McHugh, you’ll be the death of me ??? each self and second studied!
Addressing you like this, I’m halfway to the third person.
What happens when a poet’s own name is invoked in a poem of her own making? It’s a strange moment ??? startling, disorienting. The writer stands “halfway to the third person” ??? the same vantage we have been enjoying as readers, half immersed in the speaker’s perspective and half outside observer (“each self and second studied”). If we had to hazard a guess, the increase in formal distance when a poet uses his or her own proper name might cause the reader to feel equally, if not doubly, removed. Yet, when used in the right way, the effect is the opposite. As the poet’s own name increases the distance, it also, strangely, can increase the intimacy of the poem. “The sound I make is sympathy’s: sad dogs are tied afar.” (Another line from McHugh’s ghazal ??? a form in which the last couplet calls specifically for the poet to use his or her own name.) Or feels something like this:
“distinct as“ a voice inside a voice, informing you.”
(from Mud-stockinged, stuck in the mud in front of their byre)or
““he takes a breath and disappears into the“
Turbulent little word-shiver…”
(from When I see the quick)
Perhaps the best way to explore this phenomenon is simply to look at some poems and poem fragments invoking the poet’s own name and to observe their various, admirable effects. (If nothing else, a cabinet of cognomen wonders.)
* The imploring melancholy and unabashed tenderness of haiku master Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1828, translated from the Japanese by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto):
First firefly,
why turn away ???
it’s Issa.
* Name as averted expletive and exciting narrative disruption by Cody Walker (outstanding poet and fellow KR Blog writer) in his poem “Update,” featured in Slate and his book Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser Press):
Update
My latent superpowers, well, they’re back:
obliterate a marriage with my mind;
bewitch the president, that lying sack
of–Cody! Take it slow. In time I’ll find–please note, I’m speaking as my therapist–
the equilibrium that time affords.
I’ve also rerouted (I have a list)
(1) my neural pathways and (2) some fjords.America’s a country for the lonely,
the loony. Whitman said it years ago.
Remember, he could fly and he was only
an editor, a wing??d bearded schmo.My powers have increased a hundredfold
since you left. Maybe a thousand-, all told.
* Name as misheard epiphany, missed turned (physical, metaphorical), and more in this poem by Nancy Krygowski. (Krygowski is the author of the poetry collection Velocity from U Pittsburgh Press and co-runs Pittsburgh’s renowned Gist Street Reading Series, featuring emerging writers and delicious homemade snacks):
Once
One day I was driving and my friend said, “That’s it,”
but I thought she said, “Nancy,”
which is my name.
So I waited,
just a second or so, until it all hit
and made sense. “That’s it,” I thought,
seeing the road pass that I was supposed to be on,
seeing the end of something I was waiting for,
seeing a lot of the guessing that was up ahead for me,
Nancy.
* Name as gender, fear, humor, and commodification of self and sorrow, Macedonian-style, compliments of Lidija Dimkovska‘s poem “Decent Girl” (Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers, Ugly Duckling Presse, translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid):
And I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf,
I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?
(Ok – maybe everything in the poem can’t be contained in this one small fragment. But when I heard this poem at a reading she gave almost 3 years ago, I still remember how the phrase “I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?” vivified the audience — and the line remain lodged in almost everyone’s head. Also of note: this poem ends: “chirp chirp metachirp metachirp”! And whether it is created solely from Dimkovska’s uncanny intelligence, or with shared effort from her astute translators — or perhaps some affinity in the Macedonian language for linguistics and birdsong? — I am gratefully delighted. And if you ever have the chance to hear Dimkovska read, be prepared for her poem “Bouillon Cube” to knock you out with the collective loneliness contained in “12% monosodium glutamate.”)
* Name as swagger, camaraderie, and self-deprecating humor — and to my mind the best part of the poem (Toma?? ? alamun, translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins, in A Ballad for Metka Krasovec):
Andra?? and Toma?? ? alamun,
sitting in green arm chairs,
two awesome salesman from the least.
(I meant to type from the east,
but mistyped.)
* Name as self seen as younger self, understood through encounter with insect (Henri Cole, “Pillowcase With Praying Mantis” — appearing first in The New Yorker and his book Middle Earth):
Pillowcase With Praying Mantis
I found a praying mantis on my pillow.
“What are you praying for?” I asked. “Can you pray
for my father’s soul, grasping after Mother?”
Swaying back and forth, mimicking the color
of my sheets, raising her head like a dragon’s,
she seemed to view me with deep feeling, as if I were
St. Sebastian bound to a Corinthian column
instead of just Henri lying around reading.
I envied her crisp linearity, as she galloped
slow motion onto my chest, but then she started
mimicking me, lifting her arms in an attitude
of a scholar thinking or a romantic suffering.
“Stop!” I sighed, and she did, flying in a wide arc,
like a tiny god-horse hunting for her throne-room.
(Sometimes it is easier to extend more tenderness toward a fallible third-person than what we normally afford to our own (or someone else’s) “I.” Too close, too cloying, the care we extend to a first-person self all too often feels self-conscious and questionable. Meanwhile, it is easy to sympathize with “just Henri lying around reading” — lazing about while yearning toward grandeur, tortured by the imagined mimicry of that “tiny god-horse.”)
* Name as ability to observe one’s own death in the future — to look back from the vantage of an imagined future and observe a memory of what has not yet occurred. (C??sar Vallejo’s “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone” – translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly – and recently featured on NPR’s “The Making of Sonnets” discussion with Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland)
Black Stone Lying on a White Stone
I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris–and I don’t step aside–
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.C??sar Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard alsowith a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .
When Vallejo states simply at the volta of the sonnet, “C??sar Vallejo is dead” — we are jolted awake. How can this be? He was just here, speaking to us a moment ago of Thursdays and Paris, the pain of upper arm bones put on wrong, aloneness and autumn. We are shocked partly because we still believe in the incantatory nature of language: if the words are uttered, it becomes true — the power of a charm or a curse. And we are shocked because we have been so immersed in the speaker’s perspective, when C??sar Vallejo dies, that means we die too. Yes you, reader. Our mirror neurons light up — surprised and grieved by the news.
When we hear the poet speak his name, the person we thought we were sympathetically observing is suddenly our own person. It is one thing to think about death, even to contemplate it on a rainy day in Paris, and muse on how it may happen — but to declare it is true — to say one’s own name — and the poem reverberates.
In Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes, he describes the Norse rune Kano (Opening) this way: “If you have been operating in the dark, there is now enough light to see that the person on the operating table is yourself.” The third-person naming of the self can create such a burst of awareness. The writer, the reader, the soul ??? looking back in humor, in tenderness, in sympathetic mirroring ??? at the speaker, the writer, the body. We may not be named McHugh, but McHugh’s “death of me” is ours too.