Twitter alerted me to a new poem by Ada Limón called “The End of Poetry,” which feels like the perfect poem to celebrate the 31st installment of this daily column.
To still the beating hearts of loyal TBRFP readers: by no means do I plan to stop writing about poems every day, though of course my enemies would love nothing less and conspire against me daily. But at this point in the process—especially after reading last Thursday’s poem from James Galvin—you might be ready for a lyrical takedown of lyric poetry.
Limón’s new poem, which was published in the latest issue of the New Yorker, offers us exactly that. I’m not sure if she’s published it in a book yet, but her last book, The Carrying, which is available at local bookstores, won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, and they don’t just give those away to anybody.
A few notes:
• Limón’s poem bemoans overused, overly mellifluous language in poetry all while luxuriating in that very language. That is, she gets to say, “Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower / and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,” all while artfully arranging those words to highlight their sonic beauty. Listen to that string of sibilants, note the way she abandons iambic pentameter with the word “sunflower” to prove a point, privately smile at her choice to use “osseous”—a $10 word for bones—to pronounce the ossification of random words, applaud her tasteful use of anaphora, etc. etc. Moreover, though I cannot think of any examples off the top of my head, a poem about the glut of cliched pretty words in poetry is itself a common poetic trope. I’d guess at least three jaded MFA students are writing one as you read these words, and at least five MFA instructors are writing their own versions using direct quotes from those MFA students’ poems. Limón is well aware of this apparent contradiction—she’s just telling her truth slant, the way Emily Dickinson advised.
• Her point isn’t that poets can’t use these flowery words and these overused subjects, it’s that they can’t rely on those words and subjects to carry the emotional weight of the poem. “I am asking you to touch me,” she writes, and the only way to “touch” a reader with a pile of dead language is to use the old tools she so deftly uses in this poem: sound patterning, surprising imagery, and tone. That last line hits so hard, for instance, because it’s the only unadorned sentence in the whole piece.
• I can see this poem in conversation with Heather McHugh’s “Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork,” which we will discuss tomorrow.
