Hi! It’s me! With a new Thursday column for paid subscribers. In this feature, I’ll be reading the same poem every day for a week and keeping a log of my thoughts, which I’ll use as the basis for each Thursday’s poetry post.
I’ll confess that this first installment is a tiny bit of a cheat. Over the summer, I bought a copy of The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry at McKAY’s (thanks to my friend Tucker for introducing me to “the internet, but a store”). It was eight bucks and is packed with a very robust range of voices/styles, and a couple of gems I haven’t seen anywhere else.
One of my goals this year is to read a new poem every week, and to re-read it, over and over. That’s in part thanks to the experience I had deep-reading poems from The VBoCAP each day during my residency.
But first, a snack for your ears to listen to while you read (and write, and whatever). Please enjoy this January playlist, which does, in fact, begin with a Spotify track that’s just the piano part of Chiquitita.
I’ve tweeted in the past about the poem I’ve been reading all week. If you end up liking Heather McHugh after this exercise, move right along to Dark View or Language Lesson 1976 – two other picks from me.
The Typewriter's the Kind Heather McHugh for Raya The typewriter's the kind of heavy gray that's rare these days, and good for leaning on. I sit in front of it, with holes torn in my meanings, or a heart so full of complication I can't even start to start. And on the radio the cello's unaccompanied, and on the hour the news is entendu. I lay my arms upon the typewriter, my head upon my arms, and breathe and breathe and breathe, and there is all the cool immutability a fevered human needs, its current humming constant like the speed of light or fact of water (there is death on earth this moment, there is death on earth this moment... Always is already). Then I can get up, and go about my work, which is to love to see the endless world's unsavability.
One of the first things I noticed about this poem after reading it several times was how carefully “stacked” the language is. McHugh proves the typewriter is “good for leaning on” by how much she piles on top of it – the planet, outer space, her speaker’s own tired self.
Look at the third stanza – see how “upon” is stacked on itself in those lines. It’s an effect that’s followed immediately by the repetition, and stacking, of “and breathe and/breathe and breathe.” It imbues those breaths with weight, turning them into the heavy sighs we know to be escaping from our speaker.
Actually, this poem is unique in how much dimension there is, vertically and temporally. In my own copy of the book containing this poem, I highlighted every instance of “on” throughout this poem. We have a sturdy, weight-bearing typewriter, a planet populated by death and water. But we also have the radio, moving us through cello solos, bringing us the hours one after another. McHugh also chooses to include the word entendu, replicating that “on” sound in another language.
So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, or a gray typewriter, the only thing separating our speaker from "the speed of light or fact/of water," a constant knowledge of death. Despite the presence of a typewriter from the opening, no writing occurs on-page in this poem.
Instead, our speaker does the frustrating, inevitable part of writing, which is not writing. She puts her head down. She thinks about how useless her words are, her language and her heart complicated and incomplete.
But the solitude does something. Like the cellist in the song on the radio, she’s unaccompanied: her companion is the tool in front of her. And in the quiet (between songs or news pieces or poems), she does do the work, which is in service to herself. She knows her writing won’t save the world. That’s not her job anyway. All she needs to do is “love to see” the expansive, impossible world around her. Once she remembers how much she loves it, and frees herself from the expectation of redeeming it, she can write.
I picked this poem as my first Thursday close-read because it speaks so deeply to the thesis of this whole project. I began this Substack to break out of that exact writerly trap – avoiding the creative writing I love, just because it won’t save the world. I think this poem does a great job of cataloguing those dense little disappointments, and by putting them on the page, shelving them in each line, freeing the reader (and the writer) from their weight.
For what it’s worth, my typewriter is avocado green.