Not that Bridge.
Not that Bridge. SEATTLE MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES

When I read that the Seattle Department of Transportation was shutting down the West Seattle Bridge possibly forever (!!!!) but probably definitely until 2022 (!!!!) I immediately had two thoughts. First, I wondered what King County Council Member Joe McDermott had to say about the situation. Second, I knew I had to write about a bridge poem today.

Luckily, that first mystery was solved within moments. McDermott was first to start the trend of local politicians sending out furious press releases demanding answers from SDOT and its director, Sam Zimbabwe, who just has not been having a very good couple years. First he had to deal with the Snowpocalypse, then Tim Eyman's batshit initiative, then the pandemic, and now this broke-ass bridge. Oof. Just think of the property values in West Seattle. The poor, poor property values.

Anyhow, unfortunately for me, I could not think of any good bridge poems. Sure, there's The Bridge by Hart Crane, but that one is too hard and too long and too much about Brooklyn and modernism. Then of course there's Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802," but that's not about a bridge, that's about being on a bridge. Then there's Henry Longfellow's poem, "The Bridge," but who cares??? And there's "The Iron Bridge" by Billy Collins, but that poem sucks! Then I remembered there's a Seattle poet, Rebecca Bridge, who published a good poem in Boston Review a few...12...years ago. The poem is called "Now There Are Two Poems in Which We Are Kissing." I'm not sure which book it's in, but it's probably better to note that she has a new book called, A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems, which you can pick up here.

A few thoughts:

• This is an epiphanic lyric poem, wherein the poet thinks hard about some problem and then has an epiphany right there in front of the reader on the page. They're hard to pull off, but Bridge's straightforward, very mannered tone licenses the big-ass epiphany at the end, wherein she states the great paradox of poetry: "They are just words and they do not exist. But then they do."

• It's worth thinking about that line for a second. How does a piece of writing—which is nothing but a string of dead metaphors referencing objects in the world—become a poetic object itself, a thing with its own life, one that changes with the reader and the age? A simpler way of saying this is: when does a poem stop being a piece of trash in a Word doc and start being a poem? As Robert Frost might say, the figure is the same as for love. It's hard to know when you're officially in love with someone. Before you were just hanging out and your love did not exist. But then it did. I think that's what Bridge is getting at here a little bit.

• Also, I like how the title suggests there is some other poem where the speaker and her subject are kissing, but we don't know which poem that is. I guess you'll just have to read everything Bridge has ever written to find out.