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
