Bill Bissett's Ode to Frank Silvera: Urban Life and Language

Introduction: Unconventional Form in Service of Traditional Goals

Through its unconventional poetic form and deliberate violations of standard spelling and grammar, Bill Bissett's "Ode to Frank Silvera" presents a multilayered, multifaceted critique of modern poetry and modern life. Ironically, the poem also reveals a strong commitment to the traditional goals of poetry, including the use of verse to achieve intellectual and emotional reactions in the reader. One can recognize elements of traditional poetic structure in the poem, including the use of repetition and parallelism, as well as a deliberate homage paid to e.e. Cummings in the use of all lowercase letters. Bissett also achieves a kind of meta-analysis of the English language, distilling words to their essential phonemes and presenting them with blatant misspellings. In doing so, he draws attention to those very words — most notably the ubiquitous "yu," which is pivotal throughout "Ode to Frank Silvera." The content of the poem echoes that of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and William Blake's "London." All three poems depict modern urban life and the confusion, alienation, and ambivalence it produces in people.

Second Person Address and the Politics of Vernacular

Writing in the second person, Bissett directly engages the reader in conversation. The use of vernacular speech and unconventional spelling underscores a deliberate attempt to bring poetry down to the level of everyday language. Not unlike the lofty diction used by Eliot and Blake, Bissett creates an urban atmosphere in which distinctions between social hierarchies are blurred. The parallelisms that open the first lines of each stanza — "yu might think," "yu might say," and "yu might hope" — create a drumbeat that anchors the reader to the content of the poem. There are also deliberate inconsistencies in the way Bissett chooses to misspell: the word "might," for instance, could have been rendered phonetically as "mite," yet the poet chooses to alter some words, like "yu" and "th," while leaving others unchanged. This signals the contradictions inherent in modern urban life. Eliot and Blake likewise rely on the second person to connect with the reader, referring to the anxieties that accompany the speaker through his daily journey (Bissett).

Urban Imagery: Yellow Air, Blackened Churches, and Pollution

Some of the imagery Bissett employs clearly hearkens back to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." For example, Bissett refers to the "yellow colord air," and Eliot repeatedly invokes yellow in his poem — "the yellow fog" and "the yellow smoke." In both cases, yellow functions as a pollutant: a color that mars the otherwise clear light of day or the crispness of evening air. Yellow is the color of halogen street lamps and noxious fumes, not of healthy outdoor life — the very opposite of the urban environment. Blake takes the motif of pollution even further with his image of the "blackening Church." All three poems decry urban life for being dirty and degrading, detracting from human purity. This is why Bissett contrasts city imagery with that of the countryside, setting the "yellow colord air" against the "golden being" of the sun and the "racing green" of the hills. Cities blur and obscure rather than clarify. The "tenement" building is no substitute for the grandeur of the "mountain," which is "hard and eternal," according to the speaker in "Ode to Frank Silvera."