Irene McKinney's "Bravery" & "Frivolous"

Thoughts on "frivolity / in the face of hardship."

Bravery

I was tired of holding my head up. Tired of nosebleeds 
and ranks of pill bottles lined up on the windowsill 
framing a sweet green meadow. Weary, and deflected 
in the spine. Depleted. I said don't scathe me, don't 
tear me sideways, don't throw me down. Let up 
on all depletions, rend me no more. Release me 
from the bind of wire, the tangle of burnt nerves.  
Unhand me. Make a space for living, don't drain away. 
Could I have one relief? One minute? I was brave twice, 
but this is again. I am undone, again. Desist. 
Then, circuits in the wind, in the lymph, in the mind, 
work for my good, I call down joy, I cast 
a spell. I ask myself for succor, for a place 
of refuge. Inside the mind there is a balm. 
I know it, and I say hello.   

Frivolous

I'm wearing pink socks 
and double pony-tails 
sticking out of the sides 
of my head, because, face it, 
I'm basically a creature of impulse 
who has opted for frivolity 
in the face of hardship, and because 
I still can, I go on to make 
self-consciously exaggerated 
remarks that fool no one, 
and I decide that's fine, in 
infinite regress, I'll go on 
with that line as far as it 
takes me and beyond, even, 
to the place where I fall down 
on my final bed when it 
pulls me there, and in between 
defiant statements and tics 
of various entertaining kinds, 
slated to be remembered by  
my friends and family, 
I hope to look at the situation  
clear-eyed, cleansed and purified 
by a lifetime of simply fooling around.


from Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? (West Virginia Wesleyan College Press, 2013) 

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I received this book in the mail from an old friend the other week, and reading it has been one of the real balms of these recent days. If you are unaware — as I was — Irene McKinney was a West Virginian poet of real irreverence, joy, wit, and love. The book these poems are from was published posthumously, and the poems read with a kind of near-angelic transcendence and tenderness and wisdom that feels impossible — and even, I might add, so deeply wrong — to ignore. I can’t ignore it. I love these poems.

These two poems today are separated by just a few pages in McKinney’s book. I love them as companions with one another — this juxtaposition of bravery with frivolity, which isn’t, I don’t think, really a juxtaposition at all. I think they are the same thing. I think McKinney shirks a certain idea of bravery for a more personal and authentic frivolity, which is to say that — at least, for me — her bravery is her frivolity. More than anything, her choice to “call down joy,” even and especially in the midst of hardship, is an act of remarkable bravery — which is a word we so often associate with seriousness, which is a word we so often associate with stoicism. No. The “pink socks” and the “double pony-/tails” are brave, too. They say something about willingness in the face of what aims to reduce one’s capacity to even be willing or able at all. To be willing, then, is brave work. So much more is brave than we give credit for.

And I think that’s why I’ve been sitting with these poems lately. They feel, in their intimate authenticity, like an expansion of the norm — a way of seeing and expressing things that feels beautiful for the risk they take of simply being themselves. Notice how “Frivolous” opens:

I'm wearing pink socks 
and double pony-tails 
sticking out of the sides 
of my head, because, face it, 
I'm basically a creature of impulse 
who has opted for frivolity 
in the face of hardship

In essence, these lines distill, into images that stay with you forever — “pink socks / and double pony-tails” a notion of being oneself despite all else.

And notice how McKinney justifies this desire to be herself:

because 
I still can, I go on

And though “Frivolous” feels like a poem written lightly, with a kind of whimsy, notice, in “Bravery,” how hard it is for McKinney to be herself — a self that we get the fullest sense of in “Frivolous:

Could I have one relief? One minute? I was brave twice, 
but this is again.

Taken together, these lines remind me of those famous lines from Beckett’s Unnameable:

I can't go on. I'll go on.

Going on, for McKinney, for anyone, is an act of immense bravery, no matter how you choose to do it. With double pony-tails or with a cap pulled low over your eyes. With defiance or with joy. The world, especially now, and yet still always, is a world that undoes us, again and again. Let up, McKinney says. Could I have one relief, McKinney asks.

The relief doesn’t come, I don’t think. At least, it hasn’t yet, has it? But joy — in both of these poems — still does. It’s there in “Bravery,” when McKinney asks to “call down joy,” and it’s there in “Frivolous,” in every insistence on “foolishness.”

I think of Toi Derricotte’s mantra that “joy is an act of resistance.”

I think, too, of how my favorite parts of being a teacher are the daily reminders of kids being themselves. We police so much — in schools, in the world. And we police so many of the wrong things. Books and ideas. Outfits and reactions. Sometimes we punish kids for simply feeling. And our world punishes kids by withholding, lately, so many various examples — of books, of ideas, of systems of thought — that might give them better language to feel, which is also better language to be. But every once in awhile, in between all that is so wrongly policed and withheld and restricted, something joyful and pure and authentic slips through. A turn of phrase. Shared laughter. A raspberry blown when I asked for silence. A kid who wears a How to Train Your Dragon hat to school. A pencil, as a joke, sharpened all the way down to its eraser. These moments of selfhood, fully expressed within limited confines. Joy as an act of resistance.

Admittedly, in this current moment, right now, and now, and now — we are in the midst of experiencing a torrent of policies, orders, and directives that limit people’s capacity to be fully themselves. For example, see this one recent executive order that uses a language of protection and defense to essentially limit and reduce the myriad possibilities of language to help people find a better way of defining their experience of their body and their body’s relationship to the world. The order claims it exists in response to an “ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary.” In this case, ordinary (a word I love) means the opposite of frivolity, the opposite of individuality, the opposite of authenticity. It means the norm, but a norm established by people whose power permits them to reduce people, rather than expand them. And yet, the real beauty of ordinariness, which this order obfuscates and then destroys, is the beauty of people being who they are — the ordinary joy that comes with ordinary expression, which is an extraordinary thing. This order — just one of many these days — is an act of policing that weaponizes a proposed sense of safety that, in actuality, will make people feel less safe and more alone.

That act of policing, of interfering, goes against the imaginative aspects of poetry that I have come to love and cherish. I think of these lines from this new-to-me poem by McKinney, as she flies above her small town in a small plane:

But I wanted

to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being

everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known.

What beautiful lines that do what beautiful poetry does: remind me, as I need reminding, of how this world — and everything and everyone in it — deserves to be looked at, and looked at again, and wondered about, and talked about in ways it all deserves, which is every possible way, and not just one. I wanted / to reach down and pat it. I do, too, sometimes. Just like how sometimes I want to hold the moon between my thumb and forefinger. Such acts of looking and wondering and telling are acts of anti-policing, and anti-limiting, acts that create and reimagine a world unlike this one that we live in now.

In such a world, in this world, where the boundaries of what is allowed continue to shrink and shrink and shrink, our joy is an act of real bravery, namely because our joy will, I think, help keep us alive.

Sometimes, walking with my wife in the city, we’ll come across a family — mom, dad, little one — where it is beyond obvious that the child’s parents let them dress themselves. We’ll see a toddler wearing mismatched shoes, neon-bright leggings, and a dinosaur-printed sweatshirt the color of which clashes so horrifically with the color of the leggings that we can’t help but laugh. That joy — simple, surprising, and devastatingly hilarious — is the joy that comes when someone says to someone else yes, you can or sure, why not or what’s the worst that could happen. That kind of joy, one that seems so unserious, is one that — when extended to its most serious implications — keeps people alive. It’s the joy that comes when you tell someone that they are allowed. Radical permission that permits defiance. Sneaky flower blooming between the cracks. A made up word that means myself.

Such joy is important when one considers one of McKinney’s pleas in “Bravery”:

Make a space for living, don't drain away. 

That request is made by a speaker of a poem the first line of which repeats the word “tired” twice. Give me more, such a request says, not less. Allow, such a request says, don’t exclude. Permit, such a request says, don’t police. Create, such a request says, don’t erase. Live. Live. Live.

And so, such spaces are the little cracks that let the light.

And so, if you make enough space, you can invite someone in to share the light.

And so, in sharing whatever light, however small, something happens that is different than the something-happening that is awful.

And so, maybe I was wrong when I said the relief doesn’t come. It comes, I think, when we let it. In little moments, short breaths — these brief pauses that exist in between the fear, which is real, and the anxiety, which I feel everyday. Stitched together, these pauses — mismatched shoes seen on a city street, a doodle sneaky-sketched on the whiteboard — build our capacity for joy, which builds our capacity for bravery, which is something we need, I think, but something that doesn’t always have to look the way we are sometimes taught it looks. Soldiers storming the beach. Dark clouds in the sky. No. Foolishness in this awful world, laughter in the midst of all this violence. Such things are brave, too. They’re brave because certain people with certain power don’t want such things. And lately, the things that people with power do not want are, perhaps — maybe even certainly — what we should all be doing. Radical defiance. Dressing ourselves each day. Opting for “frivolity / in the face of hardship.”

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