For our Stanzas web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a brief excerpt of a poem. This week, Corey Van Landingham—whose poems “16/m/FL” and "As now it makes him think himself all glass" appear in our Winter 2025 issue—considers “Rave On” by B.H. Fairchild.
B.H. Fairchild’s long poem “Rave On,” from his 2002 collection Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, is comprised of only two stanzas. The first is ninety-nine lines long, the second twenty. Here is the closing stanza:
I survived. We all did. And then came the long surrender,
the long, slow drifting down like young hawks riding on
the purest, thinnest air, the very palm of God
holding them aloft so close to something hidden there,
and then the letting go, the fluttering descent, claws
spread wide against the world, and we become, at last,
our fathers. And do not know ourselves and therefore
no longer know each other. Mike Luckinbill ran a Texaco
in town for years. Billy Heinz survived a cruel divorce,
remarried, then took to drink. But finally last week
I found this house in Arizona where the brothers
take new names and keep a vow of silence and make
a quiet place for any weary, or lost, passenger
of earth whose unquiet life has brought him there,
and so, after vespers, I sat across the table
from men who had not surrendered to the world,
and one of them looked at me and looked into me,
and I am telling you there was a fire in his head
and his eyes were coming fast down a caliche road,
and I knew this man, and his name was Travis Doyle.
The poem is set in Seward County, Kansas, where “boredom / grows thick as maize.” A group of boys—Travis, Mike, Billy, and the speaker—are joyriding in an old Ford while Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” plays on the radio. Travis, the driver, wanting to pull off a trick he heard described “by big Ed Ravenscroft who said you would go in a boy / and come out a man,” rolls the car. The boys survive, and, other than a broken arm, they come out unscathed. This précis, of course, loses entirely the majesty of the poem, with its biblical allusions, its sense of deep stagnancy, the whorehouse’s ancient madam, “the moon-glitter on caliche.”
What I love about this stanza is how, in that third long sentence, the boys do come out men, but not in the bravado-laced sense that Ravenscroft promised. Instead, they merely grow old. They become their fathers, a fate seemingly inescapable in a town whose desuetude is its own kind of quicksand. The middle of the stanza is deeply melancholic as it swiftly glosses the desolate futures of this group of boys, as well as the dissolution of their friendship. It’s a familiar tale, especially if, like me, you’re from a small town.
Then. Then Fairchild almost ejects us into the very recent past, into “last week,” and southwest, into Arizona, where the speaker takes refuge in a sort of monastery. Where, lo and behold, resides the one friend “who had not surrendered to the world,” Travis Doyle. The anaphoric and repeated in the last four lines drives us back into the incantatory liturgical register introduced earlier in the poem, and that polysyndeton does feel nearly ecstatic as we realize, in what feels like real time though it’s unfolding in the past tense, who this man is.
I’m not a narrative poet, which is perhaps part of what makes Fairchild’s expansive temporal landscape—the surprising leaps in time as this story unfolds—and the precision of scene and character in this poem feel alchemical. This stanza is all dénouement. In the hands of a lesser poet, it would feel easy, neat, too tied-off. Not here though, where the hazardous mischief of youth is lost so swiftly. And where I feel as though I too have known Travis (haven’t we all?) nearly all my life. And where our eyes are directed insistently back to the left margin by those ands. And perhaps there is some kind of hope for those of us with an “unquiet life.” And each moment of this last stanza is, finally, its own raving revelation.