Tom Snarsky’s “The Star-Field Paintings”

Thoughts on a way of seeing.

The Star-Field Paintings

I’m here to mail a letter
It will kill me but I don’t mind

I just assumed
Corinthians were flowers

One kind of pain can hide
Another, like in one star-

Field painting of
The city there are no 

Stars at all because the light
From below is too much

But in another star-field painting
From a less-lit place

That auditorium of tiny bright
Dots drowns out

Any light from below
It is easy to forget that

The stars have already solved
The problem of the one

& the many: in the day, there is
One, & at night the many sing

A work song carrying
Our oily night on their backs


from Light-Up Swan (Ornithopter Press, 2021)

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I have admired Tom Snarsky’s work for a long, long time. This is the first poem from his book, Light-Up Swan. He has a second book, Reclaimed Water, which came to me in the mail the other day after I ordered it, and which I sat with for a long time, smiling mostly, smiling at the charm and absurdity and love and observance at the heart of it.

I hope that the final lines of today’s poem made you do something with your chest or your mouth or your heart. By that I mean — gasp, or skip a beat, or suck in a bunch of air and hold it in your body before letting it out slowly, shaking your head, smiling, and looking up at the stars a little differently.

That’s what those lines did for me.

And it’s funny — when I texted this poem to my wife, she texted back:

I just assumed Corinthians 
Were flowers

And then there was a pause. I didn’t know if that was it. And then a longer pause. And then she said:

Might be the best lines of poetry ever written.

And so there’s that. And there’s the fact that I don’t just want to talk about this poem today. I want to talk about so much of Snarsky’s work, which does what those lines above do — which is to say that it jars the world into and out of sense. It reminds us of our natural state of wonder. I mean, come on. Read these lines again:

The stars have already solved
The problem of the one

& the many: in the day, there is
One, & at night the many sing

A work song carrying
Our oily night on their backs

I love this ending to the moon and back. It makes me think of how, when I’ve been to the MoMA, I’ve always seen that crowd of people, phones outstretched as if in worship, gathered around Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I don’t know what each person in that crowd is thinking as they look upon that painting. But now, when I return, I know I will think, seeing Van Gogh’s painting, of Tom Snarsky. I will be off to the side, I’m sure. Both in the crowd and out of it. And I will think of stars in that painting, and I will think of them singing. I will think of all of us down here, phones out, shining our lights into this painting so full of light, and I will marvel at the absurdity of it, as I take a photo of people taking a photo. And then I will walk out into the afternoon and wait for the afternoon to become night, and I will try to find the stars above the city, and not finding them, I will still think of them, slicked with oil, carrying the night on their backs while trying to make their light shine. And I will smile, thinking that thought — because it’s a miraculous image.

It’s hard, reading and thinking of these lines, not to draw connections to other moments in Snarsky’s work — moments when he writes the known world a little more anew, and a little more unknown. I think about how, in one of his poems, “Song of Restoration,” Snarsky writes:

Most planets are probably so
much quieter than ours.

Or about how another poem — “Isinglass” — begins with these lines:

The grass is tall enough to ride the wind
without an adult.

Or about how another poem — “Confusion Matrix” — ends with these lines:

when I died
there was weeping
and inexpensive cake

Or, finally, about how another poem — “Prose Poem” — simply is these lines:

Another day in the ruinous world, eating
peanut butter off a knife.

Each of these moments — and, as well, the ending of today’s poem — does the work of poetic surprise, the delicate placement of the unexpected. I have never thought of a planet as a potentially quiet thing until I encountered such a description in a Tom Snarsky poem. I have never thought of a field of grass as a line of children waiting to ride an amusement park rollercoaster until I encountered such a metaphor in a Tom Snarsky poem. And I have never thought of the wind as a rollercoaster, or of the stars as a solution to the problem of the one and the many.

When I encounter a moment like this in a poem, my first reaction is distinctly one of pleasure. A real joy. I smile, shaking my head to myself. Sometimes I say yes out loud. Sometimes I let out a little laugh. When I used to run a reading series in the city, I would gesture wildly from behind the bar as this happened during a reader. Someone at the microphone would utter something that broke the ordinary into extraordinary pieces, and I would go ahh silently, my palms upturned. It’s the same feeling as walking through the city and seeing something you hadn’t possibly imagined yet, the way, just yesterday, I saw a pigeon land on someone’s head, his arm reaching up as it happened to feed it something from between his fingers.

This has to be one reason why we read, right? For one of the same reasons, I think, why we live. It is, sometimes, the most fun and surprising possible thing.

Sometimes poetry is about placement, the way a photo is. Years upon years upon years ago, I helped carry my old friend’s large format camera as she walked around New York City, looking for moments worth photographing as part of her senior thesis in college. We would walk around the city for hours. She would be looking, looking, and looking. I’d be stooped over, holding up this massive backpack with my body. But then it would happen. She’d notice something. That’s how it always began — with noticing. The shape the light made out of shadows. The strangeness of a tree between two buildings. A doll, a plaything, an ordinary object thrown into a street, or balanced along a window. A scene witnessed only through the triangular plastic window cut into construction plywood. And then, from there — from such noticing — we’d turn busy. I’d un-shoulder the pack, arrange the camera atop the tripod. She’d polish the ground glass, prepare the massive cloak she’d disappear under, and start taking light readings. And then she’d spend minutes that felt like hours preparing the single, massive photograph. And then, just like that, she’d take it. It all began with noticing and continued with it and ended with it, too. It was all about allowing someone to feel that same surprise, that same gasp, that same astonishment that inspired the stopping, the setting-up, and the adjusting.

A poem can be like that, too. Certainly Tom Snarsky’s are. The lines of his poems above remind me of the importance of the uncanny, and how it takes work — actual work — to allow oneself to be astonished by this world, by the very idea of quiet planets, or by how the word Corinthians might be mistaken for the name of a flower. Those mistakes, those moments of personal, intimate wonder — they make up, more than we might think, so much of who we are. It’s those details that draw me to the little holy thing we call a life. That we might make such beautiful, lovely mistakes. That we might be astonished in such beautiful, lovely ways. We are who we are because of our capacity to feel such things in such ways.

It’s like how, when I read these lines now — I just assumed / Corinthians were flowers — I think of my wife’s text. And I think not just of how wonderful these lines are, but of how beautiful it was to read my wife saying: Might be the best lines of poetry ever written.

I love that feeling. Of needing to proclaim the power of a thing. Of, in the moments after encountering such a thing, needing to just say how good it is.

Why does that happen, I wonder? I think, perhaps, it is because such a moment — whether in a poem or a song or a novel — makes sense and no sense at the time. It speaks, perhaps, to that part of us that is forever searching for the right words and yet never finding them — knowing, all along, that there are no right words. And so when the words come along, they fill a need that is un-fillable, a need that creates its own need. And so they make sense and yet they don’t, which is their power, which is a beautiful power. It’s part of the power of art.

I love these moments when I encounter them in life and in poetry. I think of Bill Knott’s “Death,” which reads:

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.   
They will place my hands like this.   
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

Or, too, Knott’s poem “Alternate Fates,” which reads:

What if right
in the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

I think of Louise Glück’s assertion about her parent’s lives being “heartbreaking” and then “insane” and then, finally, “very funny.” Or this moment — of so many moments — in a James Tate poem:

God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery 
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry.

I’m sure you could name countless moments like these — moments in poetry and in life. Things that have surprised you that you now hold on to. Things that have altered the way you've looked at the world — the night, for you, becoming something blueblack and painted on the sky by some unseen hand, dripping with the oil of the brush as the stars shine through it.

I wish I could say there was some kind of prescription for writing a poem like this, for writing a poem that scatters lottery tickets across a battlefield or turns the stars into little lights that do the work of holding the night on their backs. But there isn’t. And I don’t wish that at all, to be honest. Because, in the end, no matter the craft, a poem is a way of seeing. And that’s part of the joy of reading — that encounter, and how it offers such rich intimacy, a companionship with someone else’s way of seeing. Like trying on their surprise and allowing it to be yours, both of yours, for life.

I am thinking of a lot this holiday season. What it means to celebrate such a holiday through the act of consumption, and what such a holiday actually tells us about people: what they deserve, and yet what they are often given. There was no room at the inn, according to the story of Christmas, and so much displacement happening across the land. It’s a story that replicates itself in the form of tragedy this year.

When I think of today’s poem, I think of the men in the story who follow a star across the sky. I like the simplicity of that idea, how it renders them tiny and beautiful, willing believers — children, even. Wonderment, astonishment, awe: we abandon such things for a more begrudging certainty as life pitter-patters its tepid pace across our days. If you treat a poem as a gift this morning, and the next, and the next — if you view a poem as someone’s generous offering of their own way of seeing, then you might claw back some of that astonishment you may have given away to the passing days. I give that astonishment away all the time. I find it hidden, little gift of it, inside the lines of poems, and on the sidewalks of cities, and scattered across fields, falling like leaves. Hidden, always, and then seen in what I am allowed to notice. And when you find that astonishment, gift that it is, you can follow the daily work of stars, or imagine again if someone is holding up the moon. You can talk to animals and whisper to the grass. You can be a little bit more fully alive within the tremendous fullness that this life offers us.

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Some Notes:

1. I realize this post comes out on Christmas Eve. I found this story and interview in Democracy Now — on the cancelled Christmas festivities in Bethlehem this year — worth reading as you move through the holiday, whether or not you celebrate.

2. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition 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.

3. You can also follow the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha here, where he not only posts his work, but also resources, calls for solidarity, and more. Hala Alyan is doing similar work.

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.