Watchman in the Knife Factory is a comprehensive collection of David Rigsbee’s work over the last three decades spanning more than 10 books. The collection opens with newer poems and ends with the oldest, allowing the reader to see a poet at the zenith of his powers and the path that brought him there.
Starting with some earlier work, “Autobiography” is a fine example of the poet coming into his own.
As soon as you leave, you enter
memory, and that small emissary
of yourself immediately loses
its credentials. No longer yours,
you can’t recall it, or send it
instructions on tactical lying.
You may have armed yourself with
heavy qualifiers, been Henry James,
but turn your back, it’s theirs.
The notion that an autobiography, just like a life, ceases to be our possession once released is fascinating and painfully true. Notice Rigsbee’s bold and successful use of the second person in this poem, which is a rare thing in poetry. Often, its use comes off as gimmick rather than art, but not when employed by Rigsbee, whose deft use of poetics enhance this poem in every line. Look at the slant rhyme in the second line of “memory” with “emissary,” his sly contrast of soft vowels with harder consonants, and the conversational tone juxtaposed against complex rhythmic structures. Rigsbee continues:
Thus, memory. And each fresh
Installment of yourself, though
exquisite, is still lump clay.
Even the other tack, sincerity,
has zero chance because revelations
have nothing to do with memory.
Trapped, you have only the whim
they toss at you to put on.
You are a small being now, just
A fraction of the old self.
Your mother tongue begins to suffer,
Like an émigré’s. Plainly, you
were the aggregate of what you gave up.
Now you are suspiciously plural.
What is happening to you?
It is like glimpsing someone who
favors you in an old movie
you used to like. And yet,
the costume is absurd, not to
mention the horse. Or these
others, also with your face, jerk-
ing their spears in the air.
Spilled change, their faces turn
briefly to the you they obviously
can’t see. And the barbaric
shouts they make, this cast of
thousands swarming over the dust!
In the second stanza, Rigsbee explores that Whitmanesque idea of a single self-containing multitudes, how each of us in the now is different than the people we were in the past and people we will be in the future. This is not the only nod in Uncle Walt’s direction, either (“…And the barbaric/ shouts…” in the last few lines of the poem.). Anyone who reads this collection will realize, immediately, that Rigsbee is a voracious and deep reader who, like all master poets, weaves tenuous threads of connection through seemingly unconnected things, bringing them into new light. But Rigsbee has a wit on display here, too. The best example is breaking up the word “jerking” (“…Or those/ others with your face, jerk-/ ing their spears in the air.”). Being able to shift from philosophical investigation of the idea of self to imagining that same self as a character in an old movie moves from the serious to the comical. And then there’s the title: this poem is almost an anti-biography where little of the poet’s self is displayed and yet it is, in a way, an autobiography of common human experience.
Rigsbee mines the Western Canon as successfully as any great poet, but he extols pop culture just as easily. In “Roy Orbison, New Orleans, 1984,” he begins:
They were micro-operas, and he
was as lifeless a tenor, as could be
propped on a stage, so hidden in black
he seemed the emissary of oblivion,
except there was nothing
he was capable of forgetting, no hurt.
Music writers for decades have tried and failed to capture Roy Orbison in such succinct and perfect language. One might argue this collection a must read for any writer of poems or prose as a master class in economy and surprise. He continues later in the poem:
…For Roy,
all of life’s fullness survived only
in dreams, and because they did so
they were invariably sad, insubstantial—
yet within these boundaries, vivid.
The poem continues to weave in and out of communicating Orbison’s uniqueness with its significance to failed past relationships and the individuals involved; how they, too, could forget no hurt and carried it with them into their present and future lives, as we humans do. The poem concludes:
…Where did they think
they were going, the show-stoppers,
when the show was not in this life,
as we had just heard, and believed?
In Rigsbee’s newest work in this collection, we see a renewed commitment to sound and rhythm. Rigsbee’s poems—all—can be read aloud. They all contain that musician’s attention to the interplay between assonance and consonance, the almost jazz of his rhythms broken out of the heartbeat iambic by interspersed spondees and trochees, anapests and dactyls. But this newest work takes it from highly competent to masterful. In “Executor,” this use of sound and meter drive the poem. He begins, haltingly, with the line “In the box, I expected, of course, evidence.” Moving from the title to this line sets us up for surprise as the “I” of the poem opens a box of documents of a writer whose papers are entrusted to his care. He continues:
…of journeys, exotic, stony destinations
where her famous friends, those
with prizes and wit, waved on the dock
having come to greet her, fellow traveler.
They would have adventures, diversions,
and proper to their kind.
When they were home, such material!
Just like the tragedians and satirists.
When their books came out, they signed
them with abiding love, vigorous pledges
rendered in tiny, unassertive script.
From the first books, as with all
the others I quarried, flyers fell out:
reviews from The Nation, Poetry,
and The New York Times Books Review.
On the back page, notes, “P 150—Metaphor,”
“P 72—relation of present and past,”
“P 29-31—Barbarians.” I reinserted
the reviews and returned the books
to their container, sealed it with masking tape,
careful that the creases were straight,
the tape itself reinforced and taut.
The use of commas as natural caesurae, never repeating a consonant more than twice, the syncopated rhythms that both inform and are informed by the narrative. And that ending: instead of adventures, meaningful correspondences or book inscriptions, it’s review clippings and index notes, sealed again in the original box.
There is so much in this collection that should be lauded and we have limited space to do so, but moving from the first page to the last is a type of reverse engineering of a poet’s mastery that we so rarely see anymore. Each page is vital. No word is unnecessary. These are poems written with a musician’s ear, an editor’s eye, a philosopher’s mind, and a poet’s heart.
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