Hi friends,
Guess what time it is! Fine, I’ll just tell you: poetry time. If you’re new here, every few weeks I go on a little poetry kick and do a close reading of a poem of my choice (past ones here and here). Today I’m looking at Born. Living. Will. Die. by Camonghne Felix.
Sometimes I read a poem and it’s like, god, yes, exactly. ‘Exactly what?’ you might be thinking. Yeah, no, I couldn’t tell you. But exactly something. I have a long-held belief, as I’ve mentioned on here before, that writing poetry is fundamentally an act of circling around the true core of a subject. Excavating it, maybe never quite reaching it, but coming as close as possible. It’s a moth dancing around a flame: alluding, free-associating like a game of 30 Seconds. The moth immolates if it speaks its subject outright. Hence the dance.
The key to understanding that—rather than being frustrated by it—is to view the poem as a journey between two points, which is something the Scottish poet Don Paterson once told us in an undergrad seminar. (I believe he was talking about The Present, a quiet revelation of a poem by the late Michael Donaghy.) If a poem only raises one idea throughout, Paterson said, it’s not a complete poem. A poem must take the reader, and the writer, to a new place. It doesn’t need to have a conclusion wrapped up neatly with a bow. (In fact usually it’s better if it doesn’t.) But a sense of movement—a transporting, if you will—is essential.
I scribbled that nugget of wisdom down in my class notes at the time, and it has stuck with me in the years since. Whenever I feel stymied by formal structures in a poem (read: often), I think of that lesson and am reminded that a poem must travel: whether through language, sound, and syntax alone, or additionally with the framework of formal conventions supporting it. Formality isn’t always an ankle weight, some archaic or maladroit limitation on expression. Rather, when executed expansively and elegantly, it can be a subtle guide.
These days it’s fashionable to talk about emotional boundary-setting, and about how to reframe the difficult feeling of being on the receiving end of a boundary. The inclination is to see it as a punishing, a limiting. Rather, psychologists say, it’s an act of love and connection for someone to set a boundary with us: they are demonstrating the parameters of how to care for them so that within this paradigm, we may thrive. Similarly, formal constraints—stanza and meter and yes, I will grudgingly admit, even rhyme scheme—build structure into the poetic imaginary. Less a crutch than a scaffolding, or—in the language of prose—world-building. A poem’s form is its cartographical backbone. Fleshing out the boundaries, if done cleverly, therefore helps hone and sharpen the message of its interiority.
I’ve read the following poem several times. Initially I came across it via an Instagram post (lol) from Poetry Foundation several months ago. I was struck, and bookmarked it. And I kept returning to it, though I struggled to unravel what exactly was so resonant. I was reminded of the poem again this weekend by Poetry Is Not A Luxury, which always reads my mind somehow. This time around I tried to look beyond my embodied encounter (the first, most important line of reception to a poem!) and conduct a close reading in pursuit of understanding how it is so affecting.
The poem began to unlock and reveal itself to me when I noticed, quelle surprise, that a surprisingly formal structure undergirds it. It’s essentially an English sonnet. Not to a T, of course—it’s not written in meter. But, in true Shakespearean style, we do have 14 lines and a volta which hinges into a final couplet, unified in tenor if not in rhyme. And whilst Felix eschews obvious end rhyme, she quietly incorporates slant rhyme in the body of the text: tiny pinpricks of recognition, line over line, which cohere the speaker’s train of consciousness into an emotionally summative whole. Ancestry, teeth; poems, mangoes. In other words: the arcane and the embodied, intermingled. Every gain equals a depletion elsewhere, or vice versa, and there is a mutual exclusivity clause between the two: ‘I’m no longer / writing political poems; because there are / mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive’.
And then, in each line of the poem’s final couplet, Felix repeats the word ‘light’. To me, as a reader, that signals something significant. As before, the first instance is more metaphysical: the turn of phrase ‘travel light’. The second time is more quotidian, more embodied: to ‘light up,’ as in a cigarette or a joint, or even—given the domestic sensibility of ‘tidy up’ after it, a stick of incense. So again we see the marriage of two narratives, but this time instead of slant rhyme it’s the same word, two ways. The two parts find unity, peace in the balance. These final two lines, in which the speaker deploys acuity and grace in response to their own rhetorical question, are where the poem’s tone shifts: the volta, or turn, of the traditional sonnet. Both lines start with ‘I’ sentences. We’ve followed the poem, a mobile creature, to its destination. ‘I’m buying smaller images to travel light,’ the speaker says, and indeed the poem’s syntactical approach to imagery, previously languorous, has become more clipped.
It’s rare to find a poem that dances through its central thesis and journey in an innately self-reflexive way, and rarer still to find a poet who approaches the vastness of human experience with ease and humility the way Felix does. Throughout the poem there is an awareness of weight, and of the cost-benefits of shouldering and shedding language, burdens, memories. ‘I miss being in love but I miss / myself most when I’m gone,’ the speaker observes. It’s a zero-sum equation. The speaker wonders about the 'margin of loss on words not spent today’. But in the poem’s final line this dual sense of insufficiency and of accumulation becomes easier to navigate, a lighter load, as the speaker finds a way to contextualise both truths within the framework of a life.
Small stuff:
By writer and filmmaker Blair McClendon for N+1: Pictures at a Restoration: On Pete Souza’s Obama. Very worth reading for all the Americans out there (and anyone else interested in the metanarrative of political imagery). A brief excerpt: ‘Scanning through [Souza’s] An Intimate Portrait — published almost exactly a year after the election that rejected Obama’s legacy — it is now clear what we were sold: someone finally made good on restoring JFK’s Camelot. This image will probably hang over us for some time. Obama is too charismatic for it to be otherwise, and the shortcut he offers between here and some peaceful, prosperous future is simply too attractive.’
I’ll take ‘technology is ruining us’ for 400, Trebek. From the New Yorker, 'Why Twitter’s New Interface Makes Us Mad: A change like the new Chirp font might seem subtle. The effects are anything but.’
Random but interesting, from Dirt (referring to the pop culture newsletter… not, like, soil): When Netflix comes to town: One Australian community deals with "Byron Baes."
Catch you next time,
Maddy