A few years back I hailed a book of poetry called BLUE MOUND TO 161 by Garin Cycholl as the heir to Metcalf, Niedecker, Olson, Tolson and Dorn and their elaborated sense of space, their reading of history as a (sometimes violent) unfolding. Cycholl's book is still worth seeking out, but along comes Ken Rumble's KEY BRIDGE, which applies a slightlfy different sort of pressure points than Cycholl, but which aims for a similar breadth of scope in its psychobiography of an American place. Both poets find themselves and their surround haunted by the spectres of race and of Lionel Trilling's "dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet."
Politics skitter over Washington DC like locusts in some plague land of desert, until even the very earth seems unstable. The "Key Bridge," named after Francis Scott Key, is fitting enough, an aqueduct bridge, a "bridge of water over water," Rumble observes. Like the Florida Everglades there's no firm ground in all of his book to stand on, the space beneath one's feet a murky, liquefying perhaps. However Rumble finds the good with the bad: "Dear Reader," he tells us, "There is/ so much to love." And he makes you believe it.
He's not above the rhetorical gestures of the early American modernists like Frost, Robinson, Lindsay, Jeffers; he addresses the Beltway snipers by name, probing the intricacies of their relationship with an unexpected tenderness, an oldfashioned direct address. And there's that brutal offhand vein of Dos Passos "overheard," as when Rumble compiles a list of the awful things white men have said to him over the years, about their black neighbors. These are broken down by district, and then, in another poem, the white people rank the districts themselves ("wouldn;t be caught there after dark") to build up his phantasmagoric construct of a city bitterly divided against itself, trembling on the edge of the intangible. He walks with L'Enfant and Ben Banneker, the original designers of the city, who "drew the lives they made," and as I see it this book might be Rumble's own attempt at a homage to such imagination.
Of course we can't see the West with the freshness and hope we used to have, but vestiges of this spirit remain hovering above the land like heat vapors. "Don't be delicate," he reminds himself. And for Rumble it's always back to the particulars, the gritty details, names of flowers, people, streets, hills and tasks ("I have to get groceries/ to cook dinner/ to balance my checkbook," he confesses, for somehow by naming these names he comes to own them, like Adam. Likewise dates are important--each poem is named by a date eg "10.April.2001."
KEY BRIDGE comes alive pretty early and stays that way almost to the end, where it starts to fall off just a little. I can't otherwise recommend too heartily this glowing, buzzing atlas of a book, its ambition and its vision, its beauty fragile as a jar of fireflies dashed into the night sky.
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