The Rhyme of the Left Margin

My topic is the left margin, that space of reinauguration that has tra- ditionally been emphasized, perhaps almost by default, when a poet deliberately refrains from using traditional right margin resources such as rhyme or even meter which, though everywhere in the line, finds its identity only when completed at line's end. I'll be looking at Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" for what it can tell us about left-margin ac- tivation, and its relation to an abstention from other poetic forms and figures. I want to talk about the left margin not merely because it's crucial in this poem (and most other Whitman poems) but because, as the site of an intense repetition, it actually doesn't indicate an abstention from right-margin resources so much as a reproduction of their effects by other means and in a new location. This matters to me as both a practitioner and reader for two reasons: 1) because we seem to be living in a time in which most of those right-margin forms feel unavailable-overfreighted with bad histories or standing as nostalgic, falsifying pattern-consolations for the abyssal complexity and damage of everyday life; and 2) because even if rhyme and meter are currently nearly vitiated, I think their effects must be produced by other means; otherwise poetry suffers an actual loss of system complexity rather than simply enjoying a permutation of method. Poetry can ecstatically or soberly give up any form, but when it gives up Form I'm not sure it's still a genre.The original title of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" was "Sun-Down Poem." The present title, which dates from 1860, preserves in occulted fashion the therelessness of literary signs and scenes so palpable in the original; all titles, however deictic or world-building, imply the word "Poem" after them and so establish literary space at space's expense, an immaterial commons in which we read not of things but of dispositions towards the thingly. But in changing the title to "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" Whitman also announces the literarity of place in more round- about fashion, through a serious pun on both crossing and ferrying. It's a poem that records a difficulty with figure, specifically with metaphor, and evidences a desire to abstain almost entirely from it, to cross meta- phor's ferrying, to thwart its conceptual crossings of terms. In "Specimen Days" Whitman said of ferries, "I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems." What ferries apparently do is afford a certain kind of poem via a certain kind of motion-"streaming" as a metonymic motion across a local space or at least a selected, representative perceptual inventory of that space, a catalogic in which each set member-tide, wake, barge, flag, foundry-contributes to the dissolution of actual place but in so doing convenes a commons not only immaterial but atemporal or transhis- torical, allowing access to a placeless place at any time. In other words, Whitman will prefer metonymic streaming to metaphorical crossing in this poem because he thinks deictic indications of an unvisitable place allow others-readers, future travelers-a better entry to this commons than the private or idiosyncratic transmutations of metaphor.But what does that have to do with the left margin? It's simply the site of another important -phor: anaphora. Instead of a metaphor's ferrying-across we have in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" anaphora's con- stant vertical stream of carrying-back, so that each line participant in anaphoresis is a kind of motion that carries with it the threat and ecstasy of getting nowhere, of getting to get nowhere again and again and leave that thereless there again. Further, anaphora doesn't only emphasize both a vertical patterning of line beginnings but the horizontal motion of reading across the lines in order to get back to the next emphatic re- beginning. So that a metonymic motion across the possible inventory of things seen in a specific time and place, say Brooklyn in the 1850s, while standing motionless on a moving boat, is attended by an empha- sized motion across the material space of the page and the line in order to return to more such streaming motions. …