The Poetry of Anticipation: On Edward Mullany’s Syntax

In her book The Art of Syntax (Graywolf Press, 2009), the poet Ellen Bryant Voight places special emphasis on a linguistic concept that she calls the “fundament,” which is the unsubordinated subject and predicate of a sentence. Whenever we read a sentence containing a subordinate clause, such as the one that you are currently reading, we instinctively look for the main noun-verb combo to ground us. That is, after all, the fundamental part of the sentence. Only when we arrive at that particular phrase can we be sure of the sentence’s primary meaning. “To say…that a sentence provides a complete thought,” writes Voight, “is actually to say it resolves the brain’s search for the fundament” (p. 6).

You might think of that search for the fundament as a source of tension in a sentence, one which the fundament itself will relieve. Many poems feature sentences which deliberately delay the fundament to exploit that tension, to place the reader in a state of anticipation that is only satisfied at the poet’s chosen moment.

This strategic delaying of the fundament shows up repeatedly in Edward Mullany’s collection of short poems, If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, 2011). Indeed, the ideas of anticipation and incompleteness runs through the book from beginning to end. The title not only suggests an upcoming demise, but also takes the form of a subordinate clause in search of a fundament. To scan the cover art from left-to-right involves moving over an expanse of empty, white space between the silhouettes, breaking the implied image into two discrete sections. A good number of poems feel like premises that lack conclusions, or even vice versa.

Mullany’s syntax is no different; his one sentence poems often delay the main clause until near the end for maximum impact. But what I find most compelling in Mullany’s syntax is how it wrings extra tension out of the fundament even after the reader has discovered it. I’ll look at two such poems to demonstrate.

The first poem is “Widowed,” which originally appeared in the now-defunct literary magazine Keyhole. The first three lines consist of a long abverbial phrase, a sure sign that the fundament is being delayed: “During the previews for a movie / that was playing on a weekday / afternoon in a mall in a small town” (lines 1-3). This clause does a lot to set the scene for the poem, giving us time and location as context for the main action. There’s a fair amount of branching syntax here as well, which slows down the pace: a relative clause, some prepositional phrases. The reader is ready to know what happened at these previews. They will find out, but in due time.

The next line introduces the first half of the fundament, the subject: “a man” (line 4). But the fundament has only been started, not completed, for the speaker inserts two relative clauses to expand on the subject: “who’d entered the theater / alone, and who’d been unsurprised / to find himself still alone” (lines 4-6). Because these relative clauses are in the past perfect, placing the actions they described at some point before the previews started, the reader is in some sense further from the main point of the sentence than they were just a few lines ago.

Just when the reader might be growing frustrated with the poem’s syntax, the speaker finishes off a line with what looks like the second half of the fundament, the main verb phrase: “got up” (line 6). The whole sentence up to this point is an elaborate way of saying, “The man got up.” We of course have the context which makes the poem more interesting than that. But those four words are the core of the thought.

Except, the predicate doesn’t end with “got up.” It’s not even the predicate’s only main verb phrase, because the next line coordinates it with a second: “and went out to the lobby” (line 7). If anything, “went out” is the dominant verb phrase of the sentence, because the poem immediately tacks on two more phrases parallel to it: “and out / through the front doors and out into / the bright light” (lines 7-9). In the same way that getting up is a prelude to the real action, the phrase “got up” proved to be a prelude to the “real” predicate.

The second poem I’ll consider, “The Not So Simple Truth,” goes a step further than “Widowed,” in that it delays not just the fundament of the sentence but the sentence itself. The first lines of this poem are a series of sentence fragments:

Potatoes. Dirt and
water. And a soft

towel left for us while
we shower. (1-4)

The reader is presented with a list of items, with no guarantee that a predicate will ever appear (although the “and” which starts the third fragment does suggest the list is concluding). The fact that this list will function as the subject of the poem’s one grammatical sentence only becomes apparent from the next two words: “These // things” (4-5).

Already we see how Mullany uses punctuation to delay delivering the subject. One could easily rewrite the sentence with more standard punctuation, for example with a colon: “Potatoes, dirt, water, and a soft towel left for us while we shower: these things…” It’s not necessarily elegant, but it is grammatical. Yet Mullany uses periods, rather than serial commas, to separate items. The reader must first consider each item as a discrete item, rather than as part of a collective grouping that the above rewriting might suggest.

“These // things” gives us the subject’s noun phrase. The predicate’s verb phrase follows immediately. The main verb is “are” (5), but that’s as nondescript a verb as one can have. We technically have the fundament, in that we have the head of the predicate phrase, but not the satisfaction it provides. “Are what?” the reader must ask. The sentence responds: “no / truer” (5-6). The topic of the sentence is becoming clearer: the “truth,” in whatever sense, of the aforementioned things. However, the word “truer” is a comparative, which implies a point of comparison. One mystery solved, another presented.

Instead of simply providing us with that point of comparison, the poem first mentions the grounds of that comparison: “for their // plainness” (6-7). This phrase is useful for understanding the predicate, in that we’d like to know what the speaker means by “truth.” But the phrase also returns us to “these things,” encouraging us to see the items as plain. (Easy with the potatoes, perhaps a challenge for the soft towel.) When one might expect the poem to move forward through the predicate, it instead cycles back to the subject.

What does such backward-looking move achieve? I’d call it a mental smash-cut. The reader’s mind has just reproduced the starting images when the poem finishes by throwing on several new ones: “than peas / or pus or leprosy” (7-8). Finally, the point of comparison arrives. While the peas might not be so different from the potatoes, the diseased imagery of the final line represents a sharp break from the rest of the poem and its quotidian objects. The reader, anticipating mere completion, receives a broken-skinned punch.

The takeaway for your poetry: consider the holding back the fundament of a sentence, letting the reader anticipate the next move. You might, as in “Widowed,” use that delay to weave in context or show a character’s thought process. You might, as in “The Not So Simple Truth,” decide it best serves to set-up a punchy ending. Whatever the case, the reader will thank you for making the wait worthwhile.

Thoughts on “A Dark Room”

The first time I played through A Dark Room (browser version available here), there was a moment early on in the game—the village was still small, I had yet venture onto the dusty path, most everything was still mysterious—where I started to question my own virtue. Not my character’s virtue, but mine.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those who haven’t played it: A Dark Room is an online/mobile text-based game, published by Doublespeak Games in 2013, which slowly reveals its true nature over the course of play.

You begin, naturally, in a dark room, with only one possible input: “light fire.” But from single point of interaction, the world quickly expands. Quoting from Michael Thomsen’s account of the game in The New Yorker (full article here):

After stoking the fire a few more times, you have a new option: collect wood, which can be used to build a cart. Once a cart is built, you can make traps and set them in the surrounding forest, and soon you’re collecting cloths and furs, which can be used to build more huts to attract others to your small enclave, allowing for the collection of even more fur and meat. You can begin to see a structure emerge from the fragments, but where that structure will lead you remains impossible to predict, and so the compulsion to keep pressing little word buttons becomes stronger.

It’s those “others” Thomsen alludes to here that I’m interested in, the villagers who take refuge in your growing community. The start of A Dark Room feels profoundly lonely. The only company you have is the builder, a stranger who stumbles into your now-lightened room who says that she can, well, build you things. Once she starts erecting huts, though, the town’s population starts to grow. A “stranger” here, a “weathered family” there: it all adds up. You as the player-character can then start assigning those villagers tasks, such as gathering wood or hunting.

When villagers began to appear in my first play-through, I was glad for the presence of extra people, even if those people were, in fact, nothing more than a number and a job description. When a wild beast attacked the village and killed several of them, I felt something resembling guilt. I, the de facto leader of this village, had failed to protect my neighbors, and now there was no evidence they ever existed.

This emotional connection did not last very long.

Around the time my village hit a population of twenty, when I had started assigning villagers to cure meat and tan leather (for reasons I was not yet clear on), another wild beast attacked. Rather than feeling guilty or sad this time, though, I was merely annoyed. The number of gatherers in the village plummeted, meaning it would take so much longer to collect enough wood to build a workshop (for reasons I was also not yet clear on). The only other option would be to re-assign the other workers to gathering, which of course meant a trade-off in resource gathering: more wood at the expense of meat, fur, etc.

Right then, in a brief flash of insight, I realized that I had stopped seeing the villagers as text-based representations of people, and had started seeing them as resources. They were merely means to my own still-unclear ends, sacrifices to some vague notion of “progress.” And then, as if that sudden doubt never occurred, I went back to pressing buttons, back to accumulating resources.

After all, there was so much of this world that had yet to unfold.

This is, I concede, not a grand revelation about the nature of player/non-player character relationships. Games consistently take an instrumentalist approach to NPCs. They are resource gatherers, quest givers, and of course, enemies. That the villagers have no lives and no function beyond their job descriptions is hardly a surprise.

What I do find surprising, though, is that the subtext of “NPCs have only instrumental value”—which is not even a subtext of the game, really, more a convention it happens to use—is brought to the level of text in the mobile version of A Dark Room.

The browser version of the game, as developed by Michael Townsend, does suggest that the player-character is a villain in the narrative of the game. They’re one of the so-called “wanderers” who conquered this world and have left it in ruins. You eventually find a spaceship in the wilderness, your ticket out of this hellscape. It’s been badly damaged, but it could be restored, and you find it fortunate that the “natives,” people like the villagers, haven’t figured out how to yet. One could read a colonialist narrative onto that story, but the game does not directly implicate the player (as opposed to the player-character) in that narrative. It’s just too oblique in its story-telling to do so.

It wasn’t until Amir Rajan adapted A Dark Room for iOS that the game’s critique of the player’s actions became overt. In the early goings—coincidentally, near the point when I had that flash of doubt—the builder begs you to stop overworking the villagers. When you keep pushing them to gather wood anyway, the game overtly relabels them. They are no longer “villagers.” They are “slaves.”

The player’s instrumental approach to the NPCs has consequences, which is certainly uncomfortable, as Rajan notes in an interview with Brian Riggsbee (full interview here):

The web version didn’t have any of the builder commentary or the slave transition…It’s funny actually, someone reached out to me on Twitter about the slaves transition and how “it wasn’t his choice.” He was pretty angry about it. His Twitter profile background was that of Fallout: New Vegas, where you can literally [be] part of a slave-driving army.

It’s all fun and games until the game points out that your progress has come at the expense of someone else’s autonomy.

To include the slaves transition was an editorial decision on Rajan’s part, an act of interpretation as well as adaptation. But does it pull the adaptation too far from the source material? Hardly. If anything, it simply reinforces the in-game narrative. Just as the wanderer uses the people they conquered to serve their own ends, the players use the NPCs to gradually satisfy their curiosity.

After all, how else can this story unfold?

On Reading Multiple Books at Once

One of my favorite YouTube channels, Philosophy Tube, recently posted a video simply titled “How to Read Difficult Books,” in which the show’s host, Olly Thorn, offers five tips for doing just that.

Some of Thorn’s tips are fairly standard fare: take notes, don’t be afraid of rereading passages, etc. But the first tip he offers is perhaps the most interesting: “Read Two Books at Once.”

It seems like an odd bit of advice, especially when it comes to reading philosophical texts (the kind that Thorn’s viewers probably have in mind when they ask about reading difficult books). Whether it’s because the language is now antiquated or the concepts are abstract, a philosophical text can be a great challenge to work through on a word-by-word and paragraph-by-paragraph level—even with completely undivided attention. Why suggest that someone tackle another book on top of that?

Thorn brings up one crucial reason, one which is kind of obvious when said aloud. Reading two books at once means you will have to stop reading one to work on the other. It encourages you to break a difficult text into discrete units, rather that rushing from one section to another. To quote Thorn:

Often with academic books, they’ll try and say a lot in the chapter and it’ll be quite meaty, and if I try to sit and read two chapters of an academic book in one reading, the points that it’s making will just kind of tend to bleed into one, and I won’t really remember it very well. But if I physically stop myself and then pick up a chapter of something else, then I find I retain it a lot more easily.

And course, there’s the fact that reading a second book can provide some relief from the first. Especially if one book is rather dense or dry, a little fanciful escapism can help even things out. (Poetry, I find, fulfills a similar function. You can revel in the aesthetic pleasures of language for moment, rather than just piecing together its semantics.)

For me, though, the reason to tackle multiple books at once is all about drawing connections. Suppose you are reading a book on ethics. It might help, for example, to read a play or a novel at the same time, because you can think about the moral decisions of the various characters in the context of whatever philosopher’s theory of ethics. Would that philosopher approve or disapprove of how they act? This approach was really helpful for me in my last semester of undergrad—Aristotle’s system of virtue ethics made more sense to me when I could apply it to Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women, which I was reading for a different class.

I obviously can’t guarantee that any two texts will pair well together. (I’m not sure reading Shakespeare would make modal realism any clearer, for example.) But you may be surprised at the connections you’ll find; that’s more-or-less the thrust of the soon-to-be-defunct PBS Idea Channel. Even if the connections are tenuous, the simple act of making them can at least make the ideas easier to remember.

So don’t be afraid to double-up on the readings.

Just don’t do it like this:

Olly Thorn, Hardcore Reader

Baseball Highlights: Aesthetics and Context

Over at ESPN.com, Sam Miller recently wrote an article entitled “Dig the long ball? Here’s why home run highlight videos are the worst”. Clickbait title aside, Miller’s article has some solid points about why home runs might not make for the best highlight reels. I especially like how he draws attention to the hard cut which invariably comes when broadcasting a home run, breaking the flow of what is really a continuous action. (Compare that to a defensive highlight, where the cut serves as an act break: the batter makes the contact, then the fielder catches it.)

Continue reading “Baseball Highlights: Aesthetics and Context” →

A Poet of the People: François Villon in “If I Were King”

The original, 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass begins with a free-wheeling prose introduction, touching on poetry, philosophy, and the American experience. Among the many topics Whitman covers is the role of poetry and the poet in the world of politics and government. Given his background as a journalist, it is not surprising that Whitman sees the poet as having a role to play in public affairs. He writes:

If peace is the routine out of him speaks the spirit of peace, rich, large, thrifty, building vast and populous cities, encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce —lighting the study of man, the soul, immortality —federal, state or municipal government, marriage, health, freetrade, intertravel by land and sea . . . nothing too close, nothing too far off . . . the stars not too far off. In war he is the most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him recruits horse and foot . . . he fetches parks of artillery the best that engineer ever knew. If the time becomes slothful and heavy he knows how to arouse it . . .

A lovely sentiment, though in a time when poetry is not so widely read, perhaps difficult to believe. Yet it is so ecstatic in its praise that one cannot help but get caught up in its call to arms.

I found myself thinking back to this passage after watching If I Were King (dir. Frank Lloyd, 1938). The film may be set in 15th-century France rather than the 19th-century United States, but it still recalls Whitman’s vision of the poet in the public sphere. Even more: I think the film offers us another way to understand Whitman’s words.

Adapted from the play and novel of the same name by Justin Huntly McCarthy, If I Were King tells a fictional story about a real-life poet, François Villon. A rogue as well as writer, this film’s version of Villon (played by Ronald Colman) is something of a Robin Hood figure, stealing from the royal storehouses to feed the hungry citizens of Paris. Times are tough in the French city, with a Burgundian siege slowly starving the populace. Meanwhile the king and his court, who have enough food to last them six months, seem oblivious to the conditions on the streets.

Villon finds this state of affairs intolerable, and he will say so to anyone within earshot. This includes, as it turns out, an undercover Louis XI (Basil Rathbone), who has come to Villon’s favorite tavern in search of a traitor, his Grand Constable (John Miljan). Not only does Louis get his man, he also gets an earful from Villon, who takes him for an ordinary tavern-goer. After proposing an ironic toast to Louis (“May the Burgundians take the city away from him—better still, may they take him away from the city”), Villon claims that, given the chance, he would be much better at running the country:

I don’t wish to appear boastful, Brother Long-Nose, but I should think a child of two could do better. Had I been born in a brocaded bed, I might have led armies and served France. As it is you see me here, consorting with cutthroats and wantons and wasting my time with a dull old buzzard like you.

The aristocratic structure of French government greatly limits Villon’s potential power. He cannot be Whitman’s “most deadly force of the war” because he is not of the nobility, from whose ranks the generals are drawn. He can have no soldiers at his command to inspire, no people in the streets to rally to war.

Louis, poking at the poet’s presumption, asks what Villon would do if he, in fact, were king. While Villon mentions enjoying the finest of foods and purging the court of its inept and crooked nobles, his most inspiring proposal concerns how he would connect to his subjects:

VILLON: I’d try to know my subjects. I’d try to earn their devotion and loyalty, instead of their loathing.

LOUIS: By abolishing taxes, I suppose?

VILLON: No! By abolishing despair and substituting hope! I’d learn the longings in their hearts, as a man of the people would, seeing them as they are and admitting that their vices are as deep-rooted as their virtues. I’d treat them as my children, instead of as my enemies. So, by knowing the worst in them, I bring out the best in them.

He would still, as it turns out, be “consorting with cutthroats and wantons,” because those are the people he would be governing. It is somewhat foolish to talk about a democratic spirit to monarchical rule, but Villon’s vision shares at least Whitman’s love of the common people.

Villon soon gets his chance to put that vision into practice. The Grand Constable comes to the tavern, intending to arrest Villon for raiding the storehouses. A skirmish ensues, and Villon kills the Grand Constable, putting Louis in an unusual position: he must punish Villon for killing one of his advisers, and also reward him for killing a traitor. His solution: make Villon the new Grand Constable, and show him that governance is not as easy as it looks.

Indeed, Villon has great difficulty in his new position—but only when he must play by the rules of the aristocracy. Notably, getting the lords to even consider an attack on the Burgundians proves impossible. They do seem overly cautious, given the desperate circumstances. But Villon’s penchant for verbal sparring wins him no friends in the war room. Earlier in film, Villon quipped that “poetry is its own worst enemy,” and here he proves his own point. The nobility aren’t going to stand around and let some poet insult them; they will simply render his words powerless.

No, the poet is far more effective in governance where the common people are concerned. Most obviously, Villon calls on the masses of Paris to counter a charge from the Burgundians, which is what ultimately saves the city from starvation. The people’s surprise success is literally the only thing that convinces the generals to fight. “Who recruits him recruits horse and foot,” indeed.

But even his rhetoric within the court appeals to democratic principles. Consider his message for the Burgundian envoy, who offers the king “an honorable surrender.” Villon’s ode to the people’s strength would hardly seem out of place in Whitman’s preface:

Kings are great in the eyes of their people, but the people are great in the eyes of God, and it is the people of France who are speaking to you now. We are armed and provisioned. We are warm and comfortable behind our strong walls. We laugh at your threats. But, if we who eat were starved, if we who drink were dry, if we who are warm were frozen, our answer would still be the same: ha! We laugh at you, we the people, and the king.

So strong is Villon’s message for the envoy, it seems to win over even Louis, who laughs the envoy out of his court. This victory is short-lived, however; the fateful meeting with the generals follows soon after this scene.

If I Were King may present a rather optimistic view of what poetry can do in the realm of politics. Still, it acknowledges its limits, and in doing so, it helps to refine the praise that Whitman offers in his preface. The power that poets wield is not intrinsic to them. It depends on their audience.

Post-Election-Day Survival Kit

I’ve often struggled with writing list-poems. There’s an inherent challenge involved that I’ve never quite mastered: balancing the implied equality of items in a list with the need for progression in the argument of a poem.

Given this week’s theme from The Daily Post, I thought I’d dust off an old list-poem of mine. I had recently read Ander Monson’s collection Vacationland, and was particularly taken with his “list sonnets”: lists of items that told relationship stories. I decided to attempt a variation on that theme, the story of someone’s reaction to unfavorable election results (the 2014 midterms were fast approaching).

Post-Election-Day Survival Kit

maps, color-coded for inconvenience
wastebasket filled with bumper stickers, pins
Wi-Fi connection for the airing of grievances
half-empty Folgers and full-empty gin
shredded copies of the Washington Post
television off, blues records on
fresh gin and coffee, bacon and toast
for-sale sign to plant in the lawn
draft-dodger anthems from the Vietnam War
passport, suitcase, accent tapes, keys
GPS set to find to Lake Erie’s shore
plaster to puncture, stress-ball to squeeze
head on a pillow, ice on the brow
calendar turned to four years from now

Looking at it now, I’m a bit frustrated with its indecisive sense of rhythm — not even meter, just anything mellifluous — and the progression in the third quatrain seems off. But some of these lines still make me smile (“airing of grievances,” “full-empty gin”), so it’s not a total waste.

Perhaps come November, I’ll be inspired to write a sequel (though God, I hope not). Until then, I think I’m happy laying this one to rest.

via Discover Challenge: The Poetry of List-Making

Henri Cole and the Sentimental Interruption

Natural disasters, death, isolation: how many poems take these topics as their subjects? Poets from all over draw inspiration, however weary, from such grave events, yet these are difficult subjects to address well. The temptation is always present to slip into sentimentality or detached philosophy, which would do great disservice to these grave subject matters. What could trivialize heartbreak more than a Hallmark card?

At the same time, we expect poets to find deeper meanings within the events they relate; rarely are we satisfied with the written equivalents of still lifes. This is especially true when it comes to subjects worthy of elegies. Without the solace that poetry can provide us, we’d be left staring at despair — perhaps an emotionally powerful experience, but hardly a useful one. And so the tension poets face: how is one to avoid cloying sentiment on the one hand and callous objectivity on the other?

The poems in Henri Cole’s latest collection, Nothing to Declare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) — which often describe scenes of devastation, physical and emotional — resolve this tension in a curious way: they temporarily indulge in sentimentality, only to change course abruptly and return to the facts at hand. Like a release valve, the sentimental interruptions relieve some of the pressure that these scenes entail, but not to the extent that their powers are completely emptied.

To demonstrate how this “release valve” technique works, let’s take a close look at two of Cole’s poems: “City Horse” (originally published in The Threepenny Review, text available here) and “Dandelions” (originally published in The Paris Review, audio available here). In both poems, the speaker momentarily departs from a gut-wrenching situation, only for the situation itself to drag the speaker back into the moment. Once that final transition is complete, the speaker (and so the reader) gains a fuller of understanding of the tragedy they face, one for which the earlier sentimentality would not be sufficient.

As a single sentence spanning fourteen lines, “City Horse” captures a moment of continuous agony: a boy seeing a dead horse in the aftermath of a storm. The opening line leaves little doubt as to the direction of the poem; it’s a journey to “the end of the road from concept to corpse” (line 1). What was once a living, moving beast has been tossed by wind and waves, dumped alongside piles of inanimate debris (“uprooted trees, crumpled cars, and collapsed houses” [3]). Although she is positioned “as if trying to raise herself still,” she is irretrievably dead (4). The only question is how to confront that fact.

At first, the speaker appears absorbed with the physical facts of the horse’s death: broken legs, face in the mud. Of particular interest is the horse’s appearance: “the color around her eyes, nose, and mane (the dapples of roan, / a mix of red and white hairs) now powdery gray” (7-8). The declension narrative is clearest here. This beautiful horse, because of the capricious weather, has been reduced to a monochromatic object. One might expect, then, to read of further and further decay.

Instead, the speaker interrupts the description with a set of apostrophes: “O, wondrous horse; O, delicate horse–dead, dead–” (9). The register is so elevated, the repetitions so sudden, that it sounds out of character for the speaker. Whereas the first eight lines were earthy and plainspoken, line 9 is more consciously poetic, if not bathetic — can readers feel this sort of emotion for a horse they hardly know?

But “O, wondrous horse” is not indicative of the poem’s progress; it’s a sudden pulling back, an unsustainable retreat. Just after the speaker’s interruption ends, we hear the boy who sees the horse with his vernacular speech: “‘She was more smarter than me, / she just wait'” (10-11). The two voices in succession shake the reader back and forth, from lofty sentiment back to the raw details. And once the poem returns to those details, the import of the interruption becomes more apparent.

The closing image sees the boy attempting to comfort the dead horse, “stroking the majestic rowing legs, / stiff now” (12-13). It’s a heartfelt gesture, but a futile one, much like the horse’s attempt to escape its fate. She simply “could not outrun / the heavy, black, frothing water” (13-14). But then, neither could the speaker “outrun” the tragedy of the horses death by invoking some sentimental muse — he must return to the situation, the heavy, black, frothing situation.

“Dandelions” follows a similar path as “City Horse”: the speaker is confronted with an uncomfortable situation, attempts to escape via a sentimental interruption, but gets drawn back to the reality of the scene. What makes “Dandelions” a little unusual is that the scene itself has no reality — it’s a dream, as the first stanza explains:

In the dream,
a priest said
it was time
to be entirely
adult. (1-5)

The set-up suggests a confrontation between the speaker and the priest, but in fact the priest is addressing the speaker’s mother, who is “bedridden / because of diabetes” (6-7). The priest seems convinced that the speaker’s mother has little time left, repeatedly asking about her beliefs. His insistence frightens the speaker, who retreats into his own head (or further within his own head, as the case may be).

Specifically, he starts to think of the title flowers, of their simple beauty, which appears to provide him some comfort in the midst of the confrontation:

those silver gray
stems and lemony
blossoms
that transform
any landscape (36-40)

That landscape, of course, is the speaker’s mental state. For the moment, his mother’s health and the priest’s insistence have faded into the background, subsumed by the soft colors of the dandelion imagery. If “City Horse” drifts into the language of sentimentality, “Dandelions” indulges in its visuals.

But, as with the sentimental interruption in “City Horse,” the speaker’s self-distraction cannot be sustained here. He’s brought back to the dream-proper when his mother’s ailment intervenes: “and then I heard / Mother lifting her stumps, / where the hands had been” (41-43). It’s an unnerving image in any context, but when contrasted with the dandelions, it’s a downright shock.

“Dandelions,” however, arrives at a different attitude than “City Horse.” The mother’s closing declaration (“‘I believe / in these living hands'” [44-45]) might provide the speaker with some consolation at the end of the dream. His mother is aware her hands have been amputated, but she does not try to ignore than fact. Instead, she finds a kind of strength within her condition, hence why she loudly lifts her stumps. She has embraced her situation and come out stronger for it. Perhaps the speaker, once he awakes, can learn from her example.

Cole returns to the structure used in “City Horse” and “Dandelions” throughout Nothing to Declare, and it proves surprisingly durable. It never loses its punch, seeing that moment where a sentimental interruption collapses and the speaker confronts reality again. It reenacts a thought process which all of us indulge in at various points in our lives, then shows the limits of that very process. Whether solace or mere devastation await at the end, Cole’s poems show us those difficult facts that our minds attempt to cloud.

Nothing to Declare is available through Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s website and through Amazon.com.

(Disclosure: I received Cole’s collection as part of a Goodreads giveaway sponsored by the publisher. Neither the author, nor the publisher, nor Goodreads had any input regarding this post.)

Broadcasting Sports Injuries

The first few days of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio have been marred by serious, gruesome-looking injuries. On Saturday, August 6, French gymnast Samir Aït Saïd broke his leg while attempting a vault during the men’s qualification round. The following day, Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten crashed head-first into a curb during the women’s road race, resulting in several spinal fractures.

I watched both of these injuries happen live: Aït Saïd’s over an Internet stream, van Vleuten’s on the local NBC affiliate. After the initial shock and revulsion had passed, a question began to bite at me: what is the appropriate way to cover such injuries when they occur on a live broadcast? Given the inherent risk of physical injury in sports, and the inherent uncertainties of broadcasting events live, this is a question of some significance.

Broadcasters appear to face two conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, we expect that a sports broadcast will present an accurate (and often total) account of the event; on the other hand, we expect that broadcasters will maintain “good taste” — that they will not exploit the misery of participants or spectators (beyond, one might clarify, the misery that comes with defeat).

In most instances, these two imperatives do not come into conflict. Even in violent sports such as American football and ice hockey, the injuries players suffer do not generally inspire shock and revulsion. Concern and pity, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. Thus, during most games, media outlets can broadcast the events in their entirety, injuries included, without ethical worries.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, a player with sustain a gruesome injury, either as a tragic part of normal play (e.g., Joe Thiesmann’s compound-fractured leg on Monday Night Football) or as a result of a violent infraction of the rules (e.g., Steve Moore’s broken neck at the hands of Todd Bertuzzi). Such injuries inspire immediate revulsion, disrupting the constructed narrative of the sporting event and, oftentimes, the event itself. In these scenarios, the imperatives of accuracy and good taste do come into conflict. How, then, should this conflict be resolved?

The Aït Saïd and van Vleuten incidents offer two different possible solutions. In the case of Aït Saïd, the broadcast strategy was to avoid showing the aftermath of the failed vault, once the extent of the fracture became clear. The camera quickly cut away from the scene, and they did not show replays of the failed vault. When the broadcast did return to the scene, it was always in the context of Aït Saïd receiving medical attention, framed in a manner which concealed the severity of his injury.

In the case of van Vleuten, the broadcast team was more willing to dwell on the fateful crash. This was in spite of the fact that the site of the crash, unlike the site of Aït’s Saïd’s, did not have a dedicated camera, indicating a degree of choice on the part of the broadcast. Not only did the broadcast show replays of the collision, but the commentators continued to discuss van Vleuten’s injury for the remainder of race. relaying information regarding her condition.

So which is preferable: drawing coverage away from the injury, or making the injury a feature of the sporting narrative? They are markedly different, but I will say that in their respective moments both approaches felt reasonable.

One must remember that the two injuries happened in different contexts. Aït Saïd’s broken leg did not impact the outcome or proceedings of the qualification round. He was a relatively marginal figure in the competition (though he would have qualified for the rings final), and there were five other apparatuses the broadcast team needed to cover. Even if the broadcast wanted to dwell on his injuries, there might have been too much going on to do so.

Contrast this with the road race: van Vleuten was nearing the final stretch, leading by a significant margin. Her crash completely altered the medal situation, giving four other cyclists behind her a chance at gold. Further, in covering the progress of the race, the broadcast team had to film the other cyclists passing the scene of the crash. Had van Vleuten’s injury happened earlier in the race, they’d have little cause to dwell on it.

This pragmatic variance does allow us to keep both the accuracy imperative and the good taste imperative. There might be a case for dropping one of the imperatives instead. Pain is pain, regardless of context, and adjusting the guidelines based on the competitive conditions of a game may well trivialize that pain. Yet a consistent response might well do the same, treating such human misery in a dispassionate manner.

In the messy world of live broadcast, perhaps pragmatism is the best that can be done.

What Next?: Claressa Shields and Life Post-Triumph

Last night, PBS’s Independent Lens aired a 2015 documentary about Claressa Shields, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist in middleweight women’s boxing. Entitled T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold (dir. Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari), the film has its share of problems. The process of Shields’s qualification for the Olympics is not explained very well, and the film for some reason completely skips over the semifinal bout of the Olympic tournament. On top of that, the filmmakers set up a number of potential story threads in the first act, such as Claressa’s relationship with her sister, that are never fully developed by the end.

Indeed, had the film ended with Shields’s victory in London, I would have thought it a disappointment, a work with lots of promise but with little accomplishment. But the film has another twenty-five to run, and in those final scenes it finds its most compelling story: what does an athlete do after success?

Normally in a sports movie, if this question comes up at all, it gets answered with some expository text before the credits roll. This holds whether the film represents the end of an athlete’s career or just the beginning: when victory is itself the denoument, who could possibly be interested in the days and weeks after? Whatever happens, it will surely be lit with the afterglow of a championship.

But in T-Rex, the post-Olympics period is filled with uncertainty and frustration. For starters, Shields faces a difficult career decision: does she continue to compete as an amateur and defend her gold medal at the 2016 Olympics, or does she become a professional boxer and try to make a living for her family? As it happens, she chooses the former route, but that only becomes clear to audience in the closing expository text. Shields has plenty of reasons to consider the alternative path.

To further complicate matters, her relationship with her coach, Jason Crutchfield, becomes strained when she begins (openly) dating her sparring partner, which goes against Crutchfield’s principle of not mixing the personal and the professional (never mind that Shields lives with Crutchfield as a quasi-family member for the majority of the film). Considering how central his voice is in Shields’s life, seeing the two at loggerheads has an added sting beyond mere conflict.

The wrinkle that I find most interesting, however, is Shields and Crutchfield’s efforts to obtain endorsement deals following her gold medal triumph. Shields’s family has plenty of financial worries, struggling to pay for basic utilities, so she needs an income stream to subsidize her unpaid amateur boxing. One might assume that being among the first ever women’s boxing gold medalists would get the sponsors lining up to sign her, but such is not the case.

According to USA Boxing officials featured in the film, Shields faces far greater difficulty in getting sponsorship deals than someone like Gabby Douglas, 2012 gold medalist in women’s gymnastics. For starters, gymnastics gets covered during primetime on a major network, whereas boxing is shown midday on a cable channel. People, and by extension potential sponsors, are far more likely to have seen Douglas perform than they are Shields.

Yet there is also the problem of American cultural attitudes. Douglas, with her cheerful presentation and her achievement in a sport associated with traditional femininity, is an easy sell to corporations. Shields, on the other hand, has a more brash personality; in a clip from The Colbert Report shown during a montage, she says she got into boxing because she likes punching people. It’s at least partly in jest, but it’s that sort of thing, the boxing officials say, that can make sponsors wary of signing athletes.

As a black woman, Shields detects racial and gendered assumptions behind that reluctance, and while the filmmakers do not explore that particular line of thought in great depth, it’s hard not to reach the same conclusions. Given how much Shields has accomplished and how little she has to show for it financially, there must be something unfair in the system of American athletics.

Honestly, I would have loved to see a cut of this movie that stretched the post-Olympic period over two acts, giving more time to explore an athlete’s life once the dream has been realized. As is, T-Rex is a fine documentary that doesn’t reach its full potential until the final bell has rung.

Currently, T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold is available for streaming at its Independent Lens episode page (link). The 2016 Olympic women’s middleweight boxing tournament begins August 14.

Ownership in Dryden’s “Astræa Redux”

First published in 1660 to commemorate the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, John Dryden’s poem Astræa Redux lavishes Charles II with no shortage of praise. He is likened to David and Jove, described as a paragon of virtue, and cast as the favorite son of divine will. All these traits are wonderfully elevated and beautifully rendered, yet Dryden’s poem keeps returning to a word which seems rather mundane for a panegyric: “own.” Time and again, the poem discusses what Charles II or some other figures own. More than any particular actions, Astræa Redux chooses to emphasize the state of possessing something. As a dry fact of statesmanship, this seems like a rather odd topic for a time so jubilant and high-minded.

Right away, an obvious rhetorical rationale presents itself: by repeatedly invoking Charles II’s ownership of England, the poem implicitly argues that his claim to rule the country is legitimate. This would not be an uncontroversial position; after all, hadn’t the people (or at least their ostensible representatives) supported the end of the monarchy during the English Civil War? In this view, one might view Astræa Redux as a well-timed piece of Restoration propaganda, drumming up public support for what was by then a fait accompli.

There may be some truth to this position; however, I’d like to argue for a slightly different reading. The insistent use of the word “own,” rather than merely reiterating Charles II’s claim to rule, serves to highlight the virtues of his prospective reign. In the past, less noble figures laid ownership claims, and the country suffered as a result. But now that the Restoration has placed him in the role of possessor, Charles II can begin his virtuous rule of England (and, as we shall see later, possibly other lands as well).

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