The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”

“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”

Martin Heidegger offers a path to understanding the power of imagery within lyric poetry in his essay “Poetically Man Dwells.” He comments on “the way of poets to shut their eyes to actuality. Instead of acting, they dream…The things of imagination are merely made.” For many readers, the “merely” might sound dismissive. To the poet, it has the ring of coming to one’s senses.

This oblique dreaming is not diffuse. It consists of palpable objects in the inner mind, as fixed points in a realm of ambiguity and polyvalence. Rather than instruct, the poet’s first task is to offer images as fascinating objects of contemplation, suggestive rather than limited by strict denotation. Often, they begin to manifest as concrete nouns rather than abstract ones; with the particular rather than the general or universal.

As when a rabbit gives birth in a shallow depression in the ground, among underbrush, a hollow about the size of a woman’s hand, this nest covered with soft grasses and lined with tufts of the mother rabbit’s fur, her kits lie half-hidden from view, these offspring having a definite shape, perhaps to be glimpsed by a passerby, who cannot immediately make out what life form lies there—so do poets discern a word-object taking shape in their inner mind. They have not yet arrived at the point of saying anything. They can only sense a soft but firm object, as they wait to see when or whether it will spring forth and reveal itself.