by Ian Fishman

I’ve often thought of Stephen Rodefer as a kind of chameleon, a gadfly. His work flirts with many elements without being tied to anything in particular — certainly not the dogmas of LANGPO, which is how his poetry is often characterized. I came to his work in a relatively slant, nonlinear, and asynchronous way. I read his later work first, followed by his early work. In the last some months, NYRB has republished Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures, originally published by Geoffrey Young’s The Figures in 1982 — a book with price listings upwards of 400 dollars on internet marketplaces, and which I’ve only known via digital scans.

To emphasize how resistant to concrete characterization Rodefer comes across in his later books, see the subtitle to his preface to Emergency Measures (The Figures, 1987): “In the American Tree and Out the Other,” a pithy, layered reference to Kit Robinson’s and Lyn Hejinian’s short-lived, late-70s Bay Area radio program In The American Tree, and to In The American Tree, the first-ever LANGPO anthology, edited by Ron Silliman and published in 1986 by National Poetry Foundation at University of Maine, Orono. Each nods to WCW and his evergreen book of essays, In The American Grain. Good one, Steve. A joke inside a joke inside a joke. 

The poems in Emergency Measures have a tendency to keep the sentence––subject and predicate–– intact, only to pull the rug out from under the reader’s feet in subsequent sentences. Parataxis to the max, to a point of destabilization of worldscape. Like a carousel of all sorts of things, all sorts of everything, there’s a pushing and pulling effect going on with the employment of this tactic. It’s disorienting and machine-like, the fashion in which he is able to barrage the reader with these elements, especially in poems like “Flaky Material Like Talc”: 

…Aside the dig trowels mesmerize the site.
A rope of black hair enters the sensorium.
Pendants jubilant once arching
ape culture, echoing the absence of its solo
now assembled as a colony. It’s trucked away.
The visible eyeballs walking with polite citizens
wire plans attached to Cassios.

Slightly later works of Rodefer’s, Passing Duration, a book of prose pieces published by Burning Deck in 1991, and Mon Canard, published by The Figures in 2000, establish complex pretenses similar to Emergency Measures. Misdirection, intentional confusion, deference of context. Rodefer’s late work seemed inscrutable. Consider this opening sentence of “Avery” from Passing Duration: 

Vexatious scene, protean parody, demolishing sea, discern me in this thick-mist breathing night, your undisclosed hemisphere, edifice shed. 

One might find a residue of high Modernism in this register; I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. It’s beautiful, tottering on the edge of legibility. The title poem of Mon Canard begins with a page-length stichic, turns into a sequence of 14-line stanzas (sonnets, really), two per page, and is only punctuated with commas. It ends with a single page of swirly concrete lettering. “Mon Canard” reads at breakneck speed, full of geographical references and inconsistent, seemingly indiscriminately capitalized words. At times clauses slip into French. There’s mention of Lucretius, Nilus, the shipping company DHL, Char, Tolstoy, IBM, Caius, etc. I won’t name everything, I wouldn’t be able to — the poem is thirty pages long.

Last year I first read One Or Two Love Poems From The White World, published in 1974, and Villon: translations, or false/mis-translations, of the 15th century French poet; the latter of which Rodefer wrote under the pseudonym Jean Calais in 1968. Both books were issued as part of Rodefer’s own publishing project, The Pick Pocket Series.

What struck me, coming to his early books through some late works, was how they looked, read, felt, and operated much differently than the poems in his later books from the 80s onwards. These early poems had greater alignment of a variety of aspects. Lineation and syntax were less on the brink, the poems appeared more direct, blunter even, more straightforwardly erotic and kinda heartthroby, as opposed to the more elusive presentations and predilections of later poems. Take for instance these sturdy opening lines of “New Mexico Lunch” in One Or Two Love Poems… “It’s about 3:15 in February but it’s very warm. / I have to drive Connie home. I am falling asleep / in the sun where I have been sitting reading.” In these early books, Rodefer is forthright and cheeky. There’s a comedy to them that gestures toward a tenor commonly associated with New York School poetry, specifically O’Hara. 

I’ll note an observable trace of humor throughout all of Rodefer’s work, but it becomes more understated and hidden, with more inside quips, as the bibliography deepens. Jest is worn on the sleeve of the early works, confidently offered. Take this half stanza from the conclusion of “Le Noel, Morte Saison” in Villon:

…It’s cold out there; for myself, though, strangely
the desire is greater to break out
of this space I inhabit in love’s dungeon 
though the downpour puts a damper on my soul
and there are a lot of bastards out there.

There is clear intent to make sense. In The Bell Clerk’s Tears Keep Flowing (The Figures, 1978), Rodefer’s collection directly preceding Four Lectures, which on the cover features a lovely photo of a young and well-dressed Elvis Presley eating dinner, there is little intimation of the subversive forces I came to know in Rodefer’s later books. This book, like the one that came before it (which, to remind, has the words ‘love poems’ in its title), is replete with eros and love poems and poems written for his children. Here’s the opening poem of the collection, an epistle for one of his sons:

DEAR JESSE

We love you. We do not misspell
Your name. We wish you a good
Tennis game. On the serve
Keep the ball above you
And not too far behind or out front.
To begin with, the thumb on the back
Of the racquet is permissible 
In learning the backhand, but later
It should be a strong grip independent 
Of any one digit. My own game 
Depends on it. Yours of course
Will find its own form.

Much of the time, playing to win,
The net is where it’s at,
But there’s something to be said
For long rallies beginning and ending 
At the base line, for that is the fame 
The game is truly played upon.
Wearing black socks can psyche out
Your opponent, but hitting smoothly
And keeping absolute concentration 
Will do it every time even 
If you are naked. Rough or smooth,
I think you are ready.

It’s fatherly, it’s funny, and, quite cannily, delays its own humor until its conclusion. It’s quite touching, too. Reading this early work generated for me a disconnect, which, until recently, I had trouble disentangling. Reading this early work generated a sort of disconnect I had until recently trouble disentangling. It seemed to me that there were two Rodefers, the Rodefer I was coming to recognize from the poems at the end of the 70s, and the poet I knew from the poems at the end of the 80s, and in the works which follow. And what kept bugging me was I couldn’t figure out how he’d become the poet he ultimately became. After reading Four Lectures, everything clicked. Disentangled.

Four Lectures is not only Rodefer’s seismic masterpiece, but the fulcrum between the voicier, slicker, and more straightforward poems of the early books; the consistent current of experimentalism and iconoclasm recognizable in his later books. Here, breadth is the name of the game. There’s a preface of prose, a one-page “Pretext” and a one-page “Codex,” both assembled of two vast 15-line stanzas, and, of course, four behemoth long poems in between, all composed of the same 15-line stanzas, two per page. To give you an idea of the sensation of reading these poems, I’m including the ending lines of the first stanza of the poem “Plastic Sutures”:

…There is nothing to mount but the bluff. I dreamt there was this shit house,
with big tubs where the shit was. Above these were roasts being cured.
You dig the density of material thought. Without material no one can be said
to have a lead at all, and the world is a giant simultaneous performance 
of numerous unfamiliar, but fucking, actions. Count them. We are united
in art as others are united in faith, in crime, in alcohol, in political ambition.
Editors change Paris. There are many artists without much art. What we want is poetry
without poets. So the reason I forget names is the moment you remember them
you are no longer in touch with what is before you. What I am looking for
in a reader is a certain amount of misunderstanding of what is happening.

The form and tone of the title poem of Mon Canard is in many ways in conversation with, and is crafted after, the form of Four Lectures, with certain retentions and certain slippages. One of the biggest differences is how Rodefer punctuates Four Lectures so intently. While the stanzaic structure is similar to that of “Mon Canard,” these poems read somewhat differently. They’re not any more or any less deliberate, but they’re paced and parsed by the sentence, not the line. There are more opportunities to pause or stop, to let saturate, before venturing further into what is truly a fog. 

In Four Lectures, Rodefer is “digging the density of material thought” in emphatic, multifaceted ways. He digs it, and continues to dig. It’s chaos. Elements swirl and dissipate as he excavates. Sometimes they return, sometimes not. Even more so than in Emergency Measures, Four Lectures takes parataxis onto the autobahn on the moon. It’s as eloquent as it is stubborn; it’s also incredibly profane — the word ‘fuck’ appears nineteen times, ‘shit’ eleven times. Let thoughts — made of whatever material quite magically and majestically scooped up by Steve’s brain, his ear, his eye, his wrought and strong-willed song — fall where they may. Rodefer notes in Four Lectures’ “Sleeping With The Light On,” “Pick a life and live it. I think I’ll go down to the iron works / and order some chains. Shreveport and shriveltechnics. I inhabit the language / the world heaps upon me. Branch water on the rock.” Let idea and image collide. Everything’s happening at once anyway; everything’s applicable and everything’s functional. These poems are a machinery.

Four Lectures keeps a reader on their toes, more than willing to pivot at any second, to any subject or notion, or to, more accurately, many notions and many subjects, that're all spliced together in the span of just a few sentences. It’s a feat, it’s a rush, it’s got a pulse, it’s pissed off, it’s got the nerve, a dash of O’Hara, a dash of Eliot, it’s chatty, argumentative, candid, self-reflective and referential, concerned with the material of language and the many, probably innumerable, ways to make it and make it go and go now. It is privy to its own density and complexity, while also being regularly self-effacing, lacerating, and genuinely strange. It’s a kind of impressionism — the truth of the matter is that, in his late years, Rodefer took up painting and lived in Paris. Not bad for a boy from Bellaire, Ohio. This new edition is bookended by two beautiful paintings of his. The paintings’ subjects? Letters. Characters.