Publication: Sutterville Review

One of my poems, entitled “The World Survives into Another Day,” has been published in the first issue of the Sutterville Review. The title comes from Bruce Cockburn’s song “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” and I was aiming to capture the apocalyptic anxiety of the previous administration.

So far as I can tell, the Sutterville Review does not have a website, but copies of the issue can be purchase for $20.00 by mailing to the following address:

Penny Kline
1169 Perkins Way
Sacramento, CA 95818

And with that, I’ll let Bruce Cockburn play us out:

Catherine Savage Brosman’s “Plums”: An Analysis

Published by Louisiana State University Press in 2007, Range of Light is a collection of poetry by Catherine Savage Brosman that is largely dedicated to the art of landscape, casting the American Southwest as a land both treacherous and awe-inspiring. This makes “Plums” something of an outlier in the book. While it deals with a variety of fruit popular in the American Southwest, the poem is not a landscape but a still life. At just twelve lines, it’s also easily the shortest poem in the book. And yet, perhaps because of how much it sticks out in Range of Light, it’s my favorite piece in the collection, and the one I’d like to talk about.

Brosman begins the poem with a mimetic description of Santa Rosa plums, and what immediately pops out to me is just how lush her description is. Read through the first stanza, and take note of all the modifiers that Brosman uses:

They’re Santa Rosas, crimson, touched by blue,
with slightly mottled skin and amber flesh,
transparently proposing by their hue
the splendor of an August morning, fresh
Catherine Savage Brosman, “Plums,” lines 1-4 (emphasis added)

Even excluding the adjectives that function more like subject complements than modifiers (e.g., “crimson,” “fresh”), that’s five modifiers in the span of four lines, one of which (“slightly”) modifies another modifier. This is perhaps surprising to see from an accomplished poet. When we first start writing poetry, we are taught to write with nouns and verbs, to use adjectives and adverbs sparingly lest we allow our verse to be wordy and imprecise. Why say someone “ran quickly,” we are told, when saying they “sprinted” is both more concise and more evocative?

Yet Brosman’s heavy use of modifiers seems appropriate for her subject. First, the speaker draws attention to the multifaceted nature of the plums’ appearance. They are, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might call them, “dappled things”: bright “amber flesh” beneath dark “crimson” skin, which itself is “mottled” and “touched by blue.” The interplay of colors defies a compressed description. The closest Brosman comes to that ideal is by likening the plums to “the splendor of an August morning,” and it is true that the colors listed would be found in a summer sunrise. But importantly, the plums call to mind the splendor of that scene, not just the scene itself. They promise decadence, and the poem delivers on it.

Brosman’s language is not the only decadent element of the poem. Formally, “Plums” is written in heroic quatrains: four-line stanzas of iambic pentameter rhyming ABAB. The form has a stately rhythm to it, and it tends to suit grand and grave subjects. We see it used, for example, in John Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis” and in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The form is a little rich when describing plums, but then again, so is likening their appearance to the great expanse. One senses that the speaker wishes to capture the subjective experience of these plums: that they’re brilliant, and probably delicious.

However, things are not always as they seem, and in the second stanza the picture of these plums gets more complicated. That initial “but” in line 5 carries a lot of weight here. True, Brosman has given the plums contrasting qualities prior to this point, but those qualities have been in harmony rather than conflict: both the dark skin and bright flesh are necessary to suggest an August morning. Here, though, we’re told the plums are “fresh // but ruddy, ripening toward fall” (4-5). Now they’re described as having incongruous elements, as though freshness and ruddiness shouldn’t go together, and the season shifts from summer to autumn. Where there was once clarity, now there is doubt.

As it happens, line 5 also suggests uncertainty in how it wavers from the poem’s metrical contract. Whereas the first stanza is written in strict iambic pentameter—no weak endings, no substitutions—line 5 does not scan so easily. The only ways to read the line as five iambs are 1) to pronounce “toward” as two syllables, with an unnatural stress on the first syllable, or 2) to pronounce “ripening” as three syllables and argue that “ing” should be stressed instead of “toward,” neither of which is appealing. A better way to scan the line is with a double iamb (a pyrrhic–spondee combination: u u | / /): “but rud | dy, ripe | ning to | ward fall.— | “So sweet“. Even scanned this way, the line is unusual for a poem in iambic pentameter; more often one sees a double iamb at the beginning of a line rather than the middle. The effect of this line’s rhythm is to put a sour taste in the reader’s mouth, even as it ends on the word “sweet”.

But of course, that’s the point: despite appearances, the plums are not sweet. When the speaker bites into one, she discovers that it’s “tart” (6). She says that the plum has a “sunny glow perfected in deceit” (7), with the rhyme reinforcing the false promise of a sweet treat. To the speaker, it’s as if the plum’s objective is to trick people into eating it, and so she finds a new appearance within it: the “emulation of a cunning heart” (8). This bitterness is a far cry from the painterly calm of that first stanza.

I find the reference in the second stanza to William Carlos Williams’s poem “This Is Just To Say” rather fitting. “This Is Just To Say” is a deceptively simple poem in which the speaker apologizes for eating the plums that the addressee has been saving. Specifically, Brosman quotes from the poem’s final stanza:

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say,” lines 9-12

One could read this final stanza as the speaker simply explaining why he ate the plums: they were just so hard to resist. But more than that, I get the sense that the speaker is rubbing his transgression in the addressee’s face, reminding them of just how wonderful those plums would have been—”so cold,” indeed. (This is one of the reasons why “This Is Just To Say” has endured as parody fodder. It became a popular meme on Twitter in 2017, and Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” spoofed the concept all the way back in 1962.)

If that second reading is correct, that the speaker of “This Is Just To Say” is teasing the addressee instead of apologizing, then it seems that the poor soul who lived with Williams isn’t his only victim. The speaker in Brosman’s poem is aware of Williams’s work, of how he presents plums as these irresistibly refreshing snacks. “This Is Just To Say” isn’t even the only famous poem where Williams sings the praises of plums; he does much the same in “To a Poor Old Woman.” But to the speaker in Brosman’s poem, Williams has not been fully honest, as this Santa Rosa plum has been anything but refreshing.

To recap thus far: “Plums” begins as an ode to the beauty of Santa Rosa plums, a celebration of their complex appearance, but the second stanza reveals that this particular plum does not taste nearly as good as it looks. We may well expect the poem to end there, and I think a lesser writer would do just that. In this hypothetical version of “Plums,” the meaning could be reduced to a variation on “all that glisters is not gold.” That’s hardly a novel sentiment, but if presented in a skilled fashion even clichés still have value.

But the speaker literally refuses to stop there. “I eat it anyway,” she says, “until the pit / alone remains, with scattered drops of juice” (9-10). She neither succumbs to disappointment nor denies it. Instead, she acknowledges the tartness and powers through it. That willingness to proceed despite the sour taste allows her to uncover a more nuanced truth than “appearances deceive,” for the remnants of the plum are “such sour trophies proving nature’s wit: / appearances and real in fragile truce” (11-12). According to this last line, it’s not the case that the tartness is the plum’s true nature, and that the beautiful appearance is a falsehood. Rather, the two coexist, not in pure harmony or pure contrast, but as two parties in “fragile truce.”

In a sense, then, “Plums” is a poem whose ending circles right back to its beginning. The plums really are dappled things—just in a way that’s trickier to unpack.

Thanks for reading! If this analysis has piqued your interest in Brosman’s poetry, then you should check out Range of Light, which is available through the LSU Press website or through Amazon. If, on the other hand, this made you want to read more about William Carlos Williams, then you should check out my analysis of “[The crowd at the ball game].”

Recent Publication: Third Coast

I happy to announce that I have a poem in the most recent issue of Third Coast, the literary magazine housed at Western Michigan University. It’s called “Retaliation,” and it’s a poem that I’ve been particularly excited about, because of how it channels a whole bunch of my personal obsessions into a single work. Perhaps you’ll indulge me if I elaborate for a little bit. (That, and since the poem is in print I feel bad about not having anything to link to.)

First, there’s the subject matter. “Retaliation” is addressed to Todd Bertuzzi, a former hockey player who was the assailant in one of the most brazen instances of in-game violence that I can remember. On March 8, 2004, in the third period of lopsided game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Colorado Avalanche, Bertuzzi grabbed Colorado center Steve Moore from behind, punched him in the back of the head, and drove him head-first onto the ice, breaking several of Moore’s neck vertebrae. Moore would never play hockey again, and Bertuzzi faced criminal charges for his actions.

The incident has stuck with ever since, largely because I saw a lot of replays of Bertuzzi’s sucker punch while watching SportsCenter; the footage became by version of the Zapruder film. But I was also haunted by the reactions of the broadcasters and the crowd. If you watch the footage of the incident, the moment that Bertuzzi punches Moore you’ll hear the play-by-play announcer’s voice perk up excitedly and the crowd begin to cheer. It takes good while for everyone involved to realize the extent of Moore’s injuries, and then the mood shifts drastically; the whole game, as it were, crashes into a wall.

That brings me to the thematic content of the poem, which revolves around the concept of the magic circle. “Magic circle” is a term appropriated from Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture to describe the constructed world in which a game takes place, where the rules of the everyday world are set aside and in-game actions are, by and large, metaphorical. While this notion of the magic circle goes back to the work of game designers Eric Zimmerman, Frank Lantz, and Katie Salen, I first became aware of it from an episode of the YouTube series Errant Signal discussing a video game called, appropriately, The Magic Circle.

Now, everyone agrees that, if games exist within a magic circle, the boundary between the game world and the everyday world is very porous. But Bertuzzi’s actions did not merely represent a crossing of that boundary; it came close to erasing that boundary completely. All play came to a halt, spectators became eyewitnesses, and both men would enter a years-long legal process as a direct result. This was no longer a game; it was a current event and a moral crisis.

Lastly, we come to the form. I’d had this basic idea for a poem—tying the Bertuzzi incident to the magic circle concept—stuck in my head for a good while, but I could never get it down on paper in a way that remotely satisfied me. That is, until I decided to show my students “Lake Sonnet” by Anne Marie Rooney (which you can read here) as an example of how poets play with the sonnet form. In this poem, and several other by Rooney, she follows a Petrarchan rhyme scheme but only uses “identical rhymes” (i.e., rhyming words with themselves or with homophones). It works especially well in “Lake Sonnet,” as the repetition of end words highlights the speaker’s monotonous sexual encounters: “I,” “men,” “our,” “breaks”.

I had personally done imitation exercises based on Rooney’s poems in the past, but it was only after teaching it that I realized that this structure—an identically rhymed sonnet—might be a good fit for the poem I’d been trying to write. Hearing the same words over and over again could be used to trap the poem in a particular moment, and there’s something wonderfully “circular” about all this repetition. A few hours later I had a draft; a few months worth of tweaks later and I had the poem in its current shape.

At time of writing there is no link to purchase the latest issue of Third Coast, but hopefully that will change in the near future. In the meantime, you can purchase back issues of Third Coast via their website.

Recent Publication: Cumberland River Review

I’m very happy to have another poem in Cumberland River Review! Their current issue features my piece entitled “On a Small Farm in Waterbury, VT,” which is inspired by a photograph by Sasha Arutyunova that was featured in The National, the Amtrak in-train magazine. The photograph was part of a larger series documenting the Vermonter route between New York City and Waterbury, all of which are worth checking out. (Surprisingly, The National is a really good magazine; give it a read if you’re ever on Amtrak.)

Thanks again to the editorial staff at CRR for selecting my work for inclusion!

You can read “On a Small Farm in Waterbury, VT” by clicking here, and you can read my previous poem in CRR, “Overland Express Arriving at Helena, Mont.,” by clicking here. If you would like to see Arutyunova’s series of photographs that I mentioned above, you find them on her website (the one that inspired my poem is the 12th in the series).

Recent Publication: The McNeese Review

I’m very pleased to announce that two poems of mine have been published in the most recent issue of The McNeese Review: “Men Who Stand Still Are Broken” and “Luis Martinetti”. The former poem was inspired by a line someone had written on a column in the 42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal subway station, and I think it’s the only poem I’ve written where the organizing principle is having a fixed number of words per line. The latter is another installment in my series of ekphrastic poems about the Edison Studios catalog of short films (which I have mentioned here and here). In this case, it’s inspired by some footage of an acrobat going through his routine. I’m rather proud of both these pieces, so I guess finding a market for them helps validate my taste in my own work.

This publication is very exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it turns out that I’m in the same issue with Jim Daniels, a faculty member at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. (I never had a class with him, but I did get to speak with him a handful of times.) Second, this is the first publication that I’m actually getting paid for, so I can finally cross that goal off my list.

You can order a copy of this issue of The McNeese Review through the magazine’s website. If you’d like to see the film that inspired “Luis Martinetti” (i.e., the film Luis Martinetti), you can watch it below:

Some Short Thoughts on Long Lines of Poetry

It was only yesterday I learned that Brenda Shaughnessy, one of my favorite contemporary poets, has a new collection out from Knopf, entitled The Octopus Museum. I’ve of course not read it yet (and knowing me I won’t actually get to it for another two years), but from what I can gather it’s a rather high-concept book: a dystopian future in which the world that humanity destroyed is now run by octopuses. Shaughnessy’s past collections have had strong motifs running through them—astronomy and tarot cards in Our Andromeda, ’80s synthpop in So Much Synth—but thisone sounds like it goes a level beyond that.

I have no idea how one would approach the substance of an octopus dystopia, but in an interview for Lit Hub with Peter Mishler, Shaughnessy does mention how she approaches the form of it. Mishler points out how The Octopus Museum features much longer lines than is typical of Shaughnessy’s poetry. As she explains, the longer lines are not the mere product of an evolution in her writing style, but a conscious decision related to the themes of her new collection:

Oh how I love a long prose line with no self-important line breaks! It just ends where the margin says it ends. These lyric-essay/prose-poem vignettes are the correct shape for the content—almost all rectangular, as if framed, teleological. There are some regular, stanza-ed poems in the book because they are relics: humans used to write poems in which they wasted space, breaking our lines as if it would buy us more time, give the illusion of freedom. The prose pieces say: this is data, utilitarian. It uses up all the space it’s been given; it doesn’t imagine any use for taking up extra space.

I find this perspective on line lengths fascinating, because it runs counter to my own preconceptions about them. In the best case scenario, a long prose line in poetry can have a certain ecstasy to it. Walt Whitman is the most obvious example, what with the chant-like style of poems such as “Song of Myself,” and the later poetry of Larry Levis accomplishes something similar through a whirlwind of ideas and images. But to me, long lines of poetry tend to be suspect; I take them as a sign that the poet has not been discriminating in their diction or judicious in their self-editing. Such lines waste space in a poem the same way empty soda cans and scratch paper waste space on my desk: their presence detracts from the value of their surroundings.

But, upon reflection, perhaps my stance on long lines would play right into the hands of the octopus overlords. When I think of a poem in a visual sense, I tend to discount the page from the picture, as though the text were floating outside of time and space (or, alternatively, on an infinite plane, which for present purposes might as well be the same thing). But on what grounds do I refuse to consider page space as a fundamental part of the poem? I might as well refuse to consider the environment as a central feature of my life. From this point of view, there is something obscenely decadent about using an entire sheet of paper to print a haiku. It’s like clear-cutting a forest to plant a few rose bushes. No matter how beautiful the buds are, the process which produced them hardly seems justified.

I have no idea whether The Octopus Museum takes full advantage of the thematic possibilities of the long line poetry, especially in relationship to its odd premise. But at the very least, I’m sure I’d appreciate a collection which so challenged my base assumptions regarding poetry. I still remember how Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, regardless of whether or not I actually enjoyed it, taught me that poetry can deliberately sound stilted and awkward and still be thought-provoking. Hopefully, when I actually read The Octopus Museum, I’ll have similar experience to that.

Thanks for reading, and for humoring me on what really amounts to speculation. If you’d rather read my thoughts on books that I’ve actually read (and who could blame you?), my most recent post was on the role of the Missionary in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which you can check out here. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on long lines of poetry? Can you think of a book that challenged your understanding of how writing is supposed to work? Let me know down in the comments!

William Carlos Williams’s “[The crowd at the ball game]”: An Analysis

Here in the United States, baseball season is just around the corner. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m excited. In the past I’ve discussed the aesthetic qualities of baseball highlights, praised Álvaro Enrigue’s essay on baseball fandom, and even just mused on the experience of being at Yankee Stadium. On March 28, my beloved Yankees will host their first game of the season against the Baltimore Orioles. I alas will not be in the stands for that contest, but I can still experience that thrill vicariously, right?

After all, there is always poetry. This month’s poem, written by William Carlos Williams, is all about the experience of being at the ballpark, with all the messiness that goes with it. It’s called “[The crowd at the ball game],” which you can read at the Poetry Foundation website. Give it a look, and then we’ll start with some background info.

Poets have long been drawn to baseball as a subject, so it’s not exactly surprising that Williams dabbled in baseball writing. But David Ward, in an overview of baseball poetry published at the Smithsonian magazine website, suggests that Williams’s poem is a noteworthy piece within context of modernist poetry. Even though baseball has had significant influence on the American consciousness, modernist poets tended to ignore the game as a subject “because it was too associated with a romantic, or even sentimental, view of life.” That so prominent a modernist poet as Williams would choose baseball as a subject is thus surprising, though Ward laments that Williams is more interested in “the relationship between the crowd and the individual” than in the game itself, which is largely absent from the poem.

The opening lines present us with a thesis statement on the nature of the crowd, a direct account of why people have chosen to gather at the ballpark:

          The crowd at the ball game
          is moved uniformly

          by a spirit of uselessness
          which delights them— (lines 1-4)

The second stanza offers us the first surprise of the poem: the fact that the crowd can find the “uselessness” of watching a baseball game delightful. In Ward’s account, this is because baseball is “a time out from the hum-drum grind of daily work,” but I don’t find this answer satisfying. It might be a sensible response to James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” which I’ve written about before. Wright’s poem is haunted by the imagery of the post-industrial Midwest, so of course in that poem sport functions as an escape from a laborious life. But there really are no such references to such work in Williams’s poem, so Ward’s analysis is purely speculative. I think we need to take Williams’s speaker more literally: the useless of the ball game is delightful not in contrast with something else, but in itself.

We might expect to find that delight in the action of the game, in the same way that the people in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” find release in how the high school football players “grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies” (lines 10-12). But Ward is correct in saying that baseball is not the actual subject of “[The crowd at the ball game].” The description of the game that the crowd is watching is hopelessly vague:

          all the exciting detail
          of the chase

          and the escape, the error
          the flash of genius— (5-8)

Compare this description of baseball to, say, Williams’s description of a fire engine in “The Great Figure” or a barnyard scene in “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Those poems are not exactly lush in their language, but they are precise in their details and remain evocative after multiple readings. But in “[The crowd at the ball game],” the words are inexact (“the chase / and the escape” from what?) and tend to lean on abstraction (“the flash of genius”); if we weren’t given the subject in the first line, I would never have guessed it from these stanzas.

This description is so uncharacteristic of Williams’s work that I can only conclude that it’s a deliberate irony: there is no “exciting detail” in the game itself, because that’s not where the excitement actually lies. The speaker may go on to tell us that these aspects of the game are “all to no end save beauty / the eternal” (9-10), but that’s only to set up the poem’s next twist: the crowd is the poem’s true site of beauty. The parallel is explicit in both form and content: “So in detail they, the crowd / are beautiful” (11-12). Williams’s choice to repeat the word “detail” and to reemphasize aesthetics with the word “beautiful” keeps the reader’s mind focused on the same ideas even as the subject shifts.

Granted, given how limp his description of the ball game is, this may also prime the reader for a further disappointment. While repeating “detail” and “beautiful” gives the poem’s argument cohesion, it also highlights how little has actually been said so far, how little detail and beauty we have encountered. And truth be told, there is little beauty to be found in the poem, at least in the conventional sense. The speaker says the crowd “is alive, venomous // it smiles grimly / its words cut” (14-16). It’s menacing, this crowd, although just how is unclear. Is this a harmless, playful fury, the sort that lies in the call to kill the umpire? Or is this a mob out for blood?

As we get more details of the crowd, its nature becomes both more worrisome and more ambiguous. The speaker highlights the diversity of people in the crowd, and how they relate to the greater collective:

          The flashy female with her
          mother, gets it—

          The Jew gets it straight—it
          is deadly, terrifying

          It is the Inquisition, the
         Revolution (17-22)

To paraphrase “The Red Wheelbarrow,” so much depends upon the meaning of “gets it”. One possibility is that the women and the Jew “get it” because they are the recipients of the crowd’s abuse, the people who the crowd’s “words cut”. In this interpretation, the diverse elements of the crowd are an unwelcome sight to the rest of it. Williams’s invocation of the Inquisition becomes rather loaded in this reading, as the Inquisition was an especially dark chapter in the history of antisemitism. To call the crowd “deadly, terrifying” in this context borders on understatement.

But there is another possible interpretation of “gets it,” and that’s to say that the women and the Jew understand the sentiment of the crowd and embrace it. They are included in the general passion; their words cut just as well, their smiles are just as grim. All members of the crowd are equal members in the Inquisition and the Revolution. You will note that this is still a rather sinister scenario, though at least the victims of the violence have been elided from the poem. In either case, we seem to be a long way from the sense of brotherhood one finds in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” Williams does not resolve this tension as the poem progresses. It is a tension that the reader must accept from start to finish.

But while the nature of the crowd remains ambiguous, the poem does develop the notion of beauty that Williams has in mind here. The speaker once again asserts that “beauty” can be found in this scene, but it’s not the sort that one can appreciate the way that one appreciates an artwork. This beauty “lives // day by day in them / idly” (24-26). This beauty is a potential that goes untapped the vast majority of the time, but can be unleashed in certain circumstances. (Ward may have overextended himself in linking this feeling to “the hum-drum grind of daily work,” but he was not completely off-base.) The occasion of the ball game allows something, specifically the passion of the inquisitor or the revolutionary, to express itself. It’s not for nothing that the speaker remarks on the time of year, as it connects the moment to something spiritual: “It is summer, it is the solstice” (29).

Broadly construed, both the spirituality of a solstice rite and the pastime of a baseball game are forms of play. Both occur in what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga would call a “magic circle,” a metaphysical space where the ordinary rules of society are temporally suspended, whether for the purposes of law, religion, or entertainment. This goes back to the notion that the ball game has “a spirit of uselessness”: it happens outside the normal world. But just because it is useless does not make it worthless, in the same way that the “play” of ritual is still a serious matter. Just look at how Williams ends the poem:

          the crowd is

          cheering, the crowd is laughing
          in detail

          permanently, seriously
          without thought (30-34)

For as difficult as it is to figure out the nature of the crowd, for as difficult as it is to see what it is about baseball that makes this moment possible, for all of that—the sheer exuberance of the moment comes through strongly. Whatever the experience has done to the crowd, I believe the impact has been tremendous, that they have been “permanently, seriously” moved.

What are your thoughts on “[The crowd at the ball game]”? Do you have a poem or a story that puts you in the mood for baseball season? Then sound off in the comments below! If you enjoyed this deep dive into a poem, then you’ll be happy to know that I write one of these every month. Most recently I analyzed Tracy K. Smith’s found poem “Declaration,” so why don’t you start there and start exploring?

And as always, thanks for reading!

Tracy K. Smith’s “Declaration”: An Analysis

Tracy K. Smith is someone who should need no introduction, but seeing how even the superstars of contemporary poetry are relatively obscures, here goes: she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, a professor at Princeton University, author of several books of poetry (including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars [Graywolf, 2011]), and all-around inspiring figure in the literary world. Seriously, go read her.

I’m currently working my way through her most recent collection, Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018), and I was so struck by one of the pieces that I set aside everything else and started writing up an analysis of it. That’s how most of these blog posts start, really: something I read makes me think so rapidly that I have no choice but set everything down (and hopefully, set everything in order). The poem in question is called “Declaration”; you can read it on the Poetry Foundation website, where there’s also a recording of Smith reading the poem aloud.

The first thing to note about “Declaration” is that the words themselves are not of Tracy K. Smith’s creation. Instead, “Declaration” is an example of erasure poetry, a form of found poetry in which the poet takes a pre-existing text and removes (“erases”) some or most of the original words, such that the remaining words form a new composition, often one that comments on the original text. Though erasure poetry doesn’t really involve writing as we normally conceive of it, it still requires a kind of creative vision: the ability to see new contexts for old words, to find subversive potentials in someone else’s language.

In this case, Smith uses the United States Declaration of Independence as her source text, which is perhaps the most famous document I’ve seen a poet black-out. However, if you haven’t read the original document (and didn’t see Smith’s title), I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t realize what Smith was doing here. I think it may be helpful, then, to talk about the declaration for a bit.

When we think of the Declaration of Independence, we tend to think of the lofty rhetoric near the beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But such eternally quotable assertions about natural law and political philosophy are a small percentage of the document’s word count, because the Declaration of Independence was not written to be a treatise. It was a written in a specific context for a specific purpose: to state the intention of Britain’s North American colonies to break away from the mother country.

That context explains why most of the document is devoted to listing off the colonies’ grievances against George III. The history of “repeated injuries and usurpations” is the justification for the war for independence, for a course of action that would have been considered treasonous had Britain prevailed in the conflict. The list explains why, per the authors, the declaration is necessary. Yet because the content of the section is so tied to a particular moment in history, it’s the part whose present-day power would seem rather limited. I mean, we’re not exactly stirred to anger these days by hearing references to the Quartering Act, right?

At least, that’s what I used to think, until July 4, 2017. That was the day that NPR decided to adapt their Independence Day tradition of reading the declaration on-air for Twitter. In a series of over 100 tweets, NPR’s Twitter account relayed the entire text of the declaration, like a town crier with WiFi. Most people recognized the exercise as a simple patriotic observance, but a small number of people, mostly of a right-wing persuasion and likely seeing the tweets outside of their full context, assumed NPR was criticizing Donald Trump and even advocating for revolution.

Now, if you’re like me, your first impulse is some good old cathartic laughter: “Haha, the Make America Great Again people don’t recognize the Declaration of Independence!” These randos on Twitter saw a news organization commemorating Independence Day, and assumed it was an attack on their fearless leader. But by accident, the people outraged over this exercise revealed that the declaration remains a powerful document in its entirety. How can anyone reading the declaration from start to finish come upon a sentence like, “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler over a free people,” and not connect it to the present moment? And that’s with context. Now imagine seeing that sentence while idly scrolling through Twitter. Yes, these Trump supporters were off-base on the intention of the exercise, but if it were an institution less staid than NPR, I don’t think it would be that unreasonable an inference.

So, to summarize this long digression: the grievance section of the Declaration of Independence, even though it is the least-recognized and most-dated part of the document, is still a powerful piece of rhetoric, perhaps especially when the language is removed from the original context. And with all that in mind, we can now ask ourselves: What does Tracy K. Smith do with it?

The first thing I’ll note is that Smith leaves the rhetorical structure of the source material largely intact. The primary device used in the grievance section of the original document is syntactic parallelism, especially anaphora (repeating words at the beginning of consecutive phases, e.g., “He has refused to Assent to Laws . . . He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws . . . He has refused to pass other Laws . . . etc.”). Smith’s “Declaration” preserves that formal element, and if anything amplifies it by also using epistrophe (repeating words at the end of consecutive phrases). The result is something which condenses the grievance section down the sensation of listening to it:

He has plundered our—

ravaged our—

destroyed the lives of our—

taking away our—

abolishing our most valuable—

and altering fundamentally the Forms of our— (lines 3-8)

Yet while Smith preserves the source material’s form, she seems to have eliminated, erased, its content. We have all these transitive verbs which are incomplete without grammatical objects, all these phrases which sound in need of closure. One might be tempted to say that what Smith has done is transform the Declaration of Independence into something close to theoretically pure rhetoric.

That, for the record, would be a perfectly fine approach for an erasure poem based on the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps it would reveal the emptiness behind the lofty ideals and philosophy which the document advocates for: all so much pleasant-sounding air. But Smith has something more specific in mind with this. After all, the passage quoted above is not free of content. Those verbs—”plundered,” “ravaged,” “destroyed,” “taking away,” “abolishing”—have charges, connotations, that pure sound would not have. And they start to call to mind a particular piece of context behind the source material, the inescapable contradiction at the heart of American history.

You probably know where we’re going with this, but to make it explicit: the country that extolled the equality and inalienable rights of “all men” permitted and was built on chattel slavery. The men who stuck their necks out in accusing George III of tyranny practiced their own tyranny upon the black slaves they and their fellow citizens owned as property. It is the unpardonable hypocrisy that has continued to haunt the United States from its inception to the present. One cannot in good conscience read the Declaration of Independence without mentally raising that objection to it.

Some might say, of course, that we can separate the admirable aspects of the declaration from the moral failings of the society that produced it, that we can discard the slavery and keep the inalienable rights. (One hears this a lot with regards to Enlightenment-era philosophy.) And that’s why I think Smith’s choice to make “Declaration” a found poem is so powerful: it suggests that such a separation is impossible. In the process of blacking-out the original text, her artistic vision knows to preserve such phrases as “the circumstances of our emigration / and settlement here” (13-14) and “taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear” (15-17). She sees the sorts of grievances the declaration’s signers lobbed at the crown, and highlights how they were blind to the same faults in themselves.

Smith is not the first person to use the Declaration of Independence for critical purposes, of course. Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted from it during his “I Have a Dream” speech, only to then call it a “promissory note” that has gone unfilled. Ho Chi Minh cited it, alongside France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, at the beginning of the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence, then attacked the Western imperial powers for violating those cherished principles. But Smith’s poem feels even more scathing than those instances. MLK and Ho Chi Minh emphasized the ideals of the Declaration of Independence—ones that society has failed to live up to, yes, but ideals worth aspiring toward. But with “Declaration,” one senses that the ideals themselves have been tainted. For a poem that appears so halting on the page, that’s one hell of a strong theme.

That’s it from me. But what about you? What are your thoughts on “Declaration,” or on found poetry in general? Feel free to sound off in the comments! And if you’re looking for more thoughts on recontextualizing the classics, you may want to check out my piece on Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s short film In the Body of the Sturgeon, which rearranges Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha into a story about a submarine’s crew near the end of the Second World War.

And, as always, thank you for reading!

Classics Club #1: “The Dyer’s Hand” by W. H. Auden

For a number of reasons, I knew that I wanted to start my Classics Club project with a look at W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand. For one, of all the books on my list, it’s the only one that I’d read any part of; during the first semester of my MFA program, I had to read several essays from the book and then write poems inspired by them. For another, as a work of literary criticism, I thought that The Dyer’s Hand might provide a high-level view from which to consider the rest of the books on the list. And for a third, it just happened to be next on my queue regardless.

But while I was reading it, I found it difficult to settle on a direction to take this post. After the first three or four essays, I thought about comparing Auden’s fragmentary style to the philosophical inquiries of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but then Auden’s style became more streamlined and structured as the collection went on. I thought about comparing my thoughts on various artworks to Auden’s, but let’s just say that he’s seen Don Giovanni infinitely more times than I have. And I thought about discussing the Ariel/Prospero distinction he mentions in his essay on Robert Frost, until I remembered that I wrote such an essay in grad school and decided I didn’t want to repeat myself.

I was completely stuck, until I happened upon a discussion that has apparently been raging across the internet: the state of the negative review. It’s a topic that the book-blogging community raises frequently (see, for instance, this post from Krysta of Pages Unbound), but of late the topic has come up more in the popular press. In recent months we’ve seen Kyle Paoletta decry the overly-celebratory nature of TV criticism for The Baffler, Rob Harvilla contemplate the role of the take-down in the age of social media for The Ringer, and sci-fi author John Scalzi defend the virtues of the pan on his blog. And I found all this fascinating in the context of The Dyer’s Hand, because if high-brow W. H. Auden were to walk into this conversation that’s been going on, he’d actually be the most skeptical of the negative review’s value.

In the first essay in The Dyer’s Hand, entitled “Reading,” Auden says that a critic ought to perform at least one of the following tasks when discussing a work:

1) Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2) Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3) Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4) Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5) Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6) Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
The Dyer’s Hand, pp. 8-9

Looking closely at this list, one can conclude that Auden doesn’t really see aesthetic appraisal as a vital role for the critic. Auden’s ideal critics should provide context, draw connections, share discoveries, and reveal truths, but it’s not clear that they should provide up-or-down judgments as to whether a book is good. The task which comes closest here is the second, and even there, it would seen that Auden wants the critic to go in a specific direction: to show that a work is better (or perhaps just more interesting) than the audience had given it credit for. He does not advocate that critics tear down works which they believe have been wrongly praised.

Indeed, throughout “Reading,” Auden is skeptical of the notion that writing bad reviews serves any purpose, and he addresses either directly or implicitly some of the common arguments in favor of the practice. An obvious argument would be that writing a negative review will persuade readers not to waste their time on a given work. But Auden reminds us that even a negative review acts as publicity and keeps a work in the current conversation. “Had Macaulay never written his review of Robert Montgomery,” he writes, “we would not today be still under the illusion that Montgomery was a great poet” (p. 10). Instead, Auden would have advised Macaulay to remain silent on the matter, allowing Montgomery’s work to fade into obscurity.

I’ll admit, I find this argument to be Auden’s weakest, or rather the least generally applicable. Being a poet, Auden naturally has poetry on his mind as he’s writing this essay. Even by the standards of book publishing, the poetry market is incredibly small; one could probably count on one hand the number of people making a living solely off revenue from writing poems. There aren’t any big marketing campaigns to smear the latest chapbooks across the public consciousness, so reviews are basically all the advertising a poet may get. Thus, if their collection is terrible and no one wants to review it, then it will almost certainly be forgotten for all time. But the same rules don’t apply to Hollywood films and popular TV shows. The machinery supporting those cultural products is so large and powerful that there is little chance of them simply withering in the darkness.

But at other points, Auden’s critique of the negative review seems not only reasonable, but also insightful. For example, he takes up the notion that one must critique bad works of art, lest those works inspire artists to make even more inferior pieces. The problem with that argument is that influence doesn’t necessarily work like that. Those who make bad works of art often draw inspiration from masterpieces; they simply lack the skill or vision to duplicate their forebears’ successes. Think about how many terrible student films come from kids who fashion themselves the next Quentin Tarantino or David Fincher. “The more powerful and original a writer,” says Auden, “the more dangerous he is to lesser talents who are trying to find themselves. On the other hand, works which were in themselves poor have often proved a stumulus [sic] to the imagination and become the indirect cause of good work in others” (p. 10). That last point rings especially true for me: I find I have far more success in writing when I use mediocre poets as a model, rather than trying to write something like Milton or Dryden.

This is not to say that Auden sees no value in the take-down. First, he concedes that in practice, critics often can’t just refuse to review a bad work. The terms of their employment may require them to write something, and if they can’t stay silent then they’ll at least be honest. Second, Auden still believes that the “corruption of the language” should be “continually publicly attacked,” but even then he says the true culprit is not the work in question but “the misuse of language by the man-in-the-street, journalists, politicians, etc.” (p. 11). But that’s about as far as Auden is willing to go in this essay. Personally, I’d carve out a larger space for the negative review. In particular, the belief that one should connect a work “to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.” requires that a critic call out harmful or dishonest artworks when they encounter them, lest we pretend the realms of art and life are somehow separable. And the more prominent a work is in the culture, the more harm it can do, and the less compelling Auden’s arguments seem to become.

It will be interesting to see whether I can, or whether I should, keep to the spirit of Auden’s position for the rest of my Classic Club posts. At the very least, I always want to keep those six tasks he listed in mind when writing a post. I’m certain that I’ll dislike at least some of the next forty-nine books I read for this project, but whatever I write about them should have some substance beyond mere vitriol. It may be true that, as Auden claims, [o]ne cannot review a bad book without showing off” (p.11). But I’m sure one can do so without just showing off.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on The Dyer’s Hand or on negative reviews in the comments below. If you’d like to get a sense of what’s on the horizon for my Classics Club project, you can access my list of fifty books here. And as always, thank you for reading.

Recent Publication: Cumberland River Review

I’m happy to announce that one of my poems, “Overland Express Arriving at Helena, Mont.,” has just been published in Issue 8-1 of the Cumberland River Review, the literary magazine affiliated with Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, Tennessee.

This poem is part of loose series that I’ve been writing in response to the films of Edison Studios, or at least the ones that you can find on the Library of Congress’s YouTube channel. Overland Express Arriving at Helena, Mont. depicts exactly what its title suggests: a train pulling into a station in Big Sky Country. I was especially drawn to the film’s intense contrast in values, with the pure white sky looming over, and then giving way to, the dark commotion of the platform below.

You can read my poem about this film at the link above.

If you are curious about the other poems in this series, I have had a poem inspired by The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots published in Tar River Poetry (under the title “Edison Studios”) and have another one, based on Luis Martinetti, forthcoming in The McNeese Review.

Special thanks to Graham Hillard and the rest of the team at CRR for including my work in their magazine. I have another poem, unrelated to all these Edison Studios pieces, forthcoming in CRR later this year.