Kelly Schirmann’s "Dream of Relevancy"

Thoughts on feeling embarrassed for feeling.

Dream of Relevancy

Everyone knows
what their life should be
and also that it isn’t

I watched a video of a woman
saying money was a river
and another video of a man
saying money was the devil

He was weeping and spitting

Which is more true?

You have a new notification
from your most familiar sky
It’s over the town you grew up in
It wants you to come back

No one wants to be reminded
of what the world really is

There’s a canyon
or there’s an abyss

You’re walking on the rim of it
or you’re down at the bottom
taking photographs of the sky

At my family reunion an aunt
took my palm and told me
I had no emotion
I would have five children
including miscarriages

I am an artist
and so embarrassed

to be down at the ocean
like this / weeping
and spitting

Feeling anything
about it at all

from NY Tyrant (2017)

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I went down a Kelly Schirmann rabbit hole tonight — I had been reminded of her book Popular Music — and found this poem in front of me for the first time in years. I remember, I think, reading it long ago, because how can you forget those final seven lines?

This is not a happy poem (if anything is a happy poem), but I think I find myself drawn to it today because I’m not the happiest, and I’m not sure if anyone is right now. And I’m drawn — I think especially — toward Schirmann’s bluntness, which feels like a salve. It’s there immediately:

Everyone knows
what their life should be
and also that it isn’t

There are poets I love who almost always dwell in mystery and uncertainty, and there are poets I love who almost always do the opposite, who name, with a kind of rebellious certainty, their honest feelings about the world. I think of Natalie Shapero, and her poem “Not Horses,” which begins:

What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
when no one thinks of anything else, least of all
that bug.

Isn’t that great? What I adore is a bug. It’s beautiful and messy and so deeply in the world that you have to love it.

As such, I don’t really think these approaches — one laced with doubt, one spoken bluntly — to poetry are at odds with one another, either. I think, read together, poems of mystery and poems of certainty help nudge the experience of being in the world into something a little bit more bearable. When the world feels strange and painful and absurd, I think it helps to either walk headlong into that absurdity or to simply name it, to name what is weird or awful. Both acts do something difficult, and even beautiful. They both give further language to a kind of truth.

I feel that so much in today’s poem, which situates itself among dualities, an either/or-ness of the world:

There’s a canyon
or there’s an abyss

You’re walking on the rim of it
or you’re down at the bottom
taking photographs of the sky

I love these lines — and the entire poem — for their honesty, for the way they capture how it really feels to be in the world, especially when it is difficult to step away from your mind (if that is even possible) and reframe your thinking. I’m reminded of a middle school teacher I had who was obsessed with reminding us that “perception is reality.” At the time, I had just learned the word “precipitation,” and thought it would be funny if, every time it rained during school, I turned to that teacher and said “precipitation is reality.” It wasn’t that funny. It wasn’t funny at all. Now, it’s fascinating to think of the way that phrase — perception is reality — has been hijacked by the world of self-care to remind us that we can manufacture any scenario into something positive for our well-being. And that’s not really that funny, either. That’s scary, I think. Because sometimes an abyss is an abyss. In fact, probably most times. And as the fault lines of society are exacerbated, and as more and more people become aware of the oppressiveness of basic life on earth, then ignoring or reframing that abyss feels disingenuous. It seems more important, as Schirmann does in today’s poem, to simply name it.

But the thing about this poem’s blunt honesty is that it also allows for deeply complex feeling. I notice it in this stanza:

You have a new notification
from your most familiar sky
It’s over the town you grew up in
It wants you to come back

Amidst the speaker’s wrestling with the dichotomy of beauty and pain, with trying to figure out just how to feel about things, or if they should feel at all, there is this moment: nostalgia, calling itself forward from back in the past. And, as such, this poem — on the surface a poem of certainty — becomes a poem of absolute uncertainty. It communicates, through its bluntness, how difficult it is not just to have a body, but also to have memories — a past that can come rushing into the present. This is why, as Schirmann writes, “No one wants to be reminded / of what the world really is.” The world as it really is can be beautiful, yes. It often is. But the past can be gilded by the act of memory, especially when the present feels fraught. When where you are feels wrong, and where you’ve been feels inaccessible, imagine how hard life feels. Maybe, sadly, you don’t have to imagine that at all.

Perhaps this is best encapsulated by something W.S. Merwin said in an interview with The Paris Review:

Poetry [is] both exhilarating and painful all the time. It’s conveying both the great possibility and the thing that we can’t do.

That pain, though, can be so hard to bear. It reminds me of a poem by Emily Kendal Frey, where she writes:

I want to be

Buffed so hard that even

The highway

Can't scratch

Sometimes, the best response to reality is to render oneself as close to emotionless as possible. Notice that line from today’s poem: “I had no emotion.” But, sadly, or even just truthfully, that can be a hard way to live, too. All of it. All of it can be so hard. Feeling, not feeling, wishing you didn’t feel, wishing you felt different. And that’s why the final lines of today’s poem feel stuck in my head:

I am an artist
and so embarrassed

to be down at the ocean
like this / weeping
and spitting

Feeling anything
about it at all

I don’t know about you, but I have felt this feeling before. I have felt embarrassed for feeling, have felt worthless because of it. As a kid, I remember that I used to well up with almost-tears in the presence of any stern, authoritative voice. I would comply — and often still do — with any demand because I didn’t want to feel, or display my feelings, in public. This is, so often, what it feels like to be an artist, especially within a societal structure that co-opts your most marketable feelings and leaves the rest for you to piece together and cope with on your own. When art is not supported by a society on its most fundamental, complex level — that place where every feeling is still being sorted out in messy and beautiful ways — then to attempt to be an artist in this world is to always feel, I think, a little bit wrong for even trying. It’s to stand at the ocean weeping, wanting to describe the world and not knowing if the world values that description at all.

One not-so-grand, though hidden truth about the world is that poets do things other than write poems. Poets teach your children. Poets pour your beer, mix your cocktail. Poets work in an office. Poets fix the office printer. They sell things over the phone. Poets perform mindless labor. They direct customers to other levels of management. Poets are in unions, and poets also freelance. Poets work one job, two jobs, four. Some poets are rich. Some poets have tenure. Most poets don’t. Most poets walk to work, or drive, or take the bus, the train. They wait your table or wash the dishes. They work for someone who doesn’t read poetry, or has read poetry, but only a little. They help you fill out paperwork, or navigate their own paperwork, or both. Poets scribble poems on napkins, or dash off notes on their phones. Poets labor amongst all the various labors of the world. That’s the hidden truth.

The not-so-hidden truth is that the world often doesn’t care about poets, or art, or often doesn’t seem like it cares. And to be someone — a poet, a writer, an artist, anyone — who tries to make something out of “Feeling anything / about it at all” can feel isolating, or even embarrassing. You spend a few bucks to send some poems to a magazine, and maybe you get a poem accepted. And your world changes for a bit — there’s a glimmer of hope, even joy. But then the world returns, and so does that daily struggle of trying to prove that it’s valuable to not just feel, but to make something of that feeling. And you repeat, and repeat, and repeat. But it’s hard, right? It’s hard to cry when it feels like you are crying — almost always — alone.

How to deal with those moments of embarrassment, when you feel like you care about something far more than the world does, or ever will? When you feel like the only person at the party who has seen the movie? Or the only one who saw the movie and didn’t like it, or loved it? Or when you were the one who made the movie, but no one watched it? I think a lot about an interview with Ocean Vuong in The Creative Independent, where he says:

Competition, prizes and awards are part of a patriarchal construct that destroys love and creativity by creating and protecting a singular hierarchical commodification of quality that does not, ever, represent the myriad successful expressions of art and art making. If you must use that construct, you use it the way one uses public transport. Get on, then get off at your stop and find your people. Don’t live on the bus, and most importantly, don’t get trapped on it.

One beautiful thing about this world is that it is big enough that you can almost always find a community of people, however small, who feel some sort of love for the same things you do, who pay attention to what you also pay attention to. It’s enough, I think, to find those people, and pay attention with and among them, and then see what happens. It’s only then, maybe, where what you feel can be understood as valuable, and what you work towards with your feelings can be cherished and appreciated. That’s my hope.