As the title implies, this poem is a kind of musical lament, in this case for a certain sort of businessman who took a lot of chances and saw his investments and life go down the drain in the depression of the early thirties. Reading this poem aloud is a big help partly because it contains expressive words which echo the action, words like "oof" and "blooie" (which primarily carry their meaning in their sounds, for they have no literal or referential meaning).

In "Dirge," the boring rhythms and habits, not of factory work, but of white-collar drudgery, seem to determine the entire robotic life of the poem's man in the gray tweed suit:

Just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one

long look, drew one deep breath,

Just one too many,

 

And wow he died as wow he lived,

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.

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.