In John Ashbery’s “As You Came From the Holy Land,” I wrote about how daily life, as told by a poem, can be about the merest rhythms, can dwell on the most predictable boredoms. Some days, as Ashbery’s poem implies, are better spent forgetting time can pass uneventfully. And some days can be spent hoping something happens before the day ends. Where a poetics of the mundane makes time meaningless, until it’s so meaningless it’s hard to deny how meaningful it is. Like an airplane assembled from a collection of mundane objects. Bolts. Screws. Whatever that stuffing they use for a pilot’s chair. A couple weeks ago, I was reading Niina Polari’s Path of Totality, and assembling her complex views on grief were the mundane objects that populated her life. They were just sitting there. And then each of them were an occasion for reminding her of her persistent grief.
In the introduction to Andrew Epstein’s Attention Equals Life, he develops a couple different modes a poem might engage in to occupy the mundane world. There is a poetry surprised by what dullness reminds them of, and that reminder leading the poet to see a valuable new perspective on life. This can be the poetry of wonder, like Frank O’Hara noting each object in the Park Lane Liquor Store (in “The Day Lady Died”), or James Schuyler noting the special feeling of each object on the bay (in “Today”). It can be the lyrical narrative of 1990s American poetry, featuring a poet who sees something overly familiar, like a framed photo on their bookshelf, and it prompts them to rethink the past, and then, wow, an epiphany for re-seeing the past in this new present light.
There is another mode to the mundane, though. Where the ordinary objects are just ordinary. A poem set in an ordinary place, observing the ordinary parts of life noticed by the poet. This kind of poem can express the mere factness of dullness. Maybe as a consideration of the crowd of dull objects constantly in reach. I look around me right now and I see a coffee table, coasters, my daughter’s school backpack, her music stand. Everything is meaninglessness amplified, and why not a poetry about that? (Like, for instance, Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities) There’s another side to the mundane, though. An ironic one. Where the poem recognizes how particularity can contrast against all the ordinary pressures put on a given object. Like when the ordinary object carries a particular history. The dish I used to give my cat his prednisone towards the end of his life. It still matters to me, though he’s been dead for eight years. It’s an inert object sitting on the edge of my bookshelf, seldom attracting my attention. But its particularity carries a significance that rises above meaninglessness. Or maybe it simply adds more data to meaninglessness.
This is my frame of mind reading Eric Tyler Benick’s “Failure Matrix.” Not because I think Benick’s poem aspires to make a statement about particularity in poetry. I would argue the poem’s primary statement is something more abstract and ambitious: what is it to grasp failure as a state of mind. However, to depict that state of mind, Benick relies on particularly specific images. “A luster of midnights” or “a poem like an equation” or “a coarse sea of hair / each an integer.” Each of these images reads like a gracefully tied knot, complicating what might be an otherwise conventional trope by associating a particular point of view on it. For instance, in the use of “luster” from “a luster of midnights,” I see a set of colors the poet recalls from the particular night he has in mind rather than the general darkness evoked by “night.” So as the poem addresses the “aporia” the poet feels when nothing seems to add up in his life, he thinks of a certain night, and how it appeared to him at midnight.
A poetry relying on a poetics of particularity like this are often told in a voice-y style. Like if a poem feels casual, it’s best to complement that style with the small details appearing to the poet. Each detail gives traction to the poet’s state of mind. Like in Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (which I’ve already mentioned) the poet flies through many particularities, and each of them builds the real-lifeness of what he’s experiencing. They ground the poem, and they fashion the world he moves in.
And that might be what I am most interested in. The light touch particularity brings to a poem. It’s like that variable foot pace William Carlos Williams devised. Where fragments or portions of a sentence or phrases that feel like they modify some part of the poem’s larger statement but it’s ambiguous about which part, all of these can represent a “poetic foot” for Williams. A syntactic segmenting over the stresses used for a conventional poetry metric. The particular objects Benick uses for his poem are, as the poem states explicilty, an enumeration. An accumulation of visions that register what’s bewildering about the persistent failure that occupies his life. What a pleasant irony to realize failure through a series of mundane objects, their particularities, their vague accounts of what a poem can do.
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