Bodily Pain and Poetry
Hair Shirt, by Adrian Sobol
Thomas à Becket wore a shirt of hair, probably goat hair, the hair rubbing against his skin, the better to understand bodily pain, I suppose, the better to understand Christ. As Chaucer’s Parson says, “Then shall you understand that bodily pain consists of discipline either teaching, by word, or by writing, or in example; also in wearing of hair shirts.” The hair shirt would have had more than just hair. Becket would have also been wearing, in the heyres of his shirt, maggots, lice, and other freeloading protein sources. That’s value!
Our Hair Shirt is not one you can wear (I don’t think), nor will it arrive in the mail crawling with lice or maggots, but it might teach you about bodily pain—
n i n e t e e n m i n u t e s u p e r c u t o f t o m c r u i s e r u n n i n g You fall off a mountain. You fall off a terrace. You fall off a fire escape. You fall, or you let yourself go. You plummet five stories into a bathtub full of ice. You tire yourself fistfighting the carbine. You run across the carapace of every rooftop in France. You look down on the streets, where traffic, small and anonymous, still holds some memory of you. You climb onto a plane. You climb the light up to high-five the ionosphere. You tame a horse, then its cavalry. You outpace the generals. You outflank the tides. You hear the ocean applaud each time you deny it. You’re awarded medals. You see your family one last time. You sing yourself to sleep. The words escape you. The melody turns on you like the fog. Dingy, soft, your voice cracks. There’s little of it left. You save your strength. You fall out of love but you fall with grace, wired to the scaffolding of your confidence. You are ready for contact wherever it comes. You make peace with surfaces. You place your cheek on the lavish new marble countertop. It’s cool, inviting. It offers you little. You ask it for less. How simple a surface is. How uncomplicated There’s no room for despair. Between you or your thousand-yard grin.
—or bring you closer to Christ, if not Christ then truth, the universe, the sublime, the something inside you that makes you human, the ineffable, because that’s what poetry does. That’s what it’s for.
I didn’t think I cared about poetry anymore. I thought poetry, the poetry of now, at least, was random, pointless, indulgent, masturbatory—can I sell books with a post that uses the word “masturbatory”? am I going to get heat in my day job for trying to sell books with a post that uses the word “masturbatory”?—until I read Adrian Sobol’s poetry. I am sorry, by the way, to all the poets whose poems are didn’t read. I was wrong. But I am grateful, too, to Adrian, for being a poet, for working with me, for bringing me back to poetry.
I shared a copy of Hair Shirt with a colleague this week. It is the first copy of Hair Shirt to go out, in fact. No one else has their hands on it at this point, except for Adrian and me. She loves it, keeps messaging me about it. I walked into her room the other day and she was sitting there on her lunch reading it.
There are business reasons why we need to sell this book: we have put a lot into it and need to get some of that back. There are virtuous reasons to buy a book from Malarkey, a very small press making books not for money but for love. We abhor AI. We are pretty nice. We hate Amazon and are trying to follow distribution avenues outside of that platform. But none of that matters. What matters is the book. I think Adrian’s book is beautiful and important, not important like I predict it will win all the poetry awards or be taught in classrooms all around the country (although that would be nice, the latter more so than the former), but important in a more important way than that. I am talking, I think, about the importance of creating something without worrying about anything outside the creation, like fame, like awards, like book sales. Art for art’s sake. The inherent value of creation.
At the same time I am thinking about book sales, partly because we need those, we need more of those, to stay afloat, but also because book sales lead to books being read, and people should read this book. It’s nice. It’s funny. It’s weird. It’s beautiful. It’s poetry.
This one is my favorite:
t h a t j o k e i s n’ t f u n n y a n y m o r e after you’re sick of the sea there’s this: more sea