Carrie Fountain's "The Life"

Thoughts on this, too, being a life.

The Life

The toilet flows and flows
and nothing stops it

so I call a plumber but then
it stops on its own

so I call back and say it stopped
and cancel. I have these

little ideas for making my life
a marginally better life.

I can't think of one
right now. Otherwise, I find

as soon as I come within range
the spirit retreats. Before

long, it never existed. As with
a celebrity, I will always

have to remember meeting
the spirit, though the spirit will

never have to remember meeting
me. Based on conversations

I've overheard, I think
my children believe the soul

is an organ of the body.
I know they believe in heaven.

I hear them talk about it.
But theirs is a heaven of their own

making, a place where you can
do whatever you want, eat

ice cream for dinner, play
video games with a God who will

drive you to CVS—yes, right now,
put on your shoes—for a new box

of Lucky Charms, a God
who will give you full possession

of his Apple ID. Theirs 
is a heaven with no elsewhere,

a heaven with no hell.
For them there are three times:

the beforelife, which is nothing,
the life, and the afterlife, which is

everything. Who knows? Maybe
they're right. If I washed

my face and brushed my teeth
and took out my contacts

right after putting my kids to sleep
rather than waiting until

before bed, my evenings would be
better and I'd go to sleep earlier.

There. You see, I can't stop having
the smallest possible ideas. This

is the life. After a day of devout
silence, the toilet starts up again.

This time I'm waiting to see
if it's serious.


from The Life (Penguin Poets, 2021)

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I’ve been familiar with Carrie Fountain’s work for awhile now, but have never read any of her books, and so, not long ago, I found myself — as I often do — in a bookstore, opening Fountain’s book, The Life, for the first time, turning to today’s poem, titled the same as the book that it is from, and smiling at the dry wit and observational humor and flowing use of the word and in the poem’s first six lines.

I love when a poem begins in dailiness and moves such dailiness into the realm of the spiritual. This poem — and so much of Fountain’s work that I have now read, after reading both this poem and the book that it is from — does that work. For all we say about the lives that we live, which is this life or the life, for all we critique our lives and generalize them and make broad, reaching statements about them, I’ve found that a poem — just one, really, is all it takes — can snap the wide net of the general that I often cast over my own life, and can let all that I’ve bundled into that net — the toilet, the Lucky Charms, the CVS — find new possibility to be rendered into something far stranger and more interesting than the dulled generalization of some cliched statement that I might make about this life.

To put it more bluntly: a poem, I’ve found, can remind me that even a toilet overflowing can be something to take seriously as an avenue to wonder about god, or pain, or labor, or the imagination. I’ve found, too, that being reminded of such a thing is good. Not because it betters my life or makes me better in my life, no. But because it simply widens and deepens my life. It brings the wonder back in. That’s all. No, that’s not all. That’s everything.

Such deepening reminds me of other lines of Fountain’s, from her poem “The Spirit Asks”:

This life:

sometimes I feel myself so deep
inside it, blessed so painfully, so

painfully blessed, pushing into it,
pushing—and yet I cannot

get through. I want too much.

That’s why a poem, perhaps, is not necessarily really about making one’s life better — about those marginal gains alluded to in today’s a poem. Sometimes a poem can be a reminder that we are “blessed so painfully.” That’s an impossible thing, isn’t it? A paradox at its heart. And yet still, it is our life. Our wanting so much, our wanting of contradictory things, our labor for those we love, our anger, sometimes, that sits right next to our love, our complexity, our desire — in other words, our lives — is the stuff of art and the stuff of poetry because it is the stuff of life, and to recognize it and to come into contact with it when you have forgotten it, well, such recognition reminds me that I am living and that I can live and that I am not alone in such living. And that’s part of the wonder.

And so, today’s poem. I love it for many reasons and one of those reasons is, as I mentioned, how it begins:

The toilet flows and flows
and nothing stops it

so I call a plumber but then
it stops on its own

so I call back and say it stopped
and cancel. 

This is one of the longer sentences in the poem, spanning six lines. Notice how it enacts the flowing of the toilet. (That was, truly, a sentence I never thought I’d write). But notice! The reliance on conjunctions to keep the moment moving — the and, the and, the so, the but, the so, the and, the and. It is a moment that refuses to be just a simple sentence. And so Fountain enacts its movement down the page, through the white space — a plumbing mishap, sure, but also a poem.

But what I love, too, is how this poem moves from that moment, how Fountain’s sentences span multiple lines and then span just a single line, how she juxtaposes the long dailiness of a life with short, terse moments of surprise. Like this one:

I have these

little ideas for making my life
a marginally better life.

Or this one:

Theirs 
is a heaven with no elsewhere,

a heaven with no hell.

Or this one:

Who knows? Maybe
they're right.

That juxtaposition, between a kind of monotony and a kind of surprise, between a kind of ongoingness and a kind of bursting-forth-of-awe, gives this poem so much momentum and music as it moves down the page.

But what I love, too, is another juxtaposition. Look at the poem with a broader focus, as if it were a map and you were scanning its topographical lines. Notice how the “I” of the poem is so present for its first third. And notice, too, how it is present for the poem’s last third. But notice, finally, how it disappears in the poem’s middle. It goes away. It is replaced. Replaced by children and a spirit. By imagination and the soul. I love this. I didn’t really notice it until I read the poem a few times and wondered at the absence in the poem’s middle, and — as a result of such absence — what is gained. And then I appreciated the fact of the absence. I appreciated the humility of it.

The poem turns away from the utter and daily problems of the speaker — the toilet overflowing, the desire for marginal improvements at this thing we call a live — and turns toward children and the soul:

Based on conversations

I've overheard, I think
my children believe the soul

is an organ of the body.

Here, there is no certainty. There is a conversation overheard. A thought about belief. And that juxtaposition, fresh from the minute and small changes the speaker is trying to make to better their life, feels so alive and beautiful and humble. And, too, it introduces the surprise of children — the way they are like poets.

In that line about the soul, there is an echo of a Larry Levis epigraph to Steve Scafidi’s delightfully-titled poem, “Ode to the Perineum”:

Maybe the soul is only a small place on the body.

And the first sentence of Scafidi’s poem? Here:

And maybe not.

And the second sentence? Here:

Maybe the invisible filament that flickers
in the idea of the soul is the soul.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. That word echoes throughout all of poetry. And it echoes, too, in that middle third of Fountain’s poem:

Who knows? Maybe
they're right.

And so I love this poem’s humility, how the speaker fades away to allow the children to have the stage, and how, through such allowance, gives them permission to play, to imagine, and to believe, and how, after such allowance, does not dismiss their playfulness. How the speaker even admits that there is something there — something of the spirit, something of possibility.

I am struck by that humility, that allowance. It reminds me of Fountain’s poem, “Self-Help,” anchored by the speaker’s realization that they must accept their child’s fears rather than immediately try to alter such fears, a realization that the speaker offers with this admittance at its heart:

you have to
let the shame come—parenting
is full of shame and the recognition
of shame and the legacy
of shame—and you have to let it
come and wash over you
without trying to stop it.

Such humility, such allowance, such attendance is echoed by Fountain’s own words about her poem “The Spirit Asks”:

When it’s here, I’m attending to the gifts of the spirit. It’s not really about making books, though of course it is. But, more essentially, it’s about returning to the attentiveness of that discipline. Which is merely taking a breath and feeling it. Looking around and seeing. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing to do.

What is holy is all around. Isn’t that the most difficult thing to come to terms with?

It’s all around and all the time.

In today’s poem, however, the spirit “retreats” and the speaker returns back into the poem, much like life does — with that desire to optimize rather than accept, to force change rather than allow for it. It’s an honesty that I appreciate, because it feels as life so often feels — something shattering my awe with its utter dailiness. I’m struck by the light but then wonder if I have enough quarters for the laundry, if I have enough time to do my laundry at all. That suddenness of life’s arrival into the wonder that life also provides reminds me of another of Fountain’s poems, “Poem without an Image,” which begins:

Just now it has come
to me again: the sudden
knowledge of everything
that remains to be done

Yeah. That feels like adulthood, right? But not just some broad, sweeping, generalized adulthood. No; it feels like adulthood across various, specific forms. The labor of motherhood. The balancing of work and family, especially if you are also balancing a kind of economic precarity. And maybe that’s a final reason I love today’s poem. It feels real in its admittance of difficulty. It’s there here, in the opening third of the poem:

I have these

little ideas for making my life
a marginally better life.

And it returns here, in the poem’s final third:

You see, I can't stop having
the smallest possible ideas. 

There is something about our culture that idolizes this kind of optimization, and I see today’s poem not doing the same kind of idolizing, but rather noticing how much we have to contend with it, and how the act of contending with it sometimes reduces our ability to recognize what happens in the margins that are so often shrunk by our desire to, well, shrink them. But the margins are places of grace and absurdity and strangeness, places of surprise and wonder. To reduce such margins, to make out of time something so finite that it can be compartmentalized rather than felt, or lived, or experienced — that’s a reduction of so much possibility. Possibility of what, you might say. To which I’d say: the point is that we cannot name it. The point is, quite simply, that it’s possible.

One sadness of our culture is that this shift into a kind of worship of optimization puts the biggest burden of such optimizing on those whose positions are already precarious. It as if the world is saying here, did you get dealt a shitty hand; did you get fucked over by the man; do you have to work for not just for your living but for those of others; did you get denied basic and essential needs…well, try life-hacking your way to success. In other words, sometimes those little ideas that might save a minute or two of time are needed tremendously, and then, those on the margins lose the margin that they might have for play, for wonder, for joy, for whatever more and whatever else its possible. And what’s even sadder is that such an approach to optimize life is used by those in positions of economic power (see this oft-referenced article for the birth of the now-ubiquitous use of the phrase “marginal gains” in business) to continue to grow and maintain such economic power.

What to do about all of this? I don’t know. But it makes me sad.

I, too, sometimes want to optimize my life. I want to fit things in. I want to reduce my conception of what my day is into easily manageable tasks, which I can then complete, and can then feel better for having completed them. I often reduce, reduce, and reduce until everything is small enough to fit into one place and I no longer have a gaze big enough to allow for the beauty that is light, or leisure, or laughter that laughs longer than I had ever thought possible. That part, there. I said it. I can do this so often that I no longer have room for the possible.

And so I turn again to today’s poem, which reminds me that poetry can name all of this. It can name the toilet overflowing and the children playing and the idea of a soul and the trip to CVS and the complex and ever-present desires that come with personhood. It can name all of this and let the act of that naming, which is an act of attention, exist as a poem, and all that comes with such naming. The reaching. The listening. The wondering. None of that is optimized or focused on marginal gains. No; it just is. It holds the space. It holds it wide enough and specific enough and deep enough that you can step in and say this, too, is a life and, in such saying, feel less alone for all the wanting and thinking and wondering that makes up the life of who you are.

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Some notes:

1. This campaign, run by the organization Amal for Palestine (you can follow them here) is worth supporting if you have the means. Also, the magazine Mizna has curated this page, Toward a Free Palestine, filled with resources to support those in Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists.

2. And, as I have mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. I also recently donated to this fundraiser, in support of the Gaza Sunbirds — a para-cycling team that is reallocated their resources to offer on-the-ground aid in Gaza. Maybe consider donating if you have the means.

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