On Robert Chrisman's poetry

Abstract

Robert Chrisman did not feature himself as a poet, at least not to me during the years we did scholarly work together at the University of Michigan. I served as director of his PhD dissertation on Robert Hayden and then we coedited the volume Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry for the University of Michigan Press’s Under Discussion Series in 2001. I had read his slim volume Minor Casualties when it appeared in 1993, and occasionally remarked on some favorite poem, but he waved away any reference to the book and insisted that his best work would appear in his next volume—a customary gesture of modesty for all poets who always imagine that their achievement follows an upward trajectory. yet he never showed me these poems, perhaps worried that I would feel constrained by friendship to publish some in the journal I edited, Michigan Quarterly Review. He was right that I would have wanted to print them, but not from a sense of obligation. I would have felt privileged to circulate verse of such high quality. Though we never had a chance to talk about the poems eventually gathered into The Dirty Wars I at least had those precious months between publication and his death to correspond with him about the volume. It was such a significant advance over Minor Casualties, I wrote him, that it had the range and texture of a lifetime’s gathering, more like the capaciousness of Hayden’s Angle of Ascent than one of his chapbooks. He wrote me in response, “you are right on all counts regarding the composition of the volume—it has been slow work and cumulative, thus it took on the feel of a Selected Poems, as I sought to integrate its various strands.” from the stunning multicolor image on the cover—the sculpture of a female African head referred to in the poem “Olmecca”—to the final poem of blessing for a young child born “from the dawn of waters,” the book takes the entirety of time and space as its subject matter, though it focuses most intensively on the poet’s own journey through life. The cover image calls attention to “Olmecca” as a key poem within the volume’s overall purposes. The mysterious icon is blunt, “the jaws heavy,” but “the eyes global, gaze serene.” He writes of the body that suffered from decapitation, “its absence is an ache / for us”; the body carries a message to our epoch of the wounds undergone by Africans brought to this land as slaves, “born in a baptism of boats” with new names but no free choice of action. The loss of that an-