E.C. Belli's "Hues"

Thoughts on individuality.

Hues

Some undeniable facts about our world:
Diversity of life, reproduction, patterns
But also mimicry—
One thing posing
As another
To protect themselves,
Some animals
Wear their opponents’ clothes
Little imposters without syndromes
Meanwhile we self-flagellate
On our happy days for being too like the sun
On our sad ones for being too like the shadows
Denying ourselves the right
To being shadow or sun because the role is already filled, somewhere
But I can assure you I have seen many
Shades of gray
And your hue
Is inimitable; it dances against the brick
Of the buildings
In a distinct manner that summons a haunting
And in the nighttime
It hosts
The most beautiful
Tints of blue
I read about these in a book once
On a wood floor
Sitting next
To you

from A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press, 2022)

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I know it can be troublesome to begin with endings, but I think the first thing I want to say about this poem is that the way it resolves itself in those final four to six lines…it’s just so remarkable. It absolutely is. Sometimes I write that a poem made me catch my breath or gasp or whatever, and while these things are sometimes true and sometimes hyperbolic, it is certainly true that the ending of this poem left this visceral feeling — a lump, an air pocket of sorts — somewhere a few inches beneath my throat. And I think part of that feeling is due to a few things. The first has to do with craft, and the second has to do with surprise.

I’ve always loved E.C. Belli’s work; her debut book, Objects of Hunger, is so wonderful — full of these pared-down lyric poems that are at once visceral and tender. I will always have the first lines of one of her poems from that book — On the borders of tender / How it all blurs — stuck in my head. I know I’ve mentioned them in this newsletter before. Another pair of lines I love, from her poem “Junipers”:

The light isn’t made of angels, you fool

It’s made of heartbreak

Today’s poem operates with that same visceral tenderness. It’s visceral in the sense of the sharpness of the lines, which is the kind of thing that will forever hold me in admiration, as I am a poet who absolutely cannot dream up a way to write a poem that moves with this kind of lyric momentum. Belli juxtaposes entire lines of thought, such as the first line — Some undeniable facts about our world — with lines that hold just an idea, or even a plural subject (ie. Some animals).

Proceeding downward in this way, Belli’s poem gains a sort of fragmented momentum. By that I mean: the poem holds you in the loop of its offering. As you read, you don’t know what to expect from both the line that you are reading or the line that follows. Because there is such an alteration of delivery, each line has the potential to disclose or withhold so much, and each line that follows offers the same potential. In a purely experiential sense, this poem feels like being dropped into a maze of hallways, opening doors that lead to small rooms, which then lead to doors that open to larger rooms. And I don’t know how much people talk about this, but I’ll just say it: this experience of reading is something that gives me a sense of real joy. I feel simultaneously guided and yet wholly within my own agency. I feel at once like someone who has watched another person draw the treasure map and like someone who has found the treasure.

That’s one element of craft — the way the unexpected delivery and fragmentation at the line level moves the reader through the poem. The other element of craft that I love is noticeable toward the poem’s ending. As the poem moves toward this ending, it begins to echo audibly. It calls back to its title — “Hues” — through these gentle rhymes. Just read these final lines again:

But I can assure you I have seen many
Shades of gray
And your hue
Is inimitable; it dances against the brick
Of the buildings
In a distinct manner that summons a haunting
And in the nighttime
It hosts
The most beautiful
Tints of blue
I read about these in a book once
On a wood floor
Sitting next
To you

You, the poem reads. Then hue. Then the beau of beautiful. Then blue. Then you, once more.

These little rhymes might seem small, but together, they unite the poem towards a resolution. And so much of the power of that resolution has to do with theme. This poem begins as a poem that introduces so many big ideas:

Diversity of life, reproduction, patterns
But also mimicry—
One thing posing
As another
To protect themselves

These ideas are echoed in the actual lines of the poem — lines that branch out from others, lines that mimic others, and then lines — such as the final few — that take on a pattern of sound. In this way, the poem almost embodies natural life itself, operating with its own complexities and likenesses and individualities. But one thing I love about these final lines — and their gentle rhymes — is that they occur after the poem has made a kind of point. And that point has to do with the beauty of our own individuality, and the shame that occurs when:

we self-flagellate
On our happy days for being too like the sun
On our sad ones for being too like the shadows

Immediately after this point, as if to calm the reader and invest each of us in something beautiful, the poem literally begins to sing. It sings back to its title. It sings you. It sings hue. It sings blue. And as it resolves itself in this way, today’s poem reminds us — as gently and kindly as possible — that we are each our own person. And part of me is astounded — like actually astounded — at the beauty of such an ending. And perhaps that is because such a message these days might seem trite, especially within the context of a world that continually reminds us of the importance of something like self-love but does little in the form of offering a structure to make that self-love seem valuable or necessary or part of something collectively beautiful.

This is why I admire this poem’s craft. The callback of something as seemingly simple as sound — rhyme itself — makes the ideas of individuality, love, and self-kindness become wildly important, and even surprising for such importance, since such ideas are so often watered down by our world. Perhaps this importance occurs, in part, is because rhyme is a form of unity. In order for something to rhyme, it must have something to echo. I think we are the same way, whether we acknowledge it or not. When we feel, it is often in response to something else. When we feel in response to our own worries or loves or anxieties, we are rhyming with ourselves, or slant-rhyming, or moving dissonantly through the sound-like sense of our being. And when we feel in response to others, we are sometimes — when that feeling is beautiful and met with beauty in return — rhyming with those people.

Today’s poem reminds me of that first letter from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, particularly when Rilke writes:

Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

I don’t agree with all of this anymore (though who am I to disagree with Rilke), as I find some of Rilke’s message to be a little too disciplinarian and even gate-keep-y in tone. But I’ve always been drawn to that notion of the importance of one’s life even in its most indifferent and slightest hour. I often think about this passage anytime a student tells me that their life is not interesting enough to write about. I think about those words — indifferent, slight — and how even those words, and the moments they describe, are things of value when it comes to living in this world. Because at the heart of Rilke’s point is the idea that nothing is indifferent if one finds within it a kind of question, or attention, or anything.

I was just reading a review of Werner Herzog’s new novel, which I am eager to read, and, for the same reason I just mentioned, I loved the final paragraph, which included these lines:

Herzog, who has made a career studying the emptiness of meaning-making, celebrates Onoda’s noble crusade even as he dismisses its abject triviality; it takes a kindred spirit to admire someone who held himself hostage to a lost cause. Fittingly, Herzog devotes almost none of the novel to Onoda’s life after his long war…The real story is in the jungle, where so much nothing happened that, for Onoda, it became everything. 

Where so much nothing happened that…it became everything. I love that concept as a way of approaching the ordinariness of life. And so I turn again to these lines from Belli’s poem today:

Meanwhile we self-flagellate
On our happy days for being too like the sun
On our sad ones for being too like the shadows
Denying ourselves the right
To being shadow or sun because the role is already filled, somewhere

I think this is true. It is one of those universal statements that finds itself so true to the human experience. Even though there is beauty in each of our individual experiences of the world, and even though it is wildly beautiful to be like the sun, or even like shadow — which is another way of saying that we exist in relation to light, which is beautiful — we are so often primed, because of so much else, to say that we are unimportant, or indifferent, or slight. And though it is true that we are indifferent — in some ways — when considered by the powerful mechanisms of the world that move on with or without our consent, this does not mean we are not beautiful, or capable of injecting joy or sorrow or light or light’s absence into the world. Because so much of the energy of this world operates by virtue of comparison (ie. things are better or worse than other things), I think we are primed to operate by this system as well. It’s a shame, though, isn’t it? Because there is so much light in the world, so much that does not need to be measured in so base a way. And so much of that light comes from ourselves.

In one of the poems from Belli’s latest book, she writes:

I want to be grateful
To use my blue
To make purple
To radiate joy

The final poem of the book ends with a speaker’s desire:

To begin considering
The dahlias

I want to be grateful, too. I want to begin considering the dahlias. I find it difficult, though, as I imagine — and know — it often is to think or write about joy or beauty. And yet, one reason I always think about joy is because I am often thinking about people. I am often thinking about, as Belli writes, our inimitable qualities. The things that make one person separate from another. The little things. The way one of my friends can’t help but walk in circles as he’s talking on the phone. The way another is given, always, to speak in hyperbole. The way another shies so far away from conflict that it creates conflict. These are funny things and sometimes annoying things and sometimes inconvenient things, but they are things that come from people. They are based in people, and the way people are their own light.

When I have a hard time being in this world, it is because the very idea of being is caught up with something so defined and well-purposed that, in order to become it, one might hardly be themselves. It is perhaps more generous to think about the ways in which we are like all things — the sun and the shadows and everything in between — and the ways in which all things are in us. I long for a world of such generosity.

And so I am thinking of a little metaphor that might seem trite based on the lines from one of Belli’s poems above. I’m thinking about how, if you have a blue in you that you want to make purple, you might need someone or something else. I’m thinking about how we are each like that — offering color to the world — and how we can only make new colors if we are willing to merge with another, to accept the light of someone else and meet it with our own. Because color, too, is the result of light. And I know it’s simple, maybe, and I know it’s sentimental, but I’m thinking about it, okay! I’m thinking about how I want to be grateful, the way I was the other day when I heard a child explaining to another child that, when you order an ice cream cone and ask for sprinkles, you want a lot of them. You want a whole mess of them. Every inch of the cone, covered in color.