Never My Frontier

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture – you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies.
– Jean Baudrillard, America

     There are so many things to admire and celebrate in “Never My Frontier.” I’m delighted by the interstitial, fractal qualities of its form, figures, and syntax; awestruck by its willingness to break old rules and establish its own expectations for how it works as a machine made of words; pleased by its “there-and-back-again” structure and content, qualities which give this poem a capacious narrative feel even as certain moments rise to great heights of lyric pitch and density; mesmerized by a kind of honey-bee droning (an open-road-wheels-on-pavement hum) made possible by the deft engineering of sonorous vowel sounds within luxuriously long lines (hear the long “o” echo-effect, for example, in this Whitmanesque line: “never so slow to ask what have I done, or so quick to marry”); impressed by the way enjambment unfolds so sagely and frequently, creating richly suggestive, surprisingly polyvalent meanings.

      What I love most of all about this poem is the way it caresses and cultivates the aural/oral imagination. In short, I love this poem’s mouth music. If I was sitting shotgun next to LeBlanc on a long road trip, I could go on forever listening to her voice, how full and leafy with love it is, how gossamer with loss and longing as it sifts hauntings of an elusive time and place, this unforgettable recollection of a place called Wyoming. So enthralled, so siren-stuck am I by LeBlanc’s song of herself, I’ve found myself breaking into full-throated recitations, even calling friends to perform the poem aloud. A kind of shared enchantment invariably ensues, stemming from our amazement at so many windfalls of lyrically evocative lines that come dropping slow and sure like slant-shimmered light on an evening sward—lines like “Miles were never my lullaby” or “To go / back to my never frontier, to my flax at the old house still roping / the sky, those stars not much older, though some dead now.”

       I value this poem’s compelling complexity and difficulty. After living with “Never My Frontier” for weeks, holding still with it so often, examining under the microscope the intricate details of its formal, linguistic, figurative and rhetorical innovations, I’m still not sure exactly how to read this poem nor how it might be pigeonholed into neat categories and classifications so as to nail down its meaning(s) definitively. But isn’t that part of the larger point? Poetry should “resist the intelligence, almost,” says Wallace Stevens, and so does LeBlanc it seems. Just like Wyoming, “Never My Frontier” resists and rejects simple labels, facile categorizations, “the ease of binaries,” and the certitudes of straightforward definition. “Wyoming was never my frontier, my moon landing, my virgin,” chimes the speaker in the opening stanza, only to stretch her this string of (anti)comparisons further yet: “Never my escape, my antelope fetish.” How curiously inviting to begin this cross-country adventure via an introductory via negativa. So we ask, What, then, was Wyoming? If prior to her westward journey, Wyoming was a terra incognita, a nothingness, unlike any of the known things suggested by her catalogue of (anti)metaphors, then by poem’s end, oh how memorably, how beautifully the speaker has unfurled her vision of Wyoming.  The images and figures that form this vision become a vehicle for apprehending what is present and what is haunting in the presence of things. The vision charts a geography of the heart and head which is as fleetingly sharp as the sight of a Wyoming night sky above a lightning-flashed prairie. There’s no doubt in the speaker’s mind (as ours) that the whatness of Wyoming is as substantial and elusive as that scrap of her former self and convictions “caught on a barbed-wire fence flapping in the wind.”

     If on one level, “Never My Frontier” treads the path of classic road-trip poems (celebrations of movement and transience), it also delivers a powerful evocation of a fixed place forever flashed into memory like sheet lightning on a darkling plain, a fixed place of transience and transformation that renders the speaker’s “sense of time and distance never since the same.” Like “Tintern Abbey” or other great evocations of memory work, “Never My Frontier” brilliantly ponders and performs the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls facing a poetic imagination coming to terms with the universal human problem of time and distance, loss and longing.

     In "An Hour of Poetry," John Berger sees poetry "as if it were a place, an assembly point," a somewhere "to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart . . . [poetry] is the continual labor of assembling that which has been scattered.” This is the kind of poetic place-making we see and hear and feel in “Never My Frontier.” The memory shards of LeBlanc’s recollections combined with her desire to return to “never my frontier” produce an unforgettable and exquisitely imagined place, a moveable feast. In this poem we’re privy to the reflections and longing of a gifted memory-keeper and memory-maker who, in the fullness of time, is eager and willing to time-travel (always back and forth across time and distance), in hopes of recovering spots of time. When the speaker addresses the question of an unidentified interlocutor (would you go back?), fortunately she says, “yes, without thinking, as if we could trace the years behind us / in red on our old Rand McNally atlas . . . and travel the gone years like / a narrow frontage road running beside a fat new highway.” I’m so grateful she does. What a gift it is to accompany this remarkable poet as she maps the years behind. I’d be content to go on riding shotgun forever, listening at LeBlanc’s song of herself forever.