About ‘Rule(s)’: A Craft Essay by Tom Driscoll
Rule(s)
The routines ‘d gotten old by then
he said to me, all those steps one had to remember
were things to be forgotten, transcended.
They were not the dance itself —nor the music,
the beautiful spill of blue neon along a sweeping line
her shoulder turned, the neck, the side of her face.
The enormity of simply saying her name again.
Yes, even the Abstract Expressionists learned to draw
in the tradition or from out of it, representation, the real.
But what I meant to tell you about was something noticed
only in aftermath, wreckage and remnant scattered.
Once everything that mattered is forgotten about
and there is an amber silence to the next morning
—even if only in your memory. It is about dancing to that.
I came across a poem called “The Dance” by Robert Duncan just before writing “Rule(s).” There’s a group of writers here in Lowell, organized by my friend Rick Brault, who get together once a month to share poems and discuss them. One rule for this group: you can’t bring your own poetry. You have to bring another poet’s work that has somehow had an impact on you. It was Rick who brought in the Robert Duncan. I walked home from group that night turning “The Dance” over and over like my head was a very slow-spinning rock tumbler.
I take that notion of the dictated steps to “the dance” from Duncan’s piece, and I probably borrowed a bit more than that. The “amber silence” out of memory there at the end of my poem—if Duncan didn’t say that explicitly I certainly saw that glow thanks to his poem.
“Rule(s),” like Duncan’s “The Dance,” is at least playing with the idea of being an ars poetica, setting down how “it” is done, this poetry business. The ‘s’ there in the title is in parentheses because I am not sure there is more than one rule at hand in the poem. Or if there is even that one. Different earlier versions did without the parentheses, without the ‘s’—without either. There is a sense in both his poem and mine that while there are rules to “the dance,” they are only useful in the forgetting of them.
That’s where I bring in the Abstract Expressionists. I don’t remember where I heard it. I might even be making it up. But I like that notion of those wild, free, and abstract —yet powerfully expressive images coming out of some grounding field of accomplished draftsmanship, an artist’s back knowledge of depicting the real.
But the point is that those rules and rigor don’t survive. Whether it’s willful destruction or an architecture collapsing under its own weight, we end “in aftermath, wreckage and remnant scattered.” It’s there I use my one heavy-handed rhyme with “…everything that mattered is forgotten about.”
Then there’s that “amber silence.”
I suppose there’s one more aspect to this poem I want to tell you about.
My wife, Denise Driscoll died this past year. Cancer. She was an artist, as true an artist as I’ve ever known, taken inspiration from, taken lessons from—about the work, about life.
Not long before she died, she was interviewed about her work and about the practice she made of opening her studio to visitors, the pleasure she found in getting to watch as someone encountered her work. She said there was a simple breath she could overhear sometimes when someone had found something in one of her paintings, not a gasp of amazement exactly, a quieter thing come simply of a moment’s recognition.
Denise’s paintings were abstract and she seldom (never) tried to tell people what to see. She shared what she saw, trusting there would be those moments, that breath.
When I wrote ‘Rule(s)’ Denise was near the end. I’d already begun to mourn her. There in the “wreckage and remnant” I intended this poem as an elegy for her as well.
I don’t know if the reader exactly sees that “spill of blue neon” tracing the line of her neck. Maybe what I really want for them is to be reminded of their own moment of special seeing, or of saying an important name.
If not with this essay, at least with the poem, I hoped to elicit that slight breath.
Tom Driscoll, Lowell Mass
November 2024
