“oscillating,” by Jeff Stonic
There is a certain kind of quiet in Jeff Stonic’s poem, “Oscillating” (published in a previous issue of Denver Quarterly). Which, yes, might be because he’s at home, and everyone is asleep. And he describes a literal quiet. Or at least the kind of quiet where each person enjoys the mechanical noises of their choice. But for my reading there’s something more than just a literal quiet in this apartment. It’s something that settles into the flow of my reading. Like in Theory of the Lyric (Havard University Press, 2015), when Jonathan Culler contrasts iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter, and suddenly, in the space of two syllables, he shows me the subtle, meditative mode of a poem. This is what the expanded domestic space feels like for me in Stonic’s poem. But rather than a five-foot line, Stonic’s expansion comes with his extravagant sentences. Like a long sentence provides mimetic access to the poet’s personal comfort, a personal quiet, and then what he might do with all that. This is a different quiet from what I think Ron Silliman describes with his Quietism. I don’t know if I’m clear on what that exact quiet is. My understanding, however, is that Silliman is critical of those poems that reach for quiet. Or that culminate in some revelatory moment marking when the poet really understands quiet. Stonic’s “oscillating” might end on that note, but it concludes a poem occupied by a flat quiet. The quiet when you can finally think. Or maybe the significant difference I see between Silliman’s “Quietism” quiet and the quiet I hear occupying Stonic’s poem is what quiet means to Stonic’s poetic thinking. His poem is not structured to land on quiet perplexity, it kneads quiet from and into the domestic setting.
It’s something similar to the quiet poems I admire. These are not poems whose main move is to suddenly shine a light on quiet entering the poet’s world. And by main move I pretty much mean only move. Those poems can feel formulaic at best and “poetic” at worst. Like “quiet” equals “poetic.” What I prefer is work where the poet’s quiet voice seemingly absorbs the page. Marie Howe or Brigit Pegeen Kelly or Carl Phillips or Jane Mead. Maybe Silliman would say these are examples of Quietism? I can’t find where he coined the term, so I don’t know. Personally, I find these poets quiet in the best way. Like they’ve discovered a rhetorical mode that dampens out any concern except for what’s immediately concerning the poet as they write their poem. These poets have pressed a quiet grain into their poetry; their poems are a complex articulation that has shut out other distractions.
Stonic’s “oscillating,” like recent poems I’ve read by Phillips and by Howe, uses quiet as a means. What distinguishes Stonic’s poem, for me, is its quiet domesticity. The poem occupies the space and makes you feel what it feels like for someone to be inside his home. His longer lined sentences create space for this quiet. They mark a kind of rhythm where language elaborates automatically and impulsively into a complexity. I’ve been reading Mutlu Blasing’s Lyric Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2007), where she argues poetic language springs from an infant’s relationship with acquiring language. The phrasing and diction in Stonic feel like a synthesis between the semiotics of language acquisition and a mature rhetoric, where the sentence is aware of the rhythms that register age and the careful perspective that can come with that.
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