'Grave By the Lake' by Taneum Bambrick

I was first alerted to Taneum Bambrick’s debut collection, Vantage — 2019 winner of The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and yet another of Copper Canyon Press’s beautifully arranged books — by tweeted recommendation from another excellent poet, Natalie Eilbert. Eilbert valorises the book for having ‘thrown me out of bed and kicked the brown lake out of me’: a canny bit of imaging in itself, where ‘brown lake’ is both uncomplicated and suggestive and where the verb is the right kind of wrong. The brown lake is polluted, rusted, stained rotten with death and yet alive with decay. Do we all have brown lakes inside us? Probably, from time to time. How cleansing, how lightening, to have them kicked out, flushed out.

The phrase also aligns well with the world of the book. In Vantage, Taneum Bambrick (what I wouldn’t give to have had a poet’s name so gorgeous) spends her poems scouting out and clearing — dredging — garbage. According to CCP’s gloss on their website, the book is ‘a fictionalized account of the poet’s real experiences working as the only woman on a six-person garbage crew around the reservoirs of two massive dams’. The academic in me salivates at the compressive promise of that description.

You know people often talk about coming across books they wish they’d written themselves, and with any luck that feeling doesn’t stir envy or stultify but rather inspires, and breeds admiration. Vantage isn’t quite like that, at least not for me. It’s not a book I wish I’d written but a book I know I never would have been able to write. This is true of so many of my favourite recent books of poetry. And I’m glad for that. No really.

Eilbert’s image, it turns out, prefigures the particular poem I have in front of me. Its title is ‘Grave By the Lake’.

Jim was like a dad. He told me to stay,

I jumped from the truck. Followed to a plastic

tub in the gravel lot. Its opening white

and fanned as dead leaves. Backlit,

we could see the case held a body. We gloved

our noses. It burned to breathe, like ice in your nose

or inhaling chlorine. Jim crouched beside it,

some pit mix. A pet left there meant no money

to cremate. No yard to bury in. We lifted

the tub. Hands under both sides. Top wedged

with my chin. I could see his body

had been stuffed to fit, as if placing him

in a box made up for his abandonment.

Digging a grave requires a permit.

Our company provided a dumpster

for carcasses. Half a mile from headquarters,

downwind. There was what we had to do

with the dog and what Jim knew I wanted.

He turned to me, exhaled, drove away from the dam.

We found a field without security cameras

and lugged the mutt out. Fingers cut

through grass. We dropped the box in a shallow hole.

Covered damp dirt with gravel. Projecting

what the family would have wanted,

we said a few words. Unclipped and hung nearby

his heart-shaped tag. Jim was a dad, he knew

to set a flowery weed. Those were the days

he made work light for me. Said if someone were here

with his daughter — standing by the flat

water, old blood on her baseball hat —

he would want him to tell her not to come back.

Last year, for various reasons, I found myself frequently in the company of what you could call ‘found-body poems’: poems that centre around or are born out of encountering the body of a dead animal. My particular focus was on birds and, once you’re looking for them, it seems that every poet has at least one dead bird poem. I have one, resolutely unpublished (and I told myself, never again). It’s a trope, if not a cliché, and The Onion once captured the basic point of it just as well as anybody else ever did: ‘Bird Reflects On Frailty, Impermanence Of Life After Finding Dead Human On Sidewalk’. I don’t mean to suggest that dead bird poems are hacky: I love them, I need more of them. If this be poetry, give us increase of it. But it has that same flavour of something you see too often, and you might roll your eyes when you do — as you might when reading stanzas that start ‘Listen:’, or read a 600-word review that dares to use the verb limn.

In her introduction to Vantage, Sharon Olds praises the collection for somehow doing without metaphor: ‘Parts of its freight’, writes Olds, ‘has to do with ecological devastation, told with no voluptuous sentiment. Not “told” so much as seen — the ferocious images not metaphor but reality. Not ideas but things’. This is so commonplace a means of praise that it is easy to forgive Olds for resorting to it: she echoes Wallace Stevens, probably on purpose, with his ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’, and there’s a hint, too, of ‘A poem should not mean / But be’. There are plenty of ways to take this rhetoric: as a hector against heavy allegorising, as a call for concrete images over abstract ones, as fidelity to the real (whether such a thing is noble or excessive or misguided or not, depending on how you’d see it).¹ It’s of a piece with the strange literary history of anti-writing sentiment, wherein the best writing is that which in some sense hasn’t really been written. It’s nonsensical to suggest that the poems of Vantage are things seen and not told, and the whole interplay between seeing and telling is itself profoundly metaphorical, and 'ferocious images' is itself a ferociously figurative image. Language is constituted by metaphor anyway: so why hope to banish it? And good luck writing poetry without it.

But still, for all this, I think I agree with Olds, or at least it is well-taken, at least with reference to this poem. It’s the realest found-body poem I’ve ever read. Somehow.

It starts with a phrase that will be echoed and modified later on: ‘Jim was like a dad’. Jim is a recurring character in Vantage, one of the monosyllabic male members of Bambrick’s garbage crew. Jim first appears in the second poem, ‘Gaps’, which also opens with a nod to his progeniture: ‘You’re easy to me because I have a daughter, Jim said. But you / can’t forget how you look to us. Ex-construction-ex-loggers. / Pushing sixty. You’re a squirrely thing’.  Jim seems to be saying two things at once here, neither of them particularly kind (and the latter not a little sinister). First: You’re easy for me to understand and interact with because I have a daughter who is in some ways like you, but you can’t forget that you look strange and even ridiculous to us in this situation where we belong and where you don’t. Second: I am not tempted by your body because I have a daughter and thereby (only thereby) know to treat young women with respect and not harass them. But you can’t forget how attractive you look to us. The adjective easy is subtle and ironic here, given its usage in sexual spheres and its adjacency to slut-shaming and predatory attitudes: ‘an easy lay’, etc. Jim is saying, or might be saying, that her uneasiness is, for him, untypically easy, and that she should be wary that not all the men among their company will be quite so tolerant and self-resistant.

Despite these unsavoury undertones, Jim’s fatherliness also comes out in kindness and concern. ‘Jim was like a dad’ also means ‘Jim was like a dad to me’, and he is like a dad in this particular moment, cautioning before being immediately disobeyed: ‘He told me to stay, / I jumped from the truck. Followed to a plastic / tub in the gravel lot. Its opening white’. Eilbert’s point about Bambrick’s sentences shows here. It took me a while to parse their order and structure. ‘Followed’ has no subject (no direct object either, come to that); initially, I thought the subject was Jim, who has been forced to follow the speaker after he has told her to stay in the truck. Now, though, I think it is the speaker: Jim, then, has jumped out first, warned the speaker to stay, and then she has followed. There are quite a few similar moments in Vantage. It is one of the book’s pleasures. The sentences are somehow more compact and more expansive. Their gaps shrink them down, fit them into lines and stanzas (like the poor, poor dog, whose ‘body / had been stuffed to fit’ into the tub); but they also must be reconstituted, patched up, filled in.

(I like the verb in ‘We gloved / our noses’, as I’m sure you do as well. To glove something is to cover it tight, more or less, and there is no particular reason why we would only glove our hands beyond the fact that, as a body-part, it could do more than most with a second skintight covering. Our bodies are gloved in skin, after all (please, please don’t google degloving); ‘a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles’.²)

The bodily details are, in this poem, extensive and specific. Jim hazards the breed — some pit mix — in terms that manage to evoke the teeming, heterogenous mass grave into which it has been dumped and out of which it will soon be lifted. The narrator, meanwhile, reckons with what such a discovery reveals, or at least implies, about the dog’s life and death: ‘A pet left there meant no money / to cremate. No yard to bury in’. The way these phrases all concatenate from each other is oddly satisfying: even before the line-break, ‘A pet left there meant no money’ already says it all; and ‘no money / to cremate’ not only covers an unaffordable funeral but reinforces both the poverty to hand and the heartbreaking fact that, in this case, the dog’s dignity was not worth paying for (there was, that is, no money to burn).

The family was unable to pay for a cremation, and they did not own a yard where they might have buried him for free. The speaker is sympathetic but also moved enough to put things right, and she understands that there are impediments to the dog’s dignity even now. ‘Digging a grave requires a permit. / Our company provided a dumpster / for carcasses. Half a mile from headquarters, / downwind. There was what we had to do / with the dog and what Jim knew I wanted’. This is perfectly direct — while also being euphemistic — but no less devastating for that, and not without its subtleties. ‘There was what we had to do’ of course indicates that, in this line of work, where dead animals are a common enough problem that a particular dumpster has been earmarked for them, the speaker and her colleague are expected to follow a certain protocol. But taking the body there is never actually specified as ‘what we had to do’; grammatically, ‘what Jim knew I wanted’ is just as viable a candidate for ‘what we had to do’. Both are just ‘there’, in the air between the two garbage-collectors.

At any rate, what happens is that Jim and the speaker find somewhere clandestine and cameraless where they can bury the dog. The poem drops its euphemisms almost straight away and devolves into harsher, heavier, sharper verbs and nouns: ‘[we] lugged the mutt out. Fingers cut / through grass’. The verbs, again, are excellent: the image of using fingers as tools for cutting is horrible, in a brilliant way, and the verb is rather more evocative than, for instance, scraping or digging or rooting. Fingers are blunt, fleshy things, far more suited to being cut (something this usage also allows for) than to cutting. Even if the nails are in play.

Jim’s being a dad crops up again, but this time it is a fact and not a set of behaviours. ‘Jim was a dad, he knew / to set a flowery weed’. I wouldn’t have known to do that — I wouldn’t have known that a weed could or should be distinguished between flowery and non-flowery.³ The act or even the concept of ‘set[ting] a flowery weed’ is so ripely suggestive, so thick with metaphor, that I don’t even know where to begin with it. Or rather end with it. In more practical terms, a flowery weed will, presumably, obscure the site of the illicit grave better than a non-flowery one. It will also have a better chance of beautifying the site, of laying the ground for diverse and pleasant growth.

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¹ I’m not entirely sure, but I think the phrase ‘fidelity to the real’ is either verbatim or very close to something a friend of mine once said to me regarding somebody else’s strained comments on some of her own poems. After she said it, I wrote the phrase, or whatever the phrase actually was, on my hand—thinking, yup, that’s the tea, that’ll come in handy.

² Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 3. For the full famous first paragraph (and the second):

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy in suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

³ Googling ‘flowering weed’, incidentally, is not very illuminating for this poem, for reasons that are perhaps obvious. ['flowering weeds', plural, is what you want—I'm honestly surprised by how sensitive Google is to the s in this case]

'Suggested Donation' by Heather Christle

Usually I write about single poems that have for one reason or another come under my nose. My nose, as a rule, is discerning and yet generous. Easy to please and welcoming of new scents. Somewhat short and rounded. Not especially attractive. Befreckled. No stranger to bloodening but no great friend to it either.

The poems are often enough by poets I already know, at least a little, but the poems tend to arrive unchaperoned, as it were. In this case, however, I have set myself the possibly unlovely task of choosing: I know, that is, who the poet will be — but I don’t yet know which poem it will be.

Heather Christle (pronounced crystal — a poet’s name if ever there was one) is a real favourite of mine. Reading a new poem of hers often makes me feel giddy. It’s somewhat rare to feel as though you could easily identify a poem’s poet if the name is not supplied (some poets, it's true, you can recognise from shape alone, like the silhouette of a beloved), and I’m not sure I would really be able to do pick out one of Christle's under exam conditions (or in I A Richards’s class), but there does seem to be something distinctive about her work, although I’m not sure I could name this something, at least not in concrete or intelligible terms. She is, at any rate, one of the slickest, funniest, heartiest poets I know. She is also (un)cannily consistent: she manages on every page to make me ache.

Her forthcoming The Crying Book has been so generously and ingenuously marketed (it’s the wrong word: so it’s the right word) by Christle on her Twitter account that I can’t really remember ever having been so excited for a publication date. It looks fucking great — I believe that, as per Christle’s tweet, the design owes itself to Nicole Caputo, Catapult’s Art Director ¹ — and it seems to me, from my expectant perspective, one of those rare books that will only spill out more, when it is time, than the glories it has already promised and catalogued.

So. A poem. In the end, it wasn’t difficult to choose. I could have gone with anything from Heliopause, which is the only full collection of Christle’s I have actually as yet bought;² but I really cannot stop thinking about the following poem, which appeared in the hundredth and final issue of FIELD and which Christle presented to us, post-publication, on Twitter. The title is ‘Suggested Donation’.

In the morning I drink

coffee until I can see

a way to love life

again. It’s ok, there’s

no difference between

flying and thinking

you’re flying until

you land. Somehow

I own like six nail clippers

and I honestly can’t

remember ever buying

even one. My sister

came to visit and

saw them in a small

wooden bowl. I

heard her laughing in

the bathroom. I hope

she never dies. There’s

no harm in hoping

until you land.

The deer are awake.

Is one pregnant?

If they kept diaries

the first entry would

read: Was born

Was licked

Tried walking

Then they’d walk

away and no second

entry would ever exist.

I run the deer’s

archive. It’s very

light work. Visitors

must surrender

their belongings.

Surrender to me

your beautiful shirt.

I have come to love slender poems, such as this, where every line threatens to break, and often does, as soon as only two or three feet have been taken. As a reader looking for pleasure first of all, I have to admire the deftness and confidence with which Christie slices her lines so short. As a more critically minded reader, or rather a reader on his first or fifth or fiftieth return, what delights me is the high concentration (how sweet and tart) of additional or alternative meanings which, it seems to me, could not have been brought about by any means other than a line break, nor (ipso facto) by any art other than poetry — with its characteristic tension between sight and sound. I can’t imagine a serious person end-stopping while reading this aloud, but then I cringe, generally, at readers who leave a pious pause at the end of every line, who don’t seem to have developed the simple, necessary dexterity of holding onto the syntax of a clause or sentence while it skips from step to step down a poem. I do think that uniform, syntax-cleaving end-stopping can work, but it really depends on the poem. Philip Larkin, who didn’t quite contend that poems should never be read aloud, felt that so much is lost when you hear a poem without being able to see it on the page. It’s hard to disagree.³

An example, and then several more. The very first line of this poem is, given the poem's overall tone, a wry little joke, a benevolent gotcha: ‘In the morning I drink’. It’s curious — although it does make a certain euphemistic sense — that the standalone English construction ‘I drink’, wherein drink is (as yet) an intransitive verb, only ever means ‘I drink alcohol’, and, in fact, quite often means 'I have something of a drinking problem'. The poem thus opens with an apparently troubling admission that the speaker drinks alcohol in the morning. Of course, this is speedily dispelled by the object (‘coffee’) ’round the corner, and I don't think we are to worry too much about the speaker's habits; but, if you were hearing this poem read aloud, you wouldn’t even notice that it had begun with an altogether different order of admission. (Unless, of course, the reader had left a pause or dropped a wink between drink and coffee — which I suppose would be a legitimate way to read it, if not the choice I would make.)

It’s kind of an open secret in poetry, modern poetry in particular, that we can do an awful lot with line breaks as far as the creation or suggestion of meaning. They’re almost a bone thrown to interpreters on the prowl for fruitful ambiguity. If you’re struggling to make something of a poem, look to the breaks, see if you might turn one phrase into two: the more potentially contradictory, the better. (Well.) And if you look down the length of this poem, you can see that almost every line does some version of this, of making two by splitting one, of birthing-by-severance. ‘I drink / coffee until I can see’ is distinct, syntactically and semantically, from ‘I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life’, which in turn is distinct from ‘I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life / again’. ‘It’s ok, there’s / no difference between / flying and thinking’ is distinct from ‘It’s ok, there’s / no difference between / flying and thinking / you’re flying’, which, again — you get it. I don’t at all mean to suggest that this is some kind of trick or crutch on the poet’s part. This is the very stuff of poetry, and Christle does it better than anyone. ‘All poetry is fragment’, Heather McHugh has written: ‘it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn’.⁴ Line breaks, of course, are not the only kind of breakage, or the only kind of turn, but they are perhaps paramount.

Is there really no difference between / flying and thinking / you’re flying until / you land? Flying and landing are two parts of a binary here, and it’s not clear which one is the better state to be in. Flying could be all things good — success, confidence, alertness, productivity, unbounded vision — and landing could be, in turn, stagnancy, depression, anxiety. Death. Andrew Solomon has written about the curiously ad hoc or ad lib nature of effective treatments for depression which, if you are lucky, can demonstrate that there is indeed no difference between flying and thinking you’re flying (italics mine):

If you have cancer and try an exotic treatment and think you are better, you may well be wrong. If you have depression and try an exotic treatment and think you are better, then you are better. Depression is a disease of thought process and emotions, and if something changes your thought processes and emotions in the correct direction, that qualifies as recovery. Frankly, I think that the best treatment for depression is belief, which is in itself far more essential than what you believe in. If you really truly believe that you can relieve your depression by standing on your head and spitting nickels for an hour every afternoon, it is likely that this incommodious activity will do you tremendous good.⁵

Landing isn’t necessarily cognate with depression, and flying might not be depression's opposite (whatever the fuck that is). There’s scarce little in the poem to hang this on. It could, indeed, be inverted: flying, perhaps, is being adrift, unanchored, solitary, powerless, ethereal, directionless, unsafe. And landing everything other, or opposite. But whichever side flying takes, at least what it has over landing is that the mind might have the power to make it real even if you never leave the ground.

The most beautiful break in this poem is one of the most beautiful I have ever encountered. Again, it involves an initially intransitive verb which immediately then takes on an object. Without a subject it is, perhaps, already poignant: ‘I hope’. But then — but then! — ‘I hope she / never dies’. This thought⁶ is prompted, clearly enough, by the sound of her sister’s laughter, and it is at once surprising and inevitable. 'I hope / she never dies' sounds to me like a blissful sigh — that loveliest of oxymora. It’s an impossible hope, obviously, at least in one sense. But it is neither absurd nor unwarranted. It is exactly what we think, I think, when we hear the laughter of those we love.

‘There’s / no harm in hoping / until you land’, after all, in which case flying is living and landing is death. There are, however, two different ways of reading this. One: there’s no harm in hoping until you land — but thereafter there is harm in hoping. Or two: everything is over when you land anyway, so why not hope for the duration of the flight. Hoping doesn’t have to be desperate or brave or reckless or last-ditch: it can be mild, or curious, or idle, or wistful.

Both because I don’t have the energy and can’t bear to leave too much unaddressed, I will just append a few more or less unordered observations about the poem after it turns from sisters and nail clippers to deer. It evokes something of the speedy maturation of many animals, I think — I have kittens in mind — that the imagined diary of the deer is abandoned so quickly. The first two entries are passive, objectless ('Was born / Was licked') and, once the active voice, although still somewhat objectless (‘Tried walking’), has taken hold, the deer is off on its independent way. The singular deer is representative: ‘no second / entry would ever exist’, not for any deer.

And then the tremendous good joke of maintaining an archive for the single-entry journal of a single (note the apostrophe’s position) deer. I don’t know what to make of it. It is a wordless bubble of joy in my heart. And then, sweet Jesus, the end. ‘Surrender to me’, first of all. But not your self: only ‘[s]urrender to me / your beautiful shirt’. I have nothing to say about this. Is there some strange echo of ‘render unto Caesar’? Maybe. Probably not. This poem is so fucking good.

[edit — or I Guess Rather Addendum]: I forgot to mention the title! And the nail clippers! The clippers feel to me almost like a stand-up bit, a minor observation that seems universal as soon as it’s been said. I too can’t remember ever buying nail clippers, although I probably own more like two or three instead of six. But what I also love about this detail, this image, is that all the clippers have been grouped together in a bowl. It sounds as though the speaker, tidying her bathroom ahead of a visit from her sister, unearthed all six, realised there was no point throwing any of them out — some clippers are sharper or perhaps less rusted than others, some are for children, some are for cats, but they’re all basically the same, so why would you single out one or two to be kept or displayed if you had six? — and dumped them all into the same bowl. It’s both an understandable thing to have done and something which, if I noticed it in a friend’s or a relative’s bathroom, I would almost certainly laugh at. 

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¹ Oddly enough, for me, a couple of months after I wrote this post, I was flicking through Alexander Nehemas's On Friendship, a book I've owned for a good year or so. The jacket design is credited to somebody whose name I was sure I recognised — and yes, I was right: it is Nicole Caputo. It's a different publisher, and you wouldn't assume that the person who designed The Crying Book also designed On Friendship, which, you can see, features a thematically appropriate visual pun: a pair of pears, one resting its head(?) on the other's shoulder(?).

² Since writing this post, I have bought another of Christle's collections: The Trees, The Trees, which will be published in the UK in October 2019 and which you can pre-order here. Je suis, as the French say, excited.

³ Especially if you look at the fuller (and dispiritingly gendered) expression of his attitude towards ‘spoken poetry’. From the New Statesman, 02 February 1962 (hmm: that date is both Joyce’s 80^th birthday and the 40^th anniversary of the full publication of Ulysses, which, you know — anyway):

The question remains, though: is spoken poetry — poems read by their authors in a way that lets us listen to them without distraction — a good thing? Is it better than reading? I still can’t believe it is. True, one actually hears the rough mouth-music of vowels and consonants and all that, but he is a poor reader who cannot imagine that for himself. It prohibits skipping, perhaps, but equally allows your mind to wander. And if the poem is unfamiliar, how much harder it is to grasp without its punctuation, stanza-shape, and knowing how far one is from the end! […]

Is spoken poetry a bad thing, then — a gimmick of the professor just back from America, a toy for the tired schoolteacher, a way of meeting girls? No, equally strongly. Though I remain convinced that the reader’s first encounter with the poem must be a silent, active one, an absorption of spelling and stanza-arrangement as much as paraphrasable meaning and corrective historical knowledge, there comes a moment with any poem we have really taken to ourselves when we want to hear its author read it. We want to confirm our conviction that he would quicken the pace here, throw away an irony there, or perhaps our curiosity is just for what his voice can add, something we cannot define until we hear it. Well, for such ages as succeed our own this will be possible in the case of poets writing after 1930, and knowledge of them will be richer in consequence.

⁴ Heather McHugh, ‘Broken English: What We Make of Fragments’, in Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 75. I was first made aware of McHugh, and of this quotation in particular, by a lecture given by Sarah Howe while she was at Harvard. See 4.59 in the video.

⁵ Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 137.

⁶ [Originally, I had the following all inside two parenthetical dashes; my inner editor knew it had to move or go, but I couldn't be sure where to put it and still wanted to preserve it] And it seems to me a thought: it sounds to me like exactly the kind of thing Christle might well have thought, in a flash, while her sister was visiting; without wanting to fawn over origins too much, or believe too strongly in my own supposing, I can imagine that this very real moment could have been the poem's first pulse or throb for Christle, one of those incidents of overhearing or sidelong seeing by which you know, suddenly, haply, that a poem has just been born.

'Tulips' by Sylvia Plath

I’ve been reading quite a lot of Plath recently: a sentence everybody should be capable of saying with honesty all the time. Specifically, the earlyish Journals (slowly and with much unfolding pleasure) and Ariel. I’ve read most of Ariel before but not for some time, and there are plenty of poems of which I find I hadn’t carried much from then to here and now — to this current embarkation. But forgetting is a welcome slippage if it allows us to discover as if anew.¹

My current favourite is ‘Tulips’. It’s a relatively long poem that does you the favour of being clear and even straightforward at first blush and then flatters you by giving out so much more at every return. It is as inexhaustible as it is sodden with utter exhaustion. I’m not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive reading (not that I've ever managed to do that of anything) because it would take forever; all I’ll do here really is appreciate it: for poetry isn’t going to appreciate itself.

Partly what excuses me from being thorough is that others have come before me: ‘Tulips’ is probably better known than ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, another of Plath’s poems which I wrote about fairly recently. There is a blog whose title is taken directly from this poem, and whose author has done an excellent overview already. An excerpt:

The white that seeps through the poem, the narrator seeming almost ‘snowed-in’ not only in the hospital (physically unable to leave due to her illness and the weather) but also in her own dreamlike perception of reality, suggests that the narrator is trying to escape from herself. She seems to want to rid herself of identity (‘I am nobody’) and leave behind the burden of family life.

This is very good: long-leashed but nicely poised, never breaking away from the poem and careful to keep referring back to it, unafraid of profundity and yet cautious of overstating it. That this was written by an A-Level student (in 2014, I think) is damn impressive, although that shouldn’t distract from the quality per se.

‘Tulips’ has an ambiguity halfway across its first line, just before its first caesura: viz., ‘excitable’. Ordinarily, it would mean something like ‘capable of, or liable to, being excited’ — but, in Plath’s usage, it seems to also mean ‘capable of causing excitement’. The speaker resents the tulips for making her excited, and for being themselves excited. Very subtly, then, the presumably vivid-in-colour tulips are introduced with an image that gives them a gaudy-giddy vitality, already a threat to the speaker’s desire for (or commitment to) whiteness, placidity, even death. They are out of place and out of season, an unwanted, unwarranted burst of spring in this ‘winter’ both worldly and personal. I use too many adjectives. 

The speaker’s ‘learning peacefulness’ presages the pun in ‘Stupid pupil’, a delicate oxymoron that equates stupidity with inveterate attentiveness while chastising the speaker for being almost too good a student of peacefulness. She is, paradoxically, such a good ‘[s]tupid pupil’ that she ‘has to take everything in’ when learning, even everything about peacefulness: she thereby contravenes her own goal of fading away and shutting out the world. If we assume, reasonably, a likeness (however rough) between Plath and her speaker, it seems also that the speaker compromises herself by being too good a poet, unable not to notice and assess the details of her surroundings. In considering its subject matter and expressed desires, the poem’s very existence is paradoxical, since, simply, it is not nothing. You cannot write nothing; you also cannot, as much as you might want to, ‘write upon nothing’.² A pen does not work on the air.

There is far too much in the poem to keep going on like this. I will, however, take a look at the phrase that is also now the title of the blog mentioned above: ‘I didn’t want any flowers’. It begins both the fifth stanza and the twenty-fifth line overall — is thus practically the dead centre of this forty-nine-line seven-stanza poem. Clearly, the speaker did not wish to play the patient’s part in the hospital custom of sending in flowers and arranging them by the bed, as though to domesticate and prettify the space under occupation by the sick. What’s not clear, however, is how and to whom the sentiment is addressed. It could be a purely internal thought, an angry, exasperated sigh over the presence of the flowers. Or it could be something she has said to the nurses or to the people responsible for the flowers: the implication being that she was clear she didn’t want flowers before the flowers arrived, or else that she wished she had made it clear (it is, possibly, but not necessarily, ‘[I said] I didn’t want any flowers’). To marry both possibilities, the phrase could still be an internal thought, one which she has wanted to direct to the nurses but which, for any number of reasons, she has been unable or afraid to say aloud.

Beyond their intrusive life and colour, the tulips are remindful of the outside world — where time still moves, even at the rate of the growth of flowers — and therefore of a piece with the admonitory smiles in the ‘family photo’ in lines 20–21, figured here as ‘little smiling hooks’ that would fish her out of the waters within which she wants to stay submerged, fling her on the quayside, and leave her gaping, gasping.

It's quite a poem.

---

¹ The idea of forgetting having read something always puts me in mind of Red Dwarf: Holly, the ship's onboard computer, bemoans that he (I think this was Norman Lovett's portrayal, not that the actor's face's gender means anything for the computer) has read everything in existence, and requests that any knowledge of Agatha Christie be removed from his memory so that he can read the stories again without knowing the outcome. I also think of Peep Show: Mark: 'Jez, are you reading Mr Nice again?' Jez: 'Yes, it's a great book. Plus I'm usually incredibly high when I read it, which makes it better, but also I've forgotten most of it, so it's like I'm reading it for the first time.' That's not the exact quote.

I sometimes wish I could forget ever having Peep Show the last dozen times, just so I can watch it for the first time again. The same with the The Simpsons: I would give up everything if it meant I could see The Simpsons for the first time again.

² Italicisation sic. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–103, p. 102. This quotation from Swift is used by David Markson as the epigraph for his lovely book This Is Not a Novel, one of a series of not-novels built almost entirely out of anecdotes about culture, literature, history, and the arts. Interestingly, the quotation is formatted by Markson as though it were taken from a poem — and with identical line-breakings in more than one edition, suggesting to me that this isn’t to do with the spacing of the page — but A Tale of a Tub is prose. I don’t really have a conclusion to draw from this.

'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' by Sylvia Plath

When I re-read The Rainbow I had thought I might discover, like a flower pressed between the pages, the dried remains of my younger self preserved within it. In the most literal sense I was there, the underlinings and annotations, made when we did the book at Oxford (i.e. when we read a load of dreary critical studies about it), were still there but in any kind of metaphorical sense — no, there was nothing, no traces of my earlier self, no memories released by the act of re-reading the same page that I had read years before one particular afternoon wherever and whenever that was.

——Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage ¹

The word I want to lift out of this over-quoted chunk of Geoff Dyer (ah, over-quoting, stalwart friend of undergraduates in thrall to their word-counts) is a little (and, in this form, palindromic) verb: did. This is for inconsequent personal reasons having only to do with an affection for a miniscule quirk of usage — in this case, the seemingly universal usage of do among students and academics when mentioning material currently under consideration. ‘For our seminar on contemporary literature, we did Bath and Bellow and Burgess and Borges.’ ‘Are we doing Woolf or Wilde next week?’ ‘Haven’t we already done Jane Eyre?’ ‘What Shakespeare did you do at school?’ And so on. In this context, do and did are somewhat synecdochical, in that they stand in for a number of different activities, or at least a combination of some of them: reading, highlighting, annotating, thinking about, being lectured about, discussing, quoting, writing about. Although in Dyer’s experience the verb was almost euphemistic, an obfuscation of what university-level study actually involves, it really is just a breezy shorthand. My own area of interest is in English departments, but I’m sure it’s used in much the same way by any cohort burdened with a reading list.

Anyway. When I cast an eye back over my own education (excessive, but not really impressive), I sometimes think about the authors and texts I did on more than one occasion: the poems and novels I read for two different classes, within two distinct academic contexts. There aren’t very many, and most are the hyper-canonical things that crop up everywhere, but a few stick out. I did Our Mutual Friend when I was an exchange student in the States, and then did it again a couple of years later back in the UK. I did Mrs Dalloway twice. Sort of. I did Othello for my GCSEs and my A-Levels. I did Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ at least twice. I did Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and Plath’s poem ‘The Applicant’ at least thrice, and all before I even got to university. (Academic summer camp, academic summer camp a year later, A-Levels.) I never did The Kenosha Kid.

These details don’t stir any special insights in me. I’ve always believed firmly that, ‘curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it’, and also that rereading generally makes the good books better and the bad ones worse. But it’s never quite so simple as good and bad, especially when reading a particular text out of obligation. I have no exceptional fondness for any of the above — I like Mrs Dalloway a whole lot, but it doesn’t really mean anything to me — except perhaps for Our Mutual Friend, which is a wonderful book. You might then expect that my second reading was richer than the first. But it wasn’t. I barely read a third of it the second time around, but that’s because I wasn’t really paying attention. The second reading took place at a difficult time: I was in a stressful living situation, and it felt like I was cresting the absolute limit of such intellectual or literary talents as I could have been said to have had.

Nowadays, the sheer length of Friend seems to dispel any notion of having another go anytime soon; but what is also discouraging is, as with Geoff Dyer’s mature returning to The Rainbow, an anxiety over what parts of my younger self, if any, still lie pressed between the pages. Dyer’s disappointment is in finding nothing of his own, but I feel that my own anxiety would be in finding too much. I’m not sure. Memories of reading — mine, anyway — contain a lot of loneliness. The past is equal parts remorse for what you did and melancholy for what you didn't get to do. The pain of peering back, rere regardant, seems to me expressed most perfectly by Philip Roth, of all people. In Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist is an aging licentious puppeteer who missed out on the big time, something of which his wife ‘delighted in reminding him back when she was still drinking herself to death for two unchallengeable reasons: because of all that had not happened and because of all that had.’ The inescapable circularity, the irreproachable adjective unchallengeable, which is almost admiring of the watertight logic: it’s both wickedly funny and quite devastating.

Again: anyway. The poem I want to write about here is one of Sylvia Plath’s. As I said above, I read bits of Plath for school but, for no particular reason, I never did her at university. By the time I’d arrived, my experiences with Plath had been variegated enough to the point that I liked her a lot but never thought of her as a favourite. I would have been happy to see her on a reading list. But, as things turned out, the only Plath I encountered head-on was during my first ever exam, a selection of hitherto unseen poems and excerpts from which we were to choose and about which we were to write — anything. The poem I chose was ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’. What an incidental delight, the chance to enjoy a new poem for the first fifteen minutes of an exam, before picking up your pen.

Ahem:

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, not seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally, some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,

Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

The long wait for the angel.

For that rare, random descent.

         
There’s a recording of Plath reading this poem in her extraordinary, chasmic, consonant-clamping voice. Plath is one of my favourite readers of verse on record, and I love how deftly she handles her own line-slipping syntax.

It’s possible I still have the script from my exam lying around somewhere, I’m disinclined to hunt for it, but what I remember is that I took the poem as offering a conceit of poetic or artistic inspiration — more specifically, the frustration of waiting and watching for it during a somewhat dry period. Reading the poem some years later, it’s moderately gratifying to see that there’s a lot in the text to support such an angle, whether or not it wholly works as an overarching interpretation. I’ve never been too keen on creating that kind of plain-English interpretation, as if it were really possible to paraphrase a poem without losing almost everything — I’ve tended to prefer instead to focus on details, and on points of form and aesthetic (imagery, ambiguity, syntax, phonetics, punctuation), in the hope of thereby teasing out wider concerns.

This poem, however, is actually quite intelligible: its setting is clear, its argument stated with hardly any obfuscation, its imagery stark and invitingly visual. There are all sorts of subtleties, but what it describes or narrates could be fairly trimmed down (to get started). The speaker notices a black rook shuffling on a twig. She (let’s say) knows not to expect this natural image to suddenly enflame an epiphany or inspiration, and she also knows not to project patterns onto random weather. The poem is, in part, a sort of melancholy reckoning of the pathetic fallacy. Although she does sometimes wish to find ready-made meanings in nature, she knows that this is rather a vain hope, and is able to console herself with the occasional flash of unexpected brilliance and beauty, as random as they might be. So still she walks about, keeping her eyes open, simultaneously aware that she cannot wilfully bring about these ‘[m]iracles’ and confident that they do happen.

The speaker is both a poet on the prowl for material and a person hoping for meaning, in a broad sense. The rook, despite being heralded by the title, is brief in its appearances: Plath does not focus on it, in fact avoids looking at it too closely or for too long — or, perhaps, she has stood waiting for it to become more than a simple thing to see and flare into numinosity. If one of nature’s faults is to be frugal and capricious with its miracles, then one of poetry’s is its need for form and compression: it’s not easy to decide, in this instance, how soon the qualification ‘I do not expect a miracle / Or an accident […]’ actually follows on from the opening image. Is it instantaneous, almost a self-reproach for having singled the rook out at all? Or is it a sigh released after a while spent standing and staring? Despite what anti-writing Wordsworthian cultists would have you believe, good poetry is almost never written on the move, and very rarely in the moment. Either way, the rook offers nothing and so the poem continues in spite of it. It is not quite a poem about not knowing what to write, or about staring out the window latching on the first thing you see; but it speaks to creativity and inspiration as being, to some degree, wilful, or willable. If nature's not forthcoming, a poet does not wait for sights to be set on fire (even if she says that’s what she’s doing). She can make poems out of what could be conceived of setting on fire: if it ‘can so shine’, it shine, for all intents and purposes.

Paradoxically, however, the rook on the stiff twig, despite its position as mere potential, despite the speaker’s avowed disappointment, is already symbolically complex. Its initial description suggests the poet herself, a single poem, the poetic process, and a person bent under the ravages of mental weather. It ‘hunches’ (a lovely verb, lovelier still, somehow, for coming after the subject and not before, and for initiating the trochaic line), drawn into itself with only itself for shelter, not making use of its wings, perhaps momentarily unable to use them because of the rain by which it is compelled to engage in a ceaseless task of ‘arranging and rearranging’, a phrasing which evokes the poet’s shuffling about the parts of a poem in order to make them fit better, as well as the nervous fidgeting of somebody experiencing anxiety — constant motion with no directional movement, excessive self-attention without self-care or -love. It’s as if Plath couldn’t but poeticise the bird even when merely pointing it out, or as if the bird was poetical all unto itself — or as if the word rook constitutes a whole piece of poetry. What if Plath had done nothing more than name the bird?

Rook.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident […]

Now that wouldn’t have done, of course. But wonder, first, how minor alterations can affect tone (‘Rook?’; ‘Rook!’; ‘Rook:’) and, second, what names per se can offer. Take the following, from the introductory section of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: ‘shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat […]’. . .

That was somewhat disingenuous of me. The Wallace above is not a neutral display of common names, but a list that draws its luxurious, sensuous effect from reeling off unusual (and, in several cases, kind of folksy) plant-names as if one could never exhaustively account for every separate species threading the Illinois landscape; and these names pretty much all contain or display more elements than rook. But the points I’m toeing towards have to do with what actually counts as ‘meaning’. On some level, a rook does not mean but be: the rook will go on with its rooky life whether it’s far from eyes in wordless flight or still and visible on the stiff twig up there. But it might mean something to a person, and it might mean something more to somebody interested in such things as birds, and it might mean something more still to the kind of poet who might think to put it in poem. Within such a poem, the name rook means something in itself, and suggests things that could be associated with it; ‘a wet black rook’ means more — and so on, up to a point.

I realise I might be parroting or parodying Nabokov — ‘reality is an infinite succession of steps’, ‘a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person’, blah² — but, whereas his emphasis is on the impossibility of accessing some kind of total meaning (‘You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing’), mine is on the possibility that the kind of ‘natural object[s]’ on Nabokov’s mind might actually offer the appropriate amount of meaning to different kinds of people. I mean: everybody invests different amounts in everything; the superabundance of individuable natural objects, like the superabundance of poems, necessitates that we take more of some than of others, and sometimes that we leave those others wholly out.

All my talk of ‘meaning’ is, I’m sadly aware, rather vague. But then so is the poem. This is not a criticism. What would it mean to have such a ‘sight’ as a rook ‘set […] on fire / In my eye’? What kind of pattern or ‘design’ could one augur from weather, or the scattered fall of ‘spotted leaves’? What would the sky say if it were not ‘mute’ and were capable of ‘backtalk’? Plath’s speaker slyly admits that looking for ‘design’ was something she used to do and has since learned to resist (‘not seek anymore’): so she never found it, and is now sceptical that it can be uncovered. But what if she had? Would she have concluded anything more monumental than that nature was, apparently, not indifferent to her herself? And what would that have meant? We are pattern-seeking animals, and by Jove we will find a pattern, but we are also notoriously bad at drawing conclusions. I’m deliberately, perhaps obstinately, avoiding the question of God, largely because I’m not really interested in it. This poem is far more interesting than a wail for God. Nevertheless, I’m not sure Plath’s speaker knows what she would want. She is hesitant in her clauses (‘Although, I admit, I desire, / Occasionally’: count the commas, including the one I haven’t quoted), and she can’t quite, although ‘one might[,] say love’.

Perhaps as a way of compensating for ‘the unformed form of life’, the loose-bagginess of nature, Plath takes to the relative rigidity and artificiality of poetic form. ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, however, is somewhat coy about its own form, specifically its end-rhymes, as if it were ashamed of the contrivances necessary for it to have been built. But still, there is an unbroken pattern: the final syllable of every line in the first stanza chimes with the corresponding line in every successive stanza. There are scattered rhymes and half-rhymes, more consonance than assonance:

there […] fire […] desire […] chair […] honor […] flare […] fear […] occur

rook […] seek […] backtalk […] took […] walk […] rook [...] luck […] spasmodic

And so on. There is something so lovable about near-rhymes, as anybody who has enjoyed Wilfred Owen will know, and I suspect that Plath was taking a young poet’s pleasure in them here. The pattern is further obscured by the enjambment, which prevents the chiming words from being natural points for pause. As I love the half-rhymes, so do I love poems that rigidly rhyme without its being obvious when hearing them read aloud. Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’, for instance, which sticks out for me in this regard, or, to reach for a nearby book, Lowell’s poem ‘Beyond the Alps’, which opens his collection Life Studies. It seems to me one of the incidental triumphs of modern poetry — and perhaps even of nature — that it can hide its patterns so elegantly, in such plain sight.

This poem’s not all about making poems, and you needn’t be any stripe of artist to feel it fully. It is also about depression, quite plainly, about ‘[t]rekking stubborn through this season / Of fatigue’ — a phrase, nicely trochaic, which characterises depression as a mire of prolonged tiredness that is to be endured with a determination that it will pass and a willingness to appreciate moments of joy and light. Plath focuses especially on those unexpected concentrations of light, figuring them as betokening a kind of celestial lightning bolt or angelic condescension, a ‘rare, random descent’. The light may not lift us out, but it will afford us ‘brief respite’.

 It does nevertheless help to be a poet: to have recourse to a space where you can gather all these ‘spasmodic / Tricks of radiance’ and therefrom ‘[p]atch together a content // of sorts’. The word content was, on my initial rereadings, the part of the poem that I struggled with most, in the sense that it just didn’t sound right to my ear. I wasn’t sure whether its usage is meant to evoke the ambiguity of its definitions, i.e., the adjectival form describing satisfaction or contentment along with the noun describing a subject to be expressed by art — it would be quite clumsy if so. Now, however, I’m either sure it’s my own silly linguistical brain at fault or sure it doesn’t matter. Content could easily be substituted by poem, and it was prudent to go for the more inclusive term. A ‘content’, despite the demurring, deprecating tone of 'patch' and 'of sorts', which imply a slapdash though effortful (re-)arranging, is a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts whole cohesive thing, a perfectly appointed tableau or a dense rich stew, one mixed steadily of light cupped in hands and thrown into the pot.

---

¹ (London: Abacus, 2008), p. 161.
² Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 9.

Nor It the Nothing Never Is

I was on holiday recently, and, as I was picking my way through the books I'd brought with me, I re-encountered a wonderful little thing I hadn't looked at for at least five years. It was a three-page story (or a three-page piece) by Donald Barthelme, one of those included in his career-spanning collection Sixty Stories. I don't know Barthelme very well, but Sixty Stories is one of the most rewarding selections of short prose I've ever seen or heard of, and I'm thinking now that it might be a worthy contender for a go-to holiday book: it's light, compact, beautifully designed (in my Penguin Modern Classics iteration at least), and promises delight on every page. It's always an uncanny sort of pleasure to recognise a source of influence for writers you already know well, or, if not quite influence, a concentration of much that you've loved in others. I read Gravity's Rainbow after I'd read Midnight's Children, and I remember well the strange suspicion that the best of Rushdie's book had been lifted almost wholesale from Pynchon's.¹ Reading Barthelme now, he shines as a true hero of doggedly comic writers; every page calls to my mind David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, John Barth, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Rushdie, Pynchon, B. S. Johnson, James Thurber, Vonnegut, Heller, bits of Burgess and Borges and Bellow, O. Henry, Nabokov, Beckett, even Joyce. This is a partial and imperfect list, obviously, but what also matters to me is that these are not just great comic writers but writers of impeccable prose—some of the doyens, in my experience, of sentence-craft. You can get sick on prose like Barthelme's and Nick Baker's (who often writes better sentences than Martin Amis, I feel), but it's also a reliable source of uncut, moment-by-moment joy.

As an undergrad, I was assigned a handful of bits from Sixty Stories for a seminar on contemporary literature, but I remember that I missed the class. I had, however, done the reading, had enjoyed the reading, and the piece that most beguiled me back then was the one I turned to on holiday. Its title is 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account', and it was first published (surprise surprise) in the New Yorker. Barthelme himself has been recording reading it.

'Nothing', like the poems by Emily Berry and Oli Hazzard that I discussed in a previous post, is a virtuosic piece of list-making. Unlike those poems, which are laid out in sparse, regular forms, Barthelme holds the freer reins of prose.

It's not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran, nor is it the large, reddish farm animal eating the bran from the bucket, the man who placed the bran in the bucket, his wife, or the raisin-faced banker who's about the foreclose on the farm. None of these is nothing. A damselfish is not nothing, it's a fish, a Pomacentrus, it likes warm water, coral reefs—perhaps even itself, for all we know. Nothing is not a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh.

You get the idea. Here's some more:

Nor is it snuff. Hurry. There is not much time, and we must complete, or at least attempt to complete, the list. Nothing is not a tongue depressor; splendid, hurry on. Not a tongue depressor on which a distinguished artist has painted part of a nose, part of a mouth, a serious, unsmiling eye. Good, we got that in. Hurry on. We are persuaded that nothing is not the yellow panties. The yellow panties edged with white on the floor under the black chair. And it's not the floor or the black chair or the two naked lovers standing up in the white-sheeted bed having a pillow fight during the course of which the male partner will, unseen by his beloved, load his pillowcase with a copy of Webster's Third International. We are nervous. There is not much time.

More:

It's not the ice cubes disappearing in the warmth of our whiskey nor is it the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured nor is it the workers who, while reading the Bible and local newspaper and Rilke, are sentiently sipping the product through eighteen-foot-long, almost invisible nylon straws.
         And it's not a motor hotel in Dib (where the mudmen live) and it's not the pain or pain or the mustard we spread on the pain or the mustard plaster we spread on the pain, fee simple, the roar of fireflies mating, or meat.

Reading the whole short thing is truly exhilarating, vertiginous. The prose is breathless in places (parts make me think of Hopkins's 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo', a poem Richard Burton once recorded at an appropriately fast pace), but also expertly controlled. It's not a loose firehose but a tightly twiddled valve. The piece contains a consideration, or a refutation, of some concepts of nothingness, but I don't love it for its philosophical sophistication (which I'm not really equipped to judge, anyway). I love it because it's one of the most purely celebratory things I've ever encountered; in its passion for life and language, it's as stirring as the close-out of Ulysses. You know: 'and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arm around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes'.

Heidegger is far too grand for us; we applaud his daring but are ourselves performing a homelier task, making a list. Our list can in principle never be completed, even if we summon friends or armies to help out (nothing is not an army nor is it an army's history, weapons, morale, doctrines, victories, or defeats—there, that's done). And even if we were able, with much labor, to exhaust the possibilities, get it all inscribed, name everything nothing is not, down to the last rogue atom, the one that rolled behind the door, and had thoughtfully included ourselves, the makers of the list, on the list—the list itself would remain. Who's got a match?

*

If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would encourage students to make their own versions of 'Nothing', not for any significant assignment but as perhaps a fortnightly exercise, a couple of pages of not-nothings at a time—although foregoing the explicit discussions of philosophical and scientific concepts of nothingness. Imitating lists is an easy way to get yourself writing, and this list is the most germane one I can think of. Everything is permitted, first of all, but every aspect of everything is permitted: nothing is not the gin bottle on your desk, nor is it the secret beauty of barcodes, nor is it the history of serif script, nor is it the drop sliding like a tear down the inside of the neck, nor is it the double-thump heaviness of the name L O N D O N, nor is it the comfort of being dry. The goal is not to describe every inch of a space as you might in a New Novel, but rather to pluck one thing, pick a few of its petals, and move on. In Barthelme's story, each apparently new not-nothing begets a small family of not-nothings, all related along various lines. There are small enclosed narratives ('bran in the bucket', 'the large, reddish farm animal', 'the man', 'his wife', 'the raisin-faced banker'); back-pedalled chains of production ('the ice cubes', the 'warmth of our whiskey', 'the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured [....]'); and links of linguistic closeness ('a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh'). There is also, however, plenty of fancy and invention, moments where imagination creates the next step:

I am sorry to say that it is not Athos, Porthos, or Aramis, or anything that ever happened to them or anything that may yet happen to them if, for example, an Exxon tank truck exceeding the speed limit outside of Yuma, Arizona, runs over a gila monster which is then reincarnated as Dumas père. 

So the prompt or brief for aping Barthelme might read something like this: Write your own version of Barthelme's 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account'. First, find or imagine something that is not nothing. Then, name some other things that bear some proximity to the first—such as in terms of colour, shape, category, linguistics, opposition, inversion, physical closeness, or anything else. Try not to spend too long in any one rabbit hole, and don't be afraid, every now and then, to randomise. Vary your sentence structures; try to find a few different ways to introduce or declare what is not nothing. Experiment with syntax, imagery, and metaphor. Aim for some kind of cohesion, but not at all costs.

An example: Nothing is not why cavemen painted on walls, nor was it to be found anywhere in their favourite natural pigments. It is not the mental roadblock of trying to imagine a colour you have never seen. It is not, fortunately, your late grandfather's favourite watercolour, and not the square of papered wall where it was once hung and where now, presumably (you can't, I know, remember damnit which room it was), there hangs another, another's. "The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, / so what's there to be faithful to?" Is it that fine question, read aloud? It is not. Nor is it saying, more than once and with feeling, I am faithful to you, darling, whether or not you say it to the paint.²

Now that's not great, and it probably reads as confusing and obscure. But it was quick to write and, as I see it, the point of this hypothetical creative writing assignment is not to produce something proud and polished but to get you thinking and writing. It could, as I've suggested, be a genre of diary-keeping; you could use it as a way of revisiting and repackaging your day or your week. It might, for some, turn out to be a useful therapeutic tool, a kind of affirmation-by-negation that every bad part of your day, even the taste of your own tears, was nothing if not not nothing.³

Put it on the list. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely, and that the task will always remain before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.

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¹ This is grossly unfair . . . It was the simple chronological uncanny of reading second what I knew had come first, and thereby having an altered sense of their connections. I'm very fond of Rushdie, if not actively so. Midnight's Children was a very important book for me: I read it during my transitional period between adolescent and adult reading, and it was possibly the very first book that opened my eyes to the possibilities both of the novel and of prose per se. On a very local level, Midnight's Children makes use of a simple linguistic device that I absolutely love, namely, writing out lists with no commas. As on the second page: 'such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours'. Like Barthelme's story, it is exhilarating, pulse-quickening; it has a peculiar urgency, as if the importance of getting everything in as quickly as possible trumps one of the basic tenets of punctuation.

I'm also amazed by how rare it is. You'll see it in some form in poetry, but rarely as a twist within what is otherwise conventional prose. I've only seen it in one other novel (although I have a possibly false memory of seeing it in some of Whitman's prose), Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Which (and this is a pointless story, but obviously I've teed up the telling of it) Rushdie mentioned as one of his favourite novels, and one he had been recently rereading, when I saw him give a talk a couple of years ago. I queued up to have him sign my copies of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, and, while I waited, I thought about asking him about this very device. But he had so many books to sign that I knew I couldn't, and I still probably took too long to tell him how pleased I was that he mentioned Humboldt's Gift, which is also one of my favourites. He didn't even have time to notice and admire any of the hopelessly earnest notes and annotations my teenage self had scribbled in his books.

To sum up: I love Rushdie, and he has been very important to me, but Pynchon is probably better.

² There are verbatim quotations in this passage from Richard Siken's poem 'The Way the Light Reflects', which has appeared in B O D Y (among other places), April 28 2014.

³ There is a risk that you will find yourself piling up negatives in a cloying fashion. There is a risk of ending up with something that resembles Martin Amis's uncharitable parodies, in his memoir Experience, of Beckett's prose: 'At a dinner, having been irked by Salman Rushdie’s professed admiration for Beckett, he lays down a challenge:

‘Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t. […] Well I’ll do it for you. All you need is maximum ugliness and a lot of negatives. “Nor it the nothing never is.” “Neither nowhere the nothing is not.” “Nothing the never—”’.

'Some Fears' by Emily Berry

Discovering poets is rather more difficult than discovering songwriters.¹ It seems that way at least, and a few reasons suggest themselves: poetry is less well populated than music; it's not so easy to gain unfettered access to the whole output of a contemporary poet without buying an actual book (there are no poetry streaming services, not really); poetry takes longer to digest and often hits hardest when you're not reading or hearing but recalling it. It's hard to read poetry on a long drive, for the most part. Different poetry suits particular moods, sure, but we don't put together party poetry playlists to share with friends.

What I find most persuasive, however, is the possibility that human voices in themselves are more reliably compelling than utterances, that it is easier to find a voice we immediately like than it is a verbal arrangement. I'm half in love with the voices not only of those I love but everybody I meet, and in fact I love most of what they have to say; but I don't usually want to see them slow down for poetry. Inarticulacy is so often more stirring than clipped and rounded words. Words are not deeds. A kiss is not a poem.

This isn't to say that a good poem is hard to find. But to snag a whole living breathing poet takes at least a little enterprise, and perhaps some patience and serendipity too. Emily Berry, the poet whose poem I feel like discussing, was given to me as an incidental gift. She's the first in the first volume of the revived Penguin Modern Poets series, which I received not long ago included, possibly as an afterthought, inside a book-stuffed tote bag. From that first selection I graduated to her debut book, Dear Boy, which I've been reading carefully yet unsystematically. As far as I can tell, Berry is a very funny poet capable of great delicacy and opportune poignancy.

Here's the whole of a really good one entitled 'Some Fears':

Fear of breezes; fear of quarrels at night-time; fear of wreckage;
fear of one's reflection in spoons; fear of children's footsteps;
fear of the theory behind architecture; fear of boldness; fear of
catching anxiousness from dogs; fear of ragged-right margins;
fear of exposure after pruning back ivy; fear of bridges; fear of
pure mathematics; fear of cats expressing devotion; fear of
proximity to self-belief; fear of damp tree trunks; fear of
unfamiliar elbows (all elbows being unfamiliar, even one's own);
fear of colour leaking from vegetables; fear of the mechanics of
love affairs; fear of slipping; fear of ill-conceived typography;
fear of non-specific impact leading to the vertical ejection of the
spine from the body; fear of leaf mulch; fear of the timbre of
poetry recitals; fear of balcony furniture; fear of colour leaking
from the heart; fear of internal avalanche; fear of the notion of
a key engaging with the inside of a lock; fear of psychoanalytical
interpretations; fear of dregs; fear of book titles; fear of particular
hues of sky glimpsed from areoplane windows; fear of text
stamped into metals; fear of promises; fear of alieantion brought
on by hospitality; fear of unexplained light; fear of comprehesive
write-off; fear of fear; fear of help. Fear of asking for, receiving,
refusing, giving, or being denied help. 

Berry hasn't made the full text of 'Some Fears' available online, but she has been recorded reading it for Faber's official YouTube channel.

Although the poem trades in idiosyncrasy, reading at times like Barthes's catalogue of likes and dislikes, it is not a simple list of personalised paranoia. The title alone tells us that these fears are unattributed. They are not my or your or our fears—tellingly, the only possessive pronoun in this list is the generic one's—and they are thus, all at once, real, documented, imaginary, hypothetical, inverted, ironised, knowingly ludicrous, deathly serious. We don't know, that is to say, whether the poet has known these fears, heard about them, read about them, invented them out of nowhere or adapted them from something else. This makes each entry wonderfully protean, in that it will be encountered and considered differently by whoever the reader happens to be. In fact, despite the apparent hyper-specificity, most if not all of these fears are ambiguous. Is it a fear of having 'quarrels at night-time', or hearing them? Is it a fear of one's own boldness, or others'? The 'mechanics of [one's own] love affairs', or others'? (Or those at work in fiction?) Bridges of the real or metaphorical variety? Making, breaking, or keeping promises? Should we probe the figurative significance behind 'children's footsteps' or 'exposure after pruning back ivy', or should we delight in literalness?

Apart from the fruitful ambiguity of the referent, however, what has come to seem more important about this poem is that is not, in fact, a list of things to fear: it is, quite specifically,—I pause to apologise for the perhaps irritating but probably necessary upcoming italics—a list of fears. Now, this may be very fucking obvious, given the title and the identical 'fear of ...' construction hedged by semicolons, or else it may be no distinction at all. But it seemed an important step in my encounters with this poem: to recognise that these were not, as I've said, things—things of which it would be, variously, understandable or wise or embarrassing or debilitating to have a fear—but rather self-contained concepts or conditions. It's clearly no accident that the construction 'fear of ...' matches the customary form for defining phobias—or, as you might prefer to call them, irrational fears. The first thing we all know about phobias is that they can be astonishingly specific, occasionally to the point of almost poetic archness; and the second thing is that they all seem to have been ascribed an unwieldy Greek word. Limnophobia. Lachanaphobia. Metrophobia. There are websites dedicated to collecting and curating named phobias, but they tend to be far more interested in the pleasures of strange or ornate words than they are in the lived experience of phobias themselves.²

The poem, meanwhile, implicitly reflects on the nature and occasion of fear, even though it says nothing explicit about what fear is, what it feels like, who feels it, when it arrives, or anything else. It suggests that fear is indeed everywhere, and everything has the power to provoke fear. By itself, the list takes a sympathetic view on the multiplicity of modern anxiety, a word that seems to be shimmering, obscured, behind this poem. We now understand that some people 'have anxiety', that generalised anxiety disorders can live in people, precipitating any kind of irrational fear that it might be possible to imagine. I don't think the poem is exclusively about what we diagnose as anxiety disorders, nor do I think it has the gall to suggest that all fear is the same. But I do think it hopes, in part, to acknowledge that the defining feature of 'anxiety'—which is to say, its irrationality—has little effect on the force of fear. The poem never specifies anxiety, and it even slyly uses the word anxiousness instead. Each entry, however, implies a level somewhere between practical fear (or fear in the face of something) and almost abstract or armchair anxiety (fear, that is, in the thought of something).

One of the most frequent complaints about contemporary discourse surrounding mental health is that there are now far too many bogus 'conditions' or 'disorders', that the current edition of the DSM is grossly overstuffed. Martin Amis was exemplary on the very first page of his novel The Pregnant Widow: 'When [Keith Nearing, the novel's protagonist] was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid, or crazy. But now (now he was old) the stupid and the crazy were given special names for what ailed them.' This is mean-spirited, and any irony you might be able to coax out will be distinctly toothless. The sentiment, however, reflects the power of naming: Amis implies that not everything deserves a name, that the apparent legitimacy achieved by having a name for what ails you belies a signifier signifying nothing, or else overcomplicates—medicalises, pathologises—something that is, in point of fact, rather simple. From the same novel: 'I recognise that one, he would say to himself: otherwise known as Little Shit Syndrome. And I also recognise that one: otherwise known as Lazy Bastard Disorder. These disorders and syndromes, he was pretty sure, were just excuses for mothers and fathers to dope their children.' 

Berry's poem, conversely, suggests that there might not be enough names, or that we could easily do with a few more entries on our phobia listings. But she does this, funnily enough, without suggesting any names. It is of piece with Oli Hazzard's poem 'The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something', a list of unanchored definitions: such as 

The act of mentally undressing someone
One who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge
A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot
The act of beating or whipping schoolchildren
The categorisation of something that is useless or trivial 

According to the notes in the back of Hazzard's first collection, Between Two Windows, this is a found poem, assembled from this list of 'Unusual Words'. (The title itself comes from this list, the word being lethologica). These are not, then, definitions without corresponding extant words, but the words are so obscure (the only ones in the list I've ever seen before are floccinaucinihilipilification and defenestrate) that they themselves are dead—little more than mere curios. I don't mean to say that the words aren't interesting, but I think the specificity of the definitions is the more interesting part of the equation. Like Berry, Hazzard seems concerned with the extent to which the world is divisible. He also shows an affection for the dictionary definition as a form or genre of literature, one that lives and dies by how exacting (or otherwise vague) it turns out. There is no possibility of a definitive definition, after all, or a perfectly condensed one.

As a new whole thing, this found poem represents an abridgment and a rearrangement of the definitions into an order less apparent than the original one, which is, naturally, alphabetical. It is this shuffling and shifting of order and of context which makes the poem. The original list might not be a poem, but the poet's eye sees its potential and transforms it into something new while keeping it the same. It reminds me of another found poem, the class list Humbert Humbert finds in Lolita.

But I also think that Hazzard demonstrates how lexical definitions are poems unto themselves. Prose poems, perhaps, or monostiches. Part of their attempt to arrive at precision involves clearing space for doubt. More attention should be paid to the poetical habits of definitions.

Martin Amis, again in The Pregnant Window, gives us an example. He's an OED man, after all (or a Concise Oxford man), like Hal Incandenza. Nothing but the best. Accept no substitute.

What a very compassionate book it is, the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Take, for example, the entry on neurosis. [Keith Nearing] ran his wife and read it to her.

'Now listen. A relatively mild mental illness, my love, not caused by organic disease. Here's an even better bit. Involving depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour, etc. — that et cetera's great — but not a radical loss of touch with reality. There. That's so understanding, don't you think?

'. . . Come to the house.'

Lexicographers are people too, and their skills, which must be literary as well as linguistic, are in constant struggle with the history of usage, the tides of change, and ambiguity. Some are more, or less, compassionate than others.

Together with Berry's, Hazzard's poem is also of a piece with The Meaning of Liff, that wondrous book put together by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in which unassuming place names are given appropriate definitions (or, rather, daffynitions). For example, Fraddam: (n.) 'The small awkward-shaped piece of cheese which remains after grating a large regular-shaped piece of cheese and enables you to cut your fingers'. The process for Liff is markedly different, however: whereas the fears are nameless conditions, the 'meanings' in Liff have been retroactively supplied for a batch of preexisting names. You could draft a list of possible names for 'Some Fears', since we have the ready lexical formula suff + phobia, but these would have no place as part of the poem. It occurs to me that the poem is itself formulaic, and that anybody could construct their own version of 'Some Fears'. Not that it would be any good, but, again like Barthes's likes and dislikes, we could each concoct our own list of fears, either (again) real or invented. Berry's poem may not demonstrate that everything out there needs a name, but it does show that the world is infinitely divisible⁴—and, further, that each mind can draw the dividing lines differently.

There are several moments of wit here that jump out, some of them what you might call meta-tyopgraphical—'fear of ragged-right margins'; 'fear of ill-conceived typography'—and one of them what you might call juxtapositional: 'fear of the notion of/ a key engaging with the inside of a lock; fear of psychoanalytical/ interpretations'. There are also gestures towards serious personal pain which seem to build as the poem goes on: 'fear of colour leaking from the heart'; 'fear of internal avalanche'; 'fear of comprehensive write-off'; 'fear of fear; fear of help'. The entries nearer the end suggest a person afraid of, or to some degree anticipating, a serious mental breakdown: somebody who recognises anxiety (or 'fear') as a compounding force, in that it manifests in response to particular things but can grow into something all-consuming, something comprehensively debilitating. 

The final fear is also a need. With qualifications stacking up before the final word, the reader's instinct is to separate them with tiny pauses, so that 'help' sounds as if it stands alone as a disguised plea. 'Help' is also unique among this list in being followed first by a full stop and second by further detail: 'Fear of asking for, receiving, refusing, giving, or being denied help'. I don't know if I've ever read a more succinct encapsulation of the hell that is asking for help. Most people seem to think that asking for help is a good in itself, that a problem shared is a problem halved. But Berry shows us a couple of things. The contemplation of asking for help can inspire fear towards the realities of what it means to receive help, and can conjure imagined scenarios of being asked for help (and being unable or unwilling to provide it), and of finding there actually to be no help available. All this can happen in an instant. But she also shows that, in a sequence of events, the act of asking for help is not necessarily followed by relief, is not always a self-evident good. Fear begets fear, and help always comes too late. Help is a fantasy: comforting, solipsistic, scrupulously imagined, but rarely pursued. Help is other people, and that is fear enough.

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¹ I used to think so anyway. I wrote this post about a year and a half ago and now, having somewhat refined my research skills, it seems to me very easy to discover new poets I love. As with music, it depends on how generous your own tastes are, but all you need is a little effort and internet savvy and some money to spend on new collections (at best bought directly from presses or poets themselves if you can manage it, although I certainly don't live up to this). Some of the above paragraph is still true, but I would quibble with it now. (Why have I written this note literally nobody reads this blog. JC Jan 2018)

² The linked website carries a rather wonderful disclaimer on its homepage: 'Please don't ask me about curing phobias because I know little about them. My interest is in the names only.