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Troubled Water: Quietism in the Age of Performance

By Norman Ball
(previously appeared in Trinacria, Fall 2014 in abridged form)

In Jared Carters latest collection of poetry The Darkened Rooms of
Summer, the poem Picking Stone is prefaced with the following
passage from Emersons Self-Reliance:
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the
inmost in due time becomes the outmostwe recognize our own rejected
thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Carters poetry conducts the latent convictions of the earth with unwavering fealty.
Latent conviction suggests oblique paradox as does a room darkened by summer (also,
the dark shining in Scryer and the harsh glare billowing darkness in The
Shriving). The grand, ineluctable cycles that move across the earth, and in equal
measure through Carters poetry, extinguish their ends in their beginnings. Everywhere,
light appears out of the darkness, or does one interpenetrate the other? Both. Stones
are regurgitated to the surface like bundled mysteries. Were they there last planting
season? Yes and no. Each encroaches upon, or drains from, the other as though
through a great quantum sieve. One well imagines how fevered entrances and sweeping
bowsall that performative mumbo-jumbowould overwhelm what arrives to
Carters still eye as a, broken heave of light and dark (from Phoenix). Animated
readings seize the eyeballs in the room yet banish the clearing. Through it all, the world
forever adulterates and falls, mostly onto the shoulders of those who labor, in brief
intervals, atop its primordial cycle.

Carter is a contemplative poet, yes. But in the spirit of Wordworths wise passiveness
(there are powers/Which of themselves our minds impress/That we can feed this mind
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of ours,/In wise passiveness - Expostulation and Reply ll.21-24). This contemplative
state is metaphorically expressed in Mississinewa Reservoir at Winter Pool. Here, the
townspeople, as though/having risen from a deep sleep/and come at last to a place/no
longer having anything in it/except themselves.

Quietism has fallen on loud, hard times. No one wants to take a silent bullet and invoke
the clearing. Every day across America, poetry jumpstarts a bright new career in
readings. Ill-suited ovations are the rage. Bowling night hardly stands a chance. In The
Oddfellows Waiting Room at Glencove Cemetery, Carter begs to differ. A resolute
listener, he continues to hold the thin, quiet line: There must always be a place like
this/where the dimensions collapse inwardly/ like a telescope you slip into your pocket.
This is a beautiful image echoing again the Emerson quote; a telescope, tasked with
mapping the outer reaches of the universe, collapsing into and inward, to a place where
the poet stands waiting.
A heretical notion from the earliest times, quietism was formalized as such by Pope
Innocent XI in 1687. Thomas Merton referred to it as an inert spiritual vacuum. The
Protestant work ethic was equally hostile to a movement that rejected faiths role as a
catalyst for striving, wrestling and capital formation. The fundamental objection was
that a faith that lacked vigor and purpose in the world risked falling into listlessness and
solipsism. Soon enough, Gods voice would be shouted down by the clatter of railroads
and later the ubiquitous presence of handheld devices.
Theres even less escaping the world today. Poems arrive hyperlinked to position
papers. Recently, poetry critic and identity politician Ron Silliman accused quietism (or
as poetasters like to call it, The School of Quietude) of a sly tactical reticence aimed at
denial of self-identification and a refusal to be named. State your business or lay down
your pen. Resisting industrial barcodes is, for the poetry confab, a first-order sin of
omission. Poets are expected today to splain themselves on the way to a good
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internecine squabble. Wearing their schools on their sleeves, they hoist grievances with
a gusto that would make Robert Frosts politicians blanch.
Well offstage, heads down and dimly lit, Carters people are forever lifting bricks and
stones, digging up roots, exhuming the dead, but not with the isolating despair of
Sisyphus. Here is a passage from Ginseng:
But all of them together hunters,
thieves, those who keep the old ways
pass it from hand to hand along
a chain of those who know exactly
where it is going, what it is worth

The continental malaise of self-absorption has never reached Mississinewa County.
Carters people accept their sublimated roles as momentary caretakers of the land
from prior hands, into future hands. To paraphrase Frost, life is notable mostly for
going on, albeit with a flitting cast of characters, which is another way of saying time
has a way of standing still:
Nothing done well ever ends,
she said, touching my hand, not even land
built up one act at a time, so that all
that went before, and after, still waits
there. from Poem Written on a Line from the Walam Olum

We lift stones at our appointed times, then drop them for the earth to reclaim, swallow
up, to be expunged anew, rediscovered and lifted once again (the inmost in due time
becomes the outmost). This human bucket brigade treads a cosmic circle that may well
harbor a far-off, though ultimately inhuman, coherence. Coleridges tail-eating serpent
meets Eliots still-point in Mourning Dove where, all of their singing is circular, and
comes back to the same stillness. In The Undertaker, we find a similar acquiescence
to a cycle larger than one generations labors:
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Each man slowly recognized, like a combination of lost numbers,
that men younger than themselves had labored here,
grown old, and were gone, who had lifted this same earth,
who had put in what they now took out

As for this moment, for you and for me, the mind is a stone to be rolled away from the
entrance of the soul. Only then can man and earth enjoy unmediated communion. The
ubiquitous arrowheads, stones with a fashioned vengeance, are scattered about the
landscape like long-discarded arguments dropped from an empty sky. At times even
the dead must be lifted in order to deliver their stillness to higher ground. The new
reservoir promises to round all edges. Who will save the dead? Few congregants are up
to the task, as the undertaker soon learns:
Fell overcome with heat, one did, the first day;
another struck by the sun; two more threw down their tools
and walked away. The few who stayed till the job was done
rode together in the back of Sefes pickup each quitting time
to a tavern on the highwayfrom The Undertaker

What happens when self-negating labor is abandoned for the seductive rush of slogans,
movements, grand causes and petty, indulgent feuds, in short the usual bed of
fabrications (from Shaking the Peonies)? In Phoenix, we find two soldiers in
borrowed Napoleonic uniforms, trapped in a generational family feud not of their
making, in a Shawnee war not of their bidding. Adding to the worldly layers of
confusion and alienated majesty, they find themselves comrades in the same war.
Seeking to resolve these bewildering allegiances, they end up fighting one another to
the death. In perhaps the most comprehensively emblematic image in the collection (we
have the water, the rocks, the rising darkness and the failing light), the two men venture
down to the hollow with the Generals consent where a dark presence/rose up a
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basin of troubled water, seething/and boiling, surging over heaps of stones/catching
the last light through the trees.
In Picking Stone, these men seem to appear again, this time as boys, still in baseball
uniforms from a game at the Legion Later they, pry with an iron bar against a great
gray rock. They will not quit, they begin to roar as they bear down on it.
Those closest to the earth do not bear uniforms well; or else the organizing principle
becomes, so smudged you cant tell what army theyre in (from Covered Bridge).
Uniforms are regimenting colors that march us away from ourselves. The uniform du
jour in poetry these days is the performance poet. In his struggle to be heard, this
thoroughly modern bard finds his public voice only to lose his vocation. After all, his
job is not to linger, but to vacate the clearing his contemplation ushers through. The
limelight eludes the proper poet by design.
Carters quietude is a conscious and sustained act, hardly a feeble acquiescence. He
resists polluting the stillness with gratuitous detail, resigning himself with poetic fatalism
to Keats negative capabilities, that part of your mind that cannot hurry, that has never
learned to decide (from Mississinewa County Road). Forbearance is the bright shadow
that guides his pen.
The poet advertises himself only on the rarest occasions. In At the Sign-Painters, he
extolls the Depression-era sign painters who stoically accept being observed at their
labors. We sense the poets calling slowly forming in a boys mind. The words are
prefigured, waiting to be filled out with whispers. But no speeches please. The universe
entrusts its signs to the artisan who stands, in ready quietude, brush in-hand:
for the slow sweep and whisper
of the brush liked seeing the ghost letters in pencil
gradually filling out, fresh and wet and gleaming, words
forming out of all that darkness, that huge disorder.

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Contemplatives are particularly maddening because they eschew textual impartations
from higher authorities, be they clergymen or self-appointed poetry critics. At least
meditation involves meditating upon something: a prayer, a papal bull, the new Tom Cruise
movie, a political manifesto. The arrangers of the world seek indoctrinated readers, not
divine listeners. In the absence of doctrinaires, the sway of earthly power is loosened.
French Quietist Jeanne Marie Guyon called it loosening the stays. Or as Carter says in
The Shriving, Things got in the way of what he saw and heard.
I can detect no earthly authority to which Jared Carters poetry answers, except perhaps
the earth itself. No sooner did I fancy him brushing against Shaker sensibilities in
Indiana, his lifelong home and the locale for most of these poems, than I fell across
The Believers inscribed to Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky with appearances
no less, from Mother Ann Lee, the endless chain and the narrow path.
There is, in his poetry, Mother Ann Lees retirement from opinion and argument into
the unitive state of divine contemplation. When the nervous chatter stops, the clearing
is allowed and the universe bursts forth. While nature can be chronicled for the labors
it performs beneath our feet, we are here not to move mountains but to occasionally
move our dead to higher ground. The mind feeds nothing. Carters poems cannot be
willed into existence. Rather, they find him at his workbench, bristling with craft and
emptied of polemic.
This is a sprawling collection, nearly 200 pages, that assembles poems from Carters
first five books. I confess to approaching this task with great trepidation, knowing I
could never do the volume anywhere near full justice. For instance, I have barely
touched upon his metrical verse and his astonishingly unlabored villanelles. Instead, I
have kept things to where my own fascinations seemed to gravitate, mostly, as it turns
out, in the earlier work. That would be stones, arrowheads, borrowed uniforms,
adulterated light and the elevated dead. I note his latest work favors compression. I
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prefer the unhurried eccentricity of his longer lines. In the main, this poetry moves
across the earth with understated majesty. The ultimate testament to craft is the poets
polite absence. I applaud Carter for leaving well enough alone.

NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University;
MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American
businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch,
The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book "Between River and Rock:
How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments" is available here. Two essay
collections, How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? and The Frantic Force are
spoken of here and here, respectively. His recent collection of poetry Serpentrope is here from
White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.
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