A Close Reading of Patrick Donnelly's "When You Go to Venice Alone"
You maybe don't know it yet, but you need this poem in your life.
As you no doubt recall from my previous dispatch, Patrick Donnelly is reading with
on Tuesday, April 15 at 7:30pm Eastern for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series. Patrick is a marvelous poet — I really love his earlier books, the exquisitely titled Nocturnes in the Brothel of Ruin and Little-Known Operas — but his latest book Willow Hammer is daring and vital in a way that proves Patrick is unwilling to rest on the laurels of his previous accomplishments.It’s also a book that attends to so much of what we might consider “previous” — these poems are laced with experiences from childhood, from adolescence, and from young adulthood, lensed through recollection and informed by the understanding that time and distance can provide.
Register now so you can attend this reading and not miss a second of the sheer brilliance that both Patrick and Jane will share with us: bit.ly/WTUIApr2025
Having just come back from two separate trips where I traveled alone — both of which were poetry related and both will be covered in an upcoming Substack (once I get caught up on all the things I put off in order to go traveling) — I thought we might take a look at one of my favorite poems from Willow Hammer, which first appeared in Ron Slate’s excellent On the Seawall:
When You Go to Venice Alone you’ll haunt the narrow corridors at night, circling the blackened palaces. Long after the market has closed, cobbles strewn with mint and crushed flowers, you’ll watch a waiter lower the umbrellas, stack the chairs and hose the pavement. And when he finally appears, about twenty and no English, you’ll shadow him past the Fenice, follow his gesture up the endless stairs. At first you won’t see his old parents on the couch, lit by an American gameshow, and when you finally reach his tiny room at the top of the house — each waiting for the other to confirm why we are here — you’ll do nothing but sit on the narrow bed and smoke, exiling your homeless blue breaths.
One of the two professors who taught film at Providence College during my time there in the mid-’90s was infamous for his deployment of the phrase “self-reflexive.” He had a very distinctive way of speaking — an affectation, I suppose, more than an accent — and as I was reading Patrick’s poem I found myself thinking of that term (and that professor). With the intimacy of the second-person perspective, it does feel self-reflexive, as though the speaker were recounting for himself an episode from his past. Of course, this poem could just as easily have been written in the first person, shifting to the past tense to indicate that it’s a recollection and still be as meaningful, right?
Nope. At least, I don’t think so. Here, let’s see what it might have read like:
When I Went to Venice Alone I haunted the narrow corridors at night, circled the blackened palaces. Long after the market had closed, cobbles strewn with mint and crushed flowers, I watched a waiter lower the umbrellas, stack the chairs and hose the pavement. And when he finally appeared, about twenty and no English, I shadowed him past the Fenice, followed his gesture up the endless stairs.
I could’ve gone on, but my hope is that you’ve already noticed that even a theoretically subtle shift like this changes the entire poem, making it seem more like a confession of guilt, turning the speaker into someone almost predatory, and I do not at all read the original version in that way.
No, to me the speaker in the original is describing what it is like to be forlorn and lonely, abroad in a foreign land. It’s a lot of complex emotion, and I think having it in the second person provides a necessary bit of distance for the poet. Not because the poet can’t handle the feelings; no, instead it’s because the second person perspective allows the poet to transmit the feelings to us, the reader, in a very smart way. We’re drawn directly into the position of receiving as the “you” so that we hear what the poet is describing as though we’re the ones who lived it. It’s almost hypnotic, and it is very difficult to pull off successfully in a poem (or, I would imagine, in most other genres.)
I’m also quite taken by the reference to “La Fenice,” which a trip to Wikipedia indicates is “a historic opera house in Venice, Italy.” Knowing Patrick’s long history with opera, I’m not surprised to discover this is a connection, but what I didn’t know is that “Fenice” (a near-homophone of “Venice”) translates as “phoenix,” as the building has been lost no fewer than three times to fires over the centuries. As it happens, “Fenice” and “Venice” are not etymologically related, but there’s still something pleasing and cohesive about these words being so close to one another in this poem — and imbuing the speaker with a sort of cosmopolitan or Romantic air.
I think Patrick succeeds marvelously in this poem; every time I read it, I find myself aching in a particular way — I’m reminded of what it feels like to be alone, reminded of what it feels like to know desire and to desire connection while feeling out of place and out of sync with what’s around me. It was a frequent occurrence for me when I was in my 20s, particularly when I worked for an airline and would often travel alone to different cities. I have vivid memories not of Venice, with “cobbles / strewn with mint and crushed flowers” (god, what a gorgeous & evocative image — the perfume possible only through these delicate plants being pressed between shod feet and ancient stones being as potent a description of the temporal qualities of physical attraction as I can imagine), but of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, of Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, of Browne’s Addition in Spokane, and of Hawthorne in Portland, OR. My nocturnal wanderings didn’t lead to anything other than conversations with strangers in bars or in tacquerias or coffeehouses, but I still recognize something so essentially human in this story. Maybe it’s the vulnerability that is so apparent in the way this narrative comes forth; I find the “old parents / on the couch, lit by an American gameshow” to be just heartbreakingly complex. Did they notice the stranger who came home with their son? What were they thinking? Was this a common occurrence? We will never know, but the questions echo.
And they echo through the sweet, sad ending to this poem, where we find ourselves “waiting / for the other to confirm why we are here” and sitting on “the narrow bed” together, where nothing happens aside from smoking and “exiling your homeless blue breaths.”
If you have read this poem and felt nothing — if you haven’t related at all to these emotions, so carefully wrought and portrayed by a poet at the peak of his craft — please do me a favor and never tell me. My heart has been broken by this poem; I don’t need it being broken by you, too.
One final thought in the form of a musical digression: Being the inescapably Gen X person I am, this poem reminds me of the Smiths — or, at least, of some of their more emotionally raw and tender work. Certainly “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” (lyrics here if you don’t already know them), or “How Soon Is Now?” (again, lyrics here). I know Morrissey has revealed himself to be an utterly dreadful person, but these songs still mean a tremendous amount to me, and it’s high praise that I would see Patrick’s work as being just as resonant. In fact, Patrick manages to conjure these feelings without the aid of Johnny Marr’s guitar brilliance, which is a remarkable achievement. (Patrick is also pretty much the opposite of Morrissey in terms of personality — where Moz is an arrogant and self-aggrandizing racist, Patrick is a deeply kind and humane person who I’m grateful to know.)
Anyway, all of this is to say that Patrick Donnelly’s poems are gorgeous and achingly, beautifully human, and I want you to come hear him read with Jane Huffman (whose poems are her own particular blend of gorgeous and achingly, beautifully human) on Tuesday night, April 15, at 7:30pm Eastern on Zoom. bit.ly/WTUIApr2025 gets you a link. See you there!