Hello all,
I said I’d be trying to post more often, and, technically, this is more often (at least when compared to the interval between my last two posts). Is it often enough? Probably not, but I’m working on it.
Anyway, with it being the holiday season, it’s easy to get swept up in other things. And I don’t really believe in making New Year’s resolutions, but I guess it’s almost a New Year’s resolution if I say I hope to be more consistent in my postings this year. Which I do.
I did start the new year off with a success, which was a good sign. I made tacos de lengua (tongue tacos) for dinner for my family who tends to be somewhat queasy about organ meats, and they (mostly) quite enjoyed it. I know I loved it. The recipe is definitely a keeper.
Anyway, I hope y’all’s holidays were wonderful.
Sometimes, when thinking about poetry, I like to pick out a particular poem that I like (or feel like I should like, or, even, don’t like) and figure out why exactly I like that poem (or feel like I should, or don’t). This is usually a doomed task since figuring out exactly why is a bit ambitious. After all, such feelings are subjective, and no amount of discussion of the objective features can account for those subjective features — just like no amount of discussion of the objective can tell us whether you will like Blake or Wordsworth better, Hugo or Hass. (I’ll avoid here a discussion of whether or not there is an objective fact of the matter regarding one person’s poetry being “better” than another’s as this is not the point. The point is not about what you should like, but about what you do like.) However, despite all of that, it is possible to find some reasons why you like a poem. If you were particularly drawn to music, for example, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if you loved Robert W. Service’s work with its nearly impeccable meter and rhyme. (“The Cremation of Sam McGee,” anyone?) And that is exactly what I am doing here.
Since picking up Philip Booth’s Available Light some time ago, I’ve been particularly taken in by a few different poems in particular. One of them is his poem “Graffito.” Recently, I was trying to figure out what I loved so much about that piece. And I think at least part of the answer lies in the focus of this post: exactitude.
Of course, the title of this post carries with it the smell of the oft-quoted Keats lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” As it should. This is not a new idea. And, of course, there are a great number of poems that could be quoted here to make the point (“The Terrorist” by Wisława Szymborksa with its counting of minutes, “Dolor” by Theodore Roethke with its precise listings of articles, “Ice Storm” by Robert Hayden with its exacting description of the trees and the internal states of the despairing narrator, and so on).
Indeed, it seems that one of the hallmarks of a good poem is how true it is. This not being correspondence-theory-of-truth sort of truth, but rather a sort of subjective truth that is not understood but felt. Not about states of the world, but about states of the self. Even so, poems and poets, especially young ones, are often tempted towards the grandiose, the hyperbolic. (“Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms…”)
One of the things I love so much about “Graffito” is that it resists that urge so well. Here is the poem in full.
Graffito
My father, 79,
died in his home bed
with no last word,
his jawbone frozen open.
Before the service
while the chimes said
nothing, I—afraid I
might die the same way—
ran to a mens’ room
deep in the chapel.
Letting go, I read
pencil on marble:
Time is nature’s way
of preventing
everything
from happening all at once.
Father, forgive
my unforgiving mouth:
I sang how those words sang,
I felt the whole stall dance.
My focus here is on the last stanza because that was what initially made me feel so strongly about this poem. In particular, that last line, “I felt the whole stall dance.” Such a great line. And I think that’s because it’s such an honest line. He doesn’t say that he felt the whole world dance, or even just the whole room. The dancing is limited to the stall. And that limitation gives it a sort of bare honesty, but it also allows some sort of massive, uncontained hope enter the poem. How exactly the second happens, I still don’t know, but it does. And we as readers can feel and partake in the joy and hope of the narrator in that last line. This is, of course, aided by the reference to song in the previous line — music being oft referenced as the “universal language.” Song, in its transcendentality, reaches we who are outside of the stall.
I can say with near certainty that this poem wouldn’t have stuck with me nearly so much had it ended with a grander or more hyperbolic statement. In the last line’s particularity, it becomes massive, becomes something that we all, individually, can enter into.
It is important to note, however, that the exactitude executed by this poem does not become pedantic, a line it has to be careful not to cross. Consider, for reference, the first line of the last stanza. The word Father does not have a clear (or necessarily singular) referent. Considering that it is his father’s funeral, it could easily be taken to refer to his own father. However, the service is taking place in a chapel. Given this religious context, the word could just as easily refer to God. Who he is asking or requiring forgiveness from be it God or his dead father or both is left unanswered. This too is to the benefit of the poem. And it’s not that it lacks precision or exactitude, but that it uses it judiciously to avoid oversimplification of the narrator’s experience, another risk that many poems run.
This is often also the role of images in a poem, this grounding. When a poem is grounded in particulars, in certain exactitudes, it is allowed to become larger. It lets the readers in in a way that a poem that is set in lofty universals cannot. There is a place for universals in poetry, but a poem of pure universals gives nothing concrete to connect to. Though we have all felt sad, and can understand, generally, what that word means when it is used, we have also likely felt the feeling of having a new book have its cover creased and torn when we put it in our bag wrong, and the second bears far more weight because of its grounding. We can understand particulars more deeply than universals because they participate in multiple universals and are thus more faceted. Few sadness-specific features are common to all sorts of sadness, but each sort of sadness has a great number of properties.
Anyway, on that note, I think I’ll wrap up for now. Many thanks for reading. Take care and stay safe.
— D.C. Leonhardt
Today’s pen and ink pairing: LAMY 2000 (B) with Diamine Amaranth
