DREADFUL POEMS CONTINUE TO APPEAR IN BIG MAGAZINES: COMPLAINT.

A few years ago, we took a critical look at James Richardson’s poem, “Essay on Wood,” that had appeared in the The New Yorker. We didn’t “measure” our comments then, and we won’t measure our comments today, either, when we take a look at Elizabeth Spires’ poem, “How to Sing,” which recently appeared in The Atlantic. Our analysis of Richardson’s poem wasn’t personal, and neither will be our commentary at present. Elizabeth Spires is a major American poet, in any event. According to Wikipedia, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Whiting Foundation. She has published several volumes with W.W. Norton, in addition to one collection apiece with Wesleyan and Carnegie Mellon. As with Richardson, I’ve met Spires, and heard her read, albeit many years ago in Washington, D.C. No, we don’t seek to impeach these accomplishments or the person herself, but we do want to scrutinize the poem’s language, structure, and theme(s).

The poem is short enough to reproduce in its entirety:

               How to Sing

               from a hymnal

               Moderately

               Moderately slow

               Moderately fast

               With vigor

               In flowing style

               Boldly

               Well marked

               Fervently

               With dignity

               With great dignity

               Joyously

               Joyously, but not too fast

               Resolutely

               With stately vigor

               Rather slowly

               Not too slowly

               Majestically

               With joyous dignity

               With movement

               With flow

               —Elizabeth Spires, from The Atlantic (January/February 2019)

In its favor, “How to Sing” doesn’t take very long to read. Let’s not make the mistake of regarding the poem, thematically, from a monochromatic standpoint. Ostensibly, it refers to singing, but forgetting the italicized epigraph (“from a hymnal”) for a moment, let’s assume that Spires would like readers to interpret “How to Sing” on multiple levels. The possibilities include betraying, chirping, and crooning, but first let’s investigate this piece as it may apply (of course!) to fornication. We mean love-making. If we may say so, clearly the love-maker is being asked to sing “With vigor” “…but not too fast.” “Majestically” and (of course!) “With flow.” This is how many love-makers are asked to make love, so there’s nothing really new on that frontier, but okay, okay, let’s say this poem is really about crooning, even religious crooning, and if so, how is the singer being advised to practice her or his craft? [n.b. “Moderately slow” and “Moderately fast” are redundant.] “With dignity” and “Joyously, but not too fast” calls to mind the right-wing Bobcat Muzak played at Chick-fil-A and Walmart. I’m hearing The Partridge Family. I’m hearing Spandex Ballet, oops, I mean Spandau Ballet. “With stately vigor” rules out any character in the voice, yet perhaps Spires advocates for religious fervor to be “medium” these days. Pray medium. Sing medium.

What to make, though, of “from a hymnal?” When the word “from” prefaces a poem, it often suggests that the published piece is an excerpt from a longer work, but we don’t perceive that Spires has crafted a longer work entitled “A Hymnal,” and besides, “from” is italicized along with “a hymnal,” which is lower case and appears without quotation marks. Did she excerpt this from a book of religious songs out there in the real, crooning world? This is a possibility, but then why would she seek to publish that in The Atlantic, or why would she claim authorship at all? Does “from a hymnal” refer to an alternative definition of hymnal (see our fornication theory, above) or is the reader simply meant to transfer the weight of “hymn,” from an oddly fictional hymnal, onto the lifeless prayer-jargon that follows? Just what is the larger piece that these italics refer to—we don’t know. Perhaps we haven’t reached the level of enlightenment we must reach, in order to decipher this clue. Its inclusion calls attention to the poem’s structure, however, which is a block of short lines, easy enough, but we wonder (“We WAH WAH WAH WAH / Wonderrrrrrr / WHYYYYYY) if the poem couldn’t be broken and clipped, severely. Maybe this would be a better piece:

                  How to Hymn

  

                  With vigor

                  in flowing

 

                  dignity. Joyously,

                  but not too

                  stately.

                  Rather

                  not too

                  with

                  with

                  flow.

Surely now it is a l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poem (eek! salt the brisket! run for the hills!) but it is less predictable across its language, form, and theme(s). It demonstrates alternative techniques. There are rests. There are restarts. Each participant is holding a backward palm to her or his forehead!

We turn to our panel of experts, The Machine, Sausages, and Fluffy, which is advising this blog during Complaint Week 2019:

            Fluffy suggests that “Maybe The Atlantic hired The New Yorker poetry editor.”

            Sausages says, “Everything is a characterless glass building with a Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Politics and Prose in the lobby.”

            The Machine adds, “How many words does it have? How are you going to monetize that shit?”

Thank you, gentlemen. If we follow Wallace Stevens’ example, “The Atlantic and The New Yorker are one.” If poetry fits into “everything” and we think it does, then poetry has a Starbucks in the lobby. And as for “(monetizing) that shit,” I wonder how much The Atlantic pays for a poem. I would imagine quite a bit, since The Atlantic, by virtue of its name, purports to be an entire ocean.

Layli Long Soldier

I recently read Whereas, a fine collection of poetry by Layli Long Soldier, which was published by Graywolf in 2017. Some of the poems have been tremendous. In part of her sequence, “Vaporative,” she interprets the word “opaque” as “OPĀK” or more fully “O: open / P: soft / Ā: airplane or directional flight / K: cut through—translating to that which is or allows air, airy, penetrating light, transparency.” Of course a good poet can turn the impenetrable to penetrable.  The Atlantic (which does praise Long Soldier in an article or two) could stand to publish a poem of hers, so she could explain to an audience as vast as the ocean that “a word of lightful meaning flips under / buries me in the work of blankets.” (Beautiful!) (Complaint.)

blood and gutstein complaint week 2019: no solutions—just gripes

monday: democrats

tuesday: education

wednesday: poetry

thursday: beer

friday: sports