Reviews

     

The Return of the Present: Cloud Ridge, by Stephen Ratcliffe

Reviewed By Eric Selland

482 pp. BlazeVOX [books]. US$22.00. ISBN: 9781609640729 paper

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Nothing but this appearing

"grey light coming into sky above horizontal line
of ridge on left, still bright silver planet
at edge of a grey white cloud above it"

("7.8" pg. 15)

A way of looking - Cloud Ridge is a continuation of Stephen Ratcliffe's project of recording daily events, primarily what is seen, from a particular location, often called "site-specific work."

"motion of leaves in upper right corner of bamboo
thicket, whiteness of cloud pressing down above
it"

("7.23" pg. 30)

In situating the writer (writing) at a particular location, one sets out a definition of what it means to be alive and to be human... to be living in the now.

"wedge of pink orange light on wall to the left
of the unmade white bed, pale grey light in sky
above still dark corner of the plane opposite it"

("3.25" pg. 275)

And yet "existence is interpretation" (Gianni Vattimo) as we see in lines appearing after these straightforward observations -

"Kandinsky thinking 'a never-ending extent of red
can only be seen in the mind.' How each color
cannot dispense with boundaries of some kind."

("3.25" pg. 275)

Through daily notations of things seen, we are invited to see the world around us, where meaning arises gradually through the process of the poem itself. But as in Duncan's sense of "the real," this encompasses a broad range of human experience. Hence "things seen" means also things read and remembered - all of that which is important to the poet's world and the process of creating or building that world.

Writing as practice

Writing here becomes the discipline of a daily practice, both a meditation on existence and careful attention to a way of proceeding and the materials of the work. The objective representation of scenes in daily life has much in common with Shiki's "life sketch" method of haiku. Here there is a concentration on "things as they are." The actual origins of Shiki's theory were actually in painting, and this painterly quality is shared by Ratcliffe's work.

"silver of sun rising through motion of green
leaves in bamboo thicket, rufous-sided towhee
disappearing from branch in upper right corner"

("1.19" pg. 210)

Ratcliffe places the real world of his surroundings inside a frame, so that the things which he describes are as if images in a painting - for instance "empty column of feeder in lower right corner" (pg. 88), or "shoulder of ridge in upper left corner" (pg. 215). And again "small white birds gliding across below it" (pg. 284) or "white water moving across channel below it" (pg. 345). There is, in other words, the left and right sides of the frame, as well as above and below - coordinates on an axis.

Finally, this daily practice encompasses an entire life work. Ratcliffe's long term project echoes Zukofsky's sense of "the poem of a life" - the poet essentially writes the same poem throughout his life. Ratcliffe quotes Zukofsky on pg. 277 -

"the poem is 'information on existence
out of which it grows,' by which he means to say
'Thing in the world.'"

("3.27")

Ratcliffe is recording in daily observational notes the daily routine events and sightings (sitings) of an entire lifetime.

The landscape of the text

"To speak of the poem as a landscape - the body of the world - will be to think of the geography of its features." (Listening to Reading, Stephen Ratcliffe)

Here the poem itself becomes landscape in its mapping out of topologies of language and image, personal and cultural memory, and relationship to place. The basic thinking behind these poems, where words become "a form of the body," is outlined in Listening to Reading, a theoretical work published in 2000. We can see in Cloud Ridge both echoes of Pound's Vorticism where "language equals charge," and a relationship to poetic utterance which is an extension of Olson's Projective Verse. In this way Ratcliffe embraces the entire thrust of Modernist poetry in America, but the poem as translation, as a transformational force, takes us into a completely new dimension. In Cloud Ridge we are taken into the "time of the poem, the time of the body in the world: as landscape changes depending on the time of the day or year, weather conditions, the position of the observer, the poem is also 'changed' (charged) at each (re)reading." (ibid.) Here the poem becomes archival memory, containing "fragments of a life (transcribed) made present in the act of writing." (ibid.)

A sense of place - the poem of place

"horizontal white
cloud in pale blue sky above point on right,
grey gull perched on tip of the GROIN sign"
 
("10.26" pg. 125)

Cloud Ridgeis a poem very much rooted in place. Like Olson' Maximus, Ratcliffe records the life of a city, in this case the little coastal town of Bolinas north of San Francisco which has been the home of many major poets over the years, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. Ratcliffe has lived continuously in Bolinas since the 1970s and his rootedness in this locality is an essential part of his work as a poet. Even the roughly chiseled features of the poet's face seem to have been cut from the rocky northern Californian shore.

Ratcliffe structures his poem in a way which maps out the local terrain while also introducing the element of temporality. Daily observations of what lies outside his window each morning are followed by a cataloguing of what was seen or heard the previous day. Then there are quotes from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse followed by things seen in the water while surfing on the previous day. Since many of the occurrences and statements made in the middle parts of these poems are actually quotes from major Modernist works of literature and philosophy, as well as music and art theory, a large portion of Ratcliffe's observed reality is actually from the literary imagination. Here Ratcliffe reaches into the internal/subjective aspect of "the real." Moreover, since quotes are framed as if they were fragments of conversations heard in town, it is as if characters from literary works have become the living residents of Bolinas.

We can get a clearer sense of this work by placing the first and last poems side by side. The work is "framed" by the initial and final poems. Note how certain patterns are repeated with subtle differences, while Pound is quoted significantly in the final poem. Both "pictures of actions" and "processes in nature" are of course essential to Cloud Ridge and to Ratcliffe's entire project. Meanwhile, the Virginia Woolf quote, "I have had my vision," seems to voice the thoughts of the poet himself.

7.2
pale orange glow above shadowed plane of ridge
in window opposite the unmade yellow and blue
bed, an unseen bird chirping from lower left
foreground
	pianist noting the two-to-one
proportion between two parallel red lines
receding into the distance, Bach's child
breaking the harpsichord he wants to play
louder
	woman on phone startled by a loud
knocking on the blue front door, copy saying
stolen car was found
		white moth's wings
stopped on dark green leaf, eucalyptus leaves
blowing across bright blue sky
			blue whiteness
of mist against right-sloping shoulder of ridge,
pelicans gliding toward point behind GROIN sign
(pg. 9)	

10.18
grey white streak of cloud above ridge in window
opposite the unmade yellow and blue bed, song
sparrow calling from lower left foreground
woman on phone looking at center of circle
passing through vertices of triangle, noting
"proofs are in the heart of mathematics"
				man
in green shirt wondering what it means for words
to be concrete, Pound claiming Chinese presents
"pictures of actions and processes in nature"
Lily Briscoe drawing a line "in the centre,"
thinking to herself "I have had my vision"
line of white water moving across flat grey
plane in the lower right foreground, circular
green plane on point against grey plane above it
(pg. 482)


Continuities and multiplicities
"The poem is everything..." - Stephen Ratcliffe

There is a cumulative power to the poems collected in Cloud Ridge as myriad possibilities of "world" are played out within the 
fabric of the text. Daily observations of the natural world provide a quiet space where the reader can seek refuge. There is a 
certain silence produced by this landscape of words - "The image silence makes in the world." It is a means of engaging fully 
with the present. Yet there is much more here than the literalness of description. What really makes these poems effective is 
the mix of real world observation with every other possible aspect of the poet's inner world. It is the balancing of 
objective/subjective, internal/external, descriptive/non-descriptive. 

Finally, the reader is often moved by the mere fact of existence as pointed to in
these poems - by the things themselves.