitution: “the seagulls swarm, whirling in clean white air.” Normally I would frown upon a third foot substitution, but here the trochaic force serves to mimetically emphasize the whirl of the seagulls, and is effective. Lastly, I’ll mention the second to last word: wing-ed. It’s a bold move to use this pronunciation of this word in a contemporary poem, but Wilson gets away with it, as the rhythmic force of the poem necessitates it. To pronounce it “wingd,” would destroy the rhythm entirely, and so the ear is happy to adopt the archaic pronunciation without nary an accent mark required. 

This poem is a bit longer than usual for this show, and so as I go through it again I’m not going to discuss every line, but rather those moments in each stanza I find most noteworthy. Let’s now begin the poem again, reading through the first four stanzas: 

Here at the labyrinth’s heart, I find the air
 Is scintillant, just like the postcards show:
 A dream of light and strict geometries.
 Where the lagoon’s receded from the square
 Gray stones are dazzled with a blinding glow,
 And crowds wait, wincing, in the shimmer’s frieze

Like marble waiting for some word or spell
 To conjure limbs to life from lifeless stasis,
 Or nomads, stunned to find a sudden well
 Amid the endless sands, or an oasis.

I feel it. Nightly angst, ennui, and gloom
 Refine the human need for some perfection,
 Some otherwhere outside routine’s dark delves,
 And here we are in “Europe’s drawing room,”
 Napoleon’s choicest spot. Sun-glare’s reflection
 In café windows, we can’t see ourselves

At all, which is, I guess, why we worked out
 Ways to scrounge up cash, made the plans, and took
 The flights. We’ve dreamed the us we’ve dreamed about
 Awaits us here. But no, not here. See, look:

The poem takes place in the piazza de San Marco, otherwise known as St. Mark’s square, the town center of Venice, Italy, home to the exquisitely Byzantine St. Mark’s Cathedral, the famous bell-tower the Campanile, and the Doge’s Palace. Perennially a top destination for tourism, it was supposedly dubbed by Napoleon as “Europe’s Drawing Room.” The square has also long been famous for its absurdly large population of pigeons, descended from ancestors ritually released from the church on Palm Sunday. The birds which avoided subsequent recapture and devourement were said to be under the protection of Saint Mark himself. 

The speaker begins by describing the square as “the labyrinth’s heart.” Venice literally is a labyrinthine city, full of twisting alleys that are easy to get lost in. But of course the speaker is also alluding to the myth of the minotaur, the bull-headed, child-eating son of Minos who was imprisoned in the center of the daedal labyrinth of Crete. Labyrinths are one of the richest symbols in world culture: any complicated journey which culminates in an intense or disturbing revelation or challenge can be compared to a labyrinth, whether it be the passage from youth to maturity, life to death, ignorance to enlightenment, or prosperity to tragedy. To be at the heart of the labyrinth is to be face to face with a monstrous and sublime truth. By immediately framing his poem with such significance, the speaker prepares us for the playful but deeply serious investigation which follows. 

To begin with, the speaker says that the Venice he observes is more or less identical with what it is made out to be: glittering light and strict geometries, reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting. In line 5, we get an interesting bit of hypallagic description: the speaker says that the stones are dazzled with a blinding glow, but of course it is actually the viewer who is dazzled, not the stones. The transposition of reference hints at the dream-like otherworldliness of the scene, as well as perhaps the dazzlement of the speaker’s own mind. The mention of stones also reminds us of John Ruskin’s influential work of Neo-Gothicism, “The Stones of Venice,” which played a not insignificant role in developing the city’s reputation as a tourist attraction. The speaker then compares the tourists waiting in line to a frieze, a long, horizontal band of relief sculpture often found in Classical architecture. This continues the Apollonian imagery of “strict geometries,” as well as offers us a pun on the motionless tourists, who are frozen in place. It also aestheticizes what would otherwise be a rather unglamorous scene, transforming the tourists themselves into a kind of neo-classical attraction worthy of tourist attention, or at least poetic observation. 

Notably, the crowds of tourists are “wincing.” No doubt from the sun, but also, the speaker suggests, from their spiritual discomfort, which they have fled to Italy to escape. He compares them first to statues, dull souls waiting to be awoken into true life, then to desert nomads who are stunned to find an oasis, a beautiful refuge from their disappointing, existentially thirsty lives. Whether the oasis is in fact a mirage is an open question. Moreover, whether a given tourist is more like a statue, impotently dead to the splendor around them, or more like a hopeful nomad, eager to drink the water of Italian beauty, surely depends on the individual. In all cases, however, tourism is framed as an attempt at salvation. 

This dynamic is made more explicit in the third stanza, where the speaker admits, with a vague yet touching “I feel it,” that he too is one who, “out of angst, ennui, and gloom” feels the need for some perfection, a break from bleak routine. This focus on malaise, as well as the tension between condescension toward others and compassionate admission of similar deficits in oneself shows Wilson’s deep spiritual debt to Baudelaire. Toward the end of the stanza, the description of the tourists changes accordingly from a “they” to a “we.” The speaker uses the sunlight’s glare on the windows, which renders it impossible to see oneself, as a metaphor for the tourists, whom he assumes, or else projects, suffer from an identity crisis similar to his own. Unsure of who they are, they have come to Italy in the hopes of discovering the best version of themselves. In Wilson’s well-turned phrase: “we’ve dreamt the us we’ve dreamt about awaits us here.” As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, however, “wherever you go, there you are.” Wilson too has doubts that they will find what they are looking for, at least where they expect it.

Let’s now go back and read the poem once again in its entirety: 

Here at the labyrinth’s heart, I find the air
 Is scintillant, just like the postcards show:
 A dream of light and strict geometries.
 Where the lagoon’s receded from the square
 Gray stones are dazzled with a blinding glow,
 And crowds wait, wincing, in the shimmer’s frieze

Like marble waiting for some word or spell
 To conjure limbs to life from lifeless stasis,
 Or nomads, stunned to find a sudden well
 Amid the endless sands, or an oasis.

I feel it. Nightly angst, ennui, and gloom
 Refine the human need for some perfection,
 Some otherwhere outside routine’s dark delves,
 And here we are in “Europe’s drawing room,”
 Napoleon’s choicest spot. Sun-glare’s reflection
 In café windows, we can’t see ourselves

At all, which is, I guess, why we worked out
 Ways to scrounge up cash, made the plans, and took
 The flights. We’ve dreamed the us we’ve dreamed about
 Awaits us here. But no, not here. See, look:

The old clock’s broken, Venetians flee en masse,
The ones stuck here hawk trinkets. For a coin
Tourists go chattering by St. Mark’s bones,
And maybe stop a second, as they pass,
Thinking of their rivals back home in Des Moines,
To snap some well-posed selfies with their phones.

Outside, a blizzard of chivalric white,
 The sea-gulls swarm, whirling in clean white air,
 And then descend, like jagged shards of light,
 To peck to death a pigeon in the square,

Removing flesh until, pink as a tongue,
 The innards show. The passersby ignore
 The bird, the wound. But there’s a girl with bread,
 One not too busy being rich or young,
 Crouched in the square, small, casting morsels for
 The living ones. A saint, I almost said—

It is illegal here to feed a pigeon,
 Yet she does, quietly, sure that the law,
 Which holds the bottom line’s the true religion,
 Shall not expunge this world’s dark, winged flaw.

Stanza 5 is the stanza of disillusionment. Far from a dreamy wonderland of salvific beauty, Venice is a dilapidated, inauthentic shell of itself, bereft of locals and overrun with petty, status-seeking tourists. Far from a spiritual oasis, Venice is a spiritual ruin—the locals have not only left en masse, they have taken the mass with them, leaving the churches nothing but cash cows. Bereft of religious reverence, tourists pay a coin to go “chattering by St. Mark’s bones.” Paying a coin to walk past the dead surely reminds us of Charon and the River Styx, which in the speaker’s Catholic frame of reference is less an allusion to Greek mythology than to Dante’s Hell. What is the monster at the center of this labyrinth? Existential emptiness? Commercialism? Vanity? Hollow simulacra of meaningful experiences? No doubt all of the above. 

Suddenly, like a splash of ice water, this depressing, decadent charade is startlingly contrasted with a scene of violent natural sublimity. A flock of seagulls, described as “a blizzard of chivalric white” and “jagged shards of light” “peck to death a pigeon in the square.” Despite the savagery of this, the seagulls are painted in disarmingly beautiful and even positive terms. “White” alone may suggest the annihilating oblivion of Melville’s white whale, but “Chivalric white” suggests that the birds are like pure and virtuous knights coming to the rescue. But coming to the rescue of whom? Certainly not the pigeon. Rather, the speaker seems to suggest that the naïve brutality of the birds is in some sense noble compared to the mammon-driven machinations of the human beings, and that these fowl might serve as a wake-up call to us to embrace a more authentic and immediate way of living. 

Most, however, do not heed the message: “the passerby ignore the bird, the wound,” and we cannot help but think of the pigeon, a bird already suggestive of the holy spirit, as containing Christological implications. Even this visceral passion of life and death, a potentially soul-moving event, does not distract the human beings from their automatic, inauthentic encounters with whatever their guidebooks tell them is significant. Like spiritual birds of prey, the vendors continue to “hawk” their trinkets, pecking away at the souls of the hapless tourists. 

There is one, however, according to the speaker, who is immune to these hollow games, one capable of noticing her surroundings, and taking action. A little girl, who stoops down from commercialist noise and vain pretension and condescends to feed the pigeons, unaware of or uncaring of the law against it. In all likelihood, the girl is merely amusing herself and enjoying the avian attention, but in the speaker’s eyes, she is practically saint-like, a creature of instinctive compassion and genuine concern for her fellow living beings. Against the corruption and self-deception of modern civilization, she becomes a Romantic, Wordsworthian model of purity, virtue, and authenticity. Against the zombified adults clamoring to get into Saint Mark’s, she represents the true spiritual life, aware of and interacting with the world free of ego, doubt, and uncertainty. She does not need a room full of golden mosaics to inspire her how to live—she simply lives. In doing so, she is moreover defiant of the mercantile, utilitarian status quo, which believes that “the bottom line’s the true religion.” 

Now, we may have noticed that throughout this poem, the speaker has had the tendency to make some rather sweeping assumptions—for instance, that all tourists are, like himself, going through some sort of identity crisis; that this random little girl is an angelic model of Christian virtue and existential authenticity; and here, that the local law against feeding pigeons is some sort of callous and calculated maneuver to cleanse the city of pigeons and thereby increase municipal profits. In fact, the law against feeding pigeons in Venice, which was enacted in 2008, was done for many better reasons than this: firstly, to remedy the ecosystem imbalance which comes with overpopulation; secondly, to improve atmospheric hygiene and quality of life for the locals; and thirdly, to lessen the amount of bird feces destroying historical monuments. One might suspect that this law was also passed in order to make the city more inviting to tourists, but this is almost certainly not the case—historically, one of the major draws for tourists in St. Mark’s square has been feeding the pigeons, but those who do so now run the risk of a hefty fine. It is also worth noting that the goal of this law is certainly not to entirely expunge pigeons from St. Mark’s, but merely to get their population under control. In vilifying this law, the speaker creates a false dichotomy which unnecessarily valorizes the little girl’s wholesome action, turning it into a virtuous act of civil disobedience and precocious spiritual realism. 

Wilson himself is too shrewd and self-aware a writer not to have known and even consciously fabricated these perspectival complications in advance—we should by no means take the speaker’s views or manner of thinking as entirely his own. Rather, what Wilson has done is fashion a character who can speak in terms more generalizing and idealizing than he would in his own voice, but whose biases nevertheless serve to advance a point of which Wilson approves: namely, that true spiritual nourishment comes not from empty cultural gestures or systematic attempts at maximizing human happiness, but from reckoning with and embracing the flawedness of life, carefully observing and caring for the world around you, and acting with compassion. Disobedience, so often associated with Satan and the Fall, becomes in a fallen world an act of godly rebellion against Satanic hegemony. And it is only in recognizing the world’s demonic fallenness, its “dark, winged flaws” that true acts of justice and mercy can take place. Whether the child is a saint or not, whether all those who wander are lost or not, these things remain true. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Disobedience

Here at the labyrinth’s heart, I find the air
 Is scintillant, just like the postcards show:
 A dream of light and strict geometries.
 Where the lagoon’s receded from the square
 Gray stones are dazzled with a blinding glow,
 And crowds wait, wincing, in the shimmer’s frieze

Like marble waiting for some word or spell
 To conjure limbs to life from lifeless stasis,
 Or nomads, stunned to find a sudden well
 Amid the endless sands, or an oasis.

I feel it. Nightly angst, ennui, and gloom
 Refine the human need for some perfection,
 Some otherwhere outside routine’s dark delves,
 And here we are in “Europe’s drawing room,”
 Napoleon’s choicest spot. Sun-glare’s reflection
 In café windows, we can’t see ourselves

At all, which is, I guess, why we worked out
 Ways to scrounge up cash, made the plans, and took
 The flights. We’ve dreamed the us we’ve dreamed about
 Awaits us here. But no, not here. See, look:

The old clock’s broken, Venetians flee en masse,
The ones stuck here hawk trinkets. For a coin
Tourists go chattering by St. Mark’s bones,
And maybe stop a second, as they pass,
Thinking of their rivals back home in Des Moines,
To snap some well-posed selfies with their phones.

Outside, a blizzard of chivalric white,
 The sea-gulls swarm, whirling in clean white air,
 And then descend, like jagged shards of light,
 To peck to death a pigeon in the square,

Removing flesh until, pink as a tongue,
 The innards show. The passersby ignore
 The bird, the wound. But there’s a girl with bread,
 One not too busy being rich or young,
 Crouched in the square, small, casting morsels for
 The living ones. A saint, I almost said—

It is illegal here to feed a pigeon,
 Yet she does, quietly, sure that the law,
 Which holds the bottom line’s the true religion,
 Shall not expunge this world’s dark, winged flaw.