Kenneth Fearing's "Dirge" tells a story of a male protagonist whose "boring rhythms and habits, not of factory work, but of white-collar drudgery" (Barnard) nonetheless fail to provide safety from the explicitly tangible and ideological effects of the (and "a") Depression. Unlike previous critics, I read the poem as rendering an extremely problematic representation of the protagonist's death: either he dies ordinarily (from old-age, or perhaps from ill health), as others suggest, or he dies by suicide.

Kenneth Fearing’s “Dirge” offers the history of a life systematically crushed down by the capitalist culture of the Depression-era United States. The rhythms of “white collar drudgery” (Barnard MAPS) pitilessly preside over his life, death, and its aftermath. Yet in recognizing the capitalist social order that gradually erodes his life, we should be cautious in our understanding of what exactly the system has crushed. Has capitalism ruined an individuality that could have been?

In [Muriel Rukeyser’s] "Movie," as we have seen, the silver screen finale gives ostensible "truth" of revolutionary history, with the people sweeping away the facade culture of the movie sets. In Fearing's poem, however, the opposite possibility is indicated: the apocalyptically real revolutionary moment (when the "clock . . . point[s] to the decisive hour," "murder fades," and "the world grows new") is metaphorically transformed into a movie finale.

Everson's canticle to the birds is an exhortation for them, in their turn, to lift their songs to God. Theirs becomes, in this way, a service of mediation: they are capable of a directness of response to the world beyond the human.

Everson has favoured such devices as incremental repetition and a paratactic syntax. In his case, though, the poetry that results has a rugged quality to it, an austere intensity. None of his work has the flat speech rhythms that characterise so much contemporary verse. On the contrary, it fluctuates between a long, wavering line that can approach the stillness of a moment of contemplation, and a line that tightens together into an abrupt, insistent rhythmic unit.

In Thomas King's 1993 novel, Green Grass, Running Water, the characters gathered at Buffalo Bill Bursum's electronics store find that the John Wayne movie with which they are all familiar, and are now watching on Bill's monstrous wall of t.v. sets, has been doctored. Where the cavalry has in the past always appeared on the hilltop to trap and kill the Indians in the river, in the "fixed" version of the movie, the cavalry suddenly disappears halfway down the hill.

In Lousie Erdrich’s “Dear John Wayne,” the depiction of an on-screen battle between John Wayne’s character and a Native American Indian tribe mirrors a larger ongoing cultural battle between white colonizers and Native Americans. Italicized lines voice a rhetorical battle between the poem’s narrator and the figure of John Wayne as representative of the colonizers. Ultimately, it is the narrator who strikes the last, and most powerful, blow.

Among the long, multi-faceted tradition of "nature" poems, one of the most striking examples of a productive, decidedly anti-idealizing reflection on the social function of the natural world is Anita Endrezze’s "Birdwatching at Fan Lake." Rather than a disingenuous myth of Romantic transcendental connection between the autonomous subject and her dematerialized sublime landscape, Endrezze highlights how our interactions with our surroundings are mediated through social, cultural, and discursive practices.

"Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" is the first poem in The Opening of the Field; the reader thus connects the meadow in the poem with the field in the book's title. Field is a broad term referring to various landscapes, to the notion of a perceptual gestalt, and to Olson's idea of composition by field. Does the shift to a meadow signal a more specific landscape? A meadow suggests a single harmonious climate, a space protected by its surroundings.

Duncan sees in Pound's early writing on Imagism and on the troubadours the possibility of an almost Whitmanian aesthetic, but one that is too firmly entrenched in the past. Pound's thought "does not go forward with contemporary scientific imagination

to a poetic vision of the Life Process and the Universe but goes back to Ficino and the Renaissance ideas" (PC, 190). In Duncan's "opening" poem, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," he creates an ideogram that can include both of his predecessors and that has indications of both past and future.