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.
‘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.
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 80th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the full publication of Ulysses, which, you know — anyway):
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 80th birthday and the 40th 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.
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.
