Shane McCrae's "Jim Limber Refuses to Enter Heaven Until He Has Lived a Happy Life"
Thoughts on insistence.
from Sometimes I Never Suffered (FSG, 2020)
I don’t know if I am someone who is given to hyperbole, but this is maybe my favorite poem I’ve read all year. I think it is also maybe the saddest, and the most revelatory. If you haven’t read any of Shane McCrae’s work before, I think you should. I don’t think you should because of the words that people so often throw at work that they think others should read, words like necessary or essential. I think McCrae’s work is so powerful because of the way it offers its attention, and what it offers its attention toward. Subversion is often suggested to be grandiose in its attempt — noticeable in what it attempts to subvert. But subversion is also done in seemingly ordinary ways, like a hand turning a chin just a little bit to the left. That’s how I feel when I read McCrae’s work — not like he turned the world upside-down, but rather that he shifted my gaze just enough to let me know I had been looking at it wrong.
Today’s poem is, I think, a brilliant example of the work McCrae does as a poet. If you’re unfamiliar with Jim Limber, you should know that McCrae has written from Limber’s perspective before, beginning with 2017’s In the Language of My Captor, and that Limber is also a real historical figure: the mixed-race son adopted by Jefferson Davis and who Varina Davis, Jefferson’s wife, referred to once as a “great pet in the family.” In an author’s note to an earlier Jim Limber poem, McCrae writes:
And even though I already knew he had existed, still I was surprised to discover and read his story. And I wonder whether other countries that have perpetrated enormous atrocities know as little about said atrocities as the United States knows about its participation in the slave trade. Because the fact of Jim Limber would seem to be the sort of fact that would get mentioned in, say, high-school history class discussions of the Civil War. But it doesn’t—at least, not commonly. The thing about the United States is that it could not withstand knowing about the United States.
McCrae’s last line there feels so apt, and so true. And McCrae’s poems, in part, do that work of knowing. And perhaps what is so hard for me to put into words — and yet will try — is that McCrae’s work, particularly surrounding Jim Limber, isn’t the kind of knowing that should be difficult. And yet, the very fact of McCrae’s work revealing truths that aren’t taught in history classes, or aren’t confronted by those inward-looking and full of privilege, shows how stuck the American gaze is, how hard the hand on the chin must pull and pull and pull to even get that gaze to turn just the slightest. Just look at some of the titles of McCrae’s poems:
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Was Another Child First
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Explains His Place in the Family
These titles do the hard work — before the poem even begins — of hinting toward the deep humanness of the poem and its subject. They insist. They are blunt, forthright, plain-spoken, in contrast to McCrae’s poems, which are often bound by meter and structure, experiments of form and breath, full of argument. These titles are the calm before the rhetoric. They almost say this poem shouldn’t have to exist, before they say here is the nature of the world.
Today’s poem exists within that same experiment of form and breath. It is a sonnet. It is less a sonnet because it has 14 lines and more a sonnet because it hinges on a moment, a volta, a turn. On one side of that turn is Jim Limber standing outside the gates of heaven, pleading. He says, “Send me back / If you’re good angels like they got in Heaven.” He says, “Send me back and I’ll / Believe you.” He does not get sent back. He waits. He is talked to, and then talked to no more. He stands still. He shouts. He states his final point, so devastating:
If I’ve earned my reward where is the life where I can spend it
I think what is so sad about this poem has to do with its structure, as well. I think of this poem as a series of small choruses, an exercise in repetition. The first chorus is heaven, the second is send me back, the third is good boots, and the fourth is waiting. These moments of rapid repetition focus our — the reader’s — attention. They are acts of care. They say look here, look here, look here. The poem also insists on personhood. The most repeated word is I; it occurs in almost every line, sometimes twice a line. And one consequence of its reoccurrence is a kind of sorrow. A sorrow that it must be insisted. A sorrow that even outside the gates of heaven, someone would have to assert themselves, so often and so loudly and so justly, so many times.
Where is the turn in this poem? I think it is that moment when the and changes to but, and McCrae writes:
But now they just don’t talk to me
At that moment, Jim Limber moves from someone with a just argument to someone deemed ridiculous by the highest metaphorical court in the land. He has become utterly alone. No longer on earth. No longer living. No longer spoken to by the guards of the dead. And yet he is insistent. And I think that is where the poem becomes almost transcendent. Jim Limber does not change. He does not turn. He should not have to. The poem turns. The people by heaven’s gate turn down their mouths. One can imagine them turning their gaze away. Everything in the whole world and above and below turns. But Jim Limber does not. And that is the magic of McCrae’s work. In Jim Limber we are given someone so utterly righteous and just, someone so insistent and true.
I find myself utterly shattered, again and again, by the last line. It makes me realize how wild the notion of an eternity of reward is, how unjust. It has the ring of pure truth. It is the kind of thing you read and say: how could this not be true? The fact of it existing as a question is an utter travesty. It breaks my heart. The whole poem does. The move from “good boots” to a whole life. The move from insistence met with audience to insistence met with silence. The utter loneliness of injustice. And how it repeats itself, again and again.
I think of how so much of what I love about this poem also has to do with how it sounds, how contained it feels, how taut, so that when the final line arrives, it echoes outward like the last chord of a song. In an interview, McCrae says the following about meter:
But when I think about meter—traditional meter, various metrical forms—it feels like I am looking at something infinite. And I think it feels infinite because there are certain boundaries. Whereas when I think about free verse, regarding my own practice, I don’t get that same sense of infinite space, infinite possibilities. I just get the panic of it all.
I love this. I love it — in part — because I do not understand it, because I do not feel the same way. But I love what it hints at, what it gestures toward about the infinite, about acknowledgment, about recognition. In one of my favorite poems in McCrae’s most recent book, Sometimes I Never Suffered, McCrae begins:
I see visions in my head of Heaven
I see what I’m pretty sure is Heaven
Even in Heaven Heaven is a garden
Not Eden but an ordinary garden
It is almost an injustice not to post the whole poem, because when I first read it I didn’t notice what was happening along its edges, the repetition of the words heaven and garden, and more, and more, and more. The poem begins in heaven, leaves it, and then returns. And, upon acknowledging this, I realized: it’s the form that allows this. It’s the form that gestures toward the universal. What to make of that? For so long, I’ve thought of form as limiting. I’ve thought of the way in which it gestured only to the past, only, perhaps, to redundancies, to sometimes useless repetition. But to repeat something is to insist. And to insist is, in many ways, to be infinite.
And that is perhaps why I love McCrae’s work the most. Because it is work concerned with justice, and justice is an act of insistence, and insistence is an act of love. To love something or someone is to repeat its name, over and over again. To love yourself is to say I, to make space for the first person, even when you’ve denied yourself the privilege of being yourself. To love the world is to know the names of what is killed and what is tended. To be able to hold each in your hands, your mouth. Any intention present with a poem is a kind of insistence on care. It is the poet saying, I am trying, and let me show you how. Language is an absolute force. It is a force of violence, tenderness, all the things that exist in between. Today I am thinking about what it means to care about each syllable as it leaves the tip of your tongue.
lovely
Damn, that's so interesting/relatable to feel more free in something that has limits vs. the panic induced by the unbridled nature of free verse. Also, what a fresh way to look at repetition.