Reading Past the “Poetic Speaker”

For several years, I have been working on reading methods that extend a poem past its “poetic speaker.” Not that reading for speaker is unhelpful or unnecessary. I just don’t see it as part of the end game in my reading process. Or I’m interested in having complex models for when I come across an interesting poem, and it’s clear to me that identifying its speaker and their motives doesn’t really take me very far into the poem. Reading for speaker feels like I’m stepping past a series of familiar signposts. And I don’t have to think all that carefully about why those signposts are there. It’s like the arguments from the 90s that were in favor of narrative poetry, where certain people would insist a poem satisfy some implied rubric. It feels so easy for those people to argue this, because “accessibility” could assure them of “relevance.” Of course, it was easy arguing against narrative, too, because a rubric for poetry feels very lowest common denominator.

Thankfully, it shouldn’t matter anymore, all those arguments about narrative. How if there isn’t narrative, then a poem probably doesn’t “matter” (was kind of the gist of Dana Gioia’s article from the 1990s). I prefer American poetry in the 2020s, because I don’t know that there is some paradigm for how you’re supposed to read a poem. And it feels like that legacy of New Critical reading has found a reasonable resting place at the margins of poetry culture, like New Criticism was the crumpled aluminum foil teachers used for discussing baked poetry. And why not keep some aluminum foil around?

But I prefer the poems that easily complicate themselves. For instance, Destiny O. Birdsong’s poem, “love poem that ends at popeyes” (from her book, Negotiations). Reading through the poem as a poetic monologue is definitely helpful for summary. I mean, it’s awaful being alone on Valentine’s Day. And the speaker of Birdsong’s poem is there. She’s no longer with this man she was with, but, well, he really didn’t get her anyway (buying her something gold for the holiday when she prefers wearing silver). Focusing mainly on speaker, I feel this person’s position. Like maybe it’s better this way. Valentine’s really is just a fiasco. “Awkwardly” accepting the flowers, disingenuous “thank you”’s for the gifts she was given.

The poem signals, however, that reading it for speaker alone starts getting complicated. On the level of language, there are statements where the “woman” referred to could be the speaker. It could also be a woman the speaker imagines getting flowers on Valentine’s.

they are picking out fistfuls of roses or maybe tulips
maybe assorted flowers with daffodils
& he knows the woman he really loves will dip her nose
into them like a doe & say thank you thank you

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

In this instance, who is “the woman [this man buying flowers] really loves”? It could be the woman the speaker’s date is visiting instead of her. Or the speaker is fantasizing she could be the version of a woman this man imagines her as while he’s buying her flowers, because then she wouldn’t have to be lonely on Valentine’s Day! And given that sentiments like this take up the first two-thirds of the poem, it would be tempting to say Birdsong is mainly concerned with consolation. The “negotation” (Negotiations being the book’s title) someone conducts with themselves as they recognize how unsatisfying it is to particiapte in a series of hollow “romantic” gestures. And, yes, consoling yourself with an argument like this is mainly a rationalization against loneliness. Fortunately for this poem, the speaker is realizing there is something better. Wait, instead, says the speaker. Something you really want will be worth the wait. Like how she’s willing to wait for that “spciy dark” chicken at Popeyes. And like, wow! What she says about that chicken!

I would argue this poem extends past reading for monologue alone. Or, put differently, the poem has ready opportunities for other reading methods. In particular, I’m thinking of a method I’ve read about in Reuben Brower’s “The Speaking Voice,’ where you read both for poetic speaker and listener. And not just “listener” in that John Stuart Mill way. I mean, I admire Mill’s idea of the poet solitary in a room reciting their poem aloud, kind of knowing there is a listener eavesdropping on their recitation, and kind of oblivious to that fact. But the situation Mill describes doesn’t make me think about who the listener might be. I figure it’s me. And the poem being recited is Every Poem. Mill highlighting the “listener” might be helpful to see the solitary nature of poetry, and it might exaggerate how self-conscious the poet is or isn’t knowing someone or “no one” is listening to their poem.

Birdsong’s speaker doesn’t feel self-conscious to me. If anything, I feel like the speaker wants someone to be listening. A friend, just so she can be heard out. The “right person,” so they’ll know she has standards. Then there are moments where I wonder if she wishes the man who’s rejected her would listen to what she’s saying in this poem. At the end of the first stanza, the speaker rhapsodizes about how it would be more romantic to “run through fields / of bonnets so buckled with sky / they look bruised,” then she starts the next stanza:

why has no one ever loved me that way a bonnet
might engorge itself with blue so much it is a new
color unnameable breathless my loves hold
their breaths calculating they want me to look
at the food & the flowers

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

I mean just a quick aside for loving someone the way a bonnet engorges itself with blue. Heartbreaking in this context. But it seems to me reading this part of the poem beyond its monologue sets a frame for the poem—a frame involving someone speaking and a specific someone listening. For me, it sounds different if I imagine the poet stationing this man opposite her. A “you left me on Valentine’s, now you listen to me” kind of situation. And considering how many different registers a poem can operate on, speaking to “you” is but one approach (an approach that has many different branches to it). But when I imagine the quote above preceded with a “you listen to me,” I can hear the argument sharpened. I can feel the speaker’s passion.

This is how Brower suggests reading a poem. If you can establish who the poet might be speaking to, you can consider the role the poet sees themselves playing, and you can play the social dynamic out between the two people. And with every fixed points that can be established, the poet’s tone of voice can be described more specfically. Granted, Brower’s method still relies upon the dramatic situation New Critics insisted on when reading a poem, but it’s a more elaborated situation. Or it’s asking people to read even more closely, because other parts of the poem might provide further guidance. And for me reading Birdsong’s poem, it’s thinking about what a poem can be when I’m reading for more than just her saying something.

Though with “love poem that ends at popeyes,” I would say most of the poem is the poet saying something. So how to balance my reading so it is flexible enough to let the speaker reading operate as monologue and other parts to complement that speaker reading. The speaker’s strife, her rationalizing self-consolation, her eventual epiphany at the hands of spicy dark chicken (an image I’m so enamored with because it’s the wisest moment of the poem, and it’s experienced in a drive-thru), these articulate an overall structure, and the poetic speaker serves as that structure’s center of gravity. However, in many ways, the poem alerts me to its propensity to stretch past the poetic monologue. Its uneven pacing, for one thing. The poem is cut into fragments, and rather than the monolgue’s smooth passage through each caesura and line break, the poem can unpredictably halt my reading, requiring me to remap syntax and sense. Also, the poem mixes figures, or splits them. The moment where the man who has left the speaker arrives at the supermarket to buy flowers, and he’s “one flesh man” and “one floor man.” This is another moment that pushes a reader out of the fluid monologue. And it’s the accumulation of moments like these that unsettle the stable frame of the poem and encourage having other resources at hand for reading.

For me, Brower’s “dramatic situation” is useful for just a couple moments in the poem. The opening of the second stanza (which I’ve quoted above). And then a moment in the middle of the fourth stanza:

i want him to be satisfied i want him to be happy
also i want to be happy we can do that separately
or we can do it together we can do it now
or we can do it later i am a hopeless
romantic

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

The “him” here refers to a man buying flowers for the woman he loves, the poet indicating he should be allowed happiness with the woman he’s giving those flowers to (whether she’s the actual woman or the woman he was projecting the speaker of the poem to be when he would buy her flowers). This moment doesn’t feel as emphatically addressed to a specific man like the first instance where I used dramatic situation. But I don’t think it necessary to discover some single key for reading a poem. At leaset not this poem. Though I’ll say, in any poem what I really want is for it to do something interesting and to give me the impression it knows it’s doing that thing without needing to say it.

I’ll just conclude by looking briefly at Jericho Brown’s poem “Inaugural.” (which I found in Best American Poetry 2022). For my reading, it immediatley presents as a poetic monologue, though shaped more like a speech than a statement made in solitude. Maybe it could even be framed as an inauguration poem suited specifically to the inauguration in 2021. The talk about masks and diseases and “grandmothers” in the poem’s opening. But to position Brown’s speaker within a poetic monologue alone would be to underread the poem. The rhetorical embrace of the “we,” for one thing, makes it necessary to read for both poet and audience. And, as I’ve revealed in my speculation about the poem’s occasion, I can’t help but imagine a setting where people have assembled to hear this poem. What is the effect, then, of the poet aligning himself with who “we” are and why “we” are present for the poem? But then, as with Birdsong’s poem, there are benefits to a more conventional close reading based around speaker. The poem’s logic feels so assured and ceremonial. And yet, there are ruptures to this measured tone. For instance, the statement, “I don’t want / To be hopeful if it means I’ve got to be / Naïve.” Maybe this doesn’t rupture logic, but its profound comment is such a sudden surprise. The surrounding comments are straightforward rhetorical gestures, with the speaker aligning himself with the audience. These statements I see rupturing the more settled tone happen throughout. And, what I’m interested for in my reading, is accounting for these rhetorical explosions when the poem’s rhetoric feels more quietly assertive.

I say all this, because I don’t know how most people are taught to read poems. I feel like everyone is aware New Critical reading is full of inadequacies, but there is solid utility to reading in that New Critical light. As an undergraduate, I was taught to look for a poem’s meaning, and all I had was the poem’s language to find that meaning. I suppose, then, I would like to think that reading poems could be as much about how a poem is making meaning as the meaning that might be discovered through summaries or interpretations. As I’ve seen Matthew Zapruder argue in his book Why Poetry, there is substantive insight to found in literally reading the poem. And I would like to think most everyone is prepared for more than just literal readings of poems.