It came to me the other day how much I miss thinking and writing about poetry. So I am back.
Into the gap left when The Writers Almanac took its hiatus—about which I will not comment—came The Slowdown, a daily email from former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. (I can't imagine the pain of being poet laureate in the administration of the orange buffoon. But I also should not comment on that right now.)
Today's poem struck me in its simplicity and in its superb contrast of everyday images and objects with the poem's immense emotional weight. It's "A Joke About How Old We've Become," by Adam Clay.
The use of negatives to circuitously say something positive was the first thing that struck me about this poem. "Why not instead," "best not to fill," "how not to worry," "as if time won't eventually." The repetition of "not" in positive contexts gives the poem a sense of inevitability. But try as they might—and it seems they are trying—all these "nots" can't combat the one thing in the poem that is specifically "positive" but is the worst negative of all: the test results.
Negative space is the flip side of that negative language, and it's something I've rarely noticed in a poem. Often the shape of the lines can create negative space on the page, but instead, here the poet has created a number of empty spaces to be filled, or not filled, with words and images. He even says so in the middle of the poem: "sometimes it's best / ...not to fill / any space with words." There are many spaces in the poem, from the baskets hanging in midair to the body stretching, the space of the room to be crossed, "blank space" around the flag, the space of three decades, and the space "of stepping back we all do."
One form of blank space usually frowned upon in poetry as unnecessary is the homely article. How many poems have had all the "the"s and "a"s critiqued or edited out of them? A fair number of mine, anyway. But this poet uses articles as a way to slow the poem down, itself a "slow-draining sink," its weight seeping into the reader drip by drip. In one stanza, every line begins with "the," creating a rhythm: "the album... / the minor... / the room." We have not only "the plants" but also specifically "the plants in the hanging baskets." "The stars and the stripes." And most importantly, "the tests." Nouns in this poem are given their own space, their own weight, to settle in the reader's mind as familiar objects so that the speaker's fear and sadness are also familiar and become the reader's own.
My father's tests are positive, too. So maybe this poem speaks particularly loudly to me. I'd love to hear what you think of it.
