You Know This, You Know This

In her 2020 review of then-recent collections by Chris Nealon and Carolyn Forché, the poet, essayist, and critic Elisa Gabbert observes that climate change has “come to seem like the only available subject” of contemporary literature. “How can we write about it, yet how can we not write about it?” she asks. This representational dilemma is as omnipresent as the much graver reality from which it follows: “It’s not that you can’t still write a poem about sex or the rain at your mother’s funeral,” Gabbert writes. “It’s that sex poems and funeral poems are about climate change too. [...] There is weather, rain or drought, in the background, whether or not you acknowledge it.”

Though Gabbert’s focus in this essay, aptly titled “Poems from the Storm,” is the genre she calls “climate poetry,” she allows that the “all-consuming crisis of climate change” is but one of many “political and moral disasters” haunting contemporary poetry. (Others include “the rise of fascism, the carceral state, [and] severe inequality.”) None of these is new—there is a long tradition of writers concerning themselves with the political and moral disasters of their times—but Gabbert’s sense that there is something distinctive about the quality of the present literary preoccupation rings true.

The reasons for this seem to be multiple: an increased understanding, at least left of center, that climate change, with its attendant catastrophes, is no longer a possibility to avoid but an inevitability to attenuate. Another: bad news (pick your topic!) has at no point in history ever been more accessible in as great a volume to so many people. There’s also been an undeniable sea change regarding what was once derisively qualified as “political art.” The idea that poems should not—or that the best poems do not—forward an agenda or even subscribe to a particular ideology, still prevalent when I attended an MFA program 10 years ago, is now rather passé. (I don’t doubt that there are many more people who still believe this than are willing to say so, but that’s notable in and of itself.) More commonly voiced today might be an anxiety about poetry’s fraught relationship to the vast network of forces imprecisely called “the political”: How can we write about it, yet how can we not write about it?

Gabbert is a writer who acknowledges the weather in the background; her last book, the essay collection The Unreality of Memory (2020), is largely about disaster, both its specific iterations and as a category characteristic of the current time. Normal Distance (Soft Skull Press, 2022), her fourth collection of poetry, is in many ways an extension of her well-established interests as a nonfiction writer. In these poems, however, she takes up the particular and ambitious aim of regarding crisis as weather, as background rather than subject. Or, perhaps I should say, the contemporary backgroundedness of crisis is her subject. It may be a book about suffering (the title of the second poem is “About Suffering”), and about boredom and time, but Gabbert largely treats these as the abstractions they are. Here, she’s more interested in the ambient conditions of contemporary life than in the events or experiences that produce them, as titles such as “The Vagueness of the Moment” confirm.

Gabbert’s dominant mode in this collection—26 of the 35 poems adhere to it—is a not-quite-prose poem comprising unlineated, typically single-sentence stanzas, or monostichs, a form well represented in contemporary poetry. Layli Long Soldier’s indelible “38” comes to mind as a prominent example, as do recent poems by Monica Youn—“Detail of the Rice Chest” among them. I first encountered the form in Kazim Ali’s book Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (2009) and again in Graham Foust’s To Anacreon and Other Poems (2013), whose antecedents seem to be multiple—as varied as Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”; the paragraphed poems of Fenton Johnson, about which Ron Silliman writes in his influential—and also relevant to this discussion—1987 essay “The New Sentence”; and the more fragmentary passages of Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. A more humorous, pithier strain, of which James Richardson might be the foremost contemporary practitioner, can be traced back to short forms such as Japanese haiku and senryu, Latin epigrams, and Greek aphorisms. (Worth nothing: Foust blurbed Gabbert’s book, and in it she quotes both Brainard and Basho.)

As in those Long Soldier and Youn poems, this form often marries the proposition-driven rhythm of the essay with the spare precision of the lyric to great effect. Discursive and digressive though it may be, the poem-in-monostichs nevertheless proceeds—to use Richard Howard’s term for the characteristic motion of prose (whereas “verse reverses”)—without conceding a poetic relationship to language and the space of the page. Many poems in Normal Distance work like this. Consider the book’s opening lines, for example, from the poem “Prelude”:

Every year, when the lindens bloom, I think of the year when the lindens didn’t bloom.
 
This year, so far, the lindens haven’t bloomed.
 
I think of the year when the lindens didn’t bloom.
 
An idea almost comes, or it comes in disguise—it’s the same old thought, but today it is startling.

As a first poem—and therefore a de facto proem—“Prelude” is a bit of a fake out (in a fun way). Though images from the natural world recur periodically throughout the collection (“an owl swoops between two black trees” later in “Prelude”), Gabbert is hardly a Romantic, and her engagement with nature tends to be ironic: the poem “In Nature” begins, “I can think, but rarely of nature.” Indeed, everything in this book is mediated—almost all the action in these poems transpires in the mind rather than in the world. Most books are composed in solitude, but this book feels especially so: the world may be too much with us, but it always arrives from outside, whether as memory or news. In fact, that owl doesn’t swoop in the poem but enters via metaphor: “Thoughts almost arrive. // The way an owl swoops between two black trees….”) The repetition of I think twice in the first three lines is the actual promise “Prelude” delivers on: that cognition will be foregrounded here, made explicit. But readers might not be able to guess from the uncharacteristically high-lyric register of a line such as “Morning, of course, has its own foreshortened, clandestine dusk” that in a few pages, they’ll get “How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think” or “I’m trying to decide if Wittgenstein was sexy. It’s not obvious.”

Gabbert is just as likely to pivot on a semi-sequitur—

Some philosophers think that your phone has a conscious “mind.”
 
Same for anything sufficiently connected—like Pando, a tree that manifests as hundreds of trees and is “currently thought to be dying.”
 
I haven’t seen a crow in a long time—do crows have a season?—
 
     (from “The Idea of Beginning”)

or make a joke—

When it rains it’s boring.
 
When it rains it bores holes into your body. Turns out it was acid rain!
     (from “New Theories on Boredom”)

as she is to issue a quietly devastating proclamation:

Bad news: You can’t actually save time. You’ll just use it to do something else.
 
You pretty much have to do one thing at a time, and in order.
 
You could change your life.
 
You could waste some time and be happy.
 
     (from “I Don’t Want to Hear Any Good News or Bad News”)

Her revision of Rilke here breaks my heart!

Even as she maintains her essayistic stance, what Gabbert attempts in Normal Distance is to record the mind at work and play in the face of infinite claims—both worthy and not—on readers’ attention. She isn’t necessarily interested in getting to the bottom of things—“I associate the word thing with false humility—who am I to name a thing?” she asks—or in arriving at a particular point. (Wikipedia informs me that “[t]he normal distance is a type of perpendicular distance generalizing the distance from a point to a line and the distance from a point to a plane.” I haven’t taken a math class since struggling through Algebra II in my junior year of high school, so I can’t tell you what this means, but I sense it might be relevant here.) Elsewhere, she writes, “I like thoughts before they coalesce into ‘thoughts.’ Before-thoughts.”

One way Gabbert’s monosti(t)ched poems succeed at reflecting The Way We Think Now is by sometimes resembling, in their movements between various tonalities and topics, the Twitter feed of an erudite but not self-serious friend. There are threads as well as surprising, sometimes comic, juxtapositions and lurching shifts in register. One motif, appearing alongside occasional references to literature and philosophy, is the random fact or weird news story: “I heard on the radio that lazy people have higher IQs”; “Now scientists believe we have a mirror universe, a ‘reflection’ of our universe where time flows backward from future to past”; “In 2016, an archaeologist used radar to confirm that [Shakespeare’s] skull is not in his tomb”; “I read that plants can ‘hear’ themselves being eaten.”

Though the poems have distinct focuses, slantly established by their often allusive titles, they can sometimes read like iterations of one larger, ongoing poem or feed—and not just because of their sameness of form. Lines repeat across poems—“Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless and alone?”—or are apparently responded to or elaborated on elsewhere. “You can’t just talk about the weather anymore,” Gabbert writes and then, seven pages later, “I actually like talking about the weather.” And, of course, they spool and loop back (“We realize the same things over and over, new every time”) to the obsessions of this particular mind: the apparent lateness of history, that “[s]ometimes the dystopia was boring,” the nature of the mind itself. 

***

Normal Distance is a funny book that takes crisis as quotidian. To survey both minutiae and the void—in order to point out how similar they can appear—is something of a high-wire act that, like a Twitter account that embraces both humor and serious engagement with current affairs, runs the risk of glibness. Lines here and there, taken in isolation, might fairly meet that accusation: “I mean, who cares, of course, democracy is dead”; “There is almost something romantic about dying from ‘complications”; “I want to purchase a human skull.” But Gabbert never promises sincerity, and the payoff of her usually acrobatic execution of ironic ambiguity is considerable. (Besides, sincerity is hardly in short supply in contemporary poetry.)

What I am less convinced by (or maybe of) is what the book actually says about suffering. Let’s turn to the poem of that title, a riff on Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about which Gabbert has written for the New York Times, where she is the Book Review’s “On Poetry” columnist. My disagreements begin almost immediately, with the poem’s second stanza: “There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say ‘I suffer’ helps.” Certainly, I’ve articulated my suffering countless times hoping that will help, but I’m not sure it ever has. This may be a petty quibble—and perhaps baseless, given that the first line acknowledges that “the urge to announce you’re suffering” is “useless.” But at the poem’s final line, I practically take umbrage:

About suffering, no one is ever wrong.

People are wrong about suffering all the time! Its causes, its degrees. But this is, of course, a generalization of the claim with which Auden begins “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

That the generalization is so gross and knowing Gabbert to be frequently ironic, I’m hesitant to take her at her word here. As a reader of poetry who aspires to be a critical reader of poetry, I resist the notion that readers should, as a rule, understand lines of poetry to be statements of their author’s beliefs. As a poet, few things irk me more than feeling I’ve been misread as sincere when I was after something less straightforward.

Gabbert’s own essay on “Musée des Beaux Arts” might offer an interpretive key. She concerns herself with the question of that poem’s “moral valence”—whether it seeks to recognize the backgroundedness of other people’s suffering as an inevitable fact of life or to condemn the ease with which people carry on in the foreground—as the ploughman does in Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, one painting with which Auden’s poem contends. For the ploughman, the fate of Daedalus's son is “not an important failure.” In Gabbert’s reading, that the poem “seems to make pronouncements … is another disguise, the way the playful nonchalance hides moral seriousness.” Ultimately, she concludes, the poem is a provocation: “The more time I’ve spent with the poem, the more its knowing certainty feels like a pose. It wants us to argue.”

This is an apt framework for how to understand a statement such as “About suffering, no one is ever wrong”—it wants us to argue!—and Gabbert’s own “playful nonchalance” throughout the book. Consider “Genealogy (Such Deep Creases),” for example, which responds to the provocations of a different Auden poem. It begins

I’ve known all my life that my father’s Uncle Joe was killed by his wife.
 
It was almost a novelty story—a murder in the family!

I was initially bothered by the performed levity of that second line and not only as someone with firsthand knowledge of how murder devastates a family. But just a few lines later, the poem begins to undercut, maybe even critique, that initial posture:

I was in my thirties when I found out Joe’s mother—my
father’s grandmother—my great-grandmother—was
“never the same.”
 
Joe was her favorite. Her life was ruined by grief.
 
This woman, my great-grandmother, her name was
Geneva. I had forgotten.

That the speaker here has forgotten her great-grandmother’s name, something established four poems earlier, functions almost as an objective—or a phenomenal—correlative for the generational and emotional distance her grief permitted. And that distance is relayed in the syntax too, with the relational claim of “my great-grandmother” appearing, twice, as an appositive.

Soon, scene—an unusual feature of the poems in this book—intrudes, and, with it, human reality still further: “We were in a restaurant when my father told me this.” As he fills in harrowing details the speaker never knew,

These people, long dead, became yet more real.
 
It’s taken my whole lifetime to understand they’re real.
 
They say “never forget,” but you can’t remember things you haven’t experienced.

***

Though the crises that always hover in the background of Normal Distance are systemic (climate change, the death of democracy, a generalized feeling of the end times), when extraordinary suffering rather than the ordinary suffering of boredom does appear in the specific, it is usually an instance of fatal medical misfortune—Pierre Curie was run over by a horse-drawn cart, Georges Perec died of lung cancer—or, as in “Genealogy,” of interpersonal violence. “Malice & the Unknown” contrasts William S. Burroughs, who fatally shot his partner Joan Vollmer during a game of William Tell, with Norman Mailer, who “also drunk at a party, stabbed his wife—twice—almost in the heart—but did not kill, did not succeed in killing her.” Gabbert doesn’t linger, however. Immediately after describing Mailer’s attempted murder of Adele Morales, she digresses: “You know this, you know this.”

I read that turning away as a desire to subvert the poem’s moral or epistemic superiority; this book assumes readers do not need to be reminded that Mailer stabbed his wife—or that climate change is real and really bad, for that matter. Gabbert can write a line such as “I mean, who cares, of course, democracy is dead” in part because it’s a given that we—the poet and her readers—do care.

This position might be a reaction to dominant impulses in poetry that tries to acknowledge the crises that are always in the background or to foreground them explicitly—particularly as written by members of the “constituency” that Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), calls “the privileged and the merely safe.” Though Gabbert finds much to praise in the Nealon and Forché books under review in “Poems from the Storm,” she is also critical of two modes of poetic response to crisis from outside its center prevalent in contemporary poetry. The first is the poem that takes great pains to acknowledge the complicity of the (typically white) poet, speaker, and/or poem itself. The other is the older tradition of the poetry of witness, which directs readers’ attention to horrors they may otherwise look past. Having written poems in both veins, I share Gabbert’s skepticisms of each. The complicit poem skews, at worst, toward self-congratulation or absolution and, at best, can struggle to do anything but paradoxically make a case for its own non-existence. The witnessing poem, on the other hand, often overestimates the power of both poetry and witness and can easily turn voyeuristic or otherwise exploitative, inviting questions about the utility of bearing witness and about the relationship between poets and the horror they observe. (I have also admired poems of both types: poems are, after all, more specific than the categories they belong to.)

Obviously, poets can choose to not respond to or explicitly acknowledge the social and political crises of contemporary life, and their poems do not need to explicitly acknowledge social and political crisis to respond to them. Normal Distance, in emphasizing the backgroundedness of the suffering of others that Auden wrote of in “Musée des Beaux Arts”—without assuming its position is adequate to offering meaningful commentary upon it nor going out of its way to assure readers it knows that—might represent a third (or fourth?) way. If, as Gabbert says, “During the Middle Ages, ‘Poverty, wars, and local famines were so much a part of normal life that they were taken for granted and could therefore be faced in a sober and realistic manner,’” perhaps the current age requires a manner specific to it, one that makes room for the coexistence of horrors both fresh and historical: the fact that dystopia is sometimes boring and the humor that going on living within it sometimes requires of us.

But poetry differs from visual art in using language, rather than image, as its constituent matter, and the two are not processed the same by sighted people. When Gabbert and I refer to a poem having a background and a foreground, we are invoking a metaphor to describe something that is not, in fact, spatial. The eye cannot take in the entirety of a poem in an instant and travel within it where it likes, flitting from detail to detail. Rereading might approximate this—and concrete poetry and other visual poetic forms might offer exceptions—but there is no way I know of for a poem to precisely replicate how Bruegel positions Icarus’s upturned legs in the corner of his painting so that he is in the background for the ploughman, the shepherd, and the angler but still appears much closer to the viewer than the farthest things in the painting. Treating suffering mostly as an ambient reality in which the poem is written, letting it remain an abstraction, doesn't grant readers the opportunity—not in the same way as in Bruegel’s painting—to train their attention on that suffering. And what they imagine, what they fill in, might not always be accurate.  

I like the penultimate poem in Gabbert’s book, “Certain Conditions,” for its ending, which is at once funny and cutting:

My friend’s doctor tells her: eight drinks a week is the limit.
 
We have a good laugh. Should we live for a future?
 
Should we live to fight for life, when we hate our own lives?
 
I think getting what you want is just backwards desire.
 
And the undoing hurts.

Relatable content, as the saying goes.

Earlier in the poem—and maybe, if I return to my imperfect spatial metaphor, in its “background”—“A woman tries to run a man over in the street by the Capitol. // She even turns the car around, on a one-way street.” With its description of a vehicle-ramming attack and its setting near the Capitol, this line brought to mind both the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the January 6, 2022, siege on the Capitol. But I couldn’t place this particular act of violence, so I went to Google.

The only similar news story that turned up was the 2013 killing of Miriam Carey, a 34-year-old Black dental hygienist who struck a Secret Service officer with her car while attempting to drive through a White House security checkpoint. Capitol Police then shot her; Carey’s one-year-old daughter was in the backseat.

Poems are not news reports nor should we expect them to be. And hearing Gabbert remark, on a recent episode of the Times “Book Review” podcast, that her poetry doesn’t have “the same kind of truth-value” as her nonfiction”—“You definitely could not fact-check it,” she says—makes me wonder if I am refusing to meet this poem on its own terms. But that “Certain Conditions” includes details that opaquely recall the police killing of a Black woman while eliding that that’s what happened—even that the woman driving the car died—seems to me to be an unfortunate consequence, perhaps unintended, of Gabbert’s approach. The poignant humor of the questions toward the end of the poem that resonated with me at first—“Should we live for a future? // Should we live to fight for life, when we hate our own lives?”—dim in the light of this extratextual knowledge. I’m not suggesting this poem ought to have been an elegy. That wouldn’t belong in this book, and my previous misgivings about the poetry of witness stand. But another question Gabbert posed—“How can we write about it, yet how can we not write about it?”—remains, for me, open.

***

Alongside the 26 poems composed in monostichs, nine shorter poems, all announcing themselves as verse via capitalization of the first letter of each line, offer a more musical intervening strain. All but one, which is in lineated monostichs, are 15 lines, like sonnets that spill over, organized into five tercets. Almost Ashbery-esque, they find Gabbert at her most lyrical, sometimes as though she’s writing from the window between dream and waking, though never without her taste for irony or her acerbic wit.

“Mirror, Mirror” is perhaps the closest the book gets to a complicity poem, though it’s not quite. It begins

Are you my golden shadow?
Mon semblable?
Blah blah blah?

Not until I read this poem to a French speaker did I learn semblable is a real French word, meaning “likeness”—Gabbert borrows it from Baudelaire—and not just a clever play on words. (It turns out it’s also, pronounced differently, a word in English that I swear I’ve never heard before. The more you know!)

The poem continues:

We do the same things
Over and over in this life—life
The score of our normal minds.

I love the ambiguity of score here. Does it mean an accounting of points—who’s winning and who’s losing? Or is life the music, the soundtrack for the action of thought? Or is life the mark cut, as though into wood, by the sharp instruments that are “our normal minds”?

The man in the fire
Didn’t recognize his wife.
Naked, shoeless, her mouth “almost black”...

Those quotation marks are, I think, operative. They signal the appropriation of this detail from existing source material and beckon readers to follow that thread back in a way that “Certain Conditions” does not; in fact, this was the first news story in the book I was moved to Google. The scene is apparently drawn from a 2020 article published in the Oregon Statesman Journal: the man and his wife lost their 13-year-old son and the wife's 71-year-old mother in the fire they survived, one of more than 20 during the state’s most destructive wildfire season to date (though at least one major fire is believed to have begun as arson).

I wanted to name these people—it felt important—but then I reconsidered: the survivors could have Google alerts tied to their names and might not want to know their tragedy was invoked in a poem and then an essay, contemplating others’ distance from it.

The poem concludes:

We are like a surfer
On the surface of the sea, who cannot see
The whale underneath. We’re there for scale.
 
The fact refers
But the fact itself isn’t anything.
We are far from suffering.

As a matter of habit, I distrust similes, but I think that’s a very good one. “We”—the “privileged and the merely safe,” who are “far from suffering”—are so often like that, surfers riding the waves of our own lives, in which we’re almost obliged to figure ourselves the protagonists, and to address ourselves in poems. But if we’re there for scale, for whose measure? And to what end?