Alexandria Hall's "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness"
Thoughts on possibility and structure.
Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness
1. Absence
a) makes the heart grow in vines up the latticework.
b) makes dinner and leaves the dishes.
c) makes change like the man at the laundromat,
carefully on the wooden counter.
d) makes love cruelly.
2. Which of the following does not apply
a) My hunger is an ugly baby that needs touch.
b) My hunger has a very big mouth.
c) If you leave your name and number
my hunger will get back to you as soon as possible.
d) No hunger here.
3. To improve mood: practice gratitude.
I, for one, am grateful for the following beds
I do not have to make:
river bed,
nail bed,
truck bed,
hotbed of deceit and suspicion.
4. True or False: Good grief.
5. My ardor is greater than/less than/equal to a barn fire.
6. Untouched, the fire keeps burning.
Most wounds heal without asking.
In two to three sentences, explain
the bright gash of my barn on the night.
7. True or False: If my hunger is mechanical
then my vacuum bag is a sad sack.
8. Draw a diagram of not looking. Plot
points A and B where lines come close
but do not intersect.
9. One man's trash
a) is out of the office, returning Tuesday.
b) contains multitudes.
c) would like to thank you
for your generous donation.
d) is eventually revealed to be just trash.
from Field Music (Ecco, 2020)
It’s funny. Tonight, as I reminded myself again of Alexandria Hall’s grace-filled, tender, and devastating book Field Music, I was taking a break from getting some materials ready for tomorrow, since many of my students will be coming into school to take a practice Regents Exam — New York state’s version of a standardized test that high schoolers must (though hopefully this is changing) pass in order to earn high school credit for a bunch of different subjects. It’s one of my least favorite parts about teaching at a high school, this idea that my 11th grade curriculum must align to these standards that, in the end, are so formulaic and asinine that the essay portion of the English and Language Arts Regents Exam can literally be graded with a checklist. Part of me wants to go in tomorrow and give them this poem, or have students make an erasure out of the narrative story they will be asked about, or listen to John Cage’s “4’33.” But the old adage is also apt, too, as cliche as it sounds: it is important to know and practice some rules — whether implicitly or explicitly — so that you can set fire to them later.
Anyways. I came across this poem and was instantaneously reminded of the myriad ways it does its moving and piercing work. And the way Alexandria Hall does, too. So many of her poems teeter on that fine line between devastation and beauty, which is maybe where humans live, perhaps always? Forever in the balance, we hold so much truth at once. And I love how Hall conveys that. In one poem, she writes:
It’s hard
to tell you now how caressed
I was by absence. How taken.
How loud, my own vacancy.
There it is! There! That fine line, that beautiful way of enacting through language the undulating complexity of what we feel. The way absence can be so loud, like the pulsing electric static of a neon vacancy sign if you are standing right beside it.
Today’s poem begins with absence:
1. Absence
a) makes the heart grow in vines up the latticework.
b) makes dinner and leaves the dishes.
c) makes change like the man at the laundromat,
carefully on the wooden counter.
d) makes love cruelly.
There is so much I love about today’s poem, but I want to talk about the structure first, and how it allows for such possibility despite the obvious limitations of its framework. There is a great deal at work within this “standardized” structure. The idea of test-taking — that there must be some sort of “right” answer — offers a kind of disruption to each line. I couldn’t help but analyze each one, connecting them back to the idea of absence, seeing if they resonated. But I was also caught up in the downward momentum of the poem, the way a poem usually moves. If I ignored the structure — the notion of answer choices — then I could read the poem as a series of repetitions, each reflecting on absence. When these two ideas of reading combined, and I found myself reading both as someone wondering about correction and as someone moving downward through a poem, I felt so much energy in the dissonance and the attempts to merge that dissonance. How could absence make love cruelly while also making change — I imagine almost tenderly — like the man at the laundromat? How could it be both? Didn’t one have to be right?
By pushing the reader to reconsider the very notion of rightness, and by asking the reader to consider the possibility of complexity, Hall’s poem feels so spacious — it breaks free from the very confines of the structure it is written within. I feel it most especially here, in one of the poem’s shortest lines:
4. True or False: Good grief.
There’s wit here, some short, almost playful humor. But there’s also a bigger idea at work. Is good grief true or false? Is there such a thing as good grief? Surely not. But maybe yes, just sometimes? Not often, but sometimes — when the grief is mourning the loss of something, but the wake of the loss feels a little better than living within what was once had. Sometimes grief, just maybe, can feel beautiful: a vestibule you walk through before you enter a room filled with light. And so is it true? Is it false? Why not both? Indeed, Hall ends one poem in Field Music with a line that is absolutely unforgettable:
I am undone, not by grief, but abundance.
And so I love the way Hall’s poem today plays with the very expectations of conformity and rightness. It reminds me of a moment from an interview with Donika Kelly, where she considers a line she wrote — Love, I am lonely as a bear:
In that line, "I am lonely as a bear," I’m thinking about what a bear's loneliness is and how my loneliness might move in a bearish way. I don't think my understanding of loneliness is a bear's understanding of loneliness. I imagine that bears can be lonely; I think that's probably a thing. That loneliness also might not be. The simile makes my own loneliness alien to me. What does it even mean to try to approximate something, or to make equivalent something that I don't really understand? That isn’t really noble.
I love that final question, and I love thinking about it in relation to Hall’s poem today, which uses a form that is an attempt at standardization, which is just approximation sold as certainty. You notice that here:
5. My ardor is greater than/less than/equal to a barn fire.
How could ardor be greater than or less than or equal to a barn fire? But also, how could it be similar? Or greater? Or the same? Later in the interview, Donika Kelly says:
Sometimes my loneliness can get so big I don't even know what it is. I can't quite grasp all the edges of my loneliness because it's wide-ranging and it feels ignoble at times.
And I feel that same sentiment in Hall’s work today. By placing the deep vastness of uncertainty — the edgelessness of the attempt of knowing oneself — into a form that communicates pure certainty, she conveys the difficulty of experiencing this life, and the way “insatiable loneliness” is this space where so much is true and not true at once. All this sense making, and so little sense.
I’d also like to point out the poem’s final stanza:
9. One man's trash
a) is out of the office, returning Tuesday.
b) contains multitudes.
c) would like to thank you
for your generous donation.
d) is eventually revealed to be just trash.
Here, the form works so well in the opposite way of what I just mentioned. It combines the idea of rightness and the downward energy of the lines to land on that final line, which is both the last line and the correct line: One man’s trash is eventually revealed to be just trash. At this moment, both the form and the poem unite in this witty critique of masculinity, one which essentially argues that, no, a man’s trash does not have to contain treasure — it can simply be trash itself. Not everything is destined for the beautiful transformation of metaphor. Some things, when we are honest, are what they are — and society’s attempt to steer us away from that realization can often cause a great deal of harm.
The past few days, I’ve been reading Donovan Hohn’s The Inner Coast, a collection of many of his longform essays. It’s one of my favorite kinds of writing, as I love any extended, obsessive look at an object or a subject or an event that blends the critical and the personal. In it, he has a short essay about the late journalist Matthew Power. He writes about Power’s essay, “The Magic Mountain,” which ends with this sentence:
Beneath the wide night sky those tiny human sparks split and rearrange, like a constellation fallen to earth, as if uncertain of what hopeful legend they are meant to invoke.
A constellation fallen to earth — what a beautiful, apt way to describe the connections possible not just between humans, but between the things inside humans: feelings, contradictions, obsessions, loves. I’m thinking of that now because it seems to me like something that is drawn out from Hall’s poem today. I’ve been thinking recently, too, about the anthropologist David Graeber’s distinction between “bureaucratic” and “poetic” technologies, and the way in which American society so often attempts to filter the poetic through the bureaucratic. That never works, does it? The imaginary filtered through the bureaucratic simply becomes a thing in service of capitalism, a commodification of the poetic for the wishes of more dominant systems, structures, and beings. And maybe that’s why I’m drawn so much to this poem today. It uses an intensely bureaucratic form — the standardized test — to offer insight into the human condition. This is not the poetic existing in service of the bureaucratic; rather, it’s the poetic usurping the bureaucratic, dismantling the idea that complexity can be whittled down to certainty.
Our world so often cuts out the possibility for us to make constellations out of our various star-like qualities, whether those are our loves or our sorrows, our passions or our annoyances. The lines between possible connections are severed; the constellations are spelled out for us. We select the right answer from a series of choices, and, as such, we are not taught the value of any question that has its roots in the imagination: what if, or do you ever think that maybe, or might it be possible to? This is why any disruption of form feels like a valuable, precious thing. Such disruptions give us permission to reimagine the world in a more malleable way than it is often prescribed to us, to view the poetic not in service of form and structure, but rather the other way around. Walk on air against your better judgement, Seamus Heaney writes (and his tombstone reads).
And so, to read a poem that presents a complex portrayal of absence, loneliness, love, anger, hunger, and emotion while simultaneously taking on and taking over a form that has taken over society and education — especially a day after I stood over a copy machine, making hundreds of copies of a twenty-page exam littered with questions that poke and prod at certainty — well, it reminds me, as trite as it might sound, of what poetry can remind you of. But it’s true. A room full of students taking a test, pausing so often to flip a page or bubble a question, is not inherently a room that is very open to the possible.
Poetry, though, reminds me not necessarily of what is possible, but rather of the very fact of possibility. It reminds me that living a life that prioritizes and values the imagination is a worthwhile thing, even if it’s hard, in such a life, to find that value echoed elsewhere. Uncertainty, possibility, complexity — what joys such ideas are. What beautiful truths.