Mary Szybist's "The Lushness of It"
Thoughts on listening.
The Lushness of It
It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you— not that it wouldn’t reach for you with each of its tapering arms: you’d be as good as anyone, I think, to an octopus. But the creatures of the sea, like the sea, don’t think about themselves, or you. Keep on floating there, cradled, unable to burn. Abandon yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon your heavy legs to the floating meadows of seaweed and feel the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea spray, barnacles. In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over the abyssal plains: and as you float, you can feel that upwelling of cold, deep water touch the skin stretched over your spine. No, it’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you. If it touched, if it tasted you, each of its three hearts would turn red. Will theologians of any confession refute me? Not the bluecap salmon. Not its dotted head. from Incarnadine (Graywolf, 2013)
There is a poem by Charles Simic, “The Lifeboat,” that reads, in full:
That cow left alone tonight Out in the fields Does it look up at the stars? How about the cricket That has just gone silent? Was it in awe of what it saw? The night sky loves Men and women who climb mountains To confide in its ear. O the things I'd say to it If I were to find myself Alone in a lifeboat at sea.
And there’s a poem by Matthew Olzmann, “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America,” that, though published years ago, I’ve seen circulating lately, as it should, as it always should:
Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy. To have the smell of the earth welcome you to everywhere. To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife.
I think of these poems as I think of today’s poem, which I read for the first time years ago, in Szybist’s Incarnadine, and then read again in a book I checked out from the library: Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, edited by Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips — a book of poems and accompanying essays on the craft of such poems, essays written by the poets themselves. It’s been lovely to read.
In the essay by Szybist that accompanies this poem, she writes quite remarkably about the craft of writing this poem. I found myself particularly struck by this moment, of many:
I try to give myself permission to write out of nothing other than an interest in listening. I take it on faith that writing poems might help me cultivate that skill. My interest isn’t abstract. I’ve spent much of my life witnessing people I love listen just enough to collect evidence to justify their hardened understandings of one another. Or so it’s seemed to me. What I know more certainly is how often I have found myself falling—easily, thoughtlessly—into hearing just what I expect to.
It’s the kind of paragraph I want to copy on a post-it and stick above every desk I find myself sitting at for the rest of my life. And it’s that kind of paragraph, in part, because of that solid, sharp turn Syzbist takes: My interest isn’t abstract. In other words, listening is not about simply listening. It is — as so much is — specific, and, because it is specific, it is political, and moral, and powerful, and so much else. And so, when Szybist affirms the specificity, the non-abstractness, of her interest in listening, it reminds those who might be turned off by the seeming-softness of something like listening that such a thing — listening, and not listening to remain who you are, but listening, rather, to be changed by what you might hear — is where so much begins.
Yes, in this paragraph is enough connection and humility to remind me of why it matters to read and to write, simple as such things sound. And why it matters to read and write into unknowing, and into curiosity, and into one’s smallness. Because none of it is abstract. And so much of what little we know certainly has to do with how much we — ourselves, each other, the world — need to change the way we approach ourselves, each other, and the world.
That is echoed in Olzmann’s poem above, which begins with fact of listening:
Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe.
And ends with the fact — tragically, and too often — of violence:
To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife.
And so today’s poem is about listening, isn’t it? And about awe. And about humility. And about refusing to reach for one’s knife. Notice the repetition of that word: Abandon. Twice! At the end of each line. Abandon. To give over control. To surrender. To let go. And notice how the poem begins to drift a bit after this word is used, how it begins to indent, to get wider, to give itself — and you, the reader — space to listen, to loosen itself up after the giving-oneself-over, and how, in the midst of this drifting, Szybist basically drops a whole bunch of literal knowledge, wild vocabulary, gorgeous factoids of oceanic depths:
the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea spray, barnacles. In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over the abyssal plains
This beauty, this literal reality, this lushness — all of it, because of that word: abandon, and because of what that word says about listening: how you must, when you listen, sometimes abandon ideology, preconception, ego. There is a dark benthic realm that goes unnoticed, where so much lives and so much is beautiful. To notice it, then, involves a kind of giving-oneself-over. Tense body, tense mind — I never wondered, until now, how poetry might loosen it.
The structure of a poem, whether through metaphor or conceit or repetition or wordplay or line length or intentional terseness or intentional spilling-over or make believe or visualization or incessant questioning or never ending list making or subversion or anything else that might guide the making of a poem, can do that hard work of knot-loosening for us, the work of putting us back on our heels when we thought we knew for certain, or the work of lifting us on our toes to peek over the fence when we thought we’d lost our capacity for wonder. And this work, as Szybist reminds us, is not abstract work. It matters. It matters especially in a moment, prolonged and tragic as this one is, when genocide rages on and when truth feels no longer a certain word and when, ideologically hardened and insistent on protecting power, the dominant figures of empire prefer war to peace, individualism to communalism, and model nothing more for us than a refusal to listen, or consider, or humble oneself at all.1
In the poem’s accompanying essay, Szybist writes of her own act of abandonment that she enacted in order to write this poem:
Unable to step into the ocean, I entered my vocabulary for what can be found there. I let myself drift slowly toward this conjuring, an address to a vertebrate among invertebrates. I left myself drift away from language in which I heard overt preference for the human, to imagine a world in which no one is accused of “having no backbone.” I drifted away from words like invertebrate, a word that defines most of the species on earth by what they lack. And someone how I came to the word love—and I was bothered by the feeling that it didn’t belong there.
I know it’s hard to perceive what one isn’t prepared to perceive. Here, I was trying to take a step toward the beyond-human world by paying attention to my language for it—and then trying to loosen it, enlarge it, make it suppler, more prepared to hold what I don’t understand.
Notice how the act Syzbist performs here is not to hold, but to loosen. Not to engage or attack, but to drift away. It’s a powerful testament about why it matters to listen to your own language, to wonder aloud about the meaning of a certain word — invertebrate — and how such a word might point not toward enrichment, but toward lack. That wondering is a kind of listening; it hears, for maybe the first time, the real meaning of a word, and then it drifts away from it, towards something better.
Today’s poem reminds me of that seemingly-insistent desire we have to make of what we don’t know our own. Szybist acknowledges that in the poem’s first line: It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you. How quick we are to make of what we don’t know something human. I get it, yes. It can be a lonely thing to be alive. And to imagine a world of animals loving you and feeling as you do and operating in some similar way to you is one salve for that loneliness. Sometimes, I think, this is harmless. But sometimes it is the same as carving your initials into the oldest longleaf pine. When we do such a thing, we aren’t really listening, or abandoning, or enlarging. I think, instead, that we are seizing, commodifying, hoarding. I think we are stowing away and calling currency the vastness of the uncertain, unknowable universe. We are calling it ours, rather than standing still in the midst of it and wondering about it. Listening not really to what it might tell is, but simply to what and who it is.
One other way this matters? When you listen, sometimes you can be fucking astounded by what you learn. Like this:
if it tasted you, each of its three hearts would turn red.
Yes, an octopus has three hearts. Fucking nuts! And what a pleasure, what a wild joy it is to simply know this. Not to make it my own, not to assign it any kind of quality, not to reel those three hearts into the far lesser universe of the human, where we each only have one heart. Just to know it. To wonder about it. To go holy fucking shit. To marvel. To smile, even. To shake one’s head. To maybe say it can’t be, and then, later, because you listened, and because you know, to correct yourself, to say it is. That, all of that, that process of awe and wonder and laughter and disbelief and belief, matters, because, I think, just maybe, we should feel that way about ourselves, and about each other. Holy fucking shit, I said not long ago, when I listened to my friend tell a story about three kittens she found living in her basement, and how they almost drowned in the middle of a thunderstorm. She heard them. She listened. And holy fucking shit, I said not long after, when I held those kittens in my arms for the first time.
Some notes:
As I mention in the footnote below, the Committee to Protect Journalists keeps updated reports on the tragic and horrific deaths of journalists around the world.
Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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It is worth noting that, not long before I started writing this, the Al Jazeera journalist Ismail Al Ghoul, and his camera operator Rami Al Refee, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. This meant that the death toll for journalists in Gaza, by Al Jazeera’s count, rose to 165 since October 7th of last year. I think of that as I write this piece because I think that one of the main functions of any journalist is to witness, which is an act of listening before, I think, it is an act of anything else. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the vast majority of journalists killed this year have been Palestinian reporters. Reading through the context of their deaths, you will encounter airstrike after airstrike after airstrike. One reporter was killed by airstrike while on their way to see what happened to their own home, which had also been damaged in an airstrike. What else is this but the mechanism of empire saying no, we refuse to listen? Or saying, too: we don’t want anyone else to listen, because we know they won’t like what they hear?
"... Tense body, tense mind — I never wondered, until now, how poetry might loosen it ..."
Timely post. Thank you.
Yes yes yes to the Not Abstract, to listening for the specific, for the particular. Beautiful essay, yet again.