The other Outram.
Wells, Zachariah
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Richard Outram is known to be a difficult poet. His poems are often
philosophical and densely allusive, to the point sometimes of near
opacity. This not entirely unearned reputation has made him something of
a poet's poet, very highly esteemed by a small number of dedicated
readers. But, as Carmine Starnino has argued in his book A Lover's
Quarrel, there is "another Outram" out there, one who does not
need in-depth decoding by experts to be appreciated. Starnino singles
out "Barbed Wire" as one of the finest products of that other
Outram, and justly so. This profoundly moving occasional poem-one of
very few overtly autobiographical pieces in Outram's oeuvre-can be
apprehended after a single reading by a non-specialist reader. This
doesn't mean that the poem yields its secrets easily; after reading
this poem several dozen times, I still uncover previously unnoticed
nuances in its lines.
As with any Outram poem, intrication plays a key role in how
"Barbed Wire" works. The poem is woven every bit as tightly as
the titular wire; the ABAB quatrains are formally apt, being two lines
twisted together with "four short ends, sharp bevel-cut." But
there is also a looseness at play. "Interstices" are
leitmotifs in Outram's work; he is a poet who makes much of gaps,
the spaces between people and things, the silences between words. The
"ellipses" in the wedding rings do double-duty, as do many
other words in the poem: they provide a sharp visual description of the
bands, but they also alert the reader to the poem's procedures, as
Outram shifts, with little to no warning, from one image to another.
It's disconcerting to go from barbed wire, a tool used for
involuntary containment and confinement, to wedding rings, symbols of
voluntary loving union. And yet the poem convinces us, through the
associative use of the word "conjoined," that the comparison
is apposite, suggesting that even the happiest of marriages involves
some sacrifice of individuality. (It should be noted that Outram's
marriage to visual artist Barbara Howard-hard to imagine that
"barbed" is an accidental pun-appeared a happy one: the two
were not only devoted partners, but artistic collaborators as well.)
This point is reinforced in the second and third stanzas, as it takes
the reader a while to realize that Outram has shifted back from rings to
wire, creating a literal con-fusion of two images at the same time that
it creates a confusion, however fleeting, in the mind of the reader.
Outram makes another unheralded associative leap from his treatise
on barbed wire to his father's war experience, bringing violent
death and degradation into the poem as counterpoint to love and loyalty.
As with the comparison between wire and rings, this juxtaposition will
not allow the reader to slip into complacent thought habits; the poem
suggests that war is bound as closely to loyalty and love as it is to
death and destruction--a fact that should come as no surprise to readers
of war poets like Wilfred Owen. Even if "no one volunteered,"
the killed were still brought back from the wire for burial.
The final shift occurs in the first line of the last stanza. We
think at first that "they" refers to the soldiers on the
battlefield, but learn in short order that they are Outram and
Howard's fathers, standing not in mourning for their fallen
comrades, but in celebration of their children's union. In the
poem's gorgeous final line, Outram twists the poem's strands,
themes and tropes back together, "death" and "troth"
both separated and united by a "bright entanglement." As
Amanda Jernigan points out in her HPW feature on "Story,"
(which appears on page 118) Outram is drawn to the union of apparent
opposites. In this, he is a poet true to life in all its troubling
contradictions and beautiful unities.
This essay first appeared in the How Poems Work webzine on
arcpoetry.ca in October 2006.
