A theory of muchness
Here’s my latest review for the Volta, of a new poetry collection called Interrobang. In it I keep returning to “muchness.” Google reveals that I inadvertently repurposed this word from Alice in Wonderland: “you’ve lost your muchness,” the Mad Hatter tells Alice, meaning her vivacity and wonder, I suppose. My notion might not be exactly that: my “muchness” means intense emotional expression that seems constantly on the brink of overwhelming the poem, but stays just barely contained. To strike this balance takes intense skill and compassion for the reader. Many of the poems I admire most have it in common.
Two poems that wear their muchness openly are often on my mind. These poems share a humorous streak, which counterbalances and highlights their emotional intensity. Take “Snow” by Mary Ruefle, which opens with this sentence:
Every time it starts to snow I would like to have
sex. […]
The linebreak itself becomes a punch line, and the rest of the poem continues to repeat the verb phrase “to have sex” with amusing bluntness, as when the speaker envisions herself abandoning a class she is teaching with the words “It is snowing and I must go have sex, good-bye.”
The end of the poem resolves the prevailing emotions throughout (in a scene that reminds me of the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” with its “snow falling faintly and faintly falling”):
the snow, which is falling
with such steadfast devotion to the ground all the
anxiety in the world seems gone, […]
[…] yes, when it snows like this I feel the
whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.
By pairing an activity that by definition can’t be done in isolation (having sex) with the unifying “isolation and silence” of the last two lines, the speaker identifies herself more with the snow than the sex, or her physical presence in it. It’s a surprising and funny turn that also rings true: who hasn’t felt on a dreary cold day that their despair is part of the weather itself? By making this rhetorical move at its conclusion, the poem casts emotions (anxiety, isolation) as states that might affect the entire world. It’s a reminder that what we feel is part of how we understand the world around us. It’s dangerous either to disregard one’s feelings or to believe that they are the only truth.
Dorothea Lasky’s poem “I Want to Be Dead” (from her collection Thunderbird) gave me chills when I first read it. It opens:
I want to be dead
After all the ultimate act of self-indulgence is to be dead
Histrionic bareback
On the heels of the authoritative-sounding “ultimate act of self-indulgence,” the isolated phrase “histrionic bareback” strikes me as intentionally funny, a pair of words that just sound amusing together and conjure various over-the-top images, like cowgirls or centaurs. Lasky generally relies on short, plain vernacular words in her poetry (here’s her poem “What Poets Should Do” as another good example). This makes a modifier like “histrionic” stick out like it’s been surgically transplanted from a thesaurus.
The lack of punctuation throughout "I Want to Be Dead" contributes to a flat affect. The speaker doesn’t want to die, she wants “to be dead,” as if it’s a state she could study academically and dispassionately. Halfway through the poem, this phrase repeats:
I am already dead
I want to be dead
I am already dead
The speaker conflates herself with the words on the page that make up the poem, the “peppery black specks” that a reader could choose to tear up, or burn. The poem ends on an adversarial, even menacing tone:
I don’t care
I am already dead
Whatever form you make of me
I will always come back to this one
These lines are carefully arranged in a way that looks reckless: “I don’t care” is set off on its own. What I like about muchness is this reckless stance: the poet knows that there are readers who will need this poem, people who will hear and feel their own “I don’t care” in its lines. People who care very deeply about something, but know they need to maintain the bold, stony face of someone who doesn't care at all, or else caring will be used against them.
I worry about making my own poems too sentimental, too dense, too personal, too much. It doesn’t keep me from writing, but it certainly makes me edit my muchness out of the public eye. I wonder whether this worry is gendered: I think of a song that starts “the Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write.” Girls who write, it’s implied, will always be too much, and they’ll make themselves too fragile for their lives in the process. When I worry about this, I remind myself: “whatever form you make of me / I will always come back to this one”. Once something is written out into the world, I don’t have to care what anyone might make of it. I can trust the emotion in the poem to project its muchness. I can contain myself in whatever form I make on the page.
Thanks as always for reading; as always, be in touch.
Yours,
Erin