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

ESSAY ON "ESSAY ON WOOD"

I never leaf through a copy of The New Yorker hoping to find a great poem. The poetry therein often reads like a series of chapters from an outdated manual that profiles the lives of ordinary garden rocks. The poem, “Essay On Wood”, from the June 9 & 16 double issue, troubled me enough to formulate a critical response. I once met the poet, James Richardson, many years ago, when he served as one of the judges at the first annual Ruth Lilly Collegiate Poetry Fellowship—a lucrative competition I had improbably qualified for, as a finalist. While I don’t remember him very well, he seemed like an all right guy. According to Wikipedia, Richardson teaches at Princeton, but let’s not hold that against him. Wikipedia credits him with several book publications and several prestigious awards; I’m hardly seeking to impeach the man or his accomplishments in this post, but rather investigate the poem’s language.

“Essay On Wood” appears on page 52. Richardson has structured the 18-line poem in three, six-line, free-verse stanzas. The first stanza reads as follows:

At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock

and every door in the breathing house bumps softly

as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder

if something in us is made of wood,

maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,

or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.

Okay? Here goes, first stanza, line-by-line.

Line 1. How many poems, by now, still begin with words like dusk or “dawn”? As if the poem can’t ‘actualize’ until the first little bits of color inhabit this privileged setting. I say ‘privileged’ because I don’t vacation on idyllic shores with many rowboats at my disposal. For the boats to ‘drum’ against the dock, I suppose there might be 15 of them. If they’re the speaker’s watercraft, then how many boats does one person require? Perhaps this is one of the Romney docks. But of course, boats can’t really ‘drum’ against a dock. Do they beat a rhythm? Are they M’boom loud? Max Roach loud? Are there but two rowboats, to effect drumsticks? If so, perhaps the poet could write “two rowboats.” True, these skiffs aren’t yachts, and they might be tied to a warped communal dock upon which many poor bastards trudge—but the poem doesn’t nearly confirm this theory.

Line 2. I like the phrase “breathing house” because it suggests open-window spring or summer imagery. But I do question just how many doors can simultaneously [bump] softly. To “bump” is to nudge softly, so I doubt that Richardson really needs the word “softly” anyhow; he can just chip that one away. Here, we have, what, about 15 doors bumping softly at once in a house that’s inhaling like a set of lungs? To say “every door” suggests many doors, and again, I conjure a large plot of land with a dock, many dugouts, and a domicile with more rooms than you can shake a skeleton key at.

Line 3. This narrator reminds me of a modern-day CPA with flexible accounting standards … when he’s in the city. He appears to count things—the number of boats, the number of doors—without precision. Nobody’s leaving in any event, since the narrator only establishes that quantity as part of an unlikely comparison. This poem sure ain’t Creeley in the 60s. In Creeley’s poem, “Goodbye”, one person pleads with another anguished person to turn from a painful situation, the rationale being that “the pain is / not unpainful.” But here, among docks and boats and summer houses, we have the vagueness of “someone” who never exits (or enters) the poem and a milquetoast narrator in whom we can’t invest much emotional or philosophical currency. If someone were leaving “quietly”, by the way, then would she or he make any sound at all?

Line 4. The “wonder” is so significant that it’s planted out there on the right margin as we slug into the next line—but what a whopper! Our narrator fancies that “something in us is made of wood.” (Does he mean something in a guy, that’s made of wood, every morning?) No, but—really? If you believe in Mono Deity, then you probably believe that “something in us” is made of 5 Hour Energy, seeing as Mono Deity sprinkled the earth with people and critters rather hastily. If you believe in science, then you probably believe that there’s something in us made of earth and Africa. And you know what else? So is wood. Wood is made of earth and Africa. The poem, in this line, repeats a dead sound from the line before: “someone” in line 3 and “something” in this one. These “some” words avoid a tangible count and default to typical abstractions that further dull the possibility for investment by the reader.

Line 5. Ah, the “heart”, that over-spent word that keeps appearing, like a Canadian quarter, at the coin return of the Grape Nehi vending machine. The heart doesn’t drum like rowboats, according to Richardson’s narrator. The heart doesn’t bump like every door. No, the heart “[knocks] softly”, but why does it knock? Does it want in from the cold? Does it bear a message for a slumbering person? In Philip Levine’s poem, “You Can Have It”, two brothers “are only one man / sharing a heart that always labors” at the ice plant, where the narrator’s brother “had fed / the chute its silvery blocks” and the narrator “stacked cases of orange soda for the children / of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time.” They shared a “laboring heart” in that they tangibly shared strenuous manual labor in the postwar boom city of Detroit, but in Richardson’s poem, I am led to “the heart”, as if one heart represents all our billions of hearts. The repetition of “softly” but three lines apart seems a bit careless. Also, I question whether a heart can actually “[knock] softly.” Knocking reminds me of a loud, thirsty engine that must be slaked with motor oil.

Line 6. “Someone” isn’t really leaving in this poem, and what may be wooden in us isn’t quite the heart, and furthermore, something in us might not be made of wood after all—but instead, “made for its call.” I had to keep reading through the difficult convolutions of this stanza to ensure I properly situated the pronoun reference, among other entities. In the end, the narrator “wonders / if something in us is made … / … for [wood’s] call.” Is wood on the telephone? Or is it like the call of the wild? That is, wood howls out there in the gorge, and I, reminded of my feral impulses, gallop toward wood’s call. I suppose the wooden boats call, and the wooden dock calls, and the wooden doors call, okay, okay, Big Concept, I get it, I get it, okay.

  

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

The narrator of Richardson’s poem drifts onward in a similar fashion, opining, if you will, on wood. The narrator in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Song”, on the other hand, establishes loneliness as a “rowboat ice-fast on the shore / in the last red light of the year / that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither / ice nor mud nor winter light / but wood, with a gift for burning.” See? Rowboat and wood, but better. The humble and heroic father in Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” rekindles the heating element, the stove, in the family’s ramshackle house, presumably by adding coal or wood to the “banked fires.” The strength of the father’s devotion to his son causes the cold to splinter and break—the sounds, perhaps, of wood popping and sizzling. Many years later, after the father has died, the narrator expresses his own regretful isolation in a famous repetition, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Where are lines like those, in The New Yorker? I ask you.

Too serious? Perhaps you ought to read a Summer Fish Story.