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]
To be capable of honesty, every dirge must contain an intimation of joy and every encomium has to gesture towards despair. Definitionally, were the melancholic lyric not to suggest the possibility of happiness – even if it’s lost happiness – than it wouldn’t be melancholic, merely depressing. And were the joyful poem not haunted by the specters of loss, it would be disingenuous, mere pablum. The greatest verse expressions of experience must dwell between the extremes, must intertwine the poles of human emotion. Poet Ross Gay’s work is known for its exploration of gratitude, wonder, and ecstasy without ever reducing the complexity of those things into the merely maudlin. His is a poetry that insists on the possibilities of happiness, not in ignorance of the existence of that emotion’s opposite, but in spite of it. Poems such as those within his 2011 collection Bringing the Shovel Down embody the promises of joy, and the reverent, divine, transcendent dwelling amidst that feeling, even if it happens to be fleeting. Gay’s “Sorrow is Not My Name” is an exemplary example of both this theme and his technique of describing joy by alluding to its opposite.
As a rejoinder to all the sad, young literary men, the lyric is a direct answer to any sense that poetry exists only to plumb dejection and sadness, but the title makes clear that dejection and sadness are very real things, nonetheless. By titling the poem “Sorrow is Not My Name” rather than “My Name is Not Sorrow,” Gay foregrounds the theme of sorrow, even as he negates it. It’s a rejection of dwelling in sorrow, even as the poem only can work as it does because it’s unsparing about the reality of sorrow. “No matter the pull toward brink. /No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits,” begins Gay’s poem. Telling that a lyric ostensibly in rejection of the idea of sorrow begins with two negations. The first line is framed by a parallelism that sees two capitalized instances of the word “No;” the repetition of that word before the line break allows for it to exist momentarily alone, a grand and solitary nothingness in the very first line.
The fragmentation of the first grammatical sentence in the first line makes clear that this remains a poem of rejection. There is a “pull toward brink,” that “deep sleep” of death mentioned in the subsequent line, but the “No matter” lets the reader understand that this is a poem in which that finality is, in some sense, irrelevant. This is true even as the first two lines make clear that death is inevitable, that there is an impossibility of rejecting such finality in an absolute sense. There is an odd effect in the second sentence that runs from the first to the second line when Gay writes “No matter the florid,” for that adjective has been transformed into a noun. What is florid as a noun, if it’s not an adjective modifying a noun? An expression of how death – the deep sleep – is nestled amidst the fecundity and richness of life – the “florid.”
“There is a time for everything,” Gay writes in a voice evocative of Ecclesiastes, before puncturing the heretofore abstraction of these reflections with the first concrete image of “Sorrow is Not My Name.” “Look, /just this morning a vulture/nodded his red, grizzled head at me,/and I looked at him, admiring/the sickle of his beak.” A remarkable image, for several different reasons. There is the obviousness of the vulture as a symbol of death, something so clear to anyone reared in a Western poetic tradition that it might as well pass without comment, and that’s before the beak of the bird is compared to the sickle, so associated with depictions of the Grim Reaper. The narrator describes the vulture in a manner that is phrased conversationally, in the space between an argument and a concession. “Look,” Gay writes, offsetting that command with a comma. It’s clear that the function of this “Look” is both the sort of thing that in everyday speech somebody says to an interlocutor as a means of agreement (as in “Look, I agree with you here”), but it can also be read in a more literal sense, as the giving of an example. After admitting the existence of death (and thus of sorrow), the first brief in Gay’s defense is the beauty of this vulture, where the bird is not merely an embodiment of death but the occasion for an aesthetic (and spiritual) experience as well. The creature has a type of agency – he nods his head in acknowledgement; and the consonance and rhythm of “red, grizzled head” mimics the rough beauty of the vulture – and what he represents – as well. But then, “Just like that,” the bird flies off, for as Donne would write, “Death, be not proud.”
After the invocation of the vulture, Gay writes “And to boot, /there are, on this planet alone, something like two/million naturally occurring sweet things.” It’s a subtle, but powerful, transition because the phrase “And to boot,” which should be understood as meaning “Additionally,” makes clear that this unequivocally positive natural phenomenon (the two million sweet things) exists as part of the same wondrousness as the vulture. The vulture and sweetness are not in opposition to each other – just as life and death are not in opposition to each other – but rather they express the fullness of existence itself. The narrator says of these naturally occurring sweet things that some have names “so generous as to kick/the steel from my knees.” This is a poet’s poem (not every lyric is), for part of Gay’s love of these flavors is the sonorousness of the words used to signify them, of “agave, persimmon… the purple okra I bought for two bucks/at the market.”
Every great poem – and this is a great poem – must be invested in the aural or it’s merely strangely arranged prose. The choice of these sweet things is related more to the sounds of the words that define them, the vowel couched in those plunking consonants in the short “agave” sounding like an abrupt popping, the thrice-syllabled “persimmon” with its luxuriating sibilants, even the staccato rhythm of “purple okra,” which is hardly sweet tasting but perhaps sweet sounding. After telling us that he bought the okra for the steal of “two bucks/at the market,” Gay ponders “Think of that.” There is no question mark at the end of that grammatical sentence, contained in the exact middle of the seventeenth line of “Sorrow is Not My Name,” so it’s ambiguous as to whether we read it as an expressive “Think of that?!” or if it should be understood more literally again, as an actual command. It must also be understood that what we’re to think of – whether the price of the okra or the miracle of such sweet things – is also ambiguous.
Memento mori dwells within Gay’s celebration of life, as indeed it must. He describes “The long night, /the skeleton in the mirror,” the acknowledgement that all of our fleshy lives are composed of such bones merely encased within our bodies. To look in the mirror is to actually see a skeleton, or what will be reduced to such someday soon. “But look,” he writes, another instance (along with “Look” and “Think of that”) where Gay uses a conversational tone to powerful effect, “my niece is running through a field/calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel/and at the end of my block is a basketball court.” These are simple but profound things. Like the two million naturally occurring sweet things, they are a rejoinder to the brink, to the deep sleep. But the deep sleep itself is what gives meaning to the “florid,” for it’s in the undeniable existence of death that life takes its measure. As verse, Gay works in a tradition that calls upon the memento mori of a metaphysical like Donne or the carpe diem of a Cavalier such as Marvell. More directly, he evokes Jack Gilbert’s “Brief for the Defense” from the 2007 collection Refusing Heaven which begins “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere” and yet concludes that “If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, /we lessen the importance of their deprivation. /We must risk delight… We must have/the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/furnace of this world.” From the initial invocation of “Sorrow” onward, Gay and Gilbert are making the same poetic argument, which in itself is a kind of ars poetica (especially in Gay’s case, with his celebration of the sounds of the names of sweet things).
As with Gilbert’s lyric, the power of Gay’s argument is fully earned because it begins with looking into the abyss before making its case for life and poetry, wonder and joy. He ends with that conclusion in a single poetic line composed of a tricolon of grammatically complete sentences that each begin with the first-person pronoun. “I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.” What he remembers is less important than that he remembers; it’s a Cogito of self-hood. If you’re alive to remember you’re alive to enjoy life. In green shades of Marvell, he associates himself with the color of life, and he concludes by equating himself with the season of birth. From death then Gay moves towards life – the poem as an act of resurrection.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. 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.
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