Recently I had the opportunity to write a chapter, in a textbook, about poems’ use of the mid-course turn–the sort of turn usually associated with the sonnet. The focus of my chapter is how this turn shows up and functions in poems other than sonnets. One of the poems that I allude to but do not discuss at length is the title poem of Jason Sommer’s Other People’s Troubles (The University of Chicago Press, 1997). Thus, I should like to take the opportunity to write a bit about this marvelous and haunting poem.
“Other People’s Troubles” takes up the human instinct to bear, as Hamlet puts it, “those ills we have” rather than “fly to others that we know not of” (3.1.81-82). The poem is in iambic trimeter with variations and substitutions, several of which assist in signaling the poem’s movement. The first, and shortest, section describes the “Jewish parable” about “the waiting room / where all souls come.” Each soul comes carrying a bundle of his or her troubles. Each bundle is dutifully hung on a hook while the souls are interviewed. After the interviews, when the souls return, “they eye the parcels hung / in hundreds on the walls / with care, and take their own.” The adverbial phrase “with care” in the last line quoted works especially interestingly in that it can be read to modify the verb hung (thus recalling the stockings “hung with care” in “The Night Before Christmas”–a dissonant echo in this Jewish parable whose tone is much heavier than that of the lightsome rhyme) as well as the verb “eye.” These souls carefully eye the parcels carefully hung by the hundreds on the wall, but no soul will take the gift of someone else’s troubles when the option remains to keep the ills that are one’s own.
The turn into the poem’s next section, the speaker’s telling of a personal anecdote, is underscored by what I take to be the poem’s most metrically ambiguous line: “Trash night, curbside sits…” I am tempted to read the first three syllables of this line as accented, though in English a spondee followed by a trochee is most unusual, but I think that Sommer pretty much pulls it off: a spondee followed by a trochee followed by a ‘defective foot’ (a technical term in prosody, meaning merely that the foot gets by without a syllable that it would normally have–not that there is anything at all defective in the writing), yielding a line with five rather than the usual six syllables. This rather surprising shift in rhythm signals that we are entering a very different world from where we were before. The poem ushers us into an everyday lifeworld in which “a little sofa meant [note how the poem immediately smooths back into clear iambs] / for the taking” is what is sitting beside the curb. The speaker and company (his family perhaps) inspect the couch and notice that what at first appeared to be shadows falling across it “turn out / to be not impeded streetlight / but the body’s unguent, / armrests oiled by arms.” Immediately following this discovery, they decide that the couch is not for them: “We leave the sofa there, / sturdy and recoverable, / life in it yet.” This last line bears rhetorical weight as the only two-foot line in the poem, a trochee followed by an iamb; and like the phrase “with care,” considered above, this line carries an informative ambiguity. On the one hand, the life that is yet in the couch is the use to which it could be put–it is after all a perfectly serviceable couch. On the other hand, the life in this couch is the life of its former owners, whose bodies have literally left their residue in the fabric. Somehow, a couch so deeply marked by these other lives is one that the speaker and company cannot take. Like those bundles in the parable, the couch is too much someone else’s to take into one’s own life.
The entry into the poem’s third and final section is also metrically marked, this time with a five-syllable line that nevertheless maintain’s the three-accent pattern: “Lilly said that on” (I hear this as an iambic trimeter line beginning with a defective foot). As happens earlier in the poem, this shift in rhythm rhetorically underscores the shift from the world of the second section to that of the third. This latter world comes from the personal anecdote of a relative–the “Lilly” whose anecdote constitutes the poem’s third section is surely the “Aunt Lilly” who shows up elsewhere in the book. Several of Sommer’s relatives are survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, and Lilly’s anecdote provides a brief glimpse into that horrific world: “Lilly said that on / the rim of Birkenau, / before the women heard / the name or saw the chimneys’ / fires…” What follows is a description of the routine humiliation of the camp’s newcomers: being stripped, herded, sheared, slapped with disinfectant, having “the mad clothes thrown at them / without regard for fit.” It is in the details of these “mad clothes” that we encounter the disquieting echo of the poem’s previous two sections:
But not one of them–
the heavy woman choked
inside the sheath skirt
with the slender girl tenting
in a gown with a train; not
the tall woman bound
in the arms of the short dress,
pulling it down to cover
her thighs, with the small woman
hiking up folds–no one
would trade with anyone.
It’s difficult to know what to do with this echo. I am in some ways tempted to observe that even in the duress of the Holocaust, this human instinct of holding onto one’s own troubles endures, and that in a strange way it is a tribute to the nobility and strength of these women–even as their lives are being taken away from them, they hang on to what they have, even the mad clothes that are not theirs, which they claim now as their own. I do believe that there is something to this observation, though it pales before the horror of the Holocaust, as everything does. It takes great strength of many kinds to write of such things, strength that Jason Sommer’s poems show. Thus, I shall end with a simple recommendation of his poems, which work as few can.