A Story

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Jack Underwood’s poems “Poem Beginning with Lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” “The Situation,” “An Envelope,” and “Alpha Step” appear in the February 2020 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

I love being a poet. I could say, “I am a poet,” all day. Into to the dial tone of a telephone. Into the shower head. Into my wastepaper basket, louder and louder until the cat leaves the room. And I especially love being a poet in a group of other poets. Reclining in a meadow in our bardic regalia, we pass around a lion cub between mouthfuls of luscious grapes, laughing that we are poets, the chosen. Someone has baked a cake. It says “hahaha” on it. We are getting drunk, or amorous, or both, and so begin our speeches. I get teary-eyed just thinking about us all, even the bad ones among us. Even mine enemies.

I like being a poet with my own kind almost as much as I like being a poet in a roomful of novelists. “Oh I couldn’t do what you do,” I tell them at book launches, etc. “I haven’t the patience, the attention span, the stamina,” as if, as a poet, you don’t move among these “narrators” like a unicorn through a shopping mall.

And if you ever get round, as a poet, to writing some prose, it is with the sickly joy of one who knows they can quit while they are ahead. Some poets even publish novels. Their poet-friends forgive them, eventually. After all, they never intended to write a novel; maybe they’ll quit while they’re ahead. (I’m being facetious. Good prose operates on a highly poetic level. Novels, essays, short stories can be just as interrogative, speculative, or imaginative as poems. Have you read a novel recently? Amazing. Breathing in and out for hours and hours and you don’t even notice. And what’s the difference, really? A long or sashaying gait? A little run-up and summary? The inclusion or omission of marginalia? The omission of everything but marginalia? Or perhaps it comes down to that further system of grammar that your eyes enact; the way a poetic line always seems to shepherd you back into the page, as if the edges were too final, too certain, whereas with prose you fall slowly forward, and can keep on falling. I know, I know, the “prose line” is a poetic line too. That’s my point. You can walk into these different-sized and unreliable rooms and orient yourself and disorient yourself accordingly.)

I’m partisan out of defensiveness. Because the only thing more pretentious than being a poet is going around calling yourself one. This embarrassment is so widely acknowledged among poets that it has become a cliché ... a party scenario. “And what do you do? Oh, a writer ... and what do you write?” Gulp.

But, I think it’s ok. I think we need to start saying “I am poet” with both fists on the table, knife and fork upright, because our art form, pretentious as it is, with all that interior dredging, all that garment-tugging and mooning along the cliff-path, gawping at the sky’s bright awning while language unmakes our beds and so on, nevertheless amounts to a vital admission: that our world is a shared world, a roaring great intersection, seven billion versions, dying and arriving, our contracts always out for tender, our steps upon the stairs ...

And yet every day, in other modes of media, I see a tendency toward reductionism, narrowing, the erasure of the errant and marginal in exchange for more narratable versions of reality and experience. Of course, simplification is necessary. Knowledge must be verified and agreed upon as a matter of practicality, efficiency, governance, and policy, but what happens if some versions of the truth are not founded upon wider agreement, with an attention to humane, communal outcomes, but are enforced by the volume, entitlement, and brute confidence of their assertion?

Permit me the confidence to be reductive. I am a poet and the rest of the time I strain to be more accommodating. But I want to tell a story. The human mind evolved very recently. It is highly structured and limited according to the conditions of that evolution. First we were good at moving rocks, picking berries, hitting animals, and having sex. Then came more and more language to call into presence that which we found beyond our immediate reach, like “tomorrow” or “sadness.” A million or so years later and “that which we find beyond our immediate reach” and can call into presence has far outgrown our material needs and processes. The financialization of our economies, the media by which we communicate and describe ourselves, these all de-situate and abstract our interactions and relations with one another. Do we try and accommodate the range and enormity of all the human data hailing us, and relate ourselves to it, keeping ourselves open to its precipitousness, its changeability, or do we try instead to wrest control by curating the voices into medians and means by which we feel able to navigate our lives more fluently? Where do we draw the lines between useful and ethical, and reductive simplification?

Language is already a technology developed for simplification, but how vigilant can we be not to let that reductive characteristic dictate our reality, rather than describe it authentically? Are “we” even a coherent enough group for my first-person plural? Probably not. Is the world more or less divided than the terminology of categorization? I do not know. Who has the power to authorize and give credence to such categories? “State your origin.” “Present your documentation.” “What’s your real name?” “Where are you from originally?” Who invents or amplifies the terms? The media? The government? Who is the media? Who governs? Whoever gets to tell the story. And since most things take place elsewhere, beyond our immediate reach, the story is all we will ever know.

Stories protect us. They are a cognitive defense mechanism. They stop us from placing our hands in the fire because we know how that story ends. But stories can also weaken us against unprecedented threats. The climate crisis still does not exist for many people; it is not a story with an ending we know, and so it remains a fire into which we place our hands.

Because we are so overwhelmed by our de-situation, and exhausted by the noise, increasingly the powerful appeal not to our sense of principle or practicality, but to our fatigue. As such they do not need to offer real solutions so much as cartoon answers to our problems: build a wall, take back control, remain or leave, make it great. They know that nostalgia for simpler configurations and categories is a symptom of fear and frustration. They know that as everything gets worse through deliberate inactivity the more frustrated and scared we become. “The answer is simple,” they tell us: “We must simplify!” Then: “You do not cohere to simplicity. Why are you making this so difficult? Everyone else is so tired of this difficulty. Hey everyone, aren’t you tired of this? Vote for me if you’re tired!” This is the idiotic romance of nationalism, but the romance of idiocy is a much wider problem. Those who achieved power according to earlier, narrower narratives are often the first to react angrily, defensively, when complications arise. They are terrified of ceding power and influence by being outmaneuvered by new experiences and perspectives. On issues of identity, gender, and race in particular, many former commentators and politicians would rather fossilize on their hills than process their shame at having been called out, or called upon to listen again, complicate their understanding, or make a few fresh accommodations.

We need stories. Of course we do. But they should help us to learn; not reduce us, or our ambitions. To occupy a question, to take a cognitively uncertain stance, as a poem does, is to resist precedent as the default wisdom. “I’ve never actually even seen the sky./I’ve only ever seen effluents, seen wattage,” writes Natalie Shapero in “The Sky.” What does this person mean they haven’t seen the sky? It’s right there! What heresy to consensus to bring the nature of “actually” seeing back into the realm of the question. And the sky? What do we now mean by that? Which sky, actually, have you seen? And when did you actually see it? I love how effortlessly Shapero dismantles and renews our vows to the present, to the divine human act of human divination. Effluents, wattage, the phenomena as it gushes, and our mechanical terms, awkward as a spanner or a wrench in the hand.

In two lines Shapero demands more rigor and responsibility in our telling of the world. I don’t expect poets to be invited to congress or parliament as policy consultants. And I know that I am just as guilty here of generalization: my own little narrative reductions. To inhabit a contradiction ... feels true; it is never so simple. Not the radio photons hurrying through you right now; not the particles of light you omit from your body; not the one in ten cells within your being that are not of your own DNA but part of a vast microbiotica keeping you alive—a brilliant, clever, imported yoghurt. You are unprecedented. Petrol fumes on the air and a text from a friend making plans for tomorrow ... which is no more within your immediate reach than it was a million years ago. Don’t tell me it’s simple. Don’t tell me I’m being difficult. This is all our stories at once. Which is what a poem is. Or wants to be.

Look at a poem. Not bound to the causal, linear, or chronological, nor to precedent or proof; a poem does not predict, but is itself a predicament; anything can “happen next” in thought and feeling. And as poets, we ask for a participation in that stopped event, a place where stories intersect, which is collaborative, provisional, reliant on hope, more than knowledge. Poets! Delicious, dissonant little bastards, all of us. Even in our bad poems, I can feel us seeking kindness: as in kin, as in care, as in kind of. Kindness is a radical intervention; I am so gratefully dismantled and renewed. We shall need both the knife and the sky if we want to survive our differences, even those within ourselves: the facts we reactivate, by our lives and our living.