Marion Bell's "Austerity"

Thoughts on love, radicalization, & possibility.

Austerity

Look i get radicalized by love
like any normal
American

i wouldn’t turn you into a wife
i’m a person you know
and the conditions are weird
the naiveté
even of my knowing
i wouldn’t turn you into anything

i get radicalized by love
and by austerity
and by work
by austerity and by work

it’s easy to get radicalized just by paying
attention to experience
i would write to you
in the naiveté of my knowing

from Austerity (Radiator Press)

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I started writing this post on Wednesday night, before Friday’s news. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking of that line — i get radicalized by love — for the past few days. I think, too, of the power of the first word of the first line:

Look i get radicalized by love

That word — Look — invites the reader into a conversation. I love that word. Look. I love it so much. It makes the poem feel as if it is something that has been trying to be explained for a long time. It makes it seem as if there has been a long before-time of this poem, one of frustration, where the point of this poem — that the world, as it stands, is a place that makes someone feel alone for their attention, or alone in their radicalization — has been challenged and fought. That word — Look — makes me feel as if the speaker is just going to say it plain, as if it’s their last chance to say anything at all.

And I love that. Because this poem says so much in its plainness. It says so much in its repetition. It repeats love twice. And naiveté twice. And knowing twice. And austerity twice. And work twice. And know/knowing three times. And radicalized three times.

In this way, Bell’s work reminds me of both Wanda Coleman and Diane di Prima. In the latter’s “Revolutionary Letter #17,” she writes:

even the poorest of us

will have to give up something

to live free

di Prima’s plainspoken diction works almost like a reprieve in poetry. She tells it, as cliche as it sounds, like it is. In this way, she takes the form of poetry — one that sometimes obfuscates or complicates meaning — and subverts it to deliver a message that actually is as simple as it sounds, even if it’s hard to hear. Wanda Coleman does the same thing in her poem, “For Me When I Am Myself”:

i’m not good at explaining how i
feel. i have
run out of synonyms for rage

Here, Coleman offers one of the most succinct descriptions of rage by virtue of describing the absence of language. In other words: rage is the place where no language exists.

The idea that a poem must be something mined for meaning is perhaps an age-old idea that is furthered by — I don’t know — academia, maybe. Or perhaps the very notion of labor that some of the aforementioned poems protest. But a poem, I think, does not have to be something so purposely complex on the formal level that it makes meaning hard to come by. To be sure, a poem can be such a thing, and there is a great joy that comes from thinking critically about a poem on a formal level. But a poem does not always have to be such a thing. And I think today’s poem by Marion Bell — as well as the work of di Prima and Coleman — attests to such a belief.

Bell’s poem today resists formal complexity. But, to be clear, that does not mean it resists complexity. In fact, I think so much of the joy — and meaning — I get from reading this poem rests on this line:

and the conditions are weird

I love this line. I love its terseness, its seeming-simplicity. I love that, in a poetry workshop, perhaps, it might be critiqued as being too broad or too subjective. I could imagine someone saying well, what does weird mean? And I think that, in part, is the point. The conditions in our country are weird. As I began writing this, the Supreme Court — which is, admittedly, a weird form of justice — just made open carry legal in New York state, and as I continued writing this, that same form of justice just turned back the clock on reproductive rights and took away the agency of women to choose what to do with their bodies, to live free from the terror of the state. And it might be possible to articulate the weirdness and sadness and terribleness of such a thing within the more formal elements of poetry, but it is also enough, I think, to simply say such a thing is weird, in the same, honest way that what is weird can also be terrifying and fearful and full of anxiety, in the same, honest way that we sometimes say weird when we have yet to fully process a thing. A word like weird is one way to explain this world, especially in an ongoing moment that feels at once helpless and urgent, terrifying for the scope of its pain and so narrowing for the limits of power’s non-imaginative vision. To just say yeah, this is weird is to hold the whole wide room of our collective weirdness — this world we live in that does not offer freedom for everyone or care for everyone or safety for everyone. It is as weird as it is fucked up. The conditions are weird is a deeply poetic thing to say because it holds so many of us in its grasp.

I love, too, the lines that follow that line above:

the naiveté
even of my knowing

I love that such lines acknowledge how little we are capable of knowing, and how little, too, that knowing matters. It is meaningful that we know as much or as little as we do. Bell reaffirms this when she writes:

it’s easy to get radicalized just by paying

attention to experience

The just in the lines above holds weight. It calls on us to be responsible for what we pay attention to. It doesn’t imply that we have to know everything; it just implies that we should care about what we do acknowledge. And, in this case, that acknowledgement is bound up in these lines:

i get radicalized by love
and by austerity
and by work
by austerity and by work

Love. Austerity. Work. These things radicalize the speaker of this poem. Though I don’t love all three of these words, I love the choice of them on Bell’s part, the way that they are asked to be in conversation with one another. Love is a beautiful thing. Austerity, though — the simplification of structures — is less so. And work is convoluted, full of many different definitions from many different people. But these three words make me realize how impossible it is to have a generous world if these three words exist among each other. If love is austerity, then it is not complex or inconvenient enough to allow for the full range of human experience. And if love is work, then it is too difficult and too caught up in a different idea of value for it to be as generous as it can be. And if work is love, then, well, it is perhaps too easily exploited.

All of this makes me think of a quote from an interview with David Graber where he says:

We think of work primarily as making things—each sector is defined by its “productivity,” even real estate!—when in fact, even a moment’s reflection should show that most work isn’t making anything. It’s cleaning and polishing, watching and tending to, helping and nurturing and fixing and otherwise taking care of things. You make a cup once. You wash it a thousand times

You make a cup once. You wash it a thousand times. What a fascinating, powerful, and albeit simple thing to say. But he’s right. Our very romanticized idea of labor is consumed with the notion of making, and yet, there is only so much making that is happening. Most of life is the washing, the helping, the nurturing, the fixing, and the polishing. These are not objectively bad things, but they are words that deserve a place in our common lexicon of work. They deserve a place in what we acknowledge work to be. If our idea of work was removed from solely an idea of production, then perhaps love could be involved, too. Because love has little to do with production. It has more to do with words like help. Words like nurture. Words like care. I want a world that holds the idea of care with a sense of value.

Barry Lopez closes “Six Thousand Lessons” — the first essay of his posthumously released Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World — with this sentence:

We know in our tissues that the fewer the differences we encounter, wherever it is we go, the more widespread the kingdom of death has become.

I thought of today’s poem when I read that, because I think one aspect of radicalization involves the holding of possibility, the un-pigeon-holing of oneself. I think it means paying attention to people well enough to know that each person deserves their own agency to be their fullest self. If no one is allowed such a possibility — or if only a few are allowed such a thing — then Lopez is right. The kingdom of death grows wider.

On Friday, when the horrible news popped up on my phone, I was standing by the Hudson River near Riverdale in the Bronx, waiting for the graduation of my high school’s first ever senior class. I couldn’t think of a more wholesomely beautiful place to encounter such terrible news. Parents were filing in, and students who I once taught introduced me to their little siblings. I was a hot air balloon of pride, practically existing on the outer edges of the atmosphere. And, as the graduation progressed, I thought a lot about love. I felt extremely weepy, seeing students I had taught for two years walk across the stage and take selfies and shout for their friends and just generally be joyful and ecstatic, and I spent the better part of an hour perpetually on the verge of tears, or in the aftermath of them.

It’s easy to get radicalized just by paying attention. I thought of that, too. I looked closely at some of our students’ caps, and how they had decorated them. Each one made me even weepier. Some students inscribed little quotes. Some made these lavish, colorful displays of art that flowed in the wind. One student just wrote the word BYE in big, sequined letters. I laughed (but also cried) because it suited her so well. And another student had taped a bunch of folded up pieces of loose leaf paper to the top of his cap. When asked about it, he said that each paper was a letter he wrote, thanking someone who helped him get to that graduation stage. He said that he was planning, after he received his diploma, to hand-deliver each letter to each person.

I sat behind him for most of the ceremony and looked at the letters affixed to his cap and thought about that act of wild generosity. I thought of the parents that sat behind me and the teachers near me. I thought of my own mother, and how rarely I tell her I love her. I thought of that question from Phil Levine’s “What Work Is”: How long has it been since you told him you loved him? I thought of all the acts of love — ongoing and enduring and sometimes difficult — that help people just live. I want us all to be radicalized by such love and toward such love in a world that makes it more and more difficult to love and live for so many people. And I want to be more like that student — to wear the notes of my love on my body, and to offer them out to the world as often as I can. To offer them in real ways — ways that are generous and true, a handwritten letter pulled off of my body and into your hand. What a beautiful thing. Look, I can’t stop thinking about it.

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A note: Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist and organizer, shared this list of resources and actions to take in the wake of Friday’s decision. And the brilliant poet Claire Schwartz shared this email template for friends and family with some next steps. I found both helpful. Maybe you will, too.