View from
Essay

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

Andrew Foster

“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 essayPoetically 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.

In contrast, for an 18th century English writer such as Samuel Johnson, his dualistic temperament one of irascible optimism, cheer, and certainty, poetry’s role within language is not a complicated issue, as evidenced by the title of one of his best-known works, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.”

It begins thus, swirling with giddily sober abstraction:

Let observation with extensive view,

Survey mankind, from China to Peru;

Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,

And watch the busy scenes of crowded life.

There is no “actual” China, nor a Peru in this quatrain filled with abstract nouns, simply a fleeting, half thought out notion about ancient civilization. The verses, seized with self-assurance, unwind in this fashion for quite some time, instructing, hectoring and pronouncing its conclusions about vanity and humanity in self-sure, stridently unbroken and forcefully didactic iambic pentameter. Each sage word is an unambiguous vehicle for abstract erudition regarding courage and crime and grandeur in an epic-style wisdom poem where one is unlikely to find mention of an anvil or a donut. “Things” to perceive are in short supply.

Even sensualists such as the English Romantics could get lost in concepts, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “Constancy to an Ideal Object”—the title itself stating that the “object” in question is, rather, a pure idea. “O yearning Thought! that liv’st but in the brain.” And iambic pentameter, conservative and invariant, still reigns as the preferred meter of both emotion and ratiocination. Shelley, too, was often indentured to abstract idealism, as in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” in which he speaks of an “unseen Power”, and “despondency and hope,” guiding us through a channel of thought about the sublime. At the same time, we do at least get with him a cave, night-wind and a mountain-river to anchor us in the natural world, which came to be a preferred habitat of what we now refer to reflexively as lyric poetry. In the end, however, the putative distance from Johnson to Coleridge and Shelley is less of a break than is often thought.

Modernism, as in William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum “no ideas but in things,” signaled the attempt to occasion a more definitive rupture, wherein writers such as Pound, Eliot, and Williams, as well as Louis Zukofsky and other Objectivists, who favored Pound’s “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective, and “poem as object,” assigned that a central status. Modernism threw off the yoke of 19th century (Baudelaire, Rossetti, the Romantics) lyric verse in favor of a more grounded poetics in which the word as putative object would gain a prestige minimally dependent on, or even deracinated from external referents. Those who over-read “The Waste Land” in symbolic terms and thus failed to perceive that the sky as “a patient etherized upon a table” was to be looked at in its palpability, ignored how one must almost literally see that patient before interpretation can freight it with any symbolic cargo about ‘the modern condition.’

The approach to materiality of such images holds us back from premature abstract cognition, imprisoning us, albeit briefly, in the realm of the senses. The inherent brilliance of lyric poetry is its ability, with its best practitioners, to restrain our collective mania for codifying and explaining what each poem is ‘really about.’ In some ways, it seems implausible that lyric ever became about what it’s supposedly “really about.” More plausible is that one would wish to hold it in one’s palm (same size as a baby rabbit) and examine its surface. A solid lyric is like the dross left at the bottom of a furnace after it cools, except the dross turns out inexplicably to be the purest silver imaginable. (One here longs for the ecstatically impossible possibility of analytic philosophy consisting only of oblique metaphors, the same way Walter Benjamin wished to write a book entirely made of quotations.)

This salutary attitude of early modernists, however, reached a dubious apex with 20th century deconstructionists such as Paul de Man, who preached “the inexorable necessity of language as that which both defines the conditions and possibility of experience, and which equally makes the terms governing experience ontologically meaningless.” Within de Man’s (and Derrida’s) questioning of the status of the efficacy of language as such to express historical or merely personal states of being lay a skepticism toward poetic language as a specialized instance of expressiveness, unless it fell within their infinite yet unaccountably closed semiotic system of “free play among signs.” For them, Eliot’s etherized patient “always already” negates its material existence, because it is freighted with self-contradictory political and cultural associations precluding it becoming into a stable, if polyvalent, word-object. A thing can’t be a thing because it’s a palimpsest— which also isn’t a thing, just a self-indicting, infinitely regressive mental construct. (To my knowledge, Derrida never mentioned that palimpsests in the 6th century were made from animal hides.)

Deconstruction, so enticing and promising initially in its liberating promises, in certain respects led philosophy into a blind alley that ultimately required of its adherents a quasi-religious secular belief in its principles; otherwise, it was simply one more method of exegesis, clever and sophisticated but not defining. Meanwhile, as the above-mentioned early modernists labored to smash limiting paradigms, a more modest “minor” contemporary such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, not openly theoretical in the least, unvarnished in diction, was content in her 1919 “Recuerdo”, a poem often reprinted in high school textbooks, to describe two lovers going “back and forth all night on the ferry.”

It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—

But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

While the writing feels casual and low-key, thus easy to perceive, and while Millay was not known for issuing edicts, pronouncements, manifestos, or treatises about the state of poetry, in her own way she was quite the modernist, on board with shoring up the direct “thingness” of words, through a straightforward embrace of older virtues of lyric (think John Keats’s “Bright Star”), as she nonetheless remained conspicuously within the modern temper. The stark simplicity of the writing, void of abstractions and distractions, lets us smell the simile-stable, feel the fire, invites us to lie on a hill-top. The beauty of similes is that a thing is compared to a thing, thus ferry=stable as they share specific qualities relating to the sense of smell.

In this innocuous quatrain, the fire, table, hill-top, moon, whistles and dawn, while undeniably having metaphorical power to communicate a sweet memory made bittersweet by the passage of time, nonetheless possess together a nominalist density and uniqueness, existing for this couple, in that remembered moment. The objects’ generic-sounding names (for what love poem doesn’t involve a moon?) are like Keats’s moon in their ability to produce rapture, for the speaker and for us. Both poems have a special magic that has kept us reading them. “Recuerdo” is an “artlessly” delicate dance between familiarity and de-familiarization. That is the dream of lyric, to create connection and tend toward universality, while surprising us into immediate sensation, by its sheer specificity, triangulating person, time and the object beheld. Extreme nominalism would require that each of us have our own word for “table” and “fire,” or even a different word for each time, mood, circumstance, etc. in which we encountered such an object. (See Borges’ Funes the Memorious for an exploration of that very theme.). But poetry does not require the number of words in a language to be infinite in order to achieve its aims. Lyric’s genius is recombinant.

Lyric at its most accomplished has the ability to move along this particular continuum, with some poets favoring baroque and recondite idioms (Ezra Pound), and others like Millay tending toward the plain—and in between lies Emily Dickinson, who has a singular talent for making the simple sound strange. Yet at bottom, they’re all doing the same thing. Note that Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” famous for being exceedingly difficult, even hermetic, ready-made for dense deconstructive analysis, is often on its surface, quite simple, even child-like, certainly no more astounding than Millay’s “Recuerdo.” Here’s “A-14 beginning An”:

An

orange

our

sun

fire

pulp

 

when

us

(everyday)

for

us

eat

it

its

fire’s

unconsumed

Certainly one may point out the high degree of indeterminacy, or just say that the connections between the words aren’t obvious and the reader must do that work for herself of putting together these puzzle pieces. But the “pieces” themselves are common, everyday words, including “fire”, as it happens. (Because what love poem doesn’t have a fire?) In fact, I would offer Zukofsky’s verse in my reading of it as a plausible idiolect cousin of “Recuerdo,” and in this version the lovers come to somewhat different conclusions. (Playfully half-rewriting Zukofsky here into an imitation of Millay, I’d offer: ‘We threw our orange pulp/into the fire/that the everyday sun /had left unconsumed.’ Recasting Millay into Zukofsky might take a little longer.) Whether a poem is “hard” or “easy” to read because of our unfamiliarity with its significant codes often has nothing to do with its ultimate obliquity or clarity. I have always felt that most poets take the most direct path to meaning available to them. We simply all have different points of origin, so we end up of course in different places, or else the same place through different routes. After the fact, we refer to it as our destiny.

Thus, there is as much continuity as rupture over the past two centuries, when one gets down to specific cases and practices. Today’s fierce lyricists are willing to embrace what came before while fitting their poetics to the imperatives of the present moment, as they define them. I have mentioned this openness before as a primary characteristic of fierce lyric, which is “fierce” in its dispersed collective temperament of plundering the tradition of lyric while also stubbornly (or else insouciantly) expanding and even exploding it with the lessons of even the most radical-sounding postmodern verse— then tempering those, each in his or her own crucible, to produce a fresh set of possibilities for lyric mode. Fierce lyric is more a gestalt than a movement. These writers are not simply ecumenical. Their careful poetic promiscuity is to a purpose. Like Millay, and unlike Zukofsky, they are not necessarily oriented toward any grand theory of poetics. They work things out on the fly, letting their practice speak for their ideas about art, which are induced rather than specifically stated in the manner of many of those I have cited above. Not every age requires a Pound, an Eliot, or an Olsen as its unofficial spokesperson.

One of the outstanding collections of 2025 is Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s Rodeo, published by Autumn House Press, which has brought forth a number of laudable recent volumes of pure lyric intent. Like a bull coming out of a chute and into the Texas sun, the title poem begins this book.

Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull

and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles

east to our block, where just now a hummingbird moth

drinks from the pink phlox

with its long wand, and I’m alone

for a moment and the sky

is bleeding itself out over the train tracks

and the abandoned brick factories. The lights

of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe,

and I wonder just what I can seize.

the homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name

fills up every night and spills

downtown the next morning,

wings of strange creatures brush our flowers

while we sleep. A hapless moose wanders

a schoolyard before it’s caught,

tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it;

a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed

of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.

From the second line, already “doctrine” is treated with levity, consisting of “bull and clown.” Instead, we are offered the density of hummingbird moths, phlox, brick factories, and yes, we have that Eliot sky “bleeding itself over the train tracks.” Wilkinson makes clear that this is a universe of substantive things, carefully catalogued. The shelter has “some saint’s name”—it doesn’t matter which, because a shelter is a shelter, self-identical, a building. The hapless moose must mean something, but its symbolic content is not laid out for the reader. Take your best guess, if you are so inclined.

Wilkinson is expert at keeping us in the here and now. “Conversations with the Dead” begins

The stars are the remains

of the words. Look

 

how they too are left in the dark

to shine, everything we’ve said

 

all saliva and tears.

Language itself mixes into a paste of thingness: stars, saliva, tears. Her dead son is touching to us precisely because she resists turning him into a miasmic abstraction.

My dead son

talks in the tail

 

of each streak of light, saying

tell him you’re sorry,

 

keep buying chocolate milk,

I’m happy.

This is about as far from Samuel Johnson’s positivistic certitude as one can get. Yes, there seems to be a fugitive conversation about absolution, but really, it’s more about the tail of the streak of light and the chocolate milk. Ideas, seldom explicit, manifest rather as fleeting phenomena. This is true even when the speaker briefly signals an emotion.

But under the Perseids

it’s safe

 

to lift the weights

over my head,

 

to telegraph my graphic grief,

 

let it stay in the space

we call space

 

where I can’t touch it

or take it back.

Rather than a feeling one may possess, grief is an untouchable object, a thing that loses its once-fleshly thingness and flees into another material place-thing called “space.” She goes on to speak of “the slow burn/of my words,” as if they were a piece of wood or incense stick someone had lit. Most poetry features images, to be sure. But in Wilkinson’s case, those images, because of the status of language itself in her poems, are more resistant than usual to being turned (or better said, transmuted) into sheer idea. The emphasis is on perception, not interpretation. Readers are free to extrapolate, but unlike, say, the French Symbolists, who teased or taunted readers into speculation on their imagistic free association, it’s all stupefyingly clear in Rodeo. It’s like a trompe l’oeil painting, in which the photo-realism is so exquisite you want to reach in the canvas and pull out the apple in order to eat it. Then the museum alarm goes off and you are brought back to your senses. 

This is simply how Wilkinson thinks, in poem after poem. In “We Drew Out the Feeble Language:

the city was a mouth

of ivory statues and red carpets,

a language of splendor

 

we were not born to.

Then, from a chain-link fence

like every chain-link fence,

 

a family in burqas, black button-up shirts

waved in the streetlight.

To talk about feeble language, you have to talk about burqas and black button-up shirts. And chain-link fences that are simultaneously themselves and a universal concept. After this family shares with the couple tea, the speaker and her companion make a blunder, offering a thing in exchange for the thing they were freely offered.

Then foolishly, foolishly,

we drew out the feeble language

of American money. A language

 

they did not know

or need. It was not bread

or tea. It was not friendship.

That abstract quantity that the family seeks may only express itself by way of objects, bills or coins, given the absence of a common word-language. Thus, the ill-fated conversation about friendship begins with the word-things fences and tea and ends with the word-thing money. Wilkinson’s poetics itself, at large, is a barter system with the reader. Imagery—concrete nouns that feel dense as concrete when we handle them—has pride of place in her writing. Ideas and concepts are to be inferred for the most part. “Friendship” is what one realizes ex-post-facto, when “there were no clouds/no words/in the air.”

In “Poems as Objects: Invisible Images at the Heart of Lyric,” Celia Carson uses the philosophy of Kant to explain the thingness, not only of individual images, but of lyric poems as such, which transform an idea into an object, both for those who write them and those who read them. Philosophy alone fails to get to the “heart of lyric.” She says that

invisible images, or presentations, arise through a formal process of symbolic or as-if thinking, thinking by analogy. The objects that become important to human subjects can be found within the mind as forms, not as a simple perceptual process that is ultimately empirical but as the generative shaping activity expressive of the mind’s relationship with the world. In aesthetic experience form becomes a kind of internal object.

That final sentence is the defining one for lyric. And getting to that place is the alchemical duty of the poet, the magician-scientist who is an expert at that “generative shaping activity. She entices us to dwell into the thingness of the thing. Wilkinson’s tactile titles say it all: “Snow and Mud and Animal Bones”; “Ode to the Skunk Who Lives in the Woodpile I Pass on My Morning Walk”; “Ring”; “Tent”; “Don’t Feed the Coyotes”; “Canning Tomatoes, Late August”; “Teapot Lake on the Head of a Pin”; “Blackberry Jam.”

The West is burning,

Yosemite in ash,

 

smoke choking

blue sky,

 

an all afternoon I’ve cleaned

jars, rim and round

 

bellies stuffed in mounds of fleshy fires

 

the garden ignited

under green.

 

They’ll burn bright

in soups

 

all winter,

in sauces that splatter

 

my boys’ mouths

ruby smacked

 

and long stained.

 

This poet’s preferences plunge a concept into a jar of cherry jam, where it will acquire the “crimson of poppies,/the shape and sheen/of bloody knuckles of street fighters.”

Without thingness and the constant impulse toward objectifying images, as opposed to simply stating ideas, there would be no lyric poetry as we have come to know it. In Wilkinson’s world, “the human stain” is more likely to appear on someone’s shirt or face than in someone’s censorious mind. Her Rodeo gives strong evidence that current poetic practice, in the right hands, may have strong continuities with aspects of post-modernist, modernist, and pre-modernist poetic thought.

The infamous ruptures among those literary epochs, though real, may have been oversold. A magpie poet may pull off in practice what strict theory denies or disavows. The fear always seems to be that “settling” shows a lack of historical or philosophical acumen, a conservative refusal to get with the times that will result in middlebrow verse that lacks daring or ambition—that is content to recycle what’s already been done. But we poets were not born to obey or disobey philosophical systems to the letter, even while philosophers of similar tendencies argue among themselves. I continue to insist that lyric mode, however integrated, against which it strenuously fought, is precisely what has saved L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry from evolving into a sterile exercise in thought and to allow its lessons and its relevance to continue to flourish. Disruptive movements are necessary and exciting, for as long that initial energy lasts. Then the work of reconciliation begins.

Lyric is a fundamental, indispensable aspect of modern poetics and no rebellion from its basic premises can ultimately be successful. Marjorie Perloff surely speaks true when she says, “No definition of the lyric poem [can] be wholly transhistorical.” Yet it has aspects that are transhistorical, as her use of the word “wholly” implies. By this token, it is important to trace the progression or persistence of certain aspects of the lyric–in this case, the use of image–to understand how it tends to be used in any given era. We are only beginning to see, as post-structuralist philosophy (and the poetry that followed its exciting lead) has waned into one more school of thought, rather than the utopian answer to literature’s and society’s ills, how seemingly oppositional poetic tendencies may reach a satisfying synthesis. Fierce lyric is reformist, taking from the poetic tradition exactly what each practitioner requires to satisfy their needs.

Rodeo, if not groundbreaking, shakes the ground as vigorously as that aforementioned bull does when entering the rodeo ring. Its apotheosis is “Everywhere I Look I See a Rodeo,” which in a sustained act of Carson’s “as if” thinking, ingeniously turns this omnipresent event into a reverse simile.

White bulls and a crowd of blue jeans

is the sky today.

 

Purple yellow pink horses

riding the wind is the wild show

of tulips in our garden. Calf

with his legs tied

is a tulip bulb. Red sash

of the cowboys, a poppy.

Announcer: the bumblebee

in a foxglove tube.

Wilkinson turns Eliot’s now ancient etherized-patient sky into a celebratory, exuberant, high-spirited display reminiscent of the natural world of Wordsworth. She is the thinking person’s sensualist. Except there is no natural world, not exactly, because everything is a Rodeo in this kick-up-your-heels Sublime. The reverse simile of the rodeo gives us fanciful correspondences—sky as jeans and bulls; tulips as multi-colored horses; a cowboy sash as a poppy, and an announcer as a bumblebee in a flower. One can’t help but think of the exuberance of Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

Oh! many a time have I, a five years’ Child,

A naked Boy, in one delightful Rill,

A little Mill-race sever’d from his stream,

Made one long bathing of a summer’s day,

Bask’d in the sun, and plunged, and bask’d again.

Wilkinson’s similar, playfully ecstatic equivalences hew to her commitment to let things be things, while offering her consciousness as “the growth of a poet’s mind,” fusing pure Romantic lyricism with a sense of language that is wholly contemporary.

I love the world like the buster’s hand

loves the horn of the saddle,

white mountains of his knuckles

trembling.

 

It loves me back like pink

jewel-studded hats, swish

of polyester pants, soft shadows

of leather fringe.

Yet an unsettling wind blows into the poem, as the poet acknowledges the loss of one of her children, almost parenthetically.

I fight grief the way the bronco

bucks that wily man on his back,

the arc of those spasms

a kind of prayer.

In this suddenly somber yet hopeful moment, one cannot help but think of Ted Hughes’ “The Horses,” portraying a man and horses within stillness rather than motion.

The sun

Orange, red, red erupted

 

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,

Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

 

And the big planets hanging—

I turned

 

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards

The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

 

And came to the horses.

There, still they stood,

But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

 

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves

Stirring under a thaw while all around them

 

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.

Not one snorted or stamped,

 

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,

High over valleys, in the red levelling rays.

Erupted red-orange sun, flung cloud, blue gulf, big hanging planets, fever dream, dark woods with kindling tops, horses with stone manes, steaming and glistening under light-flow, frost made of fire, hind-hooves, hung heads. This concatenation of riveting imagery presses our aesthetic consciousness into a sheer thingness of thought, of immediate sensation. At the same time, it is revealing something important to us. But that something cannot be reduced to pure idea–nor is it inaccessible to us as a mere representation of things-in-themselves. It must continue to live as an aesthetic object, fertile for the mind, but resistant of any ultimate summary. Ambiguity and indeterminacy, far from creating confusion, throw the sun’s red-orange light over the horses, over us while, to repeat Carson, in our “aesthetic experience form becomes a kind of internal object.”

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, as its versatile practitioners test themselves against what has already been accomplished.

Emily Lambeth-Climaco, in “T’his Rhetoric Is Real’: William Carlos Williams’s Recalibration of Language and Things,” asserts that Williams “submits a poetics that emphasizes fluidity among categories of words, things, and ideas.” She goes on to explain that

“Williams’s attraction to the singular, common, local, and perhaps above all the material object—wheelbarrow, wild carrot leaf, wires, and stars—signifies reaching after a consummate mode of contact, one that bridges the gulf between individual experience and the real world.”

Climaco points to how an author such as Wilkinson, as is the case with Williams, without directly insisting, invites us into a communion with her “kind of prayer,” merely by showing us a fascinating display of the word-objects on her rodeo altar.

Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.