In the summer of ’83, with one year of English Lit studies under my belt (or wherever you put English lit studies), I was walking along Bloor Street when I saw Ajay Heble leaning against a building and selling a chapbook. I knew Ajay from high school, so I stopped to ask about the chapbook and bought a copy. He explained that his chapbook was an example of a school of thought, a theoretical approach, a literary practice, a something-or-other. He called it objective minimalism. The idea of objective minimalism is that you write as if you’re standing behind a sheet with a hole cut into it and all you can see of the world is what you can see through the hole; things pass in front of the hole and you record their passage. That’s it. You don’t try to imagine where these things have come from or where they go. You don’t speculate about how one thing might be related to another thing. All you do is record what you see.
I remembered Ajay’s theory of objective minimalism as I read “Home Movies, 8 mm,” the poem which gives Steven Heighton the title for his latest book of poetry, Patient Frame. Heighton imagines watching old home movies flickering across the screen. The movies have been shot by someone young, someone impatient who wants to get it all in. The person with the camera jitters around so that people pass in and out of the frame, but watching years later, the poet wishes the frame had lingered so he could pause. In the poem, Heighton offers a list of all the things remembered in these films, “the patient frame.” And then he writes:
I know memory
what these reels were meant to fortress,aims the same fickle lens, leaving gaps and blurs
in the record, but what of the eye itself, as it glides
over a lifetime’s loves the same way—careless
and rushed, a manic amateur—and the little reel clicks down inside?
If I could start over, I would stare and stare.
I remember feeling skeptical about Ajay’s prose pieces and their tunnel vision—mostly because they didn’t tell a story but presented only tiny slices of a wide wide world. I wonder if maybe Ajay knew better than me what was coming. Now, tiny slices are all I have. Heighton’s “minimalism” is even more poignant because his tiny slices of the world refuse to sit still, not like the hole in a sheet that hangs in place. He wishes he could “reach back / and brace the hand holding the camera that pans / away, again, with a young hand’s / impatience to contain all”. The tone is elegiac: if only we had known then how fleeting these memories would be, we would have paused in the patient frame. He revisits this wish for patience in “Ballad of the Slow Road” where he calls on the reader to “learn to love the wait / till the love is in your marrow / and the wait is no delay, but more / a seasoning of the will—” The unstated suggestion is that poems ought to be subject to the same demands. We want our poems to “stare and stare”; we don’t want a “fickle lens.”
Of all the things Heighton stares and stares at, the thing he fixes most intensely is the matter of justice. He wants to know why bad people sometimes thrive while the just are routinely crucified. He frames the question in the opening poem, “Another of the Just: Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, My Lai, 1968”, which marks the death of the only man to intervene when U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in South Viet Nam. Why should Thompson die of cancer with “lynch mail, roadkill, razored strays splayed” at his door as his reward for saving a child’s life, while William Calley, who raped and murdered women and children, had a life sentence commuted to three years of house arrest?
The poem concludes with:
Still, in the Agent
Orange skies, your archangelic contrail lingers—you
at the flightstick, bearing the one child. Forget the pen,
forget the sword: the strongest hands hold neither, but they hold.
Our old touchstones about pens and swords make no sense in the face of atrocities like this. We stand and stare as witnesses. We tend to think of witnessing as an adjunct to justice in the negative sense: the act of witnessing helps secure prosecution and punishment. But an honest witnessing has to acknowledge everything in the frame. In the case of the My Lai massacre, an honest witnessing has to include an act of moral courage. Heighton’s poem is particularly timely in light of stories emerging from Afghanistan and it reminds us to look with clear eyes that see everything in the frame.
Heighton returns to this in “Not The Kind To Die” which stares wide-eyed at James Von Brunn, white supremacist and Holocaust denier, who shot and killed an African-American guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Although grievously injured in the attack, this 88-year-old man appeared to be on his way to a full recovery and declared that he was “not the kind to die”, raising the obvious question: “Why the hell not?”
In moral terms, this poem is more challenging than “Another of the Just” because it doesn’t offer a window on redemption (unless we include the fact that the victim held open the door for Von Brunn). The poem further challenges us with its uncomfortable reference to Ezra Pound. What are we to make of a literary giant who nevertheless inhabits a place of moral squalor? Does a poet not have a moral duty—much like a prophet—to hold power accountable? Or is there some aesthetic space that justifies poetry apart from its moral take on the world? “[M]aybe / There is no Karma?” Heighton observes (asks?) in reference to the Chief Inquisitor named Torquemada who died in luxury at the age of 83 after a life devoted to torture of the innocent.
In the elegiac piece “Outram Lake” for poet Richard Outram, Heighton approaches the problem from a different direction:
No one’s with you on the porch the bitter night
you submit yourself to winter, to wed,
with ice, your absence
to a buried wife’s, dying toward her
in a way that’s anaesthetic
and yet, in its simple dignity, aesthetic too—
that would matter to you—
Heighton plays on the fact that Outram’s name coincides with the name of a lake in British Columbia that was obliterated in a rock slide, “a jumbled slag / like dense, enigmatic wording.” Even in the harsh indifference of a rock slide, we find an appeal to our aesthetic sensibility. But we don’t celebrate the rock slide for creating the beauty that stirs us. We don’t ascribe any kind of moral quality to the rock slide. It is what it is and we stare at it.
Heighton’s virtue is that he refrains from drawing conclusions. That is the patient frame. Through the lens of a poem, he observes closely everything that passes before him. There is space within the frame for both the just and the unjust.
At some point, a poem itself has to submit to the same kind of scrutiny. The best poems transcend evaluations like “good” and “bad” and simply are what they are, freed from the need of a justification. This is morally uncomfortable because it claims the legitimacy of space for fascist poetry. When Matthew says that god “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous,” it is in the context of a challenge: the moral life doesn’t demand from us simple choices; it demands that we create space in our hearts most especially for the things which repel us—the William Calleys and the James Von Brunns of the world. Presumably, a poetic life demands something analogous. If Matthew had been writing a gospel of poetry, he might have said something like: “the poet brings his vision to frame both the ugly and the beautiful, that which causes the reader to squirm and that which causes the reader to sit at ease.”