James Scully

Scully offers in Line Break a way of reading and writing poetry that is literally revolutionary. He revokes entrenched complacencies right and left, revealing through his patient, practical study of the work our language actually does––not what it pretends to do, or what our teachers told us it does. He shows that language is irrevocably politicized, as is our entire culture. There’s no place to hide, no verbal high ground, no American exceptionalism, on which to repose. Scully’s scope is refreshingly global, but it’s not a globalization the World Bank will appreciate. And to immerse in the perspectives Scully lights up is an exhilaration like no other, one that becomes a revelation. That all poetry is political, whether or not its author is conscious of that fact, Scully conclusively demonstrates within every essay in the book. To this end he quotes several great unknown poets, most thrillingly Rocque Dalton, the assassinated Salvadoran patriot, whose poems are no less works of art for being acts of moral illumination during an era of violent political turmoil. Scully’s most brilliant insight into poetic technique is that the “line break,”––aka enjambment, a French term suggestive of a surefooted balletic “jump” from the end of one line to the start of the next––is most truly a keen weapon for unearthing and jacklighting buried truths, buried lies, buried bodies. Scully sees line breaks as muscular fulcra on which all poetic discourse hinges. Used bravely, line breaks can decode, implode, explode everything a manipulated language wants to hide. It is Scully’s weapon of choice for radical literary insurgents committed to shaking things up. But this book does way more than arm rebels for verbal combat. It is a powerful and internally consistent argument that literature, that poetry in particular, can and must fill its ancient duty to register and judge the conduct of human beings. Line Break extrapolates and updates Plato: a poem that does not examine life critically is not worth writing.
--Robert Bagg

"Scully's brilliance is mesmerizing, radicalizing, a power plant producing synapses in the 'mind politic' that may well allow Americans, finally, to write and discourse with our kind around the globe. If American poets have a role to play in preserving free speech in the 21st century, this book belongs in our every backpack."
--Linda McCarriston

ADRIENNE RICH: FOREWORD
Poetry is neither an end in itself, nor a means to some external end. It's a human activity enmeshed with human existence; as James Scully names it, a social practice. Written where, when, how, by, for and to whomever, poetry dwells in a web of other social practices historically weighted with enormous imbalances of social power. To say this is not--as these essays vividly demonstrate--to deny the necessity for poetry as an art whose tangible medium is language.

It's a commonplace to say that in a society fraught with official lying, hyperbolic urgings to consume, contrived obsolescence of words (along with things and the people who produce them) poets must "recover" or "subvert" or "re-invent" language. Poetic language may thus get implicitly defined as autonomous terrain apart from the ripped-off or colonized languages of daily life.

It's an even older commonplace to claim "the imagination" as a kind of sacred turf. The appeal to a free-floating imagination permeates discussions of poetry and is traced to many honored sources from Coleridge to André Breton to Wallace Stevens to Barbara Guest. It can assume a degraded public world to which is opposed the poet's art as an activity-in-itself, distinct from other kinds of activity, work, production, save perhaps as metaphor.

Yet the imagination--the capacity to feel, see, what we aren't supposed to feel and see, find expressive forms where we're supposed to shut up--has meant survival and resistance, for poets and numberless others: incarcerated, under military or colonial occupation, in concentration camps, at grinding labor, suffering bleak and traumatic circumstances of many kinds. We may view the imagination as a kind of gated, landscaped neighborhood--or as a river, sometimes clogged and polluted, carrying many kinds of traffic including pollen and contraband, but in movement: the always-regenerating impulse toward an always-beginning future. Scully addresses the difference in his essay, "The Dream of an Apolitical Poetry," through the work of artists such as Gauguin, Woolf, Andrew Marvell, Mahmoud Darwish and Tadeusz Rózewicz.

Most critical writing on poetry in the United States (I can't speak of elsewhere) has reached a pretty low point: degenerated into biographical juicy bits extracted from or imposed on poems, or "postmodern" self-referential jargon. Any poet whose work is both artistically searching and ideologically dissenting knows how shallow, therefore ultimately dismissive even favorable critical response, can be, isolating poems from their historical and social fields of energy--save perhaps as the poetry can be related to a recognized aesthetic movement. (But aesthetic movements, too, belong to historical and social processes and need critiquing in that light.)

This is a serious loss to poets (who might benefit from more informed and penetrating criticism); to readers (who might welcome discussion that could bring their reading of poetry into focus with a world which they know all too well to exist, could help them become the great readers Whitman declared a great poetry would need); and to the trajectory of all whose desire for social justice is inseparable from the need for beauty.

The imagination of an unrealized, humane social order is as passionate and ineluctable~as the artist's search for unrealized expression. Scully puts the lie to the idea that one must preclude the other.

I found Line Break by chance on the Internet in 2002, searching for Scully's poetry. First published in 1988 by a small press in Seattle, it was out of print and already becoming unavailable. (Meanwhile, bookstores were stocked with manuals on poetry-writing as healing, as self-realization, as spiritual enlightenment--the commoditizing of some vague resource known as poetry, along with facile solutions to an unnamed general malaise.)

James Scully's essays, like his poems, refuse to soothe or simplify, to shortchange either poetry or the imperative for social revolution. They are continuously interesting because they take on poetry from so many angles, are written from a generous frame of reference and in a human voice. In the title essay Scully addresses the work that line-breaks actually do. Here questions of meter, free verse, punctuation and line interact with a discussion of liberalism and voice. In "Demagogy in the Musée" he unravels the assertions in Auden's celebrated "Musée des Beaux Arts," in terms of what is unmentioned in the poem. Elsewhere he lays open terms like "ideology," "protest poetry," "dissident poetry," and "poetic freedom." His fiercely demystifying intelligence is grounded in hope and realism for poetry in itself along with other forms of dissident engagement. It propels us into fertile argument with ourselves and others--Scully included.

Curbstone Press has long made possible books like this. It will be good news to many that Line Break is back in print. For new readers, in an apparently disconsolate time, it could be a window flung open, letting in necessary air and light.

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MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

Scully says that in the eight essays he means to question the "fetishes we find ourselves wearing like ankle bracelets...that enable cultural overseers to shut us up in a kind of house arrest." Adrienne Rich remarks in her "Foreword" on this poet's "fiercely demystifying intelligence." Yes, Scully fiercely, uncompromisingly, brings his hopes for a truly, thoroughly humane world into the light. Such hopes are often preceded by trenchant, riveting critiques on writings, ideas, and states of affairs; and sometimes the hopes are bound in with these in a struggle. Such struggling especially is the sign that besides having a cogent moral sense and articulated vision, Scully is a consummate realist. He does not abandon common, inevitable life for promises, visions, or programs of a heavenly life. What he surely does bring to light is the true notion that "ankle bracelets" need not be an inevitable or permanent part of life, nor be the defining attribute of it. The essays mostly and ostensibly about poetry, writing style, expression and all its sources and destinations are in a larger sense and ultimately about larger life than most are accustomed to, and than most can even conceive of. The essays packed with serious and reflective thought, earnest with teaching and persuasion, and buoyant with inspiration and possibility demonstrate once again that the best writing on politics, culture, and individual life and its choices usually comes from accomplished poets such as Scully. Essays of Seamus Heaney are another example.
--Henry Berry

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MULTICULTURAL REVIEW
Spring 2006

Scully's collection of eight essays is considered a major work on poetry as social practice . . . Scully thinks that "line breaks" are the "muscular fulcra on which all poetic work hinges." Some say that his view on the "line break" is his most brilliant insight about poetry . . .