"Shiversong" by George David Clark

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-RIP N. Scott Momaday

-Gather ye old buds while ye may

-32 Poems

-David's new collection, Newly Not Eternal

-"Iscariot's Psalm" by George David Clark

-Read the earlier version of "Shiversong" here

-The 'ol feminine-acephalous combo (we need a real name for this)

-Not rhythmic, but METRICAL modulation

-"The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

-Job 38

-Lear 4:1

-"The Need Of Being Versed In Country Things" by Robert Frost

-"Boy At The Window" by Richard Wilbur

-The Agony In The Garden

-"My Prime Of Youth Is But A Frost Of Cares" by Chidiock Tichborne

-"Oh no! The rancor!" 

-Words are straw, and the poem is a scarecrow

Text of poem:

 
Shiversong

Given snow

That doesn’t flinch

To throw its pounds

Through heaven inch

By inch, that sows

A billion motes

Of chill into

This ground man can’t

Defend; and given

Wind that won’t

Begin to tell

Us how it’s driven,

Where it fell from,

What it’s meant

To blow and which

Proud limbs the clouds

Want riven since

It doesn’t dimly

Know, or even

Why the howling

Whims have pardoned

Us thus far;

Given such,

It’s hard to watch

The black-eyed scarecrow

Some fool left here

Miming care

Above the blighted

Garden, though

Tonight he seems

Intent to wrack

The soil and climb

The air, to fly,

To crash his flimsy

Cross against

The deadpan rancor

In the vast

Grim sky. 

Transcript

Versecraft 6-3: “Shiversong” by George David Clark

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Versecraft. I regret that I must start the episode with some sad news. Last week, I mentioned how Jan Schreiber and N. Scott Momaday are two of the last living original Wintersians. I realize now, however, that I spoke in error—N. Scott Momaday actually died just a couple months ago. He was not only a fine poet but a titan of the Native American literary scene, and he will be greatly missed. Alongside the recent deaths of Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, and Lyn Hejinian, all in their eighties, it seems that a certain generation of poetic icons is now drawing to a close. 

We have many poems in world literature which urge us to “gather our rosebuds while we may,” but not enough, I think, which urge us to treasure our elders while we may, especially those who are masters in their fields. If you have elder friends or family members whom you haven’t spoken to in a while, consider writing them a letter or giving them a call. There is no shame in recognizing that we are all going to die soon or sooner, and we should therefore go out of our way to hold each other close. 

            As always, if this episode brings you any joy, or if you feel like you’ve learned something from it, please consider donating at my link in the show notes. And yes, I’m talking to you, beloved listener whose ear-bones are currently vibrating with my voice. Every contribution is deeply appreciated, and is a valuable supplement to my pittance of a bookseller’s wages. If donating isn’t in the cards for you right now, please just take a moment this week to either recommend the show to someone you think might like it, or give me a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much.

            Today’s poet is the fascinating talent George David Clark, who, like Ryan Wilson, is not only fine young poet from Georgia who has an excellent book out right now from LSU Press, but who is also the editor in chief of one of the very best poetry magazines— in David’s case, 32 Poems, a publication I would recommend all of you poets listening should submit to, especially if you write metrically. 

            Mr. Clark, who was born in Savannah in 1982, grew up in Tennessee and Arkansas, attended Union University for undergrad, and received his MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Texas Tech. A true Southern boy, y’all. He afterward received fellowships from Colgate and Valparaiso universities, and is currently an assistant professor at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. In 2015, his first poetry collection, Reveille, won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press. And as mentioned, just this year his new collection, Newly Not Eternal, was published by LSU Press, the link to which you can find in the show notes.  

            As with many of the best poets throughout history, Clark’s craft is informed by his religious convictions. He has pointed to modernists like Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and T.S. Eliot as touchstones for his work, but to me, at least in his latest collection, the complex of sensuous, playful, highly alliterative language with idiosyncratic, plaintive, and often surreal theological inquiry reminds of no one so much as Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is a limited comparison, but I mention it to paradoxically indicate just how unique Clark’s style is— anyone writing in the contemporary world who is even slightly reminiscent of Hopkins is doing something far off the beaten path. 

            Before we get to our featured poem, I’d like to offer this short stunner as an appetizer, which is formally and tonally straightlaced but which gives a good indication of Clark’s theological thoughtfulness. It’s called “Iscariot’s Psalm,” and it goes like this: 

The only way one kills a God

Is by obtaining his permission.

Submit that he will rise. Applaud

His lonely way. To kill a god

You coax him from the flesh façade. 

I saw the veil torn in a vision

Of the only way my kiss kills God:

With him ordaining my perdition. 

Without getting too deep into the weeds here, and hopefully without sounding too Gnostic or heretical, I love the way in which Clark casts both Judas and God Himself as tragic heroes. Judas must “submit that he will rise,” must betray Christ in order to further the program of redemption, and does so with Christ’s permission. Nevertheless, despite God’s complicity in His own martyrdom, Judas must be condemned to perdition for his betrayal, where he will be cut off from God, making God effectively “dead” for him. Meanwhile, God grieves at the necessity of both Judas’s action and his punishment. It “kills” Him that it has to be this way. Judas is placed in an impossible, infinitely horrific situation, and God is a victim of his own soteriological plan. The poem, at least to my reading, is a moving articulation of the mysterious sorrow at the heart of Christianity, a sorrow which is not extinguished by but instead ultimately contributes to the sublimely inhuman joy of heaven. 

Our featured poem for today is also a meditation on divine cruelty and mystery, this one in a more Jobean vein. Like Hopkins, Clark is fond of neologisms, as we can see in the poem’s title: “Shiversong.” This poem was originally published by Ryan Wilson in Literary Matters, though in his new book, Clark has made some significant changes to the text. I will read from the final version, but the studious listener may find the original published version interesting for comparison, which I will attach in the show notes. The poem goes like this:

Shiversong

Given snow

That doesn’t flinch

To throw its pounds

Through heaven inch

By inch, that sows

A billion motes

Of chill into

This ground man can’t

Defend; and given

Wind that won’t

Begin to tell

Us how it’s driven,

Where it fell from,

What it’s meant

To blow and which

Proud limbs the clouds

Want riven since

It doesn’t dimly

Know, or even

Why the howling

Whims have pardoned

Us thus far;

Given such,

It’s hard to watch

The black-eyed scarecrow

Some fool left here

Miming care

Above the blighted

Garden, though

Tonight he seems

Intent to wrack

The soil and climb

The air, to fly,

To crash his flimsy

Cross against

The deadpan rancor

In the vast

Grim sky. 

I believe this is the first poem we’ve seen which is composed in iambic dimeter—a mere two iambs to each line, a visual contraction of language which may suggest the shivering cold of the title. Like last week’s poem, this one is stichic, meaning that it is not divided into stanzas. On top of this, you will notice that the entire poem consists of a single sentence, carefully managed with an array of commas and semi-colons. One of the current hot button issues in iambic prosody is whether it’s acceptable to follow a feminine line with an acephalous line, effectively borrowing the last syllable of the former line as the first beat of the latter line. Some worry that this sort of move threatens the integrity of the lines as lines, and I can understand this perspective. Personally however, I think it can add a percussive force and sinuousness to a poem which is sometimes desirable. Clark clearly agrees, as he makes ample use of this move in this poem, sometimes multiple lines in a row, as in lines 12 through 14, and 25 through 27. In lines 18 through 22, he employs it a whopping four times in a row. What this effectively does is modulate the meter into trochaic dimeter for a short time, before gradually moving back through acephalic and feminine iambic lines into the pure iambs of lines 30 through 33. Like modulating from a tonic to a dominant key and back, Clark shows us an innovative and seamless way to create dynamic musical interest in a poem. 

Also interesting here is the use of rhyme. Given the initial end rhymes between “snow” and “sows” and “flinch” and “inch,” we may begin by assuming the poem will adhere to a strict rhyme scheme, but Clark thwarts this expectation. Instead, the poem rhymes only when the poet feels like rhyming. The poem is also however more rhyme-rich than it may first appear. Not only are there slant end-rhymes, like “Can’t” and “won’t” and “against” and “vast,” there is also, as in Hopkins, a good deal of internal rhyme. Sometimes this occurs in a single line, such as “us thus far,” or “proud limbs the clouds,” but it also may span several lines, such as the rhyme of “limbs” in line 16 with “dimly” in line 18, and “whims” in line 21. These sneaky rhymes, combined with a generous helping of assonance and alliteration, give the poem a thoroughly musical quality which makes it, like the best Hopkins or Hip-Hop lyrics, simply fun to recite. 

The last thing I’d like to note is that while nearly the entire poem is undeniably dimeter, the last line, “grim sky,” is only two accents if you believe in English spondees, and even then, a spondee is technically a single foot. I read it as one heavy iamb. The poem thus ends with a line of monometer. In its original form, the concluding line was dimeter like all the rest. Perhaps Clark changed it to monometer to create, along with the concluding end-rhyme, an additional sense of musical finality. 

Let’s now go back and read through the poem again: 

Given snow

That doesn’t flinch

To throw its pounds

Through heaven inch

By inch, that sows

A billion motes

Of chill into

This ground man can’t

Defend; and given

Wind that won’t

Begin to tell

Us how it’s driven,

Where it fell from,

What it’s meant

To blow and which

Proud limbs the clouds

Want riven since

It doesn’t dimly

Know, or even

Why the howling

Whims have pardoned

Us thus far;

Given such,

It’s hard to watch

The black-eyed scarecrow

Some fool left here

Miming care

Above the blighted

Garden, though

Tonight he seems

Intent to wrack

The soil and climb

The air, to fly,

To crash his flimsy

Cross against

The deadpan rancor

In the vast

Grim sky. 

The poem begins by asking us to take several things as givens. First of all, relentless snow that “doesn’t flinch” to fall from heaven, bombarding and burying the world. No pathetic fallacy here, although the suggestion that snow can “throw itself” projects perhaps a bit too much agency on frozen water. Already the connection between snow and ruthlessness reminds us of Wallace Steven’s poem, “The Snow Man,” which is undoubtedly one specter behind this poem. The reference to “heaven” immediately situates us to view the snow as an expression of divine wrath. 

The snow sows chill “into this ground man can’t defend.” As I try to show on this podcast again and again, there are so many cool ways to use puns that are not humorous, and this is a great example. The snow literally falls onto and into the ground, chilling it, and no one can prevent this from happening. The uncaring deluge of snow also sends a chill into the human soul, sowing a seed of terror and doubt, and reminds us that the ideological grounds we hold, such as religious or ethical beliefs, are not positions we are entirely able to rationally defend. It also reminds us of the ontological ground of being itself, the nature of divinity, which we have no ability to explain. The harsh sublimity of nature, here in the form of a blizzard, exposes these vulnerabilities in ourselves. 

We must also consider the howling wind that isn’t disposed to answer any of our questions: how is it driven? Where does it come from? What does it mean, and what are the targets of its seeming wrath? The wind itself of course “doesn’t dimly know.” These questions, which are versions of the existential, cosmological, and teleological questions we ask about God and nature, are given no answer. We cannot even know why the “howling whims” of God—a play on “howling winds”— have spared us from destruction so far. The ascription of “whims” to the lord of the cosmos, which suggests irreverent and arbitrary decisions, shows that the speaker’s soul has already become quite chilled. 

Of course, we cannot read this section without thinking of Job 38, which is my vote for the greatest passage not only of the Bible but of all Middle Eastern literature. There, after Job has essentially put God on trial for injustices done to him, God appears as a voice in a whirlwind, and thunderously says: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” In essence, God is saying: who the hell are you, a mortal who cannot possibly understand the long game of the universe, to question what I do?” It is the most effective non-answer in all of theology, one which firmly and correctly places God far beyond the scope of human ethics and even human imagination. Despite his beliefs in Christian revelation, Clark also recognizes that God is fundamentally unknowable and terrifying, and that the God who appeared to Paul is also the God who appeared to Job. As snow pelts the earth and winds fiercely blow, it is the Jobean God who comes to mind, the sort whom Gloucester was thinking of when he lamented: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” We should also note that much of the collection from which this poem comes deals with the stillbirth of Clark’s son, Henry Thomas. A man of faith dealing with such horror and grief cannot but contemplate the darker, more inscrutable face of his Lord. 

In the second part of the poem, the speaker directs us to a new image. Given the relentless snow and inscrutable wind, he says, it’s hard to watch this hapless scarecrow left exposed in the elements. One would need a “mind of winter,” or, perhaps, be “versed in country things” not to feel pity for it. We may also be reminded here of Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Boy At the Window,” in which a little boy “seeing the snowman standing all alone/in dusk and cold is more than he can bear.” In that poem, the snowman is described as having “bitumen eyes,” and here the scarecrow is given a similar moniker, “black-eyed,” which may be a suggestion of the battering the scarecrow is receiving, or perhaps the dark cosmic revelation to which he is imagined privy. 

The scarecrow was left outside by “some fool,” and this is an interesting detail which doesn’t exist in the prior version of this poem. If the scarecrow is a stand-in for mankind, which we might initially suspect, then the fool who left us here must be God. This would be a rather startling, borderline Gnostic attitude to take, implying that the god of creation is inept or even malevolent. Alternatively, and much more likely, the scarecrow may be a stand-in for Christ on the cross. In this case, the obvious identity of the fool would be Pontius Pilate, but even here, it is still possible to interpret God the Father as the so-called fool. 

The scarecrow is “miming care above the blighted garden.” Another richly polyvalent phrase. The blighted garden obviously references both the frost-damaged patch of farmland the scarecrow protects and the sin-damaged garden of Eden from which mankind was expelled. Most importantly, however, it is a reference to the garden of Gethsemane, the place where Jesus underwent a period of existential anguish and reckoning with death before he was arrested, tortured, and crucified. The fact that the scarecrow is above the garden rather than outside it lends credence to the hypothesis that the scarecrow here represents Jesus upon the mount of olives rather than mankind exiled from Eden. The scarecrow is “miming care,” and this could mean a few different things. “Care” can mean love for someone, as in “I care for you,” concern for someone, as in, “I care about you,” help given someone, as in, “providing care,” caution taken in doing something, as in “taking care,” or simply worry, as in the thematically appropriate Chidiock Tichborne line, “my prime of youth is but a frost of cares.” Theoretically, the scarecrow could be miming any of these things, but given the Gethsemane reading, the last, where care means anxiety, is the most likely.  Not only that, but we can interpret the word “miming” in a cynical or non-cynical way. Is the scarecrow “miming” merely because it seems to us that his flailing in the wind imitates care, or is the scarecrow putting on a misleading performance of care? Though we have a leading hypothesis, different combinations of the different senses of these words will yield intriguingly various theological and existential interpretations and implications.

From this maze of semantic suspension, the speaker then somewhat clears the air: “Tonight he seems intent to wrack the soil and climb the air, to fly, to crash his flimsy cross against the deadpan rancor in the vast grim sky.” Here, the scarecrow takes on a defiant valence: he seems to want to break free of his earthly bonds, rise into the atmosphere, and, like the prince of the powers of the air, crash against the cold, wrathful God whom he feels has wronged him. The description of the scarecrow’s cross, of course, complicates things. We may think of Christ crying out to the sky, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Or we may think of a Christian, brandishing their flimsy cross, indicative of their wavering faith, crying out in anger at divine injustice. In the most orthodox reading, however, we have here the resolution of Christ in the garden to accept his fate, to be crucified, and to thereafter ascend to heaven. In this reading, the grim rancor of heaven is not the mark of a sinister God, but that of one angered at the sacrifice of His son. 

Speaking of which, the phrase “deadpan rancor” is an interesting one. Rancor is a feeling of longstanding bitterness, but deadpan denotes an expressionless delivery. In other words, the terrifyingly whimsical, unknowable, possibly hostile God outlined in the poem does feel genuine anger, but only grimly expresses it through emotionless, objective events, like snowstorms. We might also detect a pun in this phrase, playing on the homophone r-a-n-k-e-r. God is a “deadpan ranker” in the sense that He impassively decides who is destined for hell, who for heaven, who deserves grace, who does not, who will have a good life, who a miserable one. This reading of God as a rancorous ranker brings an intriguing Calvinist note to the poem. 

On the other hand, if we read the scarecrow as defiant but also a Christ figure, sent to redeem the world from Satan, we may read the deadpan rancor as the disposition not of God but of the infinitely bitter Satan, the prince of the powers of the air and the lord of this world. When the scarecrow “wracks the soil,” he is releasing Himself and others from the temptations of earthly things, and when he rises to “crash his flimsy cross” against the sky, he is neither committing a vain Promethean gesture nor merely accepting his fate, but is actually assaulting the princedom of the devil. 

With so many possible readings of this poem, I cannot say for sure what Clark’s intentions were, other than that a Christological, Golgothic interpretation is almost certain. In any case, this is a poem which gives us a vast range of ideas to chew on, and does so using vivid and concrete imagery which is haunting in and of itself. It is hard to ask more of a poem, especially one as short as this one. What is also certain is that this is a poem which calls us to question our own theological suppositions, and to tremble before the unknowability and horror of the world. It is a shiversong. It is itself a kind of scarecrow, shooing us away from grazing through life in spiritual complacency. 

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

Shiversong

Given snow

That doesn’t flinch

To throw its pounds

Through heaven inch

By inch, that sows

A billion motes

Of chill into

This ground man can’t

Defend; and given

Wind that won’t

Begin to tell

Us how it’s driven,

Where it fell from,

What it’s meant

To blow and which

Proud limbs the clouds

Want riven since

It doesn’t dimly

Know, or even

Why the howling

Whims have pardoned

Us thus far;

Given such,

It’s hard to watch

The black-eyed scarecrow

Some fool left here

Miming care

Above the blighted

Garden, though

Tonight he seems

Intent to wrack

The soil and climb

The air, to fly,

To crash his flimsy

Cross against

The deadpan rancor

In the vast

Grim sky.