Kim Addonizio's "The Sound"

Thoughts on the soft and human noise, and its silence.

The Sound

Marc says the suffering that we don't see
still makes a sort of sound — a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we
might think of — more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it's like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother's resigned sigh
when she sees her. It's like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It's shy, it's barely there. It never stops.


from The Philosopher's Club (BOA Editions, 1994)

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I have been meaning, for the longest time, to write about a poem by Kim Addonizio. I have a note on my notes app, where I keep my running list of poems to write about, that simply says “Kim Addonizio!”

A couple of years ago, if I remember right, one of Addonizio’s poems went sort of viral in the way poems can. It’s called “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall.” It’s a beautiful poem, visceral, tender, achy, filled with reaching, and it ends with a line that has joined — as it maybe has for you — the little litany of lines I have in my heart:

listen I love you joy is coming

I was happy when that poem began to circulate, and am happy whenever I see it, because anytime anyone is introduced to Addonizio’s work, it is a good thing, since Addonizio’s work absolutely fucking rules, beautiful thing it is — searching and loving and desirous and full of longing and wanting and reaching out across the gap that separates whoever you are from whoever and whatever you are reaching towards.

I hope you notice that kind of reaching and longing in today’s poem, which is from Addonizio’s “The Philosopher’s Club,” a personal favorite book of hers. I feel the searching so heavily in it. It’s the kind of book that makes you fall in love with dark things — the spaces between the stars that, in some sense, give the stars their light. Or, if you already love such dark things, it is the kind of book that makes you feel less alone for that love.

Funny thing, love is — isn’t it? Salve for loneliness and cause of it. Over and over. Hold me and never let go. I’ve never known such a thing capable of so much.

In that book, Addonizio writes into the unanswerable. Every ordinary moment holds the weight of mystery. One of her poems, “Gravity,” begins with Addonizio’s speaker carrying her daughter to bed. She remembers a time when her daughter was smaller, lighter — “no more,” she writes, “than a husk in my arms.” The poem ends:

Now
that she's so heavy I stagger beneath her,
she slips easily from me, down
into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed,
fixed there like a second, dimmer star,
though the stars are not fixed: someone
once carried the weight of my life.

Come on! Though the stars are not fixed!

And how about this moment, from Addonizio’s poem “Beds”:

When death
beats its wings at the window,
I hope I am not standing
alone in the kitchen
with a cup and a hairbrush,
watching doves on a wire.
I want to curl up
in that dim, disordered bed
where all my loves lie

I love this for the mess it knows life is, how it is at once the ordinary window-gazing and the extraordinary tangled quality of love. Addonizio’s poems are full of life. They make and remake meaning out of it, which is to say that they question and they listen. And so, it is no surprise that today’s poem can manage to reach toward the very idea of suffering, and how it is buried in the soft sounds and almost-silence of every single ordinary moment. It is the kind of work Addonizio’s constant wondering is capable of.

Do you want to know something cool, maybe, about this poem? Before we go any further? Something you may have missed, as I did, the first time you read it?

See…soft…we…doffed…back…dress…crack…stress…by…leaving…sigh…heaving…drops…stops.

This poem rhymes, so beautifully and on the nose. It is also a sonnet, making that small argument over fourteen lines, that argument about sound and silence and suffering, layering on one possibility after another — the hat doffed, the crack in the foundation — before that final, stone-dropping moment, which, with its couplet, enacts that weight of the stone. It lands, doesn’t it? And yet it doesn’t. It never stops.

It's like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It's shy, it's barely there. It never stops.

I love that this poem rhymes, in its own obvious and sneaky way. I love that this aspect of its structure snuck past me when I read it first. I love it because of what the poem speaks to — the endlessness of our suffering, and the way it lives in the ordinary and unnoticed moments of our lives, the things forgotten and taken for granted, the sounds we do not hear. A kind of silence.

Notice, too, the way that Addonizio gets at this sneaky, undercurrent of a structure. For the first twelve lines, Addonizio never lets any sort of punctuated pause sit at the end of a line. She rolls those lines right through, cascading each one into the next. It feels, in some kind of way, like:

the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed

But then, in those final lines, Addonizio allows for sound to be noticed. She delivers the end-stopped couplet, and those periods land like stones, even as she writes of stones not landing, but being forever in the air, always in the process of making a splash, and yet still making a sound. That sound — yes, like before: a kind of silence.

One could say, then, that if suffering makes a small, unnoticed sound, so too does joy, or love. Don’t you think? Consider the music of this poem, as it slips from one line to the next, the rhyme singing but then blending back into the world. When you notice it, it sounds — even in its sorrow — a little like joy.

I think of this poem as being about a kind of silence because it feels to me as if even silence makes a sound. I think of the labels we place upon silence and I think of the noise with which we try to drown it out, or the noise that drowns such silence out without our permission. I think of how we live with that noise everyday. I think of one of the saddest articles I’ve read recently, about how our resistance to silence and dependence on noise is something that quite literally is killing us:

According to the World Health Organization, average road traffic noise above 53 dB or average aircraft noise exposure above about 45 dB are associated with adverse health effects.

Nearly a third of the U.S. population lives in areas exposed to noise levels of at least 45 dB…

Mounting research suggests that the relationship between noise levels and disease is eerily consistent: A study following more than four million people for more than a decade, for example, found that, starting at just 35 dB, the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease increased by 2.9 percent for every 10 dB increase in exposure to road traffic noise.

And so, when I read this poem, I wonder: who can hear any soft sound anymore? Any gentle noise? Who can hear the slight scrape? The slippage in the foundation? The sigh? Who can hear the stone before it falls? The air around it, moving? Who can hear the air?

This poem is not just about suffering or silence or sound. It is also about noticing. It is about the frequency at which we choose to listen. What we tune ourselves toward. Tune and turn. What we tune and turn ourselves toward. Because, when that quiet suffering is neglected, when it is, in fact, not even heard, what then?

Earlier this week, students in one of my classes read stories by Ted Chiang and Raymond Carver. We spent a lot of time talking about the title story in Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” We talked about love, and what it might mean, and how Carver’s characters communicate so many disparate ideas that exist in the same space, floating around and running up into one another. Re-reading the story in preparation for class, I found myself struck by the final moment:

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

Though this moment of hearing is borne out of drunkenness and darkness, it feels in such companionship with today’s poem, if only for the line: I could hear the human noise we sat there making.

I am thinking about that human noise now. I am thinking of what keeps us from hearing it, not just the noise of the world, mechanical and whirring and endless, but also our own aversion to it. I am thinking of teaching sometimes, and those moments when, after asking a question, I am faced with silence: abject and unexpected and sometimes painful. I am thinking of how quick I am to put my voice back into the silence, to interrupt it rather than to sit with it and allow that human noise to manifest itself, and appear as whatever it is: thinking or struggling or suffering or learning. We add hard and harsher noise atop the “soft / noise” that Addonizio alludes to in her poem. We add so much of it. I don’t know, sometimes, if we know what softness sounds like. If we’ve even reached that level of lowness, beneath the murmur and beneath the sigh.

Younger, I used to be so scared of hearing the heartbeat of anyone I loved. It sounded so loud in the silence of a dark and nearly-empty room, in that moment just before sleep, tender intimacy that is. But that noise is human, isn’t it? That steady beating of a heart. It is not loud at all, but when it is all we hear, we hear it for all it is — which is to say, we hear the suffering and we hear the joy; we hear the utter humanness of who we love. Scary thing, that is. I can understand running from it, turning the body away, the volume up, trying to forget. But I also know it is beautiful. I want to know how to run back toward that beauty, toward that soft sound that holds our suffering and our joy more than any loud noise ever could.

The world is a loud one. I think, perhaps, it is louder than it ever has been. Maybe each day it is louder still. But today I am thinking of the foundation, the “stress / and slippage” that could be noticed if we tried. I am thinking of those moments when the lights are low or everyone is asleep, when I am standing alone in the kitchen, staring off into my own reflection, the one peering back at me from outside, where it’s dark. I am thinking of my own heartbeat, foundation of my little life, and how it still sometimes scares me, hearing it. But I am thinking of breathing into it and seeing what I notice. And maybe it is suffering I notice then, and maybe it is joy, but it is still the noticing that happens then, the noticing that comes out of the quiet. And I am thinking: if I could only do that with everything I encounter, my hand on the wall of an old building, my arms around an old friend, that long pause to notice what is shy or barely there, what is softly present, almost hidden but still living. This life, this life. When you listen close, it hurts. But even the hurting makes a song.

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