Commentary Diary: Shane McRae, 'For Melissa Asleep Upstairs'
A close look at a short poem about mouse shit
Every so often in my life I have tried to keep a commentary diary. I mean would write a short essay offering a reading of a poem, for my own purposes. I want to resume this practice and I will try to post as many of these as I can on here, as I try to re-ground myself in poetry.
I’ve felt very distant from it for reasons that probably have as much to do with disappointment as age, hitting a wall with own attempts with the medium. Recently, poetry has seemed small, often, a tiny imitation of a big noise. My attention has been incapable of holding it. But for better or worse I’ve built most of my adult life around it. So I thought I would write about some individual poems and why I found them worth attending to, and what I think they’re doing.
This one is from Shane McRae’s most recent collection Cain Named the Animal. The book was pretty good. I enjoyed it, and the long sort of extension or continuation of the ‘Hell Poem’ from his last book is very compelling. The poem here, ‘For Melissa Asleep Upstairs’ is not exactly representative of McRae’s work, but contains most of the book’s usual tics, while being short and lovely, and therefore optimised for the kind of thing I’m about to do here:
Midwinter spring a mouse since we
Have risen some from poverty
It’s not a rat flies everywhere
Above my head below your bod-
y in the ceiling in the floor
I pick its shit from the countertop
And late don’t say anything
The only part of my mind not
Flying in your talk then being the part
That keeps the shit from you false spring
Undecorates the eaves and boughs
The animals can’t find their season
Though it is everywhere now life fills even
The shadows in this house
As you can see, it’s a little lyric poem in a sort of loosely rhymed iambic tetrameter. I’m not going to talk about the metre too much, though I will get pedantic in other ways, because I want to talk more about the other features that seem to me to be more representative of contemporary American prosody. In fact, these irk me a little, but I think that talking about them will show how effective they can be, in the hands of McRae here, for example. The major modern-seeming contributor to the poeminess of the poem is pretty obvious if we look at the opening:
Midwinter spring a mouse since we
Have risen some from poverty
It’s not a rat flies everywhere
Above my head below your bod-
Y in the ceiling in the floor
You probably notice the absence of punctuation. If it were prose, I might punctuate it like this ‘Midwinter spring, a mouse—since we have risen some from poverty, it’s not a rat—flies everywhere above my head.’ Or perhaps ‘Midwinter spring, a mouse—since we have risen some from poverty, it’s not a rat. Flies everywhere above my head…’ But like all of the other poems in the book, and others by McRae and others by others, there’s no punctuation.
On average punctuation has been declining in American poems—and British— precipitously over the last 50 odd years. It’s sort of amusing to see that modern grammatical anarchy and the random spacings paired with the almost reactionary majusculation (the capitalization of the first word of lines) and the proper metre. But it’s that grammatical disorder that makes the poem hard to immediately grasp. And this is sort of the point. The poetic quality, the strangeness or difficulty that people so often associate with modern poetry, comes from this absence of the normal organising elements. This is, if anything, rather predictable as a way of making the poem surprising. The presence of a traditional accentual syllabic metre is much odder, but it doesn’t seem, weirdly, as ‘poetic’.
The freeform grammar thus, because it makes the visible a little hard to see, as Wallace Stevens once put it, acquires a general poetic aura; but it does also serve a specific purpose here. We are forced to compose the meaning ourselves, and also to live with the strangeness of possible combinations. How can a mouse be spring? Is the mouse springing? Are there flies everywhere or is it the mouse that is flying? Is the mouse scuttling around on the ceiling or are flies buzzing up there? We can’t really say.
Uncharitably, you could say this is a kind of pointless trick. An attempt to make fairly trivial elements like spacing and layout work to provide the conceptual thickness that rewards our attention. Poems thrive on ambiguity, but I don’t know if I always want ambiguities to be introduced in this fashion. If you put a hyphen in the word at-one, so that we are forced to think more about atonement, you’re putting your thumb on the scale a bit too much for my taste, for example. The equivalent of reading any old shit out breathily so it sounds poetic.
No one gets annoyed about this kind of thing anymore, at least not in public. But poetry used to have readers who might get particularly mad about the line break after ‘bod/-y,’ which forces a split between the way we apprehend the poem aurally, and the way we read it, making something that would be easy to listen to hard to read. It allows you access to an off-rhyme with ‘countertop’, but at what cost? In that sense, it’s a gimmick. And so often, when I read contemporary poetry, my suspicion that something is a gimmick is activated. Oh cool, man, there’s no punctuation. That’s deep. Oh cool, it’s in two columns, oh cool, you’ve modelled it on a shape.
But all of those critiques of gimmicks could apply just as well to George Herbert. So, it might be better to slow down, and as with Herbert, ask, how could we see it as not a gimmick? What if the trick is wedded to the kinds of things the poem is trying to say? In fact, the poem, as I read it, is partly about the porousness of certain boundaries. The beginning, ‘Midwinter spring’, already shows us that our distinctions are breaking down. There are distinctions that the speaker wants to preserve; he has risen from poverty, and so the mouse is not a rat. Whether this distinction is euphemistic, or a consequence of what neighbourhood of New York you live in, I can’t say, but we know that this boundary is drawn. Yet it’s also undrawn; the mouse is here, reminding him of the rat, of poverty. It is on the floor and the ceiling at the same time, upstairs, downstairs. A common metaphorical class marker.
On the one hand, then, the poet sees himself as preserving order. He picks the shit off the countertop, keeps the house tidy, and tries to eliminate traces of what seems like the trauma of a past life. But when he picks the shit off the countertop, the metre of the poem breaks down. Chaos shakes the poem a little, and the poet lets it; he speaks to his lover in a way that lets her know a little indirectly that he is shaken, too
I pick its shit from the countertop
And late don’t say anything
The only part of my mind not
Flying in your talk then being the part
That keeps the shit from you…
The flicker in the meter here is caused by the mouse shit, suddenly we’re in a more prosey world. This is the world that the beloved of the poem deserves better than. But is the poem necessarily the best way to do that? Keeping the shit from ‘Melissa’, we could read, after all, as dishonesty, but in this deliberate ambiguity, between cleaning house and hiding things, the collapse of that distinction, we see a pattern of affectionate behaviour, attempts to spare the beloved, perhaps, the worst of oneself, even if that might not be what any lover wants. And yet, of course, he is putting it into a poem for her.
In a way then, we might read it as him saying that he can be disturbed with her, that he can be honest with her.
And he is disturbed. The whole world is disturbed. Starting with the seasons:
false spring
Undecorates the eaves and boughs
The animals can’t find their season
Though it is everywhere now life fills even
The shadows in this house
We don’t know if false spring is false hope or a clear sign of, say, climate breakdown, but we can see that whatever it means its ambiguity disturbs order. It’s a lovely word ‘undecorates’, don’t you think? And that’s kind of what the poem does. It makes the house that the poet is cleaning seem… run down, a little, yes, but also not decorative. Not fake. The shit is not hidden. The order of the house contains a little chaos, contains a little life, and that is something real, shared between the poet and his beloved, even if that life is shadow and trauma, a range of hard life events detailed elsewhere in the book, and across his oeuvre.
Life is something of an ambiguous term for McRae here. In the poem ‘worldful’, he asks ‘what life does not have to be reduced to be imagined’. That question might be answered here; the imaginary order of the poem gestures to the lively disorder of the poet’s mind. We are presented with a reduction of complexity into a pattern: that he can’t find his season, is torn between present and past, and yet carries on, making a home. Life is too complex to apprehend as order, and yet we want to see beauty in it, and we can do that by toggling between order and disorder. The poem’s order is made more beautiful because it coexists with the disorder of life.
That question ‘what life does not have to be reduced to be imagined’, you might have noticed, doesn’t contain any punctuation. I talked about the absence of punctuation in a lot of poems as maybe a cheap trick. If it’s a way of putting your thumb on the scale a little so that people notice an extra ambiguity, then we ought to disapprove, I think. This behaviour seems to me to be illegitimate, against the rules of the game, which ought to be to generate the necessary break from prose under the conditions of the strictest prose.
But I suppose so much of the poetic comes dangerously close to this kind of cheating. The tiny cognitive pause of the line break, the cheap connection of rhyme. I do think that it is easier to suspend disbelief in the non-salience of unusual or non-prosaic elements when it comes to certain features than others. The absence of grammar can seem faddish, while metre can seem fusty, but when they work, as I think they work here, they both show a kind of faith in the poet’s ability to make prose seem like just another constraint, just another reduction. A life cannot be reduced simply to prose; it also contains the feeling of wanting to make order, of wanting to clean things up a little. The absence of grammar and the presence of rhythm is, for McRae’s purposes, an effective trick, and in this case the magician has managed to fit a flying mouse up his sleeve.