Matthew Siegel's "How Am I Doing?"

Thoughts on holding it together.

How Am I Doing?

Wearing a bathing suit as underwear 
is how I’m doing, though I’m learning to ask 
better questions like: what’s most important? 
And answering: what allows day and night 
to live inside us. I’m saying I took those trunks 
right off and did all the laundry, even the sheets. 
Naked, I spun my mattress around to consider 
a new distribution of my heaviest parts. 
Most things need to be rotated regularly 
if one hopes to get maximum life from them. 
How much life am I getting from this life? 
I have learned to ask myself, as if rotating 
my mind. I feel the urge to smother myself 
in the bedsheets and blankets, but I don’t. 
I close my eyes, imagine myself as a pin on 
the blouse of time, barely holding it together.


first published in Bennington Review (Issue 13)

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A pin on / the blouse of time. That is, without question, an unbelievable image. Close your eyes and think of that. Do it now, if you can. Make yourself that small. I am trying to do it, too. When I do this, when I make myself this small, it is not the making-myself-small that feels hard, but rather the weight of time, especially the way time is described in this image, and the tension I feel between time and my small body as I try — with all my might — to hold it together. And I feel it, when I think of myself this way — I feel time folding around me and over me and upon me like a too-big sweater, like a blanket coming apart at the stitching. It’s pulling, and pulling, and pulling, trying to come undone, and there I am — little pin — trying to keep it together.

That’s what I love about an image, how it can sew itself into your mind and never leave you, how, when I think of that phrase — holding it together, which I think of often — I will now think of that little pin, pulled on both sides by a piece of fabric whose length and weight and depth we have no capability to even imagine, trying to keep it tight, so that the present doesn’t slip too far from the past, so that this life — by that, I mean yours, I mean mine — doesn’t feel too impossible to grasp.

When I hear that phrase — holding it together — I am reminded of the first line of a poem by Linda Gregg, “Grinding the Lens,” which reads, in full:

I am pulling myself together.
Don’t want to go on a trip.
I have painted the living room white
and taken out most of my things.
The room has never been so empty.
Just now a banging thunder
and suddenly falling rain.
I leave the typewriter and run
outside in my nightgown and take
the cotton blanket off the line.
It is summer and I am in the middle
of my life. Alone and happy.

Here, in Gregg’s poem, her speaker moves through a moment of real solitude — I have painted the living room white / and taken out most of my things — that echoes the speaker’s motions in Siegel’s poem today:

I took those trunks 
right off and did all the laundry, even the sheets. 
Naked, I spun my mattress around to consider 
a new distribution of my heaviest parts. 

I think of how both of these poems are in conversation about the ways people can move through these moments of solitude and reflection and reconsideration. For Gregg, such movement ends in a kind of solitude reframed as happiness. But for Siegel, such movement ends in an image that reinforces how difficult it is, simply, to hang on. In both poems, maybe, there is revealed that slight difference between those two lines:

I am pulling myself together.

barely holding it together

And so, I love this poem today, especially during this moment of the year, when things feel a bit swirling and we oscillate between the communion of family and friends and the loneliness, sometimes, that comes from spending time with people, which is a strange loneliness, as it arrives surprisingly and with a great, even devastating sadness. The sadness of locking oneself inside one’s room in a crowded house. The sadness of trying to escape a room where joy seems to be happening because one doesn’t feel capable of experiencing joy oneself. The sadness of smoking a cigarette outside a party in winter, where the soft sounds of metal clinking and people murmuring and music filling in the spaces between float through windows and cracks and arrive in your ears as one sound, the sound of you-not-being-there, as you stand where you are, alone and away from it all.

And, amidst the sadness, there is, almost always, that question that begins and titles today’s poem:

How am I doing?

The craft of Siegel’s poem today lies in the way he takes a question so commonly asked without real curiosity — and so commonly answered with a bland fine that satisfies one’s incuriosity — and turns it into a poem that demands more curiosity, and more imagination. He turns it into a poem that wonders about “better questions,” ones that feel more generous and expansive:

what’s most important? 

How much life am I getting from this life? 

And in between these questions are answers just as expansive, such as the speaker’s answer to that question about what is most important:

what allows day and night 
to live inside us.

I love this. Add it to the ever-growing, never-ending definition of what a poem is, and what a poem could be: something that honors both the day and the night, a vessel that holds both joy and sorrow, something that doesn’t resist, but rather allows — just as this poem does today, this poem that does not shirk vulnerability, this poem that admits (which is a kind of allowance) the parts of oneself that sometimes we try our best to hide, our trying-and-failing parts, our bathing-suit-as-underwear parts, our heaviest parts, our barely-holding-it-together parts.

It’s funny, too, because I feel like this time of year (the holidays entering the new year) is a time less of an expansive idea of allowance and more of a limiting idea of betterment. We are encouraged, often, to reflect and then reset, to use our reflections in order to adjust ourselves toward something different — insert: better — in the new year. These notions of betterment are often limiting; such limitation is at play even in the language we use, these phrases like new self and old self, that encourage leaving parts of ourselves in some nebulous graveyard of the past rather than allowing both day and night to live inside us as we move through the present together.

It’s that limitation that leads, I think, to the poem’s final image — this small thing stretched to its own limits, trying to hold together something that feels impossible to hold. Contrast that with Gregg’s poem, where her speaker resists the aspects of culture that feel limiting — Don’t want to go on a trip — and allows herself to live free of whatever constraints feel the most imposing, until she is, finally, “alone and happy.”

I think of another poem by Siegel’s, which begins with the titular line You can’t hire a crew to clean up your heart, and then continues:

can’t cut your ice-water with lemon-fresh floor polish,
can’t eat the candy-like detergent packets
with their orange and blue swirls. You can’t

scrub-brush your gut, can’t vacuum your veins,
can’t purify your blood with a little bleach. You can’t
get clean as much as you try. You try with poems.

You try with pills and prayer but you are held back here
in this place. You walk the lake ringed with bulbs at night
feeling encircled even though you’re doing the circling.

You ride a train to another town. You say hello
to all the folks, kiss the conductor on the mouth. It seems
for a moment the world is not destroying itself.

We can get from here to the next here. 

Here, Siegel demonstrates how the very idea of betterment is not simply some threshold to be crossed between one year and the next, but rather a conscious act of trying that is filled with many little moments of failure, which is to say many little moments of life. Here to the next here feels like a more expansive and generous way of looking at something like a new year, not where we move from an old self to a new self, but rather where we move while carrying all of ourselves, the threshold between the days just that, a simple threshold, not some reminder to leave a past self behind. What goodness, I wonder, can come from thinking of ourselves with this kind of patience? This kind of permission?

One last thing: I love how this poem makes the pithy both transcendent and funny. I think of that line about rotation:

Most things need to be rotated regularly 
if one hopes to get maximum life from them. 

For years — from when I was sixteen until I was twenty-one — I worked part time at a running store, fitting customers for shoes. I’d watch them run on a treadmill, diagnose their foot strike, their pattern of takeoff, and then bring them a handful of shoes that best supported their specific feet. And if they really loved a shoe, I’d encourage them to buy two, especially if they were training for something, and to alternate pairs from day to day, allowing the foam and other strange technology in the shoe’s sole to decompress (poor shoe, I think now). But it was worthwhile advice, and true, and I thought of it immediately when I read these lines in this poem.

And yet, not all metaphors from one part of life apply to all of life, and I think Siegel, especially through that description of maximum life, is poking a bit of fun at that here: how we can rotate and rotate and rotate, but still that goal — maximum life — will be forever out of reach. What does it mean, even? Maximum life? And yet, Siegel then turns from that moment, I think, of critical humor into a genuine question: How much life am I getting from this life?

When he asks this, I notice how he uses life, and not some other word. Like progress. Or money. Something accumulative and measurable. Something that could have a quantifiable much-ness. Instead, there’s just that word: life. Which is to say: something that allows for both the day and the night. Which is to say: some trying-thing, some sometimes-heavy-thing, some whole thing that is both one’s regrets and one’s loves, one’s urges to smother oneself and one’s most joyous moments. Which is to say: something that is full of an impossible to measure much-ness. In this poem of allowance, life isn’t just one thing, which means it can be so much more than what we are often made to limit it to be. I am thinking of that today, amidst the year-end lists and the retrospectives and the intentions to make oneself anew, and I am asking how much grace am I giving myself in this life? And, because grace is part of life, just as the failures it forgives and the joy it allows are also parts of life, I want to be able to say so much, as in yes, I am getting so much life from this life.

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Some ongoing notes:

In the vein of reflecting on the year, though, I’d like to offer some of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I keep a little notebook each year where I write down the books I’ve read, making note of passages and phrases I want to hold on to from each one. I draw the tiniest star next to titles I really love, books I want to return to (or not to return, begrudgingly, back to the library). For what it’s worth, here are those books (I read a lot of plays in 2024 — they were, so often, a revelation):

Zero at the Bone, Christian Wiman

Heroes of the Fourth Turning & Corsicana, Will Arbery

The Flick & Circle Mirror Transformation, Annie Baker

Missing Time, Ari Brostoff

Artful & How to Be Both, Ali Smith

Cost of Living, Martyna Majok

Inciting Joy, Ross Gay

Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh

The Greatest Evil Is War, Chris Hedges

Sweat, Lynn Nottage

Downstate, Bruce Norris

The Wall, Marlen Haushofer

Gloria, Branden Jacobs Jenkins

Ordinary People, Judith Guest

My Name Is Lucy Barton & Lucy By the Sea, Elizabeth Strout

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

Parable of the Blind & Our Philosopher, Gert Hofmann

Happy Days, Samuel Beckett

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

1. Though I think it is currently sold out (with an option to join a waitlist), I’ll make one more announcement about how I am really excited to be teaching an online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers (thank you, Tyler Barton) on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. We’ll read a bunch; we’ll write a bunch; we’ll talk a bunch. It’ll start in February. If you’re interested, here’s the link to register. And here’s a class description: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.