When we speak of poetic form we usually mean patterns of rhyme and meter; I would prefer, however, to begin with the definition given by W. P. Ker in his book Form and Style in Poetry: “… it is the scheme or argument that is the form, and the poet's very words are the matter with which it is filled. The form is not that with which you are immediately presented, or that which fills your ears when the poem is recited—it is the abstract original scheme from which the poem began.” Form, we may say, is the pattern of thought which organizes and precedes everything else, including the words of the poem, its sound patterns, its content, and its themes.

Among the many patterns into which a poem could fall, two contrasting possibilities—linear form and what I will call circular form—are especially useful for understanding an important aspect of contemporary poetry. The basis for distinction between them is the way time is managed within the poem. All poems, as they are read, move forward within the realm of real or external time; that is, the reader discovers, perhaps with dismay, that he is a few minutes older when he finishes the poem than he was when beginning. But in terms of the internal time frame of the poem—time as it passes or does not pass with regard to action, theme, or content—some poems move forward and some do not. Those that do are generally called linear: their basis is in narrative; they begin at one point and end at another.

The circular poem is more difficult to define but seems to take place within a single, very limited period of time, what we might call the meditative moment. The speaker of this poem does not narrate a series of sequential actions; instead, he or she is observed in the act of thinking—drawing together ideas, scenes, and events which may have occurred originally at widely separated times. Such items of content are available through memory, intellect, and imagination—all faculties of the thinking, creating mind. Speaking of the work of Charles Wright in her book Part of Nature, Part of Us, Helen Vendler defined what I mean by circular form as “spatial form”: “It renounces, as forms of articulation, narrative, the succession of events, the sequence of action and reaction”; it is characterized by “this arrested motion, this taking thought.”

The circular poem as I speak of it is certainly related to what Louis L. Martz has defined as The Poetry of Meditation, but two distinctions are in order. For one thing, Martz points out a strong connection between the poems he discusses (by Donne, Herbert, Roethke, etc.) and the specifically religious practice of meditation. I do not mean to imply such a connection as I speak of the contemporary circular poem. Secondly, whereas Martz's definition of the poetry of meditation is derived from the content of the works he examines, my definition of the circular poem is derived primarily from the form of the poems I will be discussing here. …

Charles Wright's The Other Side of the River continues the formal breakthrough toward an expansiveness of circular form achieved by the poet in his earlier volume, The Southern Cross (1981). The new book makes use of four basic settings or locales. California is the setting of the present moment, the present tense, the time of actual speaking. Memory carries the speaker into the past, which has two generalized settings—Italy and the American South. Desire carries him toward the future, into imagination or vision, the possibility of an afterlife, which is set across the river. (In fact, the title Charles Wright has chosen for this book seems intentionally to echo the title to one of James Wright's books, Shall We Gather at the River, in which a poem called “Willy Lyons” envisions the speaker's uncle as having achieved peace in the afterlife by crossing the river—the River Styx masquerading as the Ohio.) In his title poem, Charles Wright's speaker expresses his wish in this way: “I want to sit by the bank of the river, / in the shade of the evergreen tree, / And look in the face of whatever, / the whatever that's waiting for me.”

The form of the long poems here is circular as I have been developing the term—this despite the fact that these poems contain units, sections, that are obviously both linear and narrative. To illustrate the ways Wright uses form to embody both theme and content (as well as the beautiful sound patterns he has always been master of), I will discuss in some detail a representative example, “Lost Bodies.” The poem is divided into seven unnumbered sections, each of which serves a specific function. The first section is introductory, much as the first sections of so many of Whitman's open-formed poems are introductory. Just as Whitman does, Wright introduces us to all the elements of his poem briefly at the start:

Last night I thought of Torri del Benaco again,
Its almond trees in blossom,
                                        its cypresses clothed in their dark fire,
And the words carved on that concrete cross
I passed each day of my life
In Kingsport going to town
          GET RIGHT WITH GOD / JESUS IS COMING SOON
If I had it all to do over again
                                                            I'd be a Medievalist.
I'd thoroughly purge my own floor.
Something's for sure in the clouds, but it's not for me,
Though all the while that light tips the fast-moving water,
East wind in a rush through the almond trees.

The first three lines introduce the Italian setting which forms the basis for one of the poem's patterns of memory; the next four lines introduce the Southern setting which is the basis for the other pattern. The concluding six lines are thematic: the desire to be a Medievalist seems like a wish for religious certainty; the something that is “for sure in the clouds” seems to suggest a spiritual possibility—the efficacy of which the speaker immediately denies, but then, just as quickly, seems to grant though in a different form: if he cannot find the spiritual in the clouds, perhaps he can find it in the light on the water, in the wind in the trees.

The following six sections establish a regular and repetitive pattern: numbers two and five develop the memory of Tennessee; three and six develop the memory of Italy; four and seven develop the theme, the meanings of these memories. Charles Wright grew up in Tennessee; after college, he lived in Italy while serving in the United States Army. The sense of spirituality which is developed in the Tennessee sections is earthy and strongly Christian, the Word emphatically made flesh: “the cross is still there, sunk deeper into the red clay / Than anyone could have set it.” Wright has provided an indirect gloss on these passages in the poem “Lonesome Pine Special,” where he asserts: “In the world of dirt, each tactile thing / repeats the untouchable / In its own way, and in its own time.”

Spirituality in the Italian sections is more evanescent, not so much inherent within material objects as dancingly associated with them; it exists in the interplay between wind, water, and vegetation:

An east wind was blowing out toward the water …
I remember the cypress nods in its warm breath.
I remember the almond blossoms
                                        floating out on the waves, west to Salò.
I remember the way they looked there,
                                                            a small flotilla of matches.
I remember their flash in the sun's flare.

The thematic sections are rational and intellectual rather than emotional and imagistic; though a desire for belief, for faith, is expressed in them, it is overridden by the logic of doubt: “You've got to sign your name to something, it seems to me. / And so we rephrase the questions / Endlessly, / hoping the answer might somehow change.” The answer is that taught by the facts of everyday life:

When you die, you fall down,
                                                            you don't rise up
Like a scrap of burnt paper into the everlasting.
Each morning we learn this painfully,
Pulling our bodies up by the roots from their deep sleep.

No matter how hard he strives to make them suffice, the speaker of these poems ultimately cannot rest easy with the strictly religious answers he considers.

We recall the spiritual function of words, of poetry, expressed in the passage from “To Giacomo Leopardi in the Sky” quoted above. It would seem that the answer Charles Wright seeks in these poems can only exist as a component of poetry itself; somehow the form of the search is its own answer. Passages from two other poems seem to validate this solution. Certainly the chief poetic devices used by Wright are those which double meaning, those which establish similitude—the metaphor and the simile. In “California Dreaming,” Wright asserts that “What I know best is a little thing. / It sits on the far side of the simile, / the like that's like the like.” The statement does not express belief in a settled truth; it establishes a path, a method, which might lead to some sense of truth—if religious certainty is to be found, that is, it will be discovered through the operations of something like metaphor or simile.

Most obviously to the point is another passage from the title poem in the book, where Wright comments directly upon the meditative, metaphorical, circular method of his long poems:

It's linkage I'm talking about,
                                        and harmonies and structures
And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Something infinite behind everything appears,
                                                            and then disappears.
It's all a matter of how
                                        you narrow the surfaces.
It's all a matter of how you fit in the sky.

Wright is talking neither about reality nor about settled truth here; his subject is the method of his poetry, the process whereby truth might someday be cajoled to reveal itself out of the confusing, the camouflaging, the byzantine fabric of the reality which conceals it. The Other Side of the River is a wonderful book, another compelling stride forward taken by one of America's most important poets. …

“Elegies for the Ochre Deer on the Walls at Lascaux” [by Norman Dubie] is surely the most complicated of the circular, meditative poems discussed in this essay. It demonstrates, I think, not just the great freedom and subtlety of the form but also the wide range of possibilities which are open to the poet. We have come a good distance from Rita Dove's excellent but far simpler poem, “The Copper Beech”—but I think we have traveled in a straight line. Obviously my discussion has emphasized the circular rather than the linear poem, but I do not mean to suggest by this the superiority of one form over the other. I have dwelled at length upon the circular form because it is the less well understood, the less often discussed of the two forms—and because it is a crucial element in the way these poets [Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Alan Dugan, Rachel Hadas, Derek Walcott, and Norman Dubie], like so many of their contemporaries, are writing.