read than prose, yet poetry can “eject reams of exposition”
“I write I” often the dead weight of a lot of prose. Unlike the expectations
The First Person in Sugar Mile
by Jon L Jensen
Glyn Maxwell’s 2005 verse novel begins in two places.
The first poem is titled, “September 8th, Broadway and 86th.”
The reader assumes this as a date and a New York address,
but the first stanza is situated high above the ground, looking
down at a city where “buildings are sand / and peter out. All
land / is a ledge, all space is a drop, all steps have a nerve.”
The poet wrote “at the top of breath,” top either because he has
been climbing, or because he has entered the stratosphere. It
is here that he wishes to write in a place where “There can be
no first person” (3). But the book that is about to emerge, quite
organically in the reader’s hands, is one that could not exist but
for its reliance on the first person. Maxwell’s shifting first person
narratives serve not only to drive the dramatic action of The
Sugar Mile, but also ultimately show us a world where the
individuals caught in war are far more important than the
buildings crumbling around them.
In the afterword to his 2007 verse novel Ludlow, poet
David Mason makes a concise and persuasive argument for
narrative poetry. Even in looking at Maxwell’s use of the first
person, we must begin with a question Mason says any
narrative poet must confront: “Why didn’t you just write it in
prose?” While acknowledging the nearly overwhelming
prejudices held by both publisher and public against storytelling
in poetry, Mason insists on several advantages that the form
provides both writer and reader. In a world dominated by the
movie, he insists that “verse is more cinematic than prose in its
rhythms and images, its narrative economy.” Most
contemporary readers believe that poetry is “more difficult” to
of prose in poems, “speakers of dialogue don’t need to be
identified but are inferred from context.” Mason admits that
longer poems can lose intensity quickly, but so can novels. “In
the right hands, verse actually has more clarity, drive and
economy than prose, and it can offer literary pleasures of a sort
unavailable in other genres” (227-228).
Mason fails to include Glyn Maxwell’s name in his
“woefully incomplete” list of the gifted contemporary poets
writing narrative and dramatic verse (227). However, his
description of what the form might be perfectly describes The
Sugar Mile. In the deft opening pages of the work, Maxwell
manages to evoke a present (three men sitting in a Manhattan
bar), with a past (the first day of the Blitzkrieg on London), all
as a way of commenting on the “future” 9/11 attacks three days
away from changing New York forever. All of this he does
largely through his use of first person narrators—ten in the
impressively economic first twenty two pages of the work.
The first narrator is a poet—one beginning, over drinks
in an Upper West Side bar, to write in an “empty moleskine” (3).
But he is struggling. He begins crossing out text, deletions left
not only for the reader to see but also someone else in the bar.
“An Old Man Saying” is the title of the second poem, the old
man in question is someone we will learn is Joe Stone, an
Englishman who spends his days on the barstool the poet has
unknowingly chosen to sit on. Joe begins, like us, as a reader,
but he quickly takes over. “I wasn’t meant to be watching,” he
says as he comments on what the poet has chosen to delete.
He is drunk and wants to interrupt and insult the poet any way
he can, but then he says, “Today is the day, I’m standing up,
the day to cross it out. // And I / make no appearance in the
work of art. I” (6). This pronouncement, a denial of his first
person, is ironic, just like the poet’s earlier, “There can be no

first person” (3). Joe has just invaded whatever the writer is
attempting to create. Soon the drunk even begins dictating for
him, insisting, “unquote did you hear that / sir, now I’m the poet,
// quote unquote, I’m the poet. / And the poet” (7). As the book
unfolds Joe will become the dominant voice in a chorus that he
tries to direct, but cannot ultimately control.
The structure of The Sugar Mile is first person
narratives, which are not monologues, per se, because they
often are just one side of a conversation the reader is meant to
supply in her head. The third narrator, the bartender Raul,
illustrates Maxwell’s technique. Raul begins speaking:
Don’t worry, guy, that’s Joe. Joe’s got issues.
He thinks you’re sitting in his spot. Stay there,
guy, what are you crazy, you paid money
to sit, you don’t buy tickets for the barstool.
Another Bass? It’s kind of he’s like a fixture.
(Is that how you spell asparagas? It’s not…
with a u? That can’t be right. You sure that’s not
some British thing? Okay.) No Joe’s got issues…” (8)
The bartender’s speech tells us several things about Maxwell’s
technique. First that he will delete responses in conversations,
that each poem in the work will maintain its own solitary point of
view, one that requires that a reader “hear” the other side of
dialogues.
Raul’s speech illustrates not only the dialogic approach
of the poems, but also say something about Maxwell’s art as a
formalist poet. Raul’s language is colloquial, repetitive and
natural American speech, but remarkably he is also speaking in
inherited form. By the second line of the second stanza is
apparent that Raul is speaking a sestina, a virtuosic form from
the 12th century, which requires that the poet write six six-line
stanzas all using the same end words in a prescribed shifting
Jensen 2
order. The final tercet of the poem recycles all six words a final
time for effect. Our bartender may not know how to spell
asparagus, but, wow, he even speaks iambic pentameter.
Maxwell’s use of form in the book is not alienating, it acts
instead as a joke shared with the more informed, but more
importantly as a way of creating a natural flow of speech.
The naturalistic speech of Maxwell’s narrators relies
heavily on repetition. Although the poems utilize a wide array of
line lengths, stanza forms and meters (fixed and free), almost
all of the speakers “rhyme.” Rhyme is ballsy for almost any
modern poet in a single poem, let alone in a verse-novel. Yet
here Maxwell’s gifts imitating speech are of foremost
assistance. Taking his clue from the sestina, Maxwell violates
the rules of rhyme in many places by having his speakers
rhyme through repetition not of sound alone, but also words.
The “Man in a Little Flowerbed” speaks in heroic couplets that
rhyme with the same end words.
“ ….wiped out
there’s fuck all where there was before. Wiped out
Bob Piper he had Glenlivet. There’s them Pray’s
in the road. Lucky name that Prays, as in God prays
it’s them ones. Look at the soil all over these shoes.
Look at the soil all over these two good shoes” (14)
This innovation in the world of rhyme, one that would appall the
poets of old, mimics the ways that almost any speaker repeats
him or herself. In some poems these repetitions or naturally
occurring rhymes and half-rhymes within language help to
decide line breaks. These breaks regularly help to deepen the
text’s meanings in ways that prose could not.
“that pen of his just hovering in the air
then dabbing here and there
a little shape or two, then a cross, a swoop,

why not then it’s up, up
and away am I bothering you?
He turns away with a grin. Am I bothering you,
sir? Now he’s pretending I’m not here.
Of course, he’s a writer, nobody else is here (5).
Notice how the breaks in the lines and couplets allow for the
pauses in Joe’s language and at the same time make subtle
plays on the movements of writing and idiom as in the “up, up //
and away” falling down to the next couplet.
As freely as Maxwell’s characters speak, the author has
put an enormous responsibility on their shoulders to advance
the narrative. Some of this responsibility is also left to a reader,
who has to be more alert than he/she might be if this were a
standard work of fiction. As Raul finishes his first speech, he
tries to wake Joe. The reader turns the page to find 10 and 11
blank. This is puzzling at first until one realizes that this is Joe’s
next monologue, his silence in sleep. Titles help the reader out
somewhat by announcing speaker and situating the action of
each poem. Unlike dramatic writing, where the speaker’s name
would be followed by a colon and an italic stage direction,
Maxwell’s titles are in prose style: “Raul Emptying Ashtrays,”
“Joey Awake Now” (24-25). The rest of the storytelling is up to
whoever “has the mic,” so to speak. “Granny May on the Stairs”
is responsible not only for notifying the reader that we have
entered a flashback but for changing the mood of the text
dramatically. Granny is trying to get a Joe, here a young boy, to
come down for tea. She is trying desperately to pretend that
everything is “business as usual” for her grandson, who is
upstairs watching the first bombs drop on London. This sets the
reader up for quite a surprise by the time she finally loses her
cool blurting, “Don’t go there, Joey! The blinkin world’s on fire. /
Jensen 3
There’s nothing to bring back. / What do you mean ‘to look’? /
There’s unexploded! Joey! It’s the war / that’s all it’s the
blessed war” 13. Again, unlike prose or dramatic writing, the
action is all in the first person’s mouth. Joey runs out of the
house through Granny’s words, not in a stage directions or a
report of what he has done.
Surprisingly only one of the early characters even
seems to be “reporting” and that is the “Man in the Little
Flowerbed.” And yet the man’s reportage seems quite natural
to the idiosyncrasies of his communication style. He mixes
important details about where the bombs have landed with his
own obsessions about the damage done to his flowers or his
likes or dislikes for the people involved in the action. This
amalgam of the important and unimportant, the personal and
impersonal, allows the man and the other speakers to remain
people and never turn “journalist” in the telling.
The first flashback ends when Joe wakes up, but the
story of the first day of the Blitz will become the primary action
of the novel. Yet the frame of a drunk guy telling war stories in
bar is far more than ornamental. As the reader progresses
further into the book, the date provided in title of the first poem
becomes more important. Joe informs us that that Saturday,
the 8th of September 2001 is the sixtieth anniversary of the
Blitz. Raul gets a phone call informing him that he has a new
job starting Monday at the Windows on the World restaurant in
the World Trade Center. But like most of the emotionally
weighty material in the book, this information is passed to the
reader with no more emphasis than Raul’s announcement of
the specials.
The knowledge of Raul’s possible fate makes the
opening poem with its battle over the first person make far
more sense. The title, which we assumed was a street address,
“Broadway and 86th” can also be the 86th floor of the Empire
State Building, looking down at the destruction of the “buildings”
 Jensen 4

reduced to “sand” (3). After all the “top of breath” could come There can be no first person.
from his breathless climb to the top of the skyscraper. The I fill my lungs to go and the first person’s
poem is repeated at the end of the book, now dedicated to Joe,
but now revised and missing the following uncut and cut lines of yards ahead. Then he jumps.
the first version: Then I look and he falls and falls until my lungs
“and it’s evening in a mirror,
peek-a-boo through a platoon of optics are veal and I’m alone.
I write I and it leaks like a first inkpen (3 and 139).
as he begins, resembling
any stranger, reaching for an ashtray,

nothing in his notebook Works Cited

but this. Nobody knows him. There is nothing Mason, David. Ludlow. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007.

waiting. The twin barmen Maxwell, Glyn. Sugar Mile. New York: Houghton Mifflin
serve him with their backs to one another. Company, 2005.

waiting. And the barman’s

bewildered by his own words on a blackboard

waiting, but the barman” (4)

The mirror is crossed out in the final poem, but it still remains
as a reminder of the act of first person writing itself. Whatever
“I” the writer creates, it is still his own reflection. As Joe argued
in his first words to “Glenn,” with a writer nobody else is in the
room. But in the first version, Raul is seen as “twin barmen”
through the mirror. The “Twin Towers” look like the first person
“I” the writer creates, only to reduce to ruin. The platoon of
optics are the great chorus of first person voices that Maxwell
has so beautifully created. And yet he still insists that the “past
is an empty moleskine.” For his struggle with subjectivity, with
what the first person might mean, remains: