Derrick Austin's "Sadness Isn't the Only Muse"

Thoughts on sweetness and the imagination.

Sadness Isn’t the Only Muse

I can’t imagine myself reading bedtime stories 
to a toddler, and I’m older than my father was
when he read those brightly colored books to me.
His voice is deeper than mine will ever be
but just as sweet. I always picked Freight Train.
I loved the black caboose. A train runs across this track… 
through tunnels and cities, darkness and light, forever. 
I still love books where nothing happens,
good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.

from Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021)

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Yeah, this is a beautiful poem. I recently bought Derrick Austin’s newest collection, Tenderness, which is a gorgeous book — tender, yes, but also critical and vulnerable and loving. It is full of phrases like “villanelle / of suffering” or “I had no space in me for less than life.” These moments of lyrical richness or compassionate honesty or both.

The poem above is no different. I have it dog-eared and have, over the past few days, returned to it over and over. I was struck, at first, by the declarative notion at the heart of the first three lines:

I can’t imagine myself reading bedtime stories 
to a toddler, and I’m older than my father was
when he read those brightly colored books to me.

As I write this, I’m about to turn 31. It’s an age I thought would look and feel different than it looks and feels, and I understand now that such a feeling — this feeling of living within a moment you once imagined from the long-ago past, and having that moment be different than you imagined — is part of what we have come to call “growing up.” For some reason, I can’t get the line from Larry Levis out of my head:

Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:

I’m wondering, though: what happens if, in the present, you remember something you once imagined? And if what you once imagined could fit right alongside the present tense of yourself, but it doesn’t fit? Maybe that’s what I’m wondering, and what these opening lines of today’s poem make me consider.

In other words, I remember being young and thinking assuredly about fatherhood. I remember dreaming of fatherhood when I was a teenager. At that moment, I was being raised by only my father, but in that moment, too, I also remembered the way my mother had read to me years before, when I was a little kid. Now, I remember crawling into bed with her, and I remember the little 10 inch television she kept on her nightstand, the antennas bigger than the screen. I remember nuzzling into the nook of her arms. I remember how much I longed for the darkness of night, because it meant the arrival of some kind of love. Later, after my mother had left my family, I longed to be a father in the same way my mother was a mother. I wanted something small to care for. I wanted some beautiful explosion of love.

But now, like Austin writes, I am growing closer to being older than my mother was when she read to me in bed. And I am realizing the way the world sometimes gets in the way — or, at the very least, complicates — the beauty of what we imagine. It’s harder to imagine fatherhood now than it was all those years ago. It’s harder to imagine a lot of things. That’s one great sadness I feel so often. The trifles of capitalism and bureaucracy are not really trifles at all. They are great weights to bear, ones that whittle away power, and labor, and — perhaps most of all — imagination.

But this poem today turns from those opening three lines and offers imagination in the form of tenderness:

His voice is deeper than mine will ever be
but just as sweet.

The phrase just as sweet acts as a kind of counterbalance to the earlier I can’t imagine. Though fatherhood is not something within the speaker’s realm of imagination, that doesn’t render the speaker incapable of making a compassionate connection to memory. It’s a beautiful moment because of the way in which it refuses limitation. It acknowledges the way in which sweetness — something gorgeous and true and larger than its seeming-smallness — can take different forms.

I’m struck by such a moment because of the richness almost hidden within the poem’s syntax, a syntax that feels prosaic at first read. But read it again. Instead of merely being two sentences enjambed into five lines, these opening moments gather a kind of acoustic, sensory steam. The word stories at the end of the first line finds an echo in the word he at the start of the third, which finds an echo in the word me at the end of the third, which finds an echo in the word deeper halfway through the fourth, which finds an echo in the word be at the end of the fourth, which finds a final echo in the word sweet, which closes out the second sentence of the poem halfway through the fifth line.

These little touchstones connect the growing imagination of the poem’s first two sentences on an acoustic level. In other words: they sing. They enact the almost-lullaby-like quality of childhood — of real and tender care — at the same moment that they describe and reflect on the memory of such care itself. There’s a subtext flowing underneath the opening of this poem. Even though the speaker cannot imagine fatherhood, they can still sing the lovely, sweet effects of it. And they sing such effects by virtue of their own imagination. They might seem simple, these first five lines, but they’re not. They’re complex, riddled with humanness. They point at something I love about Austin’s poetry — the way that his work illustrates how tenderness is sometimes the labor of play. The good labor of play. Which also means the good labor of joy. The good labor of sweetness.

There’s a moment in an interview I really love, where Austin says:

When I look at an artwork, particularly because I prefer old things, I’m awed by the fact of its existence. I’m awed by the fact that we have a piece of somebody’s imagination and intellect and spirit and labor still in the world.

That kind of generosity is at play in the opening lines of today’s poem, where the desire does not seem to be to resist connection, but rather to extend a real kindness toward memory, and the effects of memory. That phrase just as sweet is one that begs to be uttered again and again — about so many things. I’m imagining a world right now. One where we utter that phrase — just as sweet — about so many things. About oranges, about people, about light. It speaks back to the poem’s title — “Sadness Isn’t the Only Muse.” If sadness is the only muse, the poem seems to say, then a father’s voice is only deeper than a son’s, and not as sweet. If sadness is the only muse, then perhaps sweetness doesn’t enter into the vocabulary at all. If sadness is the only muse, then we become limited in what we allow ourselves to extend the wide and generous range of our attention and imagination toward.

It’s funny, because I was drawn to this poem from my own sadness. I read the opening few lines, and immediately felt the sadness of memory — that aforementioned longing for something I do not have, and can hardly imagine having at the moment. I read the opening few lines, and I thought of my mother, and how I missed her for so many years before she came back into my life, and I thought of my youthful dreams, and how they are not the same as my present reality. I thought of these things, yes, but then the poem went on. And it was the poem itself, and the way in which it enacted its own capacity for imagination, that allowed me to imagine something other than sadness.

In Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which I’m reading now, there is this scene where a character says:

You’re lonely inside your life.

It’s a tight, punchy phrase embedded within a paragraph of dialogue, but I underlined it and circled it and wrote it above the text at the top of the page. It’s true. I am lonely inside my life. And maybe you are, too. But when I allow myself to enter a poem — whether through the front door or a side door or a barely-opened window — I enter, too, the life of someone else. The poem says imagine this world. The poem says sadness isn’t the only muse. The poem says just as sweet. And maybe, for a moment, I am less lonely inside my life.

I feel that idea of loneliness inside of a life echoed in the poem’s final lines:

I still love books where nothing happens,
good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.

I love the way these lines exist in tandem with the poem’s opening lines. There’s so much imagination at work in the poem’s opening, and one might think that the phrase books where nothing happens is a resistance of imagination. But consider the possibility that a book where nothing happens is its own form of imagination. Consider the ways in which the world — so dominant, insistent, overtly powerful — demands that a narrative contains something like conflict, something like action. Something like both. And always. And all at once. If this is the case, if the dominant ideology about narrative is one that involves conflict, then perhaps a narrative where nothing happens is — by virtue of its resistance to the dominant ideology — truly imaginary. In this way, these final lines don’t counter the opening lines. They further them. They take the imaginative work of finding sweetness in a father’s voice and extend it to the page. They say: a story can simply be. They say: there is imagination in ordinariness. They say: there is so much in the world that demands so much, and because of such demanding, is terrible. They say: something can be not like me and still be just as sweet.

The final sentence of this poem reminds me of the fact that a person moves through so many landscapes at once. One form of privilege involves the limitation of the landscapes you must move through. In other words: it is a privilege to not even have to consider the fact that you move through many landscapes in one day. It is a privilege to move through only one. But many people move through emotional landscapes, and racialized ones, and economic ones, and sexualized ones, and so many more. And so many all at once. These landscapes, I imagine, are filled with their own forms of fear and anxiety and conflict. Why must we insist on filling the landscapes of our imagined narratives with even more conflict? And, if we insist on such a thing, are those landscapes truly imagined? Or are they just reenactments of the same oppressive landscapes people move through on a daily basis, with or without their consent?

In the final lines of his poem, “Poem for Julian,” Austin gets at the consequences of conflict becoming an assumed part of narrative:

I’m sorry for blood on sidewalk chalk. Sorry
for a future I cannot see. A future with hope.

When conflict is assumed to be a part of the everyday, then it — just like the deadening effects of capitalism, the mindlessness of bureaucracy, the oppressive language of systems and corporate-speak — reduces the ability to imagine a world that is unlike this one. A world that is hope incarnate. A world where hope is not even needed.

I love today’s poem because of the way it centers imagination around ideas that are beautiful because of their seeming-ordinariness. Sweetness and nothing. That’s a beautiful world, right? One where there is sweetness and nothing else? There is no what if in such a world, no but don’t you think? No, no, no. There is sweetness and nothing else.

One beauty of living in this world is that our conception of what it means to be alive in this world evolves as we are living in it. I began this little essay by talking about a memory about my mother reading to me in bed. That memory ended, but my life didn’t. It went on, and so did my mother’s. And now she sends me books with little notes written in the first few pages. I imagined many things in my youth, but I didn’t imagine that. I didn’t imagine such sweetness. But it is there. It is here now. What I forget often about life is the way in which it will surprise me. Always. Without fail. But I have to allow it. I have to be open to the way something might be or could be. I have to open that window, dwell in that space. I can’t just say this is. No, no. Why would I want only that?