The cruelty is in the repetitions. If April teems with blossoms, it teems with the same blossoms; if the instinct to write fizzes up, so do the bromides of National Poetry Month. Sara Nicholson’s April (The Song Cave, 2023) is a meditation on the despair and possibility of this eternal return. Its ground is a world weary with knowledge, so filled with the brushstrokes of art history and allusions to canonical lyric that flowers can only be perceived as “poetry’s bad faith”; as she deadpans, “We have MFAs / In wielding the violet.” But razoring this unwieldy, often beautiful, and masculinist mass of relations with characteristically sharp linework and wry irreverence, Nicholson produces a sinewy record of vocation and its discontents, a love letter to the decentered “whisper network” thriving at the heart of the canon (18, 27). (It remains, for Nicholson, the canon.) Whether ventriloquizing a decaying baronesa, spinning an Iris Murdoch line into a crown, or giving a shout-out to “the man / Who told E. she writes / ‘Like a man,’” April wields camp to keep off-kilter, flaunts its drag conservatism (26).
The refreshing impersonality that ensues (we “recycle language / On dying land” [36]) rejects the dramas of the ego that power much contemporary poetry and their attendant horizons of political capital. Rather, Nicholson nods at discourses of trauma and epiphanic anecdote, while speaking around them in direct addresses that slowly incorporate the reader into a longue-durée “whisper network.” In “The Goatherd and the Saint,” one of many ekphrastic pieces, Nicholson destabilizes the absorptive appeal of the paintings at the Frick through recognitions of Henry Clay Frick’s anti-labor politics, the exclusivity of the museum context, even a woman playing Candy Crush beside Rembrandt’s Polish Rider. Despite and because of these caveats, a Fragonard scene of pursuit offers an intimate, transhistorical channel of communication: imagining herself in the painting, Nicholson’s speaker writes, “Assaulted by / The proto-Romantic sublime / You wait hours to slip / A note to me / Who is either a servant or / A knave in silks” (40). Once the identities of both speaker and addressee have been supplanted by the drama of the painting, it becomes possible to lightly balance the language of the contemporary victim-subject (“assaulted by”); an archly distanced art-historical idiom; an unstable first-person indirect pronoun (“us”); and the prick of historical distance, graphed through labor politics. This is enabled by Nicholson’s sharp enjambments, which work occasionally as scare quotes, sometimes as cliffhangers, and often, as in “slip / ,” as a sensitive annotation of meaning.
This combination of leftist politics, formal rigor, and high referentiality defines Nicholson’s three books; the poet Jane Gregory has called her “our last, best Romantic poet.”[1] Since The Living Method (The Song Cave, 2014), her poems have begun from a postmodern and more particularly post-Ashbery premise that takes artifice and a decayed but inextirpable canon as poetry’s slippery ground. From this premise follow the two main threats with which Nicholson continually grapples. The first is that actual experience feels nugatory beside its mediation. “Schloß,” a striking instance from The Living Method, begins by losing itself in a maze of belatedness, enjoining the reader to “Command the air to laurelize / the work of others, and to write // the work of others’ works.”[2] The second is that once you start tugging at the thread of reference, there’s no stopping, and the putative subject of a poem opens rapidly into an echoic gyre. April’s “Weather Talk” opens by picking up Hamlet’s melancholic philosophizing (“Something about the music grief is / Either prey to or heir to …”) and closes in a beleaguered cosmic catalog, as the recessive speaker (“I, the plural form”) distributes themself as “calendrical / Time, pain, grief, joy, energy / And entropy, all the state / Flowers: red, gold, purple, white” (3–4). Nicholson’s earlier work managed the threat of the poem’s overwhelm by antecedents primarily with tone (ironic), humor (bemused), and politics (feminist). A typical instance in What the Lyric Is (The Song Cave, 2016) comes in “We Are Seven.” This landscape poem in drag opens with a jab at Wallace Stevens (“If morning be the color of peaches / Let the clouds be seafoam”) before shouldering on to the real target: “Night rubs its hand / Over the butt of the earth. / I think I would make a good father / To the infant Wordsworth.”[3] The marvel and humor of such lines is in how dexterously their tone swivels with each line break, juxtaposing high poetic conceit and a blunt take on the sexual politics it conceals, then, via an apparent non sequitur, lightly remediating those abuses, as the female speaker winks herself into literary history. I could fix him.
April transposes these puckish riffs on Poets and Poetry into a mellower, elegiac key. And, as a confident third book, it shows how Nicholson’s bluff recutting of her forebears emerges from a sustained challenge to later twentieth-century models of influence and personhood. Against, for instance, the anxious overhangs proposed by Bloom or Gilbert and Gubar, Nicholson’s recessive, classically minded speakers relate to precedent much more equanimously, like the process of mutual adjustment that Eliot details in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For Eliot, “after the supervention of novelty [viz., a new poem], the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.”[4] It’s a commonwealth, but membership comes steep, demanding the genuflecting poet’s “continual extinction of personality.” Yet the boon is parity with the past, as literature, per Eliot, “never improves.”[5] For the reader who holds “the whole existing order” in their head, the pleasure of reading poetry is then scalar, as interventions on the smallest scale—for instance, a crisply enjambed line—ask us to imagine entire canons “readjusted.” Or, as Nicholson writes in “Lives of the Saints,” the long pandemic-era prose poem toward the end of April,
The littlest tide pools host whole ecosystems. A dribble or ooze, given time, will carve a canyon in the rock. If Niagara Falls could speak it would say, in the words of the great diarist Jules Renard, “I very humbly confess my pride.”
*
The odds overwhelmingly favor it: your life is not interesting. Why, then, do you write about yourself?
(52)
The “dribble or ooze”-esque agency Nicholson implicitly assumes here, as elsewhere, is structurally similar to what scholar Anne-Lise François has influentially called “recessive action”: the various ways by which subjects, often female, resist “masculine communication” and narratives of the major.[6] In the context of forced lockdowns, Nicholson invokes the ruined divinity of lives such as Saint Lucy and Christina of Markyate—notable for “stabbing their eyes out” and “living for years in a box,” respectively—alongside cats, misanthropists, and crabs under rocks, as she attempts to locate intelligible meaning, no matter how infinitesimal, in great private suffering (56–7).
This process, however, does not merely result in a new context for Nicholson’s characteristic use of literary precedent to adumbrate and resolve subjective affect. Rather, the poem’s ambitions are slyly major, as it loosens the tissue of argumentative, impersonal prose, which is the tenor of contemporary authority, by weaving in a capacity for paradox, a respect for the medieval doctrine of resemblances, and a penchant for aphoristic disjuncture. It’s a project foreshadowed in the poem’s first section, which reads in its entirety: “I like some things because I don’t like others. Rejection is affirmation. And affirmation is necessary for living well” (51). Linguistic confidence, here, may be derived from self-knowledge, but it spills over instantly into gnomic claims that point back to the Stoics’ preoccupation with converting worldly loss into philosophical gain. (Though this echoes Epictetus, at other times the aphorisms channel Ecclesiastes and Adorno.) Blitzing through its syllogistic logic, the language leaves the reader no time to question Nicholson’s central, unstable, François-esque thesis: “Rejection is affirmation.”
This martyrological inversion is, of course, central to Christianity, and it explains Nicholson’s leveraging of religious storytelling as an explanatory discourse in a moment when cause and effect seem scrambled. But, as Nicholson’s Eliotic poetics of reference and slip rejects vertical hierarchies of all kinds, the language of high suffering is an odd fit. Its application to the banality of, for example, teaching writing, can yield humor: “No wonder, then, that every single day the teacher’s soul is violated, spit on, laughed at, trampled underfoot. The trick is to think of these violations as a gift” (56). As the long poem keeps iterating, the inhabitation of historical structures of feeling allows for a new connection to people in the past, even as Nicholson’s high/low inversion crumples:
Sometimes I feel that I have so much to give, but no one to give it to.
In reality I have nothing to give, and anyone can have it.
*
The women of Lemnos. Clytemnestra. Judith. Lizzie Borden. Medea. I love all of you. The Danaïdes.
(58)
The speaker’s self-effacement rejects a model of personhood constituted by what one has (“I have nothing…”) in favor of an identity constituted by what one “likes” (as in the first section) and whom one loves. Nicholsonian personality is ultimately defined by habitual gestures, such as the rapid tonal pivot, and a certain intensity of identification; as such, it challenges the contemporary notion that the recompense of tribulation is a toughened, sovereign self. Ultimately, by turning to other women—not just to the literary artifacts that sometimes encase them—the poem and the book convert the threat of referentiality into an escape from recursion.
Indeed, acts of dedication to other women, at various levels, structure the book. There’s “A Crown for Iris,” which adapts a line from Murdoch, and is inscribed to the poet Hannah Brooks-Motl; another is after Jennifer Moxley; and even the brilliantly campy “Spain” ends on a note of pathos, as “each September” the speaker leaves a flower on the grave of her mother, “Doña Maria, Baronesa.” In its last three pages, April turns to Jane Gregory (also referenced in What the Lyric Is) to ask, “Jane, it’s Sara, can you / Hear me?” The moment is so striking because Nicholson’s speakers are usually recessive; this is the book’s one instance when someone named “Sara” emerges. With the appearance of “Sara” and “Jane”, the medium’s capacities simultaneously expand with novelty and narrow toward privacy. “This might not be the best / Way to communicate with you. / Are you there Jane?” (71). Theorists such as Jonathan Culler have posited apostrophe’s diaphanous conceit of presence as the core of the lyric; conversely, J. S. Mill argued that “the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” is built on a fiction of absence.[7] At this last moment in a text characterized by sly reference, Nicholson breaks from these familiar models of poetic speech, dependent on audiences abstracted (Culler) or internalized (Mill), to suddenly estrange readers into interlopers. We realize how these poems’ indeterminate speakers—defined by what they inhabit and how they move, rather than firm identity—had allowed for a transhistorical intimacy, as in “The Goatherd and the Saint.” Similarly, a difficult-to-scan speech rhythm grinds over the poem’s faint but careful tetrameter, making Nicholson’s meter sensible only in the moment of its loss. The reorientation, at this point in the collection, is so complete that it flips the rest of the book inside out like a glove, as we’re left wondering if we’ve been reading for the wrong values. We took Nicholson’s impersonality and Spenserian artifice at face value, hearing irony and self-delighting pleasure, when it was a two-way radio all along—a technology that allows you to check in with, to care for your friends who are far away. But the poem and the book enact that communication by musing on childhood and the music of crickets—“a work song native / To evening”—before ending on a prayer enjambed across two sections: “until we /// Come anew” (72–3). This is high lyric out of Archilochus and Sappho, Keats and Pound, and it represents Nicholson’s ability to further charge her smart, melancholy beauty with a capacity for tenderness. If we readjust our readings of poems to highlight people and the care of them and go back to the book’s proem, we can see how the referential pronouns Nicholson has left open allowed us also, as readers, to join the “whisper network” in the heart of “Poetryland”:
A little songbird
Who is frightened of the moon
She hears me say it to you
Who listen, I hear her
Who hears me too.
(26–7, 1)
There aren’t people here, quite, but there are people-shaped pronouns, slippery commas, and well-worn lyric tropes that grow vital again as, in the silence between lines, the web of quietly subversive relations they’re embedded in readjusts.
Notes:
[1] Jane Gregory, introduction for Sara Nicholson given at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, April 24, 2023.
[2] Sara Nicholson, The Living Method (Brooklyn, NY: The Song Cave, 2014), 5.
[3] Sara Nicholson, What the Lyric Is (Brooklyn, NY: The Song Cave, 2016), 60.
[4] T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, eds. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 106, original italics.
[5] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 107–8.
[6] Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), xvi, 74.
[7] Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 211–43. J. S. Mill, “What is Poetry?,” The Monthly Repository 7 (January 1833): 64.