by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]
There is no genuinely effective lyric poem unless there is a line which lodges itself in the brain like a bullet. Often – though not always – these lines are the first in a poem, the better to abruptly propel the reader into the lyric. William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” or Langston Hughes’ “I’ve known rivers.” For example, John Donne and Emily Dickinson are sterling architects of not just the memorable turn-of-phrase, but the radiant introductory line as well. Think “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” or “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.”
While memorizing poems in their entirety was a common pedagogical exercise at all levels of education until around a century ago, today works remain pressed in the commonplace-book of-the-mind because of a deftly memorable line, a phrase which announces itself like the hook of a pop song. With some irony, contemporary poetry is sometimes maligned by more conservative critics as having a deficit of iconic lines, where the language itself submerges into an undifferentiated mush of abstract nouns and erratically enjambed lines, experimental precociousness and pretentious obscurantism.
Presumably every period of literary history is deluged with bad poetry so that there is a bias towards that which survives, giving a shining glean to previous centuries which they may not entirely deserve. After all, not every poet in the English Renaissance was the equivalent of Shakespeare; most were as if Giles Fletcher or Barnaby Googe. Still, many readers would perhaps find it difficult to name a poetic turn-of-phrase as memorable as those written by Wordsworth, Whitman, or Hughes, not to mention Donne and Dickinson.
This, I would venture, is due to the sheer preponderance of that which is written more than some intrinsic quality of our time period, for American poet Donika Kelly produced an opening line every bit as propulsive as those most iconic examples in her 2016 collection Bestiary. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Graywolf Press published Bestiary was Kelly’s first full-length collection. Now a professor at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, Kelly holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt; her verse is less evocative of the idiomatic voice we associate with contemporary poetry than with a tongue that is archaic, hermetic, ancient. Drawing from the conceit of Medieval bestiaries which used to enumerate the qualities of animals both factual and fanciful, Kelly’s collection explores subjects like childhood abuse and emotional repression by recourse to mythic creatures such as satyrs, griffons, chimeras, werewolves, mermaids, and Pegasi.
Her lyric “Love Poem: centaur,” only two pages after a lyric with the same title, save that the latter’s beast’s name is capitalized so as to act as a palinode on the earlier poem, has a first line that deserves to be emblazoned upon the memory, that has the essential, yet often ineffable, quality which makes a turn-of-phrase eternal.
“I have never met a field as wild/as your heart,” writes Kelly.
Like Wordsworth, Whitman, and Hughes before – as different as all those poets are from one another and from Kelly – she avails herself of the prophetic urgency of the first-person pronoun. It is a line that stakes out its claim, enigmatic thought it may be, for it may not do otherwise.
Presumably narrated by the eponymous centaur of the title (the poem references “a lock of my mane,” though ironically the beast with a human torso wouldn’t have a horse’s mane), the creature is speaking to some beloved more wild than the mythic animal itself. Our centaur, if that’s indeed who is doing the speaking, is strangely domesticated, with its’ “hand, soft, uncalloused,” the greater to make the contrast with the addressee. The comparison is made between the “field” and the “heart,” whereby the former can be “wild” insomuch as its specifically not sculpted, as it grows its flowers and weeds independent of human intervention, in the same manner that the abstracted heart of the beloved is free. There is, to be sure, a degree of marvelment and trepidation that comes with such attraction, such love. “Now, I am afraid,” writes Kelly six lines later, “and so I turn to the field.” The field – the heart – is both a source of safety and of anxiety. They are both dangerously tender.
A centaur isn’t an incidental beast, of course, nor is a mermaid, a satyr, or a griffon. Kelly’s collection doesn’t use these creatures as simplistic allegorical stand-ins; there is a degree of the cryptic with how we’re to understand each instances, with nothing as reductionist as the merely symbolic implied by any reference. This is true in “Love Poem: centaur” as well, obviously. Yet as with all of those other monsters sprinkled throughout Bestiary, a centaur is an in-between creature, half-human and half-horse and thus not fully either. This poem, and the book in which it is included, explores what such inexactness, liminality, and ambiguity feel like by triggering uncertainty in the reader about what all of this means.
Yet by consciously connecting her collection to the tradition of the bestiary, Kelly’s poems do inevitably avail themselves of some connotations. Centaurs, in addition to being hybrids, have frequently been associated with ancient wisdom, as with Chiron, the adopted son of the god Apollo. This hermeticism in a lyric poem narrated by a mythic beast conflated with primal, chthonic, secrets lends Kelly’s line its oracular sound. “I have never met a field as wild/as your heart” evidences a borderline pagan metaphysic, in keeping with the provenance of its narrator. Having been told that the centaur has “never met a field as wild/as your heart,” there is the necessary question of how an inanimate field is anything which can be “met” at all. Visited, seen, or experienced, perhaps, but to have “met” something implies a consciousness of sorts, unless we’re to assume that the field – a vestige of wild nature – is in some way an agent.
Love poems are impossible if all things are loved equally. Despite the centaur’s pantheism, the creature is still capable of discernment, so that the beloved is contrasted with the field, is differentiated from the rest of conscious nature. Perhaps, as is the want of a centaur’s love, the being whose heart is so wild it is to be contrasted with the raggedness of a field, is best seen as an avatar of nature, as a deity of this world which thrums with so much potential. As it is, Kelly’s line lodges in part because it rotates, spinning-about-and-about in the head, a sentence that reads as if a Suffi prayer, as if it’s from a Sibylline papyri.
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, and a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.