Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2018. 112 pages. $16.00.
Catherine Barnett’s enchanting third collection, Human Hours, takes its name from her “Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” an ode as sly and fleet as time itself. It begins by doing something unexpected: immediately fulfilling our expectations. If the poem’s title promises something discursive or argumentative, a verse essay in dialogue with eighteenth century literature, that is what its opening tercet offers us, or pretends to:
John Locke says children don’t understand elapsed time,
and when I was a girl it was true
and it remains true—
On its face, the language here is so exceedingly literal, so dutiful, it’s almost parodic, a burlesque. Her line endings underline the poem’s repetitions both visually and aurally, and break her run-on into three halting claims, which seem both more complex and more redundant the longer you look at them. And indeed, Barnett can’t keep a straight face for long. After that dash, her sentence continues, hitting us with the punchline the deadpan first stanza has set up: “It’s been three hundred years and still my feelings for Locke / must pass unrequited.” Later in the poem, she extends the riff: “Locke would look pretty good lying here,” she writes, describing him like a nineties heartthrob, “with his long face, his furrowed brow and center part.”
I’m belaboring this point about the poem’s movement because I want to highlight its resemblance to comedy, and how Barnett borrows her sense of timing and tone from stand-up and improv. Here, as in much of the collection, she proceeds by an antic, sideways logic of the clown. Her attention continually strays from what you’re “supposed to” focus on in a Serious Poem—Locke’s philosophy, say—to what you’re not: Locke’s looks, the contents of the speaker’s purse (“lipstick, Ricola, matches, binder clips, and a tiny bar of soap / stolen from the Renaissance Inn / where I sometimes cheat on Locke with another man”), the sound of a word, or the speaker’s poor command of a foreign language.
Which is not say that Barnett’s work is somehow silly or unserious, however light its touch. Take the miscommunication the Locke poem drifts to. The speaker mistakenly thinks that duration is a French word and tries to pronounce it as such: “John Locke et la duration.” But what “her new French friends” hear, instead, is adoration. She plays this for laughs, having fun at her own expense, and showing us the poem’s seams and likely origins. But her good humor belies just how important the confused terms, duration and adoration, are to her inquiry, especially in how they relate to one another. What makes love last? Does its force and value depend on its consistency and durability? And how are we supposed to live, knowing that love, like us, can’t endure forever?
Romantic love in particular can give these existential inquiries a real urgency, and, indeed, a number of Barnett’s poems address a love affair, a tenuous relationship of hotel room liaisons and counted minutes. But in Human Hours, time also tests the speaker’s sturdiest, most enduring bonds—those with her parents, her child, even her own body. Our speaker ages, her son leaves home, and her father loses his memory. And, as the book’s later poems attest, history—time’s broader, societal counterpart—also has a way of upending the stories we tell about ourselves. “No matter how hard I push,” Barnett writes, “I can’t outrun the news, / can’t stop the trucks, destruction, blood, / ICE, uranium, plutonium, floods.” Now more than ever, it seems like empiricism, the philosophy that Locke bequeathed us, leaves us with far more questions than answers. Or, as she sums it up in a different poem: “Geworfenheit / is a German term / for being thrown into a game / without knowing the rules. / That pretty much explains it.”
Even for a skeptic like Barnett, this is an uncomfortable position to be in. “Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more,” she writes in “Epistemology.” But she is too wise a poet to indulge this desire with canned wisdom or reductive conclusions—with, as Frost once called it, “anything more than the truth.” To wit: the backbone of the collection is a dazzling series of prose poems called “Accursed Questions,” which can only ask and meditate on asking. At the same time, Barnett is too generous to merely usher us into the dark, to surrender to nihilism, which can be its own easy way out, a shorthand for artistic seriousness.
What she offers instead is comedy. I mean this, first, quite literally: her poems are often very funny. Like her Locke poem, “The Necessary Preoccupations” is one of unrequited passion, this time for the speaker’s roofer, who has a particular way with words: “Weep hole is not an anatomical term, / we looked for my weep holes, but he couldn’t find them, / he gave up too soon, some men do.” “Summons,” certainly the best poem I’ve ever read about jury duty, has a lot of fun with the name of the presiding jurist, Justice Tingling. “Origin Story” begins with a confusion stemming from the poet’s mother’s maiden name: “When I was little I thought Karl Marx / was part of my extended family.”
Later in that same poem, she quotes another Marx, Groucho: “The only real laughter comes from despair.” Barnett also offers us a theory of comedy, one that imagines humor not only as a balm, an elixir, for life’s painful absurdities, but as a sustaining force, one that widens our horizons. “Turns out my inner clown’s full of hope,” she writes, and there’s something enlivening about the way she ping-pongs down the page, discovering, in each line, new charms, gems, surprises. “Calamity ends with amity,” she writes in one poem about the 2016 election, turning a word on its side to find something beautiful inside it.
For all the contemporary poets who rely on wordplay or the associative mode, very few write poems this gratifying, or with such philosophical heft. Barnett plays for mortal stakes, the comic and the tragic in constant dialogue. “Often when I’m in despair,” she writes in “The Sky Flashes,” “I turn to the back page / of the New Yorker and try to think up something / funny to say.” When she asks her father to help her caption the cartoon there, he replies, “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one.” He means this literally, declining her request, but she takes him seriously, which is to say, she laughs. Though she comes to understand the misunderstanding, her slanted outlook still offers a way of moving forward: “I keep sending that caption in, every week, / hoping one to win, one day soon, // before we lose him.” What’s less important, perhaps, than truth or certainty or the durability of those things is connection. Humor, Barnett suggests, can help us find it, again and again: “If you’d laugh,” she writes, “I’d feel less alone.”
