from Fidelity (Macmillan, 2008)
I love arriving late to the poetry of poets who wrote for such a long time before I walked grateful and unaware into the rooms and houses they made of their work. Grace Paley is one of those poets. I am forever enamored by her wit, her charm, her compassion, her anger, her eyes, her spirit, her words. This poem floored me the moment I first read a few months ago, and I return to it often.
Some of Paley’s work has the clarity of some of my favorite musings — the “Aphorisms” written by poet James Richardson. One of my favorites goes:
All but the most durable books serve us by simply opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and wonder how we could have loved them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.
I love that last bit — “You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you” — and how stunning it feels after reading the pure simplicity of what comes before. Another favorite of his is:
Happiness is gratitude in search of something to be owed to.
There are a lot of ways to be a poet. One of many, I think, is to convey, however personally and intrinsically you can, your search for meaning or mystery or sense or all the above and more. Another way to be a poet (of many! sheesh! don’t think I’m limiting it here!) is to convey how to search. Another way to be a poet is to convey what to search for. I guess what I’m trying to say is that some poets ask what better might look like, and some poets tell us what better looks like. I think it’s really hard to do the latter. I don’t know if I ever could. I’m too scared! And don’t think I know enough! But I love Grace Paley because she does it sometimes, and she does it in this poem today.
The title of this poem — “Proverbs” — carries so much of the work of the poem itself. Much like Richardson’s aforementioned “Aphorisms,” the word “Proverb” holds a kind of connotative meaning for so many. I think of adages. Maxims. Commandments. The word itself literally means “to put forth words,” or “to push words forward.” And so, by using this title, Grace Paley is giving her poem this deep historical weight. And yet! Almost every proverb in the biblical Book of Proverbs is declarative. Each one makes a statement — “Iron sharpens iron,” “Commit your works to the lord” — and, in doing so, establishes a kind of unquestioning authority. The beauty (and sorrow) of this Grace Paley poem is in its modality. By using the consistent repetition of “should,” Paley is talking about a world that could have been possible or, if you’re feeling hopeful, might be possible. These are not proverbs in a traditional sense. They reject the authority of institutions. They long for a better world. And, in that longing, they know what better should look like.
All of that is a kind of craft choice that Paley makes. A choice to reject authority. To structurally enact and convey possibility. But within that craft, then, is Paley’s voice — a voice so wildly compassionate and struck by the supreme weight and complexity of the human experience. It’s a voice that begins with anger and is unafraid to complicate such beginnings. It’s a voice that pairs things both like and unlike — anger and respect, happiness and communion, love and time.
As this poem progresses, it gives in to complexity, and yet simplifies that complexity at the same time. It says that anger should be respected, but does not have to be shared. It says that happiness should be shared, but does not have to be understood. But then, it says, a person should be understood. And a person is a person of anger. A person is a person of happiness. It’s such a little thing, what Paley does, how she builds the poem little by little, twisting the dial of complexity ever so slightly just as she is widening canvas that such complexity could be applied to.
You see that complexity at play — and it is a kind of play — in the third stanza, my favorite. It begins with such a simple plea:
a person should be understood
But the way Paley complicates that is with an image so striking its instantly memorable and recognizable — the image of anger moving quickly to laughter. It’s an image, since reading the poem, that I cannot get out of my head, because I see it everywhere. I see it in myself, brows furrowed at a recipe, the prospect of a day ahead, the heat, anything, and then — by some miracle, maybe an almost-but-not-yet-stubbed toe, a remembered moment, some kind of self-schadenfreude — I find myself laughing at myself. I see it in my students. I see it in the people I love. I see it in my father. I see it everywhere. That quick turn. That volta of the self. That luminosity that saves us, again and again, from ourselves.
This poem offers that image and then turns next to love:
a person should be in love most of
the time
What can I say? In just eleven lines, Grace Paley offered a simple, complicated, generous how-to for life. It is — to re-quote James Richardson and push against his aphorism — a kind of window we can take with us. It is a kind of seeing, if seeing means all that seeing means: living, breathing, loving, fighting, wanting.
It’s hard, though, to read this poem, too. It’s hard, always, because of the “should,” and it’s hard to know if Paley is writing this from a place of hope or a place of despair. I think, perhaps, that it is both. Truth is a stubborn thing, I think, because it is a small word with a big promise, and more mystery than it lets on. But one of the saddest things about truth is the way in which so many things that are true in the most fundamental sense — people’s rage, people’s anger, people’s love — are often discredited, made to seem untrue, and, being such, made to seem worthless. Grace Paley’s work here returns us to the elemental truth of feelings, which sometimes seeming-smart people (academics, politicians, pundits, fuckwads, and more), discredit on the very basis of being feelings. What a dumb, asinine, less-than-smart thing to do. One of the things I am is what I feel. I think I know that. I want to believe that. When I read Paley’s work, I feel witnessed in such a way, and I feel the immense desire to witness others in such a way. To validate. To carry the labor of this poem into the labor of the world. That is — in one of many ways — what better can look like. And — in one of many ways — what a poem can do.