A close reading of Susan Rich's poem "Dear Wild Unknown—"
To paraphrase Walt Kelly and John Keats, "We have met the Wild Unknown, and it is Negative Capability."
Brookline, MA, has given the world several poets who are of great importance in my personal poetry pantheon: Jane Lunin Perel, who was my beloved undergrad poetry mentor; Robbie Gamble, who is my beloved grad school cohort-mate; and Susan Rich, who is a beloved correspondent for years via social media, but who I only had the pleasure of meeting in person recently. (This is because Susan no longer lives in Brookline, having hung her hat in Seattle for a while now.)
Susan’s work is widely published, and for good reason. She brings a high level of emotional acuity to the page, and her deftness with description enables her to stitch poems together that engage difficult subjects without alienating her readers. Her latest book, Blue Atlas, is a deeply personal collection that is also timely, as it involves abortion. It’s a collection I am treasuring, but it’s also one that I’d prefer to let her speak on rather than imposing my own gloss. Fortunately, Susan is reading with Cynthia Manick (who is from Brooklyn, not Brookline, but that doesn’t make her — or her work — any less beloved by me!) for What The Universe Is on Wednesday, May 8 at 8:30pm Eastern.
For today’s close reading I opted to take a poem of Susan’s that was published in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices:
Dear Wild Unknown— Today you wander towards me through the apocalyptic newsrooms and by the glow of backlist smart screens. For you, we have emptied our schools, shuttered the cafes, prohibited picnics by the sea. Today, I trust only the unsettled cloudscape, the fleeting mission of cherry blossoms lined up here on 47th street. Like everyone, I overthink the fever burn of skin, the dry brush at the back of the throat—a whole expressway of sensations that travel through our bodies. Dear Wild Unknown, you whom I so often adored, looked-up to in an extended outlook of bright constellations. You whom I’ve courted and worked to construct in the lit room of a stanza or the breath of a line break. Deep inside the awkwardness of my pen you seduced with syllables—my friend with benefits. But not now. Now you’ve emptied the greengrocers of Venice, the local playgrounds, and my own first date at Vivacé’s— all indefinitely postponed. Instead I venture out to the neighborhood pharmacy, the lonely shelves— no hand sanitizer in the land. Dear, Dear Unknown— tell me what can we do with our bodies now that we cannot hold hands? I stand on the back porch and practice my cracked aria rising up through the alleyway as in Verona but unfortunately, we Americans are not born singers, instead we howl and bang pots. What can we do but cry out onto the page? Scratch a code in curved lines and dashes— imagining the day we will reclaim our own good names.
It’s interesting at this juncture, four years out from those initial few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, to read this poem and find myself remembering the feeling of once again living through capital-H History, through something collective rather than fractured the way so much of our recent history has been. I, too, felt as though we were on the edge of some “Wild Unknown” — I was terrified about how many people were dying, though I was also insulated from it as well, as no one I knew directly died of COVID (though I mourned — and still mourn — the loss of Adam Schlesinger, a truly staggering musical talent. But I digress.)
I love the approach Susan takes in this poem, the personification of the Wild Unknown, affording it the power of a Greek god strolling through the neighborhood and looking to mess around with all the humans there. The imagistic details in the poem also blur the line between this novel contagion and the poet’s engagement with craft — an example of the negative capability that Keats named as a crucial element for all poets.
The speaker in this poem is, in a way, refusing to be cowed into silence by the “Dear, Dear Unknown” that they’d previously “courted and worked to construct / in the lit room of a stanza or the breath of a line break.” I’d even suggest that the speaker’s claim to “the breath of a line break” heightens the tension between the literal and the figurative in the poem, given the effects of COVID-19 on the lungs of those it infected, especially in the earliest days of the pandemic. This tension drives the poem; I’m utterly fascinated by the way the conversation between the speaker and the Unknown continues, the way that the speaker still asks the Unknown questions — as in, “what can we do with our bodies / now that we cannot hold hands?” and “What can we do but cry out / onto the page?”
That second question, coming so close to the end of the poem, serves for me here as a volta (or, as Paul Celan would have it, an atemwende — a breathturn) where the speaker’s question isn’t vulnerable, almost pleading, but is instead rhetorical. Throughout the poem the speaker has wrestled with the changes to the Unknown and the changes to the self, and they have arrived somewhere pragmatic in the face of horror. What else can poets do but “cry out // onto the page” in the face of capital-H History? I’d suggest this realization is reinforced by the speaker’s experience with raising their voice in song during the nightly moments of appreciation for the front-line workers who kept the nation running:
I stand on the back porch and practice
my cracked aria rising up through the alleyway
as in Verona but unfortunately,
we Americans are not born singers, instead we howl
and bang pots.
Throughout these moments, there’s such a desire to do something in the face of powerlessness — this desire would be repeated again and again in the coming months and years since the spring of 2020, and this speaker’s response seems to me to be in conversation with Auden’s famous poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats, particularly with the phrase “poetry makes nothing happen” — a phrase often quoted out of context, one that I think many contemporary poets engage with. The ending of Susan’s poem seems to me to take it, as Auden observes, to “Raw towns that we believe and die in” (and to do so in a very literal way, given the subject matter.)
In this way, it is a potent poem of witness, of documentation; it captures the anxiety and thinking of a poet during a terrifying moment in our shared history, and it connects that personal experience to the larger global experience.
I hope you’ll come to hear Susan read more potent poems that connect the personal to the global tonight (Wednesday, May 8) at 8:30pm Eastern, along with Cynthia Manick. Get registered at bit.ly/WTUIMay2024!
And, as always, thank you for joining me in this engagement with this poem.