What the life was reaching for
The same reading I give a failing draft, turned on the years that made this house.
For a while now I have kept a second publication, a few streets over from this one. It is called The Cutting Room, and its business is the reach that does not hold — specifically, the failure of poems to reach what they want to say. Each week I put a draft on the slab, almost always one of my own, name the exact mode by which it fails, and make the cut. Readers who found me there know nothing of this place. Readers who found me here may not know that place exists at all. I have kept the two apart for these first months, and I have started to suspect that the keeping-apart was itself a small concealment — the very thing I diagnose in poems most weeks, practised quietly on my own working life.
Because they are not two practices. They are one practice, pointed at two different objects, and I would like — for once, and plainly — to say so.
The taxonomy I run on a poem is, underneath, a taxonomy of ways a thing can pretend.
A poem reaches for depth and produces the appearance of depth without arriving at the thing itself. There is the abstraction reaching — the draft that writes grief where it should have shown the cornflakes underfoot. There is the easy resolution, the closing line that broadens into a proverb so the poem can feel finished without having earned the finishing. There is the borrowed cadence, someone else’s music carrying lines that have no pulse of their own. And there is the one I fear most, because it is almost impossible to catch from the inside: the buried subject — the poem that is secretly about something the writer has not admitted to himself, and so writes around, fluently, at length, and never towards.
A few weeks ago, in that other publication, I changed the question I ask a poem. Not what is wrong with this, but what was it reaching for, and where did the reach fall short. I owe the reframe to Glyn Maxwell, who retires what is wrong with you in favour of what happened to you, and insists all the while that this is no softening. The standard does not move. What moves is that you read the poem as a creature reaching for its life in the little time it has, rather than as a defendant with a case to answer.
What I did not say, when I made that turn public over there, is where I had first learned to need it. I learned it here. I learned it in the years this publication is named for — the solitude I keep insisting is a place you pass through rather than a position you take up on a hill. The truth is duller and harder than the masthead. For a stretch of years I was a man reading his own life the way an anxious editor reads a poem: noting, framing, standing at the correct distance, declining to enter.
So let me turn the knife the other way for once, and run the taxonomy on the life instead of the draft.
The easy resolution. The account I gave of a marriage ending was clean, and had a moral, and let me feel the chapter closed. It broadened, in its last line, into something that sounded like wisdom. It was a proverb. A proverb is what you reach for when you cannot yet bear the particular, and it lets the poem — or the year — feel finished without having been lived through. I had ended on the wrong line. The repair, in a poem, is nearly always the same: cut the consolation, and sit with the plainer thing underneath it.
The speaker contemplating instead of acting. This is a failure mode I can name in four seconds in a stranger’s draft — the poem whose speaker stands at the window and observes, beautifully, and never once crosses the room. I did not see, for a long time, that I had built a life in that grammar. I watched. I described. I was excellent company at the window. The poem does not come alive until the speaker moves, and neither, it turns out, does the man.
The buried subject. The hardest, here as on the page. For years I wrote around a thing rather than towards it — around the shape of a life I had not yet let myself want, the making of a home, the people who stayed when they had every reason not to, a new house with no memory of its own that I walked into carrying all the memory it was ever going to have. I was fluent. Fluency is how the buried subject hides. The poem that will not arrive is usually the one still circling the thing it most needs to say.
Here is the principle both publications are actually built on, stated once and then left to do its work.
Behind the whole taxonomy sits a single conviction I drew from Heidegger’s Aletheia and named, years ago, in the title of an as yet unpublished collection, What Storms Disclose. Bad poetry conceals; good poetry discloses. That is the sentence The Cutting Room exists to enforce. What I had not let myself notice is that it is not a sentence about poems. It is a sentence about attention.
A life lived without attention conceals — from others, and more expensively from the person living it.
A life lived with attention discloses. The knife I take to a failing draft and the attention I have had, slowly and late, to bring to a failing stretch of my own years are not cousins. They are the same instrument. I only ever owned one.
That is why the two publications are, from today, openly the same room. The Cutting Room is where I turn the practice on the draft: the named failure, the reversible cut, the line I protect at all costs. Beyond Solitude is where I turn it on the ground under the window — landscape, inheritance, the small mechanics of a life being remade in a country that has always been between two others. Different objects. One reading. If you came for the craft and you have ever suspected that the way you revise is the way you live, the door to the other room is open. If you came for the essays and you have ever wanted to see the method with its sleeves rolled up, likewise.
I am not going to tell you the reading is comfortable. It was not, on the page or off it. But it is the only one I have found that treats the thing in front of you — the draft, the year, the house with no memory — as a creature reaching for its life, and asks the single useful question there is to ask of anything still reaching.
Not what is wrong with it.
What it was reaching for, and how to clear the way.
— Adam