On Stanley Plumly's Poems [with Response]

The landscape of Stanley Plumly's poems is the landscape of the body in sleep or at the edge of sleep, which is a kind of death, and of the body at the edge of death, which is a kind of sleep. The word "body" occurs six times in these three poems. The body is something to be escaped from, to be understood, and, perhaps, to be recalled from the dark which has risen around it. In "Dreamsong," the most explicit escape occurs. (I want to look at the poem without the reference to Berryman.) The speaker says, "I wanted to die." He feels trapped in "the cradle of myself" and cannot do what he wants until the body allows it. "Then I rose and walked the water." The escape from the body is associated with water, with "the dark side rising." These are key elements in Plumly's other poems. As one rises from the body and walks the water in death, so one floats to the water's surface, amid the debris of death, in sleep. "In Sleep" can be read two ways: as literal death called "sleep" by the terms of the metaphor, which is the less interesting way?or as a dream-sleep that puts one in contact with death. In other words, our imagined death, the fact that we can and do imagine it, is the death that really counts in our lives. The escape here occurs when "you begin to open all your body, bob, and with both hands wipe the water clear." With the body opened at last, "you begin to see what it was." The poem moves from the drowning water toward the clear silence of outer space where the parents and the sister "and one wife, one wife, one wife" drift like birds. The body is still "tied" but in sleep there is escape and illumination.