You will have noticed by now that, one by one, we’re drawing your attention to various pieces of the fall 2006 issue of The Kenyon Review, which hit bookstores and mailboxes this week. We cooked this plan up a few weeks ago, and so when the latest KR arrived, I paged through it looking for the piece to which I’d stake my claim. And I found it–or, in the way of poems in my life, it found me–on page 63: “Prayer,” by Joanie Mackowski.
As a reader of poetry, I often start out as a fairly shameless seeker after self, though the poems I love most tend to be the ones that carry me well beyond who I thought I was and what I thought I was looking for, reworking my world and my place in it. In my professional life, I am a researcher and teacher of fictional and autobiographical narrative. In my private life of reading and writing, I am a gobbler of novels but a savorer (and furtive scribbler) of verse–and, I will admit, a Searcher for Meanings. And so it is that I gravitate to poems that Seek, whether or not they Find. What moves me about Mackowski’s poem is its quiet, grounded plea for the unfound and the unfinishable, and its sublime openness to the spiritual value of resisting certainty and closure. Here’s what you should do, if you want to keep reading: click here to read Mackowski’s poem. Don’t just run your eyes over it. Read it aloud–or, better yet, entice someone else to read it aloud to you. (A friend and I wondered last week whether we could rustle up grant money to hire people to shadow us, reading verse aloud to us all day.) Once you’ve tasted this one on your tongue and allowed it to play in your ear, click on and read my thoughts on the poem. And then perhaps you’ll feel like discussing–which is what we have a comments section for, after all. I can’t call on you–alas, we’re not sitting together at the seminar table in Sunset Cottage–so you’ll need to speak up of your own accord. But I’ll be listening.
What grasps me immediately about this poem is that all of its statements, all of its fragments, exclude the I who is praying–the prayer of this prayer, as it were. We have to infer Mackowski’s speaker from her “That…”s; she has drawn herself behind the things for which she’s uttering a plea. My eye tells me that this poem might be a sonnet, though a somewhat strange and broken one. I count the lines; there are indeed fourteen. But their meter is not regular, and their rhymes are not exact. Mackowski’s canny use of near rhymes, in fact, helps me crawl into this poem and feel it from the inside out.
Consider the pairs of words that rhyme, or seem as though they should be poised to do so. Over/lover and shadow/know are close–close enough to make us think, at the outset of a poem that looks like a sonnet, that we might see something fairly regular, a rhyme scheme that keeps following the pattern AABB, perhaps with CCDDEE (and so on). And then Mackowski drops contain/tiny on us. We can hear the connection between “tain” and the first syllable of “tiny,” if we listen carefully. Similarly, in cluttered/tired, we can hear “tered” making contact with “tired.” But this middle quatrain is disruptive. It’s broken or cracked, loosened away from certainty or exactitude, in an important way. When we reach l. 9, we meet up with pairs that embrace in something tantalizingly close to repetition, a nearness that underscores the impossibility of perfect togetherness: “fails” tumbles into “falls”; the “gen” in oxygen adheres to “join.” And then, for “storm,” there is no mate: Mackowski breaks her last line off in the service of reiterating one last time her poem’s privileging of the open, the broken, the vulnerably unfinished form–the hole in the skull that her speaker pleads to retain.
In my fourth decade, I am still, as I hope I will always be, an apprentice to this craft of reading. I am still learning my poetic terms, and so I keep a copy of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics close at hand in my office (and a copy of its shorter version, The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, at home, where it lives in my dining room, of all places). Seeking something to call the kind of rhyming Mackowski does in this poem, I looked up “near rhyme” and, as is often my wont, swiftly became more interested in the encyclopedia’s writing about rhyme than in the names it could offer me. Here’s T.V.F. Brogan, suggesting alternate ways inexact rhymes might be interpreted:
In much late-Victorian and Edwardian criticism, one finds frequent attacks by reactionary prosodists on all less-than-correct rhyming as decadent, degenerate, and incompetent…. But in retrospect such practice is to be seen not as a falling-away from a standard but as a redefinition of that standard. In a radical age, the breaking of conventions is an expansive and creative act. Near rhyme is in this sense not an abandonment of rhyme in defeat but an opening up of the rhyme canon–not supplanting rhyme but enriching it. (824)
In fact, this account of near rhyme’s possibilities connects beautifully with what Mackowski’s “Prayer” sets out to do through its interlocked form and content. This poem’s speaker imagines her body, her skull in particular, as a redefinition of sacred space–an alternate kind of holy place, if you can pardon the pun. She needs to keep the hole in her skull clear of all that might close it off–“mosses or brick” (l. 2), a laddered lover’s perhaps well-meaning “patch” (ll. 2-3), a “shadow” that sounds awfully like the shade of folded, praying hands (ll. 3-4).
Having established what she’s staving off with this prayer, our speaker expands into the reasons she wants to keep that hole in her skull: “there’s too much to know. / There’s too much to want never to contain” (ll. 4-5). She makes contact with that earlier spiritual startler Gerard Manley Hopkins, capturing a sense both of human limitation and of the ecstasy of transcending that limitation even momentarily, in her hope that “the backbone beanstalk” will continue to “shoot[] up through the tiny / roof that I stand for” (ll. 6-7). She invokes (not least through her near rhyme) the danger of becoming “cluttered” and “tired,” muddied and unreflective (ll. 7-8).
I’m still puzzling over the many possible ways to read the lines at this poem’s middle: “the tongue grows tired / of holding up the sky” (ll. 8-9). Mackowski frames reflection and speech as opposites. Does she suggest that the tongue’s tiring work may actually keep the sky, with all its expansive space, away from her speaker–that speech “holds up” or interrupts this speaker’s contact with a grandeur separate from her?
I suggest this reading because of what comes next: a flood, an ocean, a falls, the deep (ll. 9-12). We’re plunging into the elemental here, diving and immersing and being submerged in a great, living thing, a deep with its own “salt breath coaxing” its “own lungs” (ll. 11, 12). There’s a vital circularity in these lines, a circularity that begins even in the phrase “each rise a falls” (l. 10). May what goes up come back down, this speaker implores; may what breathes out coax a new breath in. And it’s from this widening, deepening interaction with an ever-more-expansive, constantly self-regenerating natural body that the speaker returns us to her own body, and to her plea that that body never close off from the world this poem has drawn into its lines. In these last lines, her skull becomes more than just her skull, more than just a “tiny roof”: it becomes a moving, breathing participant in an expansive natural order. Through Mackowski’s last simile, the skull’s holey bones become a cloud formation, as much an easer of storms as the salt breath has been a coaxer of the sea’s oxygen. What is devoutly to be desired is not the closure of constant cloudpour (far less a steady streaming of sunlight) but a perpetuity of “join[ing] together” and “breaking apart” that will breathe the storm into and out of this speaker’s always open bones (ll. 13, 14).
“There’s too much to know. / There’s too much to want never to contain” (ll. 4-5): I’ve gone back to these lines again and again in the couple of weeks since I first read this poem. There’s an expansiveness about them that I love; they capture the contradictions and complications–and the utter glories–of remaining vulnerable and open to unknowingness and incompletion, to the ever wider and the ever more. And the poem’s final line–which feels to me like another nod to Hopkins and his deeply spiritual “curtal sonnets,” which have ten whole lines and an eleventh half-line–leaves us with the full weight of these contradictions and complications. In this last line, Mackowski’s speaker suggests the pain, the shortcomings, the half-finishing that must take the place of certainty if we are to make humble, ecstatic contact with that which is not ourselves, that which is beyond what we think we know, beyond the self-contained finitude we might fold over and grow shut believing in. It’s an abrupt and deeply affecting final moment.
I hope you’ve stayed with me this far, not least because I love this poem and hope that others will want to write about it, too. I’m going to post this reading now–that way, you can decide whether to take me up on my invitation to discussion, and I can devote some steady attention to the red-bellied woodpecker that’s been, for the duration of my writing, making a long, slow afternoon’s meal out of whatever it can beak out of the tree outside my office.