There is the sort of poetry which is shy and odd. Here is no titanic novel, no Lord Byron of a thousand rhymes, no comedy, no tragedy, no autobiography, no song.
It is the sort of poetry that looks at you and says…yes? Did you want something? Were you looking for someone?
It is the poet who is so not cool, they are cool. Or, so cool, they are not cool. And so on. And they secretly hate you—or love you. You can’t tell. They sit across from you for an evening and say nothing—with words, or otherwise.
Theirs is the sort of poetry that is a little bit funny without any effort at all, and for a moment they might have you thinking that to be a little bit funny with no effort at all is really the greatest thing it is possible to do.
In the 2016 March Madness East bracket, we have 12th seed Stephen Sturgeon, who is currently literature librarian at the University of Iowa, with this line:
City buses are crashing and I can’t hear Murray Perahia.
A line like this is unassailable. One could never pronounce it bad or good. Sturgeon’s line wears the magic coat of John Ashbery, protected forever from criticism. It could mean something, or not, and because it baffles, it pleases sweetly and ephemerally, like a cigarette, or any trivial pleasure which pleases because of a certain sly, unhealthy, indefiniteness. It is unhealthy to be indefinite all the time. And in our minds, small doses of the unhealthy will tend to feel like pleasure. One can be addicted to non-meaning, and actually find it to equal actual pleasure. If they haven’t done a study of this, they should.
Boredom is separated from death by one thing: variety. If differences ceased, boredom really would be death—to be bored with one thing endlessly is perhaps the one thing that is hell for the mind—the hell of pure boredom, without pain.
“City buses are crashing” is very high on the modern spectacle-of-interest scale and not being able to hear Murray Perahia makes perfect sense, and yet is so odd, especially if you are one of those people who say to yourself, Murray Perahia? I’ve heard that name, but who is he? It is that tantalizing uncertainty: Buses crashing? Why? Are people dying? Is the poet on the bus, or just witnessing the crash? And so on. It is all those questions, all those uncertainties, all those elements—which save us from the horror of boredom. “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” Said Berryman. Yes and yes.
Susan Terris, who was published in the latest Best American Poetry, is the 5th seed in the East, and her line is:
Cut corners fit in marry someone
It is what we do. It sums up life. After the buses crash. After Murray Perahia finishes. It is funny how a few words can capture a life in such a way that, even though we know there is so much more to life, there is a part of us that relents, and says, Oh God. This is it. This is life.
It almost as if we like the way language can put us in a little box and there we remain.
Someone has to come out of this box and be the winner. Will it be Stephen? Or Susan?
From the box come indefinable sounds.
