The Face of a Poem

Nearly everything I know about football can be summed up in two profoundly funny and funnily profound poems by Mary Ruefle “Elegy for a Game” and “Super Bowl.” Though neither explicitly mentions it, these poems both remind me that I have a face. 

By face, I mean the literal human face, capable of expressing a wild, vulnerable, and living range of emotion. I’m also using face in a figurative and craft sense, to refer to that which makes a poem wildly, vulnerably alive. As I’ll get into later, this concept is inspired by some of Ruefle’s writing on craft (and dolls). But first, football. 

In “Elegy for a Game,” the speaker claims to not “actually know what a football looks like.” Clearly, Ruefle is being hyperbolic, professing an absurd level of ignorance, before making an imaginative swerve to suggest that footballs “have something to do with babies,” and that the game’s objective is to save these babies by crossing great lengths of a field. What follows is a startling observation, stated casually: “Sometimes people die trying to do things. / That’s OK.” The tension between the casual tone and the weighty meaning makes me laugh. I laugh, then think, Is that “OK”? That people die from all this effort? What’s the point? 

The poem identifies many things as “pointless” and “meaningless,” among them: sugar, spending more than ten minutes in a hot tub, white poinsettias, and “[m]aybe Christmas.” What’s not meaningless, for the speaker, is the game of pretending all these things are not meaningless. The “game” this poem elegizes is that of being a confused human, among other confused humans, making all kinds of weird meanings in ways at once arbitrary and important. The face of this poem conveys—all at once—confusion, determination, grief, fragility, and a goofy kind of gladness. 

In “Super Bowl,” the speaker’s on a flight and tries to make small talk by asking a fellow passenger who won the Super Bowl, only to be told: “The game’s tomorrow.” Humor arises from the speaker’s attempt at socializing with a stranger—maybe she’s feeling confident that she’s correctly performing social norms, for once—only to have her attempt swiftly shut down. From there, the poem unfolds in ever more surprising, astonishing lines in which the speaker overhears a woman recalling a visit to her mother’s grave that was interrupted by the sudden news that her son “fell off a mountain in Italy.” Instead of the expected shock and sadness, the speaker experiences “such joy over the unknown / outcome of her words.” By the poem’s end, the speaker affirms a strange connection with this woman, who is also only “feign[ing] interest / in the world”—due, in her case, to tremendous personal loss. Perhaps another reason for the speaker’s joy is the encounter with language that’s very much outside of the social norm. The face of this poem is simultaneously a wrenching expression of loss and a joyful response to words. 

Both of Ruefle’s football poems are really about mortality, about the possibilities of language, and about what it means to be a sentient, sensory being on this planet. Often it seems silly or even impossible to talk about poetry in terms of what it’s “about,” as poetry, good poetry anyway, is always about many things, including rhythm and silence, and it exceeds summary, escapes paraphrase. In any case, football here is a conceit, partly a ruse, which allows the poet to bring in both humor and meditations on larger concerns. 

That’s the extent of my own interest in football—how it may be used to discuss life. And maybe that’s what ardent fans of the sport are in it for, too. I’m picturing a Sunday gathering of men whose love for the sport is fundamental to their masculinity. While watching football together can be a time to assert that manliness, it can also be an outlet for processing their lives, their experiences as sentient, sensory, and, as it often goes, stressed-out creatures. In this context, they might feel comfortable enough to share, say, a challenging moment in parenting, or how they’re really doing after a demoralizing week at work. The ritual of game day allows for this honesty; they’re able to drop their “manly” masks a little, let their faces peek through. 

Playing the sport can also foster “acceptable” forms of intimacy between men. I think of Barbara Kruger’s iconic artwork “Untitled” from 1981, in which a group of young men in suits are laughing while pushing around one of their crew, hands all over his face and upper body; the text collaged atop the image reads: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” (Jenny Slate’s excellent standup bit makes a similar point.) Then again, isn’t there an equally intense devotion to “intricate rituals” in poetry? A football fan could call what I do a linguistic game, one that allows me—and my readers, I hope—to be more vulnerable, to touch something vital and bring it closer. 

Ruefle’s poems have faces that make me feel like I can show my own face, in both writing and in life. They offer electrifying approaches to doing so. They illustrate how having and showing a face means understanding that life can be tragic and comedic and meaningless and meaningful, all at once. Poems with a face are alive with contradiction, they pulse with a recognition that life is hard and living is a joy. As Ruefle herself puts it in a gorgeous essay, “Lectures I Will Never Give”: 

When a little girl is sad, a doll with a sad face makes her happy.

The problem with many of the poems one sees in workshop is that they differentiate between happiness and sadness. When you do this, your poems have no face. 

A faceless poem is a game devoid of playfulness. You read it, you get it, you may even play with it, but it doesn’t play with you. There’s nothing to truly engage with because you’re not looking into a face, you’re staring at a static idea. A face changes, is always changing—from one feeling or state to another, from young to old to a mix of every age you’ve ever been. A faceless poem can’t be funny. Or it can’t be a multifaceted kind of funny. Only poems with a face can do that, because humor is much more than being happy and making others happy. Humor is being alive and making others come alive. 

Ruefle’s work contains some of the most alive humor I’ve come across. It’s fantastically imaginative without ever losing sight of reality, of the ground, this mortal field we’re all on and moving across, each of us carrying what we utterly love, sweat dripping down each distinct face.