On If by Song by Marcia Karp

Whitman, MA: Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021. 132 pages. $18.00.

Drawing on influences from Sappho to the Exeter Book, Marcia Karp’s If by Song uses the poem as a vehicle to move between celebration, joy, and sadness. Karp—herself a classicist by training—uses her knowledge of form, music, and tradition to enact the tension between the song-poem’s roots as a public object and the private griefs which her poems contain.

“If Asked, She Says Only” is one example of a poem which engages in formal play to uncover grief. Written in couplets—a form which inherently suggests a pairing—the poem opens: “If asked, she says only / ‘I am no one.’” Here, the conditional “if” gestures toward a tension that drives much of this poem’s movement. The protagonist’s nobody-ness appears only “if,” not when, she is asked, suggesting that the absence of an interlocutor, or an other, enables her to retain her sense of selfhood. But this “she” is also deeply lonely as a result:

She says all the eyes
             have closed to her;
Without them she is no one
             to herself.

Wanting to be seen as a self but asserting that this sight might destroy the self—this paradox is the poem’s central tension. Just as we reach this conclusion, however, the poem shifts, indicting the protagonist’s complicity in her misery:

But it’s only her self
    she has wiled,

For she knows who she is
    and can’t bear it—

She is just who she meant to be—
    beguiling and

Shy of those eyes
    that adore her.

The speaker’s self-knowledge betrays her; the desire to be seen is fraught with impossibility. The unstable, misaligned couplets enact the conflict between the speaker’s desire to be seen and her contradictory attempts to foreclose the possibility of such sight. In a poem written in a form so often associated with love and togetherness, it is no accident the speaker—aside from an “other” briefly mentioned in one of the poem’s final stanzas—is the only named individual.

Moreover, the poem implies that the speaker’s misery is self inflicted: her eyes “[whirling] in their own tearpools” separate her from “the other” and blind “hundreds of eyes / which had recognized / someone long since in need of home.” She has, in fact, been seen by others, just as she desires, but her inability to accept “who she is and . . . bear it” forecloses any possibility of real intimacy.

Karp’s self-reflexive interiority in this poem is masterful. The poem is about an age-old paradox: longing to be seen, paired with the fear that this seeing might reveal too much. Yet its enactment allows the reader to simultaneously empathize with this “she” and to recognize her complicity in her loneliness—the pain is, we learn, largely self-inflicted.

Even as the poems move through such forms of grief, Karp also makes room for defiance. In “A Lover’s Spell,” the speaker is triumphant. Comparing herself to mythic queens such as Helen and Kleopatra, she writes:

Helen had her heroes
Kleopatra kissed a king
But “Marcia makes men mad”
Is not a brag the children sing

             So let M be for mmm
             A for again
             R, our discretion
             C, charm and change
             I is indulgence
             Ahh, yet again

Because of her self-awareness, the speaker’s acrostic feels earnest and playful rather than contrived. “I is indulgence” reads as a particular indictment of the self: literally, the “I” in her name represents indulgence, but Karp also suggests that writing in the figurative, first-person “I” is self-indulgent as well. The speaker, engaging in a self-indulgent gesture—what, after all, could be more egocentric than the acrostic?—recognizes her own egocentrism. By admitting soby admitting she is no Helen or Kleopatra, even while the juxtaposition in the first quartet suggests such a comparison—the speaker elevates herself more quietly to “Marcia”: poet and enchantress all the same.

As a result of this gesture, the poem becomes a spell of defiance but one which remains deeply aware of the limits of its own magic. The final parenthetical acknowledges that, like all magicians, the poet requires an audience to perform: “I am entrusting you for a witness.” Like all good epistolary poems addressed to a Beloved, here named only as TR, the “you” feels intimate enough to be speaking to a single person while simultaneously addressing the reader themself. After all, it is only the reader—the witness to the spell—who lends the poem its full power.

Karp wanders through various forms as the collection progresses, demonstrating her formal dexterity and mastery of rhyme and music. Many of these poems are explicitly in conversation with other poets and poetic traditions. Karp writes to Sappho and, in one particularly memorable sequence of poems, retells several of the notoriously lewd riddles which end the Exeter Book, an early tenth-century anthology of English poetry.

Yet Karp never loses sight of the limits of such fidelity to form and history. In “From the Oral Tradition,” Karp directly engages with these limits. As is the case with many of the poems in If by Song, this poem is addressed to an intimate “You.” But, rejecting the lyricism which the poem’s title invokes, the poem begins with a conversational—even sarcastic—tone: “It’s not couth, it’s not kind, your complaint. / And it’s (this’ll kill you) not clever.” Despite her clear obsessions with ancient poetic traditions, Karp refuses to believe in their infallibility, trusting their wisdom only if the wisdom can enact revelation.

This tension between received wisdom and discovered interiority culminates in the collection’s titular poem, “If by Song, Words,” which enacts an argument between the speaker and herself. “I have no words,” the poem begins. Then: “I meant to have.” The speaker’s interior thoughts are, here, represented by italics, whereas her third-person actions are unitalicized, giving the impression that the third-person self is somehow more stable. Yet even this impression is illusory, Karp suggests:

An eye is not enough
An eye that keeps its pictures straight
An eye that names its colors

The explicit argument presented here concerns fallibility of sight: to see clearly and then name what one has seen is, literally, “not enough.” But Karp, who plays with sound and homonym in many of the collection’s other poems, does the same here. “Eye” shares a sound with the first-person “I.” And this first-person “I,” the speaker suggests, is also insufficient. Trapped, lonely, and desperate, the speaker invents conversations with herself in the absence of a relationship to an Other.

This loneliness emerges powerfully as the poem progresses:

Her self’s bells jangled out one tune:
Unloved.
                Love
me.   Love
                        me alone.

As Karp suggests, who else might we turn to but the self? The Beloveds in If by Song—brother, parents, significant other—come and go, but the self remains (“me alone”). There is a sadness to this realization, but, as the collection’s title suggests, a beauty, too. The poem is, as Karp reminds us, a song: an object which can hold space for both celebration and grief, sometimes all at once.