Public Grief, Public Love, Public Record

Be Recorder. Carmen Giménez Smith. Graywolf, 2019. 88 pp. $16.00 (paper).
Grief Sequence. Prageeta Sharma. Wave Books, 2019. 104 pp. $20.00 (paper).
Dear Delinquent. Ann Townsend. Sarabande, 2019. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper).

More and more, our lives are built around a persona we skillfully weave on social media. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living or what remote tree-lined peak you live on; it’s nearly impossible to escape the constant barrage of oversharing and oversimplification that occurs across the many public platforms we choose to use. The new era seems to be that of “I do things in public.”

Against all odds, and common sense, poetry is flourishing in this environment of abundance. We share an individual poem on Twitter, and within minutes hundreds more people have read it. The same goes for Instagram and Facebook. It’s easy to assume, with the proliferation of poems in public spaces and the plethora of nonpoets sharing their inner most revelations online, that books of poetry or individual poems themselves would have lost their inherent urgency. Not so. The last decade has proven to be a time for poetry to operate in the white heat of response, to move passionately across the screen, and come out stronger for it.

Still, even with all the daily oversharing, there is a secret telling that only gifted poets can accomplish. There’s a way that they lean in, clear eyed, reaching both inward and outward, and share something intimate and timely, something utterly explosive. We still desperately need that explosiveness, that trust and rigor that only fine poets can achieve when carefully balancing craft and impulse.

In Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence, Ann Townsend’s Dear Delinquent, and Carmen Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder, we as readers are allowed to bear witness to the type of secret telling that only true art can achieve, not just about a life or a world, but about a particular interior life and this world that we live in now. These books are written by poets skilled at controlling the narrative while creating space for mystery, sonic pleasure, syntactical delight. They remind us that the art of sharing is not about telling the whole story, or even about telling the whole truth, but about building a space for both reader and poet to enter, to stand for a moment and see the same world, to be linked by image and lyric in a way that feels intimate, isolated, electric.

In Prageeta Sharma’s fifth book, Grief Sequence, we see a poet rise to meet grief with an almost otherworldly clarity. The poems concern the sudden death of the poet’s partner and all the surreality and inescapable reality that follow. Rather than focusing on the thin scrim between the ineffable and the living, the poems take meticulous note of the dying process, the dreams that occur afterward, the experience of survival after loss.

Made up almost entirely of prose poems and using sentences as the primary engine, Grief Sequence is tightly controlled. These pieces are compelled by compression and the airlessness of the new reality of grief. You can feel the walls closing in around the poet as the brutal new world takes hold. Still, Sharma is not governed by her grief; instead she is governed by her poetic impulse to record and take note of what that grief is doing to her as a human, a lover, a poet. In the very first few pages of the book, in “A Human With Feelings,” Sharma writes:

I am having trouble today. How gauche it is to be in this body being unseen by you now. And I am wearing to bed the floral shirt I bought you, because it’s the only thing that keeps me intact. You are not you anymore and I am trying to understand how a human with feelings disappeared. You were mine.

That “trying to understand” is the magnifying glass placed again and again over the wound of loss. Yet like a physician searching for the root cause of an illness, there is an acute intelligence at play that steps outside of the dizzying emotions and interrogates, reasons.

A dream sequence (Sequence 6) moves in the opposite direction, like a patient trying to figure out their symptoms, knowing full well the diagnosis has already been etched in stone. Each section of this poem has the haunting opening of an em dash and then, in brackets, the words “In this one,” so that the reader knows there are many more dreams, that they are ongoing: “—[In this one] Dale was back. It was because somehow he could live a little longer. There is a hallway light.

It is a passageway. We lie together in bed to do this.” The near-obsessive reporting of the facts, dreams, and details never feels forced; rather, they are a lifeline, a rope out of the darkness. At the center of that obsessiveness is, of course, the “you.” The poems aren’t written for us, the reader, but for the partner. We are eavesdropping. We are being allowed to see the unanswerable letters written into ether.

In the third section, “Sequences with Titles,” poems delve into the pettiness of living. In “My Poem About False Friends,” Sharma writes:

Your two bro-friends did see me as much less because I was a misshapen bag of stress and feeling the burden of racialized markings. Because of that sort of seeing or not-seeing, you did your best to protect me but you also had traumatic pain to work through. I didn’t like some of your friends; I wasn’t sure whether you shared secrets with them or they shared secrets with you. Retrospectively, it was all tied to misogyny.

Later this passage deepens with, “How can I paint you as flawed when you are no longer here beside me making your case as to why their flaws and yours are something to forgive . . .” This arguing with the dead in short, compressed prose poems allows the reader to wholeheartedly believe Sharma—because even dead, even witnessing death, no one is a saint. In fact, in speaking of other lost friends she writes, “Who is a saint in hospice and who believes in one’s own sainthood during this time?”

Grief Sequence is a book that uncovers truths as it goes. It is both generous with the elegized loved one and unrelenting. It is not acceptance, nor is it denial. This is an almost accidental sharing, driven; as Sharma writes at the completion of the book, in an extended “Poetry Obituary & Notes,” “For me, closure happens through talking. Or rather closure isn’t closure but openings.” That is exactly what she has given us with Grief Sequence: an opening.

If Grief Sequence is an opening, Ann Townsend’s Dear Delinquent is a closing. Not closing off, but slamming the door with such a satisfying whack that all the windows shake a little. With a spare lyrical form, the poems in Dear Delinquent very often address a “you,” frequently the speaker’s lover in an apparent affair. The language is simultaneously internal and precisely spoken, giving a sense that these poems are not written out of obsession or frantic need, but out of deep wonder.

With a title that echoes how the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay addressed her lover Salomón de la Selva, Dear Delinquent is full of lines that are astringent in a way that clarifies and brightens. And there is pleasure in Townsend’s willingness to reveal without relinquishing her expert control. In “Here Be Dragons,” Townsend writes:

                  so body from body sadly divided 
                 we left our own haze of pity

                           and pleasure behind until one day

                 it was rendered like this: that first 
                 you knew me for my words alone,

                          and now I sing of all I’d rather not.

That last line, “I sing of all I’d rather not,” invites the reader to look at what is both necessary to speak and what is ushered into the world because the art depends upon it. Here is the cruel truth: a poet doesn’t always write poems because they want to; they write because they have to. Townsend’s gaze upon the world is penetrating and at times psychedelic with desire. While grief shifts everything in Sharma’s world, want and loss color Townsend’s world, with a healthy dose of acidity.

Rarely have I seen such a deft rendering of an affair, in all its unseen wholeness. Unlike Sharma’s book, which begs the conflation of speaker and poet through its notes section, I won’t presume the speaker is the poet here; Townsend’s notes indicate an indebtedness to the troubadour tradition and to Millay. Persona or not, these unflinching lyrical poems read like someone in the midst of disaster who responds by sharpening her knives and delighting in the sound.

Townsend plunges into desire and the sounds of desire. In the poem “Millay’s Hair” the speaker finds a lock of Millay’s hair “glued loosely” inside Millay’s sister’s scrapbook. Townsend writes:

                               I shouldn’t have touched it, but in those days 

                               I was always hungry. Despite the rare books
                                        librarian lurking, I set my thumb against it.

Here we have not only a present-day desire, but a legacy of desire, a feminist history of want. The language is overflowing with oo’s and ah’s, letting the ear open to the sound of sigh and breath. The sensual long u’s of “glued loosely” and the short o’s in the grocery list found in the notebook, “Olives, Cookies, Scotch,” give the reader a song of rapaciousness. Townsend ends this poem with the speaker finding that a single hair from Millay has fallen from the page:

                                                                                  I lifted it,

                                  casket of DNA, protein, lipids, and still titian red.
                                              Really, was I wrong to swallow it?

Desire is not thrust upon the speaker unwittingly but is searched for and owned. Desire, in the form of the strand of hair, is eaten with eyes open, rare book librarian be damned.

That confidence in how the speaker views the situation allows for both a distance and an authoritative clarity that forces the reader to lean into the poems on the page. In “Doll,” Townsend writes:

                              On his hand, the ring 
                              I hate. Rest easy,

                              he writes to her—
                              nothing happening

                              here.

The poem ends almost viciously but also honestly, and without denial:

                             Nothing happening 
                             here, he says,

                             smiling.
                            And Nothing

                            steps forward, 
                            into his arms.

The speaker is the thing that is happening; the speaker is the manifestation of the lie. But because words matter above all else here, the speaker is also claiming that she is nothing. That is the name the “he” has given her and the “she” has accepted by being in the affair. Perhaps what makes this book so remarkable is that while the “you” is ever present, it is the “I” that always shows up to stab the page with her voracity for truth.

In the final section of Dear Delinquent, a strengthening of resolve turns the poems into powerful tools of dismantle and release. The poem that haunts me the most there is “Abattoir,” in which the speaker finds a fledgling rabbit tossed about by her cats like “a shuttlecock.” As one does with a fatally wounded animal, she intends to end its suffering, but instead she holds it for a moment as if to say goodbye:

death in its eyes, myself mirrored
back.

She is at one with the animal. Both have been the thing batted around, both have been the limp animal being played with for pleasure. Then, because tenderness can only last so long, she does what needs to be done:

                     The rabbit and I regarded
                     each other. It closed one brown eye. 
                     Stilled, so small—the cats would have it, 
                     no doubt, by sunset. I drove
                     the shovel down against its spine.

It is refreshing to see a poem that can both give us a gentle moment with nature, then turn around without apology and let death happen, let the end happen. She is the one doing the hurting and also the one to—eventually, with sympathy—put the poor beast out of its misery.

Throughout Townsend’s book there is a sense that she is telling us her secrets, but they are not just hers; they are archetypal and eternal, they are every affair’s secrets, they are desire’s secrets. What is it to be in love without being able to show that love in public? What is it to be the woman forced to be hidden? There is a relief and a release to this book, a great outward breath that seems to be saying, I have held this in too long. I have lived in the shadows too long. These poems are a stunning example of what the right light can do to shadows.

Carmen Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder, her sixth book, is another kind of secret telling. If Sharma talks to her now-gone partner through the lens of grieving, and Townsend’s speaker lets us eavesdrop on a multifaceted desire, Giménez Smith addresses all of us in an expansive reckoning with identity on an individual and collective level.

Through a variety of forms, from poems in long lines and prose poems to a forty-two-page sectioned central poem—the eponymous core of the book—Giménez Smith is almost delirious with her need to tell us (and ask us) something important: How do we live? Who are we as a country? How are we made?

These poems are built to be public poems, abundant and rhythmic, manifestos and songs filled with pop-culture references and the meaty stuff of now. In the first section, called “Creation Myth,” which deals primarily with the many identities that make up the speaker, a poem called “No Apology: A Poemifesto” asks the reader to change the daily routine of apologizing for one’s own existence:

I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine. 
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.

And at the end she urges all of us to stop apologizing, speaking directly to the reader in a call to action, a call for a paradigm shift:

I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

Be Recorder makes its bones on not apologizing. Wide ranging in its subject matter, it’s particularly interested in the ironic suffering of modern-day living, and the mythological ideas of America and being American.

In the long sectioned poem in the middle of the book, “Be Recorder,” a pulse of chaos runs through the words like an echoing bass line. Here, everything is happening at once. With enjambment as the engine and a strange syntax that implies simultaneity, the poem aches with prodding wonders:

I hardly care that I’m doing 
harpy that I’m a city’s pestilence 
should I mother or write
serve art or the state

The long poem unfolds with these interrogative phrases as Giménez Smith works at what it is to be Latinx, to have both a legacy of luckiness and a legacy of denial:

I became American each time 
my parents became American
each instance symbolizing a different 
version of being American

And later in a different section Giménez Smith insists:

with me will you jump in and fight can it be your caravan too 
record my face lover record my limbs record them for
us all I’m lucky I’m lucky I’m so lucky that I’m lucky

This recognition of “luck,” of privilege, is part of the work’s fertile complexity. There is both the isolation of being “other” and the acknowledgment of being better off than some, all while needling at the irony of trying to make art out of the stuff of life, the need to share and expose the self.

In a later section that plays with both caesuras and the anaphora of “or,” the page becomes a sort of frantic banter that’s both terrifying and pleasurable at once. It is the poet’s mind at its wildest:

how much credit do I claim        and where do I claim it like at the office 
      of art claims         or
the office of welfare and how                         did I earn   contempt        was it 
      my cheeky            or
basic mode                 I suffer how I suffer                      and  it’s all my fault 
      is there a grant    or
should I get an agent in all senses of the word literary and                cultural 
      and mask              or
will my class ascent           assuage your guilt                   is it ever 
      inevitable             or

On a whole, the long poem of Be Recorder is a triumph as it gathers its energy from the absurdist storm of the Anthropocene. Everything is happening at once: a monolith threatens; human beings are in cages; we must define our origins, our suffering, our “art”; we are both spurned and shunned by the state; and yet what is the final task? The ultimate call to arms? To witness. To write it down. To record.

The final section of the book is a mix of modern love poems and generous prose poems that delve into the problem of consumerism, capitalism, and motherhood. Here we see a tenderness and a clarity, and the mind at work is calmer and quicker to reason. Ending the book on these final poems provides a softness that would have otherwise been missed. In a striking and complex love poem, “Entanglement,” Giménez Smith writes:

I hate the word faith, but that’s all there is. Only
the last one standing knows the score. Think of the types 
of violence on a continuum, and toward the mildest
end is love.

To see love as a type of violence is to acknowledge that we are opened and changed by love’s intrusion. This poem recognizes that love doesn’t always come easily, softly, but that it sometimes arrives in a way that requires an intense reordering, a reimagining of a life. That with love often comes grief. Still, in the end, there is faith. A word Giménez Smith says she hates, and yet “that’s all there is.” And she’s right. She also offers here a recognition of a complicated love, one that is different from what we might see on social media or in the public eye. She shows us that love can be more of an earthquake than a steady ground, something both to long for and, at times, fear, because of what might happen to the body, the heart, a life.

At a time when anyone can compose a long, meandering online post about loss, write a statement that causes a stir, or rant about our daily political mayhem, poetry will always be the kind of sharing I want, the kind of secret telling I crave. Poetry, with a capital P, the craft that relies on form and sound and syntax and knows that it’s not only about the telling but also about the singing and the silence that follows. Sure, social media might be good for journaling and keeping up with distant friendships and praising each other and sharing pictures of dogs and cats and kids, but poets prove to us that it’s not the amount of words that matters; it’s the care you take with them. I for one am grateful that these poets are still doing that kind of extreme caretaking, still making sure the public life of language isn’t known just by verbosity but rather by its art, by its truth.

Read more from Issue 17.1.