Peter Cole's "Can You Hear Me?"

Thoughts on trying.

Can You Hear Me?

Can you hear me?
There at the back,
yes? Testing
1, 2, 3…?

This is working?
Great. Everything’s
working? Great.
Just checking—

you never know
what exactly’s
getting through,
do you?         It’s

a little like the
day, years ago,
I was on
a radio show—

Sound Check,
that was its name,
though at the time
I didn’t know

what it was called,
so, when
I was sent
into the studio

and the host looked
up and said—
“Just follow my lead…
This is Sound Check…”

I kept staring
slightly terrified
into his eyes
trying to hear

if we were live
or only rehearsing,
which is, in its way,
always the question.


from Draw Me After (FSG, 2022)

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Typing this poem above as I prepared this newsletter, I caught myself — struck immediately. I had only typed the title and the first line — can you hear me — and it was as if I was asking the question. It was as if a plea was coming forth from my body, a question: can you hear me?

And so I retyped the entirety of the poem, moved by the immediacy of this personalization. And I felt — in Cole’s lines — the void of wondering if anyone was out there, or if anything was getting through. By the end of the poem, in that final stanza that has, ever since I first read this poem, knocked me slightly askew, rattled me back to wonder, I laughed to myself at the sudden strangeness of this experience. Of preparing a draft of a newsletter. Of typing out a poem. Of feeling it so personally. And of typing out this question — if we were live / or only rehearsing — as if it were emanating from me. All while wondering what I might say about this poem, which is, in and of itself — wondering, I mean — a kind of rehearsal, which is, as this poem attests, a kind of life, which is, as this poem might possibly suggest, all a kind of questioning.

Can you hear me?

Are we rehearsing?

Or are we live?

And so, it is from that experience that I am beginning to wonder about this poem, which is a poem I love. I love it for a number of reasons, not just for that final stanza. I love it, too, for its halting, somewhat anxious voice, which is heightened by Cole’s short line.

There is a way in which the short line complicates a thought — or the process of a thought — in a different way than a long line. When I think of the long line, I think always of Larry Levis. Consider this ending, from a forever-favorite poem of his, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which I discussed not long ago with Julia St. John and

Washington Review of Books

):

                              I have a child who isn’t doing well in school.
It’s not his grades. It’s that he can’t wake up.

He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t
Return my calls. The last time I saw him we took the train down from Connecticut

To New York & wandered around Times Square. We went into this record store
And pretended to browse through some albums there

Because we didn’t know what to say to each other. It was night. It was just
Before the Christmas season, & the clerks in the store

Would call out loudly Can I Help Anybody & Can I Help Someone & there was
Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with him & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

There is so much in these lines, and Levis complicates them with his constant conjunctive usage — the polysyndeton made possible by and. When I read these lines, particularly the rolling, additive, anxious, expansive final few lines, I am overcome and overwhelmed. I feel Levis’s sense of helplessness and I feel his love and I feel the music and the noise and the wondering and the hoping and the trying and the defeat encountered amidst all that trying.

Cole’s short line, as one might think, actually does not resist the expansive wondering of being alive in this world. In fact, the final twenty-five (!!!) lines of this poem today are a single sentence. So no, I don’t think the short line exists in perfect contrast to the long line, or that the short line cannot possibly hold or contain the so-much-ness that a long line like Levis’s does. Look, too, at how Cole’s poem today is filled with clauses, double-backs, asides: though, so, and, if, which. These words turn the poem again and again, and, in that turning, make it reach and wonder.

And so, a short line can still contain the expansive quality of a long line. But the way it complicates that expansiveness feels different. The long line — see Levis’s above — feels almost like an enactment of a heightened sense of stimulation. It desires a kind of holding. I feel myself long-lined often, reaching and reaching and reaching — trying to hold both all of myself and all that I desire at once. But the short line enacts an almost mindful attention toward the self. What becomes evident in a poem comprised of short lines is not the and, but rather the space between each word. The pause. The pause becomes evident. Sometimes, I think that pause is because of thought. And maybe sometimes it is because of anxiety. Or even distraction. But always, I think, it is because the poem is paying attention to that process. When am I short-lined, I wonder?

I think it is

when I am trying

to say something

I don’t know

the answer to.

I think it is

when I am

revising myself

as I am living,

wanting to find

the right words,

knowing that

the right words

will never come,

still trying,

endlessly, expansively,

doubling back

to correct myself

even about myself,

how this looks

sometimes like

I don’t quite know,

trying again, which is

a kind of living,

to get it right.

And so, I love that quality of Cole’s poem today. How it uses the short line not to resist wondering, but to complicate it in its own way. And I love, too, Cole’s voice. Witty, charming, funny, wildly smart. Immediately, from the poem’s opening, you encounter it:

Can you hear me?
There at the back,
yes? Testing
1, 2, 3…?

This is working?
Great. Everything’s
working? Great.
Just checking—

you never know
what exactly’s
getting through,
do you?

Here, Cole moves from a sense of humor — that repetition of Great — to a playful question — you never know / what exactly’s / getting through, / do you? — that, because you are so primed for play, stuns you for its veracity. Here I was, laughing to myself at these opening lines, and now I am saying yes — I don’t know what’s getting through. Yes, I sometimes feel lost. Yes, this world feels, so much and so often, like something too big for me.

In an interview, Cole refers to his serious employment of wit as “sublime-adjacent.” I love that. It’s a good way, I think, to wonder about this poem today. Sublime-adjacent. As in: just touching, glancing, deflecting off of the sublime. Or, as in: subverting the ordinary moments of the world with a sense of the sublime. It’s also a good way, I think, to describe one way of looking at the world — a way of noticing, in the mundanity of the everyday, moments of sublimity, or wonder, or awe. There’s probably no better way to describe the ending of the poem today than as something “sublime-adjacent,” seeing as it finds in the strange everydayness of a radio talk show something approaching and even involving wonder. Notice how Cole does it, that seemingly-tiny use of the word terrified to signal a turn away from the confined space of a radio talk show and towards the sublime:

I kept staring
slightly terrified
into his eyes
trying to hear

if we were live
or only rehearsing,
which is, in its way,
always the question.

And I think now I’d like to think about these final lines, which have stuck with me from the first moment I read this poem today. And it’s funny, because, as I think about these lines, I can’t help but consider the way such a question — if we are live / or only rehearsing — is made into these kinds of trite one-liners in our culture today. These ideas of living once, or living presently, or amidst or amongst the moment. Seizing that moment, because it only happens once. Sure. Yes. I know. I can imagine this contemporary moment speaking to us, commodified and urgent and fast-paced: fuck rehearsal, we are always live.

However, none of these ideas give grace to the fact that living and rehearsing are one and the same thing. That revision, too, is part of the present moment. It’s there in that tongue-in-cheek ending of today’s poem, that little phrase, only rehearsing, as if there could be such a thing. I think the speaker of this poem knows that trying to get something right is part of the present moment, which is to say that it is part of life.

It’s funny, how often life is built around moments when you are supposed to get it all right. Or when you are supposed to have all the answers. Or when you are supposed to perform, as close to flawlessly as possible. It’s funny, how so much of life is structured around this notion that so much of life is rehearsal for one moment of life that might matter more than the rest of life. School is like this — a whole year meant to study for one test. Or a whole childhood meant to prepare for, what? An acceptance? Something about prestige? On the other side of performance is almost certainly another performance. A life structured in such a way will probably always wander aimlessly toward perfection, thinking it attainable, finding out it is not, and yet striving again to reach it even though it has, time and time again, inevitably proven itself to be impossible.

And so I wonder about the idea of the rehearsal as a way of thinking about the present. I wonder about how much more graceful it is, and humble. I wonder about how it centers trying rather than succeeding. And how it must offer and extend the grace of such centering — which is a widening of the path that often creates margins — to others. So many ways of thinking reinforce binaries or cause someone else’s marginalization. Even the idea of only living once creates a binary out of yourself and your relation to the world, to others, and to all of history. Perhaps a way of thinking that gives more grace to trying might be more expansive than reductive. And, too, such a way of thinking might allow us to find more love for the trying itself. The going-back-over. The line edits. The retyping. The endless revision. The hands moving along the scales atop the piano. Trying not as preparation for perfection, but as an act, in some ways, of love.

Sound check, then, feels like an apt way of wondering about a life. It feels more like life. Years ago, when I was in a band that briefly played shows at some small venues in New York City, I remember those anxious, fleeting minutes before a show. Those moments when we’d be in an almost empty venue, playing to just a few people, our sound levels a little off, our nerves all over the place, trying to get ourselves right. Expand that moment forever. Dwell in it for just a moment longer. The song cut off midway through. Let’s run it back. The wrong note on the piano. I can’t quite hear the vocals. The bass too loud. The drums a little fast. It’s fine. It’s okay. No one’s watching. Well, a few people are. And that’s okay, too. They understand. It’s the sound check. It’s not the real thing. Except it is. It also is.

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Some notes:

1. This is probably the last time I’ll mention it, but I had an essay published in Longreads about a month ago. You can read it here. Thank you for reading it, if you have the time. It is about a year of learning (when I sent in the essay, it was just titled “Learning”) and what such learning has taught me — which is to say, more about about how to cope with the uncertainty of life than anything else. What is the word for that, I write in this essay (and still wonder), for the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?

2. Here is a list of urgent fundraisers for Gaza, if you have the means.

3. 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.

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.