#4: A Triptych from Sandra Simonds
A manifold revelation of identity, evidence and knowledge. Plus, open submissions from Penteract Press, RIPE Literary Journal and Red Lemon Review.
Sandra Simonds’ “Double Happiness, or / ‘Modernity / Means Contingency’ ”
Commentary & Analysis
When I asked Sandra Simonds to contribute a poem under 14 lines for Paper Knives, I was so pleased she chose one from her forthcoming book Triptychs (out from Wave in November). What seemed like a tremendous value — three for the price of one — actually turned out to be so much more economical than that. Give me some time to show my math.
There’s the three panels of the triptych. Then there’s the whole of those panels as a triptych. Then there’s the difference between the whole and the panels conceived separately from each of their vantages. Like, what one object-as-such excludes that the other includes and vice versa. Plus, there’s the fact that the triptych as a whole has two titles — a double naming that allows us to read it differently depending on what name we give it, and another non-dual interpretation based on that duality.
All of which is to say I sense a kind of Fibonacci sequence at play here — and a concomitant “golden mean” sort of proportionality — indicative of classical art compositions and organic formations. The way this/these poem/s interrogate the question of what makes a poem a poem leaves me struggling to articulate how to refer to it/them because of their multiplicity and multivalence. Likewise, I’m vexed to refer to these parts of the triptych as panels, columns or stanzas. I flirt with all of those terms in what follows.
There’s a surface that presents itself simply and which unravels or spins or spits out a series of less easily digested “rhythms.” Each column of the triptych seems to entail a different scene that appears to develop the others in a kind of story. From left to right they shift in tone from the (seemingly) concrete and particular details of quotidian cosmopolitan contemporary life into a more mysterious and ethereal engagement with the divinatory traditions of Aegean antiquity.
Each panel likewise entails a reference to a jump in time and place. In the first we flash from PF Chang’s in Detroit back to China, where a drone was bought. In the second panel, we flash forward from Detroit to a “backyard” home where the speaker’s son’s drone dies in the pine. The third is the most mysterious of these movements: there’s a student situated in the past who “said” a piece of advice (and a reference to their former laureateship in Sacramento), and then the narrator of the poem who also refers to themselves in the past as having “revolved or revolted.” Within the context of the poem, PF Chang’s occurs in the present, China was in the recent past, and both the speaker’s oracular activity and the student’s prudent maxim exist in an undetermined past — perhaps even apart from one another. Geographically, there are also three distinct locales mentioned: midwestern Detroit; the end-of-the-west Sacramento, California; and China to the east. This is a poem in the Homeric tradition of Odysseus, insofar as amid such geographic and temporal flashes it depicts a homecoming.
The leftmost panel, headed by “Double Happiness or,” presents a discrete scene: Detroit airport, PF Chang’s, narrator with a gift from China for their son. Innocuous and uncontroversial as this simple snippet of apparent autobiography seems, it raises a host of questions about identity and evidence. The line “playing xmas music” suggests the scene occurs at Christmas time, but that’s not directly stated; it’s an interpretation contingent on our assumption. We tacitly accept that the speaker bought a drone in China. But China is so large that any initial image we might hope to capture dissolves on further reflection. We have no information about the city or town or province the narrator visited, or the duration of time they spent there.
What seem like concrete particulars in this aspect of the triptych suddenly seem much more generalized, revealing to readers the certain priors they assume without any warrant beyond the fact that they’re reading the poem now and don’t want to bother with situating their reading against those contingent assumptions.
I began reading this poem thinking there is only one Detroit airport, but it turns out Detroit is home to both Coleman A. Young International Airport (DET) and Detroit Metro airport (DTW), with Coleman airport known until 2003 as Detroit City Airport. I dare not spend more time to nail down whether one or both of these have a PF Chang’s and leave that to a gentle reader more familiar with the Detroit metro area.
Similar elision of evidence occurs with “I’m pretty sure someone / is eating a whole cabbage.” What warrants the speaker’s qualified certainty is remarkably uncertain for the reader of the poem. We might also pause to ask, if this is a layover from China to a final destination, why the poem is in Detroit rather than at home. Even the reference to home is oblique in the second column, where the “backyard” becomes a final resting place for the drone, but home itself is never directly mentioned. Transience pervades the poem to suggest how an individual is always contingent on their location — just as our reading is contingent on assumptions we’ve yet to recognize.
If this isn’t a layover, it seems curious that one would stop off at an airport restaurant for drinks before heading home. Likewise, we know little about whether the speaker is travelling alone, with family or with colleagues.
The companions the narrator does mention in this stanza appear like blank faces: the second stanza implies that the bar is occupied by “sports / people” who were previously only identified as “baseball caps.” The second stanza also has me wonder what it means to be “drinking beer with” someone. There’s a familiar sense of being in a barroom where one is having drinks with everyone in the place and in some sense “drinking with” them; on the other hand, when we get invited to go out for drinks with someone, we tend to think of ourselves as “drinking … with” only the person who brought us. Even larger than the question of companionship — and one that attention to companionship might evade — is who is this person telling the story? Who or what does “I” refer to?
Though it lacks any direct reference to the left or center stanza, the third panel may be read as a conjunction between the “I” of the previous stanzas and the simulacrum of the prophetic oracle. That in turn throws into ironic relief the fact that the “dead drone” getting “caught in the backyard / pine tree” is “unbeknownst” to the speaker. We might ask whether they shouldn’t have gathered as much from its foreboding name: “Ghost Ranger.”
Our linguistic habit of referring to the electronic and mechanical devices that extend our reach as dying (engines, motors, phones, batteries) further suggests not just the persistence and pervasiveness of the metaphor of death, but also the fact of mortality as a precursor to human anxieties about the purpose of our lives or of life as such. Famously on this count, the end or greatest good of a human life for Aristotle was eudaimonia, which often gets translated as “happiness” but is more aptly interpreted as “flourishing.” For any particular person that means “Do[ing] what you do well,” with the criteria or values for wellness or virtue being for Aristotle the means between the extremes of excess and deficiency.
A curious series of inversions occurs in the beginning of this third panel as well that throw more light on important issues of pedagogy as they relate to the epistemological and ontological dilemmas raised elsewhere in the poem. There is of course a literary-historical question about the identity of the unnamed male “student” who was a former poet laureate of Sacramento. If they’ve been named a laureate, what need to they have to study under another poet? Is a student necessarily being “taught” by their teacher? I presume this a student in a poetry class, but the narrator could be a yogi who just happens to be dabbling in poetry because they were inspired by the laureate in their yoga class.
That latter remark was someone in jest, but the tongue in my cheek only because of how playfully this poem “revolved or revolted” around the issue of identity and certainty. The last few lines also draw us to dwell on what is “the selfsame / compartmental / space I tried to exude.” Typically, “selfsame” would suggest a context where a “compartmental / space” had previously been mentioned. But there’s no unambiguous explicit reference to a “compartmental / space.” There are various identities that have been obliquely referenced but never concretely defined. The one concrete identity mentioned is PF Chang’s in a discrete airport somewhere near Detroit. I imagine the genesis of the poem catalyzing in the compartmental space leased by the airport to a property manager and then to the PF Chang’s franchised, with the narrator/author attempting to give a general sense of the ethos, with the remainder of the poem spinning, as poems often do, out from there.
One problem for poets acknowledged throughout literary history lies in the intoxicant effect of “spitting / out rhythms” when they start to speak from a single, compartmentalized “space” of our own identity. It’s one of the reasons that any critical project like Paper Knives has to wrestle with the heresy of paraphrase and the intentional fallacy: Poets are always saying more than they intend to — and more than any reader could hope to compartmentalize with a paraphrase.
I swear this isn’t an attempt to revitalize the New Criticism. But it is to suggest that there’s more to be drawn out of close readings of poems in themselves, if not only because what “the poem itself” even is remains at least not uncontroversial. Granted, there’s a very small audience of people who care to acknowledge that and an even smaller audience dedicated to hashing it out. Welcome to a very small club. Luckily, Simonds has wonderfully complicated such contemplations.
Not only do supposedly synonymous terms always carry different connotations, but also because identity and meaning, like any transaction, aren’t ever exactly reciprocal relationships. When you order “Double Happiness,” you can’t be sure what you’ll get. What one restaurant had on its menu may not be on PF Chang’s. (I looked: Double Happiness doesn’t appear in their online menu.) If you order “Double Happiness” at one Chinese or pan-Asian restaurant, you might get something very different. Especially if that restaurant is in Detroit rather than Shangai … or in any of the various provinces of China.
A few more remarks seem worth making as regards the narrator’s identity. We might assume that the author is ostensibly identical with the narrative voice — a confessional gesture and interpretive assumption that extends back to Sapphic lyric and Homeric traditions of invoking the muse to sing through the poet in an inspired state of madness not unlike the oracles at various shrines. (For more on this look at Plato’s dialogue Ion and Socrates’ appeals to a proclamation of the Oracle at Delphi as his main evidence in both Plato’s and Xenophon’s respective apologies (though what he purports the Pythia to have said differs between the two).
Plutarch discusses the physical exhaustion of the oracle’s prophetic and divinatory duties. Moreover, the themes of self-knowledge and caution against certainty that extend throughout the poem form two thirds of the legendary injunctions carved above the temple entrance of the Oracle at Delphi, as discussed in Plato’s Charmides. The third is temperance in all things, which seems to relate to the theme of consumption throughout the poem: PF Chang’s and Chinese drones in the first panel, drinking in the second, and even inspired writing or declamation in the third. Interested readers might consult the sources on how the Pythia at the Oracle of Delphi prophesied under the influence of vapors and fumes to consider how this might figure in to a deeper interpretation.
Another contingency of the poem lies in the direction of reading English dialects: we go left to right. There’s a precedent order we assume in our orientation to the text that is itself a contingent condition — not a necessary one. The three dimensional “diamond” introduced in the right-most stanza highlights the linear default to which we attend texts. This stanza thus may serves as a kind gravitational center and fulcrum to break with past tradition of reading generally and of this text in perticular. After all, we can refer to the speaker’s actions as revolution whether they “revolved or revolted.”
All the foregoing is compounded by the fact that the two right-most columns seem to present themselves as a unit which suggests the reader consider what’s subordinate to them both as all of apiece. That the triptych poem’s title read as a whole also reads as two alternate names suggests that how a reader interprets this poem is very much contingent on what orientation that reader takes to the object of the poem as such. There’s a hint (to my mind at least) of a responsibility to consider all of the contingencies of these facets in our interpretation, but also an implicit acknowledgement that doing so is beyond our practical abilities.
To put it differently, the way the light hits the wall depends on how many slits it passes through. Simonds was kind and circumspect enough to give me the hint that the quote comes from TJ Clark. Even more interestingly, the various sources where I’ve found this quote attributed to TJ Clark have “modernity” in quotation marks in Clark’s original text. I can do no better at present than offer the same “patchwork of quotations” from Clark’s introduction to his book Farewell to an Idea, supplied in this essay by Daniel Spaulding at Metamute:
“Modernity” means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information. This process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short supply – “meaning” here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, implicit orders, stories and images in which a culture crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the reality of pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, “the disenchantment of the world,” still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best. […] “Secularization” is a nice technical term for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting (or resenting) a high level of risk […]. I should say straightaway that this cluster of features seems to me tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings. […] And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled – and obscurely felt to be ruled – by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose.
But we can also note that even the use of the term “Modernity” signifies a person’s cultural capital; it marks their membership in a particular social and intellectual class. It proclaims that one is aware that one is part of a social order ruled by economic forces without humanizing values to orient it. I’ll go ahead and step on Hume’s pitchfork here to suggest that the acknowledgment of a lack of grounding for transcendental values ought to produce a yearning for such a grounding. At least it would in antiquity. We might well consider Latour’s provocative proposal that we have never been modern at all.
I mention all of this to reinforce the problem of contingency as it relates to reference and meaning, understood in the sense of semantic meaning as well as our anxieties (or at least my own?) about fulfilling life’s purpose — particularly when one finds oneself on a Detroit layover, drinking at PF Chang’s with a drone in tow but feels a yearning to instead be spewing oracular incantations. But the triptych also forces me to pause and ask whether human life in 21st Century Detroit Airport PF Chang’s is somehow less meaningful than human life for the Greeks who would ask the Pythia of Apollo at Delos to soothsay for them. The team logos emblazoned on the caps of the “sports people” seem to bring them some shred of meaning, as does the oracular, diamond-like revolution of the speaker.
Simonds brings to bear on the reader an overwhelming question of what it means to say one thing is or means something else, as well as what we mean when we feel as if we are bereft of meaning or “pretty sure” of anything at all. And this poem reminds us that what we “do well” or maybe do best is find patterns and create or invent meanings … or at least new forms. There’s a clear connection to my mind drawn in this/these poem/s between ontology (what exists) and epistemology (how we know or believe what we do)— but more importantly, there’s an awareness that each impossibly presupposes the other.
In addition to the sojourns from east to west in this poem, it flits from modernity to antiquity as well. In all of this, through Simonds’ poem, we’re asked to range through time — from the airport back to China, forward two days to the drone’s crash, to an unspecified time-slice when the speaker’s student offers a common enough platitude that’s perhaps earned its status as a cliche due to its truth. We ought to be careful, though, not to endorse the idea that truth simply is what gets repeated. Lurking behind this, I can’t help but sense the grim sentence so many of us have heard — or perhaps even uttered — that poetry or art means whatever you want it to, or that this semantic ambivalence is the greatest of its virtues.
Rather, it seems more appropriate to say that good poetry, excellent poetry changes what we want because it means something we can’t exactly say. It calls us to spin and spit rhythms out from the “compartmental / space” of the ineluctable identity we find ourselves confined to which we can only come to question or transcend on the basis of prior assumptions that were “unbeknownst” until reality exposes them to us … and us to them, even if only ever in partial.
The hope of orienting ourselves to the task of understanding the poem without examining the contingencies of the evidence available to us turns out to be empty if we begin read carefully. As beautiful and beguiling as the jewel of the poem might be, answers to the questions they raise aren’t easy to come by and they’re not always not comfortable when we get them. Certainly, preliminary or provisional readings are unavoidable and necessary. And subsequent, more precise readings are desirable. But the myth of an authoritative interpretation, or a reading which isn’t fraught by contingency, would require a mind unified with the divine and able to translate its omniscient and omnipresent vagaries for mere mortals. In other words, an oracle whose own words’ full meaning would remain incomprehensible to the limited minds of mortals.
Notes & News
In addition to a fascinating back catalogue, Penteract Press has a three-day window from June 10-12 where they’re accepting manuscripts of formal, constrained and visual poetry. Even if you don’t submit, check out the Penteract Podcast for engaging conversations on visual and constrained writing, and follow editor/publisher Anthony Etherin for his anagrammed lines and palindrome poems.
If you enjoy elevating the mundane in your writing, Red Lemon Review #5 is out and the publication is accepting submissions for its next issue. It’s a relatively young magazine, but they do a great job of promoting their authors via Twitter, and they have an eclectic range of styles and voices included in their archive, as well as workshops and other events.
Ripe Literary Journal is also announced on June 1 they were accepting submissions until June 30 for their second issue. Read the first issue and then submit! This LGBTQIA+ owned lit mag is in its early stages, so support and promotion means a lot. They’ve produced a spare website that gives attention to the text with quality selections that reward time spent with them. A word of advice: though Issue #1 included prose, Issue #2 is poetry-only. (But prose poems are probably okay? Don’t quote me on that. Query!)
Let’s Connect
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