POETRY: Everlasting Quail (2001)

Sam Witt's debut poetry collection, Everlasting Quail (2001), is a breath of fresh air in contemporary verse: difficult (often overwhelmingly so), unrelentingly original (which is always a challenge), and steeped in allusions, ranging from John Calvin to Philip Sidney to Walter Benjamin (all credited in Eliot-like endnotes). Witt's is a surrealist poetry, like Federico Garcia Lorca's, and his reviewers tend to make mention too of Wallace Stevens, though not as a direct role model (Witt himself mentioned both poets when I had the privilege of a live conversation with him in October 2001).

Often collaging lines from eighteenth-century literature and even dabbling in old spellings (including the elongated, F-like S's we see in Benjamin Franklin and elsewhere), relentlessly metamorphosing in form but mostly laying one- and two-line stanzas down several pages apiece, the poems explore themes of family (frequently apostrophizing a mysterious "Sister" or "Uncle"), sex (untitillatingly), the body (sometimes in medical terminology), and sensory experience (intense, synesthetic, transubstantiating). Persistent motifs include the colors green and blue, light, hair, eyelids, and the ear. This latter motif evolves across several poems, from "the ear / perfected in its joy" to "optic lobes that listen / ... set against the light that hides itself in my glowing ears" to "I was born to sound: a voice forgotten its body." Meanwhile the speaker loses his sight as the poems progress: his eyelids are ravaged by the sea at one point, and at another turn he takes his lover's thumbs into his eye sockets, his "dead, empty eyes." A call is perhaps being made for us to experience these poems aurally and abstractly, as music, rather than being constrained by the usual physics of the seen world. Witt hinted as much when he told my undergraduate poetry workshop, "William Carlos Williams originally painted, but he turned to poetry because then you can really make a dewdrop roll however you want."

Raised in England and in North Carolina, Witt took a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1993 and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa in 1995. He was living in San Francisco when Everlasting Quail won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Poetry Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In 2002 Witt traveled on a Fulbright fellowship to St. Petersburg, Russia, to write a second book. He is currently teaching creative writing courses at Harvard University as a visiting lecturer.

Witt has said that his poems are enactive rather than descriptive, that he experiences rather than creates them, and that their complexity compels the patient reader to linger longer with the poem and thus take part in an intimate exchange with the writer on the other side of the page. I cannot claim to have milked his work entirely after one or two readings, but I can feel that this slim (and beautifully designed) volume is glutted with substance. Unlike so many poets of this day and age, Witt does not waste lines or speak in worn-out ways: his intelligence is made plain by his boundless creativity. Only he could treat us this way to a woman's nape, which is "blue radiance of capillaries / blue mud pulled from a creekshelf," and then watch the same woman lying in a hospital bed and see "the crystalline cherry of your brain eaten away."