Two Poets Looking: “At Twenty-Eight” (GA)

The beginning of this essay was a conversation in a poetry workshop (Decolonizing Poetry) I’ve taught for a few years. While teaching poems tethered to specific ages, students analyzed and discussed various speakers, meditating on the value of experience as one grows older. As poets and people, we were all in unison about how age is truly a number when it comes to living our dreams, starting afresh, finding love, or publishing a book. This felt untrue for how I had felt turning twenty-eight this past December. A decade had passed since I moved from my hometown to another city in India, and six years had gone by since immigrating to the United States. In all these years, there was such a sense of urgency in reaching the goals—almost all centered around being a poet. In class, we discussed speakers focused on a specific moment in their life and how poems moored by an age number in the title freeze that specific time and memory—it helped me bridge the decade that lapsed my knowledge of the world. Age markers become cauldrons of memory, of a certain nostalgia, of a person one was. In poetry writing or art making, age is not just a number but a portal to the channel where we are at a certain point in time.

It is for a good reason, then, that Saturn returns (when Saturn returns to the same place in the sky as you were born, usually around twenty-eight to twenty-nine years of age) are associated with deep grief and loss of something while welcoming the new and, each year—unearthing something new about ourselves. In the poetry dream world, and in terms of age associations, as I revised my poetry collection that I started writing when I was twenty-two and sent this new twenty-eight-year-old self’s revised version to my poet-colleague Jack Vanchiere, I felt far away from realizing this poetry dream too that I have so far built a life around. But then, as I returned to look at our poetry mentor Amy Fleury’s poem “At Twenty Eight,” that immediately places the reader in a time and place on the page, I saw things in a new light. In her sonnet, Fleury (who has been my visa sponsor for many years now so that I could read and write poetry), describes a playful speaker, one that’s open to perception. Still, in the turning lines, the speaker takes control of the perception, diving into the joy of existing at this stage of their life. Fleury writes: 

But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.

She denies the reader a pitiful look towards oneself, outside understood ideas of what one must do or have achieved when they are twenty-eight, which is a refreshing return to my understanding of this age and point in my poetry life. Then, in my attempt to find linkages to other poets who had written in this tradition of time stamps, I turned to Don Welch’s poem, “At Fourteen.” The lack of control in the speaker’s headspace, but with a title that functions similarly, the speaker draws from the “You”—the reader instead of centering us in the first-person. The opening lines of the poem:

To be shy,
to lower your eyes
after making a greeting.
to know
wherever you go
you’ll be called on,
 
to fear

There is a deep sense of unsurety that comes from being an adolescent that Welch situates us in the title. The fear seeps through the speaker to the reader, which connects to this feeling. Irrespective of a reader’s teenagehood, this portrait of this fourteen-year-old takes us back to the sheer powerlessness of being in this transitional phase, especially more so in the later “rooms full of anger” that Welch leads us to.

In thinking about being or reading “At Twenty Eight” or “At Fourteen,” one can make the argument that most poems channel a certain sense of time, like Camoghne Felix’s “Born. Living. Will. Die,” where in the closing couplet, the poet says, “I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light./I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.” However, the thematic difference between an age-title poem becomes more apparent because it does a very different work of putting the reader back into their specific feeling at that age—building a direct connection to the reader’s world—which may or may not be true for where they stand at the present. Or as Walter Benjamin explains in The Arcades Project, “For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.”^[1] The age-title poem employs the usage of this “sudden emergence”—or a revelatory  moment in  the speaker’s life landscape deploying language in a way that creates an understanding of the past and the present.

Many of my students and friends who resonated with Amy Fleury’s “At Twenty Eight” were single femmes or queer people around that age who shared how they felt through this experience. Another example of a poem moored by age is Anne Sexton’s “Menstruation at Forty,” where she sets us both in the subject matter or state of mind as well as age in the title—further locating us in the specifics of time when the speaker says: “The womb is not a clock/nor a bell tolling,/ I feel the November/of the body as well as of the calendar,” hinting explicitly towards the awareness of the possible parting with something she’s lived with for so long. The usage of age in the title changes the stakes for the speaker and the reader from the first line coming into this world. Another example of this is Nissim Ezkeil’s poem, “At 62” where the speaker handles the opening of the poem by acknowledging how they already know the disadvantages of being old but are just discovering the advantages of it. There is a sense of wisdom and authority established by having lived through six decades, and the speaker’s realization of how “Death, in the distance/ and near,/ is my only halo” along with this desire to heal as much they can before this inevitable meeting. In both “Menstruation at Forty” and “At 62” there is a sense of changed time and literally, having lived.

In the Decolonizing Poetry Workshop, I asked students to spend the first fifteen minutes writing and boxing ten memories from their lives chronologically.^[2] We then added an approximate age to that specific memory box. The experience of writing to a particular age becomes intense for someone with trauma. After writing our memories, we visit other poets writing about a specific age. In the last twenty minutes of the workshop, we write our poem, picked from a memory box we built at the beginning of class. Many poets write portraits of a younger self; some even use it as a point to jump back to a repressed memory, and some speak to memory generally. In all variations, what becomes evident is the “triggering town” work of age, as employed by other poets.  

Poems and poets (around us) offer a way to portal ourselves into the specifics of a certain feeling in context. I remember reading “At Fourteen” first and thinking this is how I felt on my seventeenth birthday (a year before leaving home for ten years now) when my father got extremely upset that my best friend used the words “sexy seventeen” on her greeting card for me. For me to have revolutionized from the sheer powerlessness felt at that age to employing language in a way that continues to heal me is a reclamation—of age, memory, and girlhood. In extension of this girlhood, I think of Fleury, now Amy, and her poem as recorded poetic evidence—believing the feelings in the present of the poet writing a poem at a particular time—as her definition of twenty-eight and hold it as evidence to mine too.

I told Amy about writing this essay earlier this summer when we were perched on a park bench with her husband, Derek, in Central Park. Derek called these age poems “her signature work.” She said she’s written two new ones for her collection titled Stardust & Luck, and they are indeed later stages of her life. At this moment, I reckon that this essay itself is not only an ode to poems moored by age or memory but also to the poets themselves. Simone White, in her book, Dear Angel of Death talks about philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the function of hidden citations  in Walter Benjamin’s work, where Agamben says, “Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writing of the past and the present a similar kind of meeting transpires…” She builds on the idea that intertextuality remains across human time.^[3] This idea is central to my reading of poetry and the multigenerational conversations between poets passing these number stamps on their lives—literally and metaphorically. Poems tethered by age numbers offer a portal to return to the readers, and language continually provides redemption. More importantly, poets and their histories are indeed the critical constellations that lead us to those ideas as both readers and writers who may eventually be compelled to write our own poems. And we can only hope that when we look closely, there might be a chance alignment that can change our perspectives.

Two Poets Looking: “At Twenty-Eight” (JV)

I owe a great deal of my adult life’s joy, musicality, and growth, to the poet Amy Fleury, who taught and directed the Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at McNeese State University for over a decade. How do I express my gratitude to Amy without gushing ad nauseum? Through studying with her, I have found many of  my closest friends and met many wonderful writers and artists, two beautiful gray cats, and drunk some of Wisconsin’s finest beers. In reading Amy’s work, participating in her undergraduate and graduate workshops, and growing in friendship with her, through two catastrophic hurricanes, the pandemic, historic floods and freezes,  I have witnessed how “poetry, the word, is the only thing left to us from when we did not yet know how to speak, a dark song within language, a dialect or an idiom that we are unable to fully understand, but which we cannot but listen to—even if the house is burning, even if in their burning language people continue to talk nonsense.”^[4] In the spaces where we met, so too were others, running from floods, fires and other plagues. In all our mutual dialects, Amy’s, Gauri’s, and all the others from our time together, though we could not necessarily grasp the (lived) reality of each other’s language, we learned to (though we couldn’t not have) listen to and love the honed song of the manifold other.

When I dropped out after my first college attempt in New Orleans, where I found the joys of poetry vis-à-vis The Lockpicking Club, a group of wiley lit majors who gathered to eat pizza and read our poetry to each other, and returned to my hometown to attend the local university, I enrolled in Amy’s undergraduate poetry workshop. The Lockpickers supported each other’s writing style almost without question: this was my first experience engaging with a critical group about creative work. There, I met the litany of writers and teachers, who (for some strange reason, I imagine they asked themselves) wound up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, pursuing a deeper understanding of their poetic and fictive crafts. Even now, as I draft this essay, I am sitting in the dining room of a mutual friend, Maegan, whom I made in that first undergrad workshop space. There, and later, in my graduate studies, we practiced how to more clearly manifest the interior visionary landscape into a shareable thing, and how this literary alchemy can and does not only alter the writer’s life, but with some sympathetic magic, can reach into and change a reader’s life.

I find this magic effectively illustrated in Fleury’s “At Twenty-Eight,”  which takes the form of a perfectly pentametric sonnet. The poem utilizes enjambments with entertaining and satisfying degrees of irony, engaging in a wry sense of litote by acknowledging and subverting stereotypes about womanhood and its expectations. Line 5 references the pitfalls of love and how “at turns charmed and cursed a girl knows romance,” before breaking into line 6, to deliver these objects of romance “as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude.” Again the line breaks wonderfully, Fleury continuing this tongue-in-cheek play with romance, counting solitude as “daylight virtue.” After these clever demonstrations of the speaker’s ideas of romance, line 9 delivers the turn of the poem, reflecting on the bookish subversions, stating “But this is no sorry spinster story, / just the way days string together a life. / Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. / Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.” Here the speaker nods again towards this tongue-in-cheekiness, referring to, yet refuting, marriage, its perhaps uncouth, yet economic, non-dirtying of a bowl.

While the poem’s meter is consistent, it utilizes a subversive ABBAABBACDECDE rhyme scheme, with only off, slant, and near rhymes through the first 12 lines, and one final perfect rhyme, the E-line end words of “pan” and “can” to conclude the poem. The poem also ends where it begins, with “luck.” But whereas in line 1 the speaker claims to “get by on more luck than sense,” the end arrives with a nod to itself and its sonnet form of “a little song”, the poet “singing like only a lucky girl can.” The arrival of singing is not quite a substitute for writing, but, as the poem lives in the world of the sonnet, makes for a compelling fraternal twin. This playful blurring of the lines between writing and singing is key to allowing the poem to function so artfully. Coupled with the arrival of the poem’s sole perfect rhyme, Fleury winks and nods at the reader, displaying her control of the interplay of the poem’s form and function. Because, not despite, the lines’ breaks and their enjambments move away from stereotypes, and the rhyme scheme lacks perfection, Fleury’s speaker shows the choices were measured, displaying more sense and wisdom than pure dumb-luck in its balance of subversion of expectation, ultimately exceeding them.

The more I read this poem, the more I am stunned by its yielding simplicity, which gives way to a richer experience the more closely it is observed, how it evokes this experience of becoming twenty-eight and the associated pressures of focusing and honing in on one’s calling. Serendipitously, my colleague Gauri and I find ourselves now at the age of twenty-eight, undergoing our first Saturn returns, a time when individuals often are confronted with strict limitations of their beings from insistent reminders of the world to focus on what they are most drawn to do in their life’s journey. Mine, frankly, has been filled with hoops, hurdles, and walls, but again and again I am caught and redefined by the networks of my friends, family, and beloveds, reminders that “there can be no salvation for us as individuals; there is salvation because there are others.”^[5] While I face the limits imposed perhaps by my Saturn return, coincidentally the United States faces its own obstacles and limitations as it begins its Pluto return, whose 250 year cycle is often marked by an encounter with the ultimate limit, that of death, destruction, and total disrepair.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, and as Agamben states in When the House Burns Down “a poem written in the burning house is truer, more right, because no one can hear it, because nothing ensures that it can escape the flames. But if, by chance, it finds a reader, then that reader will in no way be able to draw back from the apostrophe that calls out from that helpless, inexplicable, faint clamor.”^[6] We feel ourselves to be increasingly inflamed, literally and figuratively, humanity’s desires volatilizing the Earth’s physical and mental climate. He continues, stating that “only someone who is unlikely ever to be heard can tell the truth, only someone who speaks from within a house that the flames are relentlessly consuming.” Hopefully we all through the grace of our others, survive this flirtation with finality, and can live through this change in order to reach a new and more expansive sense of self, one that encompasses community, where we learn to blend our voices in compassion and song, in harmony with the house, the flames, the others, and ourselves.

A MOSTLY HYPOTHETICAL ASIDE

JV: Speaking of constellations, you and Amy are something of a pair of soulmates, yeah?

GA: Yeah, it’s funny, though I wish you would stop bringing this up all the time, but yes, Amy and I have near perfectly symmetrical synastry on our birth charts.

JV: Wow, that’s pretty special and rare? I have never seen anyone with perfectly corresponding charts, born so many years apart.

GA: Yes, it’s really quite a rarity, a rarity usually saved or destined for marriage.
JV: Too bad Amy already married Derek! But there’s still time yet.

GA: Or we could just be friends….

^[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 462 [N2a, 3].

^[2] Based on a fiction workshop exercise designed by the writer Sarah Thankam Matthews.

^[3] Simone White, Dear Angel of Death (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), 78.

^[4]  Giorgio Agamben, “When the House Burns Down,” trans. Kevin Attell, Diacritics Journal,  January 26, 2021, https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/when-the-house-burns-down/. Originally published as “Quando la casa brucia,” Quodlibet, October 5, 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia.

^[5] Agamben, “When the House Burns Down.”

^[6] Agamben, “When the House Burns Down.”