WATCHMAN IN THE NIGHT FACTORY, by David Rigsbee.
Black Lawrence Press. 2024.
www.blacklawrence.com
Going through some old issues of the New York Review of Books one recent evening, I found an article by Manwali Serpell entitled “Such Womanly Touches” that I only got halfway through before I got interrupted, and then headed off to sleep and never did get back to finishing it. I recollect, though, that one of its main questions involved the ability of a reader to detect the gender preference of an author’s identity. if one only has the writing with which to hazard a conjecture. I’m starting my commentary on David Rigsbee’s exceptionally fine collection, “Watchman in the Knife Factory” by citing this particular question because it seems to me that one of the crucial contributions Rigsbee makes to cultural discourse with this book is the way its poems buffer gender with their prowess. No doubt the late Robert W. Fuller, who decried rankism, would cringe at my use of prowess, for it is not so much a virtue, but a magnifying gauge of some other long-standing dedication, such as fortitude. I can’t get around it, however, nor do I want to: one’s prowess establishes the compelling motive for whether something deserves the precious time of our attentive consciousness and admiration.
What exactly is prowess, however; and how does Rigsbee’s prowess infuse his poems with an authority that provides nutritious intimacy and insight into the human condition? In general, one’s imaginative prowess requires a nimble dexterity; this isn’t just a matter restricted to verse! Let’s look at the example of musical performance: It is very difficult to sing and play an instrument at the same time. If Rigsbee’s best poems exude the prowess of an unflinching imagination, it derives from a technical control of cadence and rhythm with an unerring eye for the lyricism of dramatic detail. Such blending requires strength that is capable of constant emotional and intellectual adjustments, and it can only develop if one is alert to the succession of artistic models that have preceded one’s work. In other words, one must inculcate prowess as a reader along with that of writer.
Needless to say, a problem with this formulation doesn’t exactly dally in speaking up. At the current cultural moment in the United States, the calculations of prowess would more often be perceived as associated with masculinity. Obviously, that’s a case of cultural conditioning, since I can’t think of many factors that would limit prowess to one gender. Even so, Rigsbee’s prowess with the language turns out to be firmly entwined with social situations that interrogate our comprehension of masculinity’s travails. If one would wish to understand the cross-fire that makes the performance of masculinity so challenging for those assigned as males at birth, one need only start with the poems in Watchman in the Knife Factory. If, however, prowess seems too imbued with masculinity, and is therefore in your estimate a suspect agent in social formation, and you feel uncomfortable in any way with that alignment, then you have more or less admitted that you will not be able to read Rigsbee’s poems with the vigorous enthusiasm they deserve. Go your way, but it’s your loss.
Now you might reasonably wonder why I begin a consideration of Rigsbee’s poetry by mentioning this particular context. Quite frankly, I can’t figure out why he is not better known. To put it bluntly, why are not several poems in Watchman not conspicuous in anthologies of contemporary poetry? When I first thought about this absence, my first reaction was that I simply must not be looking at enough anthologies. Just now, though, our old pal AI served us this little dish:
David Rigsbee’s poems have appeared in various anthologies, including Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry (which he co-edited) and The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry. Additionally, his work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, such as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review.
Note the adjective: “various” anthologies; not “numerous” anthologies, which should be how the survey’s summary should read. I can’t say that I am fond of AI, but at least it saved me several hours going through my bookshelves to prove what I already knew: Rigsbee is an underrepresented, proportionate to the quality of his work, as a voter in a gerrymandered state such as Texas.
On one level, I guess it’s a bit of a futile endeavor to urge others to read with the inquisitiveness that I bring to poetry; and why should I be disappointed that Rigsbee is extremely unlikely to ever win enough critical or popular attention to be announced as a poet laureate of some literary domain, if not at least to be prominently anthologized? I’ve never met him. He’s not even a casual acquaintance. In the end, I have to admit that the fact that there is an inexplicable gap between Rigsbee’s accomplishment as a poet and the recognition he deserves is not really that unusual. The same case can be made for dozens of poets. Yet Rigsbee’s plight seems just that: something with a touch of scandal, for I cannot emphasize how rare it is that such a fine poet deserves at the very least to be known as the “go-to” poet of an outstanding small press. While there are hundreds of poets who can claim to have as extensive a publication list in literary magazines, few in fact have written truly memorable poems that require one to make conjectures about the genealogy of their poetics.
Before we consider Rigsbee’s influences, let’s consider one of the myths that has infected explanations of poetry’s trajectory in the past 125 years. Please grant that oversimplifications are unavoidable; when I say that modernist and post-modernist poets have an inflated sense of their importance, for instance, let’s first ask ourselves with a cynical smile what literary movement doesn’t overrate its own value? Self-promoting narratives are such a drag, and it’s very hard not to flinch when I run across statements about how Pound and Eliot and Williams and Stevens (PEWS) are the crucial poets in the genealogy of contemporary poetry and that without them we wouldn’t have much work worth reading. We certainly wouldn’t have the enormous variety of writing we get to choose from now, if PEWS had not produced all of their writing, but to fantasize that the writing that doesn’t affiliate with their poetics is ipso facto inferior is a proposition I refuse to buy a time-share in.
So what is one of many alternative genealogies, and what is its relationship with PEWS? I have no doubt that Hayden Carruth absorbed a great deal of his craft in writing verse from the above quartet, but when I think of Carruth, the poet who strikes most readers as the most important influence is Frost. What seems to get forgotten, as one reads a poet such as David Rigsbee, is how strong the DNA is that flows from Frost to Carruth to the most memorable poems in Watchman in the Knife Factory. And let’s be clear about this: there is no anxiety of influence here. Not only that, the best of Rigsbee’s work deserves to be set alongside that of Frost and Carruth as the kind of work that tests the very fabric of human consciousness in the mendacious projects that entitles itself the United States of America.
Part Two
I recently saw a list of recommended books of poetry that a creative writing teacher at a college put together for a syllabus. Almost all the titles were “New and Selected” and “Collected Poems.” I groaned at the complacent laziness of such a list. While I certainly have benefitted from first encountering the work of poets such as W.B. Yeats and Theodore Roethke in a volume of “Collected Poems,” one misses out on the kind of instruction that a stand-alone collection can provide a reader who aspires to write. While this piece of commentary has had its impetus in the publication of Rigsbee’s up-to-this-point retrospective of his poetry, it is one book in particular that I want to call attention to: School of the Americas is replete with memorable poems, and I confess that I find myself utterly bewildered as to why the book does not seem to have, at the very least, been on the list of “Best Books of the Year” when it came out. What exactly is bedeviling the people who have literary power in this country that there are unable to detect which books have writing of enduring merit?
The title of the book, with its echo of neutered bureaucratic nomenclature, could easily serve as one question on a comprehensive test of political consciousness in the United States. Not being able to identify the title as a reference to an institution notorious for its advocacy of brutal torture in support of right-wing dictatorships would not mean you flunk the test, and I would never want to belittle someone for their lack of knowledge about this institution. After all, the numerous travesties of human decency that take place on a daily basis on this planet are overwhelming, to put it mildly, and it’s hard to keep up. “Is there a hole for me to get sick in,” sang Bob Dylan, and that about sums it up.
Unlike almost any other poet who addresses the reprehensible side of American history, Rigsbee juxtaposes his revulsion with sketches of other people he’s encountered, sometimes on offhand chance, as finely drawn as anything written by E.A. Robinson. Now I wish I could assume that in citing Robinson, my readers would immediately understand which of Robinson’s poems I am citing when I praise “Tom House” or “Get It Down.” Unfortunately, all too many poets have simply not done basic reading and wouldn’t be able to draw a line from “Miniver Cheevey” to Rigsbee’s poems; nor if I quoted lines from “Clavering” such as:
I think of him as I should think
Of one who for scant wages played
And faintly, a flawed instrument,
that fell while it was being made
would they see how Rigsbee has drawn upon the accumulation of traditional tropes and renovated them with extraordinary, bemused dexterity. But it ill becomes me to devote too much time to berating Rigsbee’s potential readers. One doesn’t have to first read Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Alan Dugan, Tom Lux, and Robert Wrigley to prime oneself for the distinctively understated assessment of war without any exit strategy in “The Pilot House.” For one thing, the poem that precedes it in Watchman, “The Gulf,” deftly dangles the reader in the wheelhouse of history. If you have not read the oncoming waves sooner than those whose perspective is only a notch above the churn that is the slippery deck, then you deserve your baleful fate.
Another instance of how it would help one appreciate Rigsbee’s subtle shadings of theme would be if one read Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” before reading Rigsbee’s “Roofers.” The former’s central metaphor is so egregiously obvious that it’s like having to endure watching an alleged magic trick while listening to the color commentary of the magician’s assistant. “Roofers” surmounts the temptation to make certain that the reader “understands” the poem by keeping the symbolic burdens of its titular occupation unspoken of except as the embodied commandment to keep one’s protest to oneself, and to give that which enables one to get the task done – whether a roof or a poem – the clenched efficiency of total concentration. (As a side-note, Ray Zepeda’s poem, “Roofing,” also fulfills its mise-en-scene in a much more satisfying comic manner than Heaney’s poem in using labor as a metaphor. I’ve never ceased to be astonished at the capacity of critics to fawn over third-rate work.)
Finally, anyone familiar with Rigsbee’s poetry will note how I’ve deferred mentioning a quartet of poems interspersed throughout Watchman in which Rigsbee either directly or obliquely addresses the suicide of his brother. “The Slug,” “The Courage of Unspeakable Acts,” “The Red Tower,” and “Immortal Soul.” If you have been fortunate enough to have been spared the insatiable abrasives of such a familial drama in your own life, you will begin to understand the peripheries of its grasp; although if you, too, have suffered such a loss, you will not be purged of an iota of your grief. You, too, as Rigsbee does in another poem, will climb into the attic until you find the omphlos of its instigation and touch the proud flesh of the wound.
In considering these poems, what I want to point out is how part of the textual apparatus of the book undercuts the presence of these poems in a volume over 350 pages in length. Where is the index of first lines and titles? For that matter, how about an index of final lines? The conclusion of “Immortal Soul” surprises the reader by pointing to what might seem a peripheral character, who only arrives in the narrative at the last instant. “See, it looks just like you,” says a visitor to a dying woman, who is being shown a photograph of herself when she was spry. Implicitly, we are being asked if we can recognize ourselves as other than we are, and find in that tether the comfort of immortality’s infinite brevity.
Take hold of this book, and don’t let it spend too much time on your shelf. Make sure there’s always a chair nearby wherever you might happen to set it.
POST-SCRIPT:
*******
Here are the links to two other reviews of Rigsbee’s work, along with a list of poem they cite that are not mentioned in my review.
Number One:
https://www.culturaldaily.com/watchman-in-the-knife-factory-new-and-selected-poems-by-david-rigsbee/?fbclid=IwY2xjawLIHnpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETF3UFB5T1F4VXZ5SFpnRHRZAR6IfX4x9q7hgWlSea_0rWjmj_DcN3RA9IEog2pcSoLjN5LuGelCb0rHOSskHw_aem_t90Cg9sWZVKirJXMzWpkdw
Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems by David Rigsbee
Shawn Pavey — a 600 word review, with extensive quotation from three poems:
“Autobiography”
“Executor”
“Roy Orbison, New Orleans, 1984”
Number Two:
https://iowareview.org/blog/david-rigsbees-school-americas
Carolyn Wright’s review addresses such poems as “Heresies of Self-Love”; “Shum”; “Gil’s Sentence,”
******
In addition to the poems examined by these two other reviewers, I would suggest also starting any reading of WATCHMAN by reading the following set:
“After Rain”
“Miss Tilley”
“Clothespins”
“The Stegosaurus”
In fact, I would love to read a review, at least as long as mine, by some other poet that focuses on these ten poems.
About Bill Mohr