I'M NOT SLEEPING WITH MADELINE MILLER BUT I MIGHT AS WELL BE

A thanks-giving for the poetry of the novel, brought to you by LitCafe🔥

Poets aren’t the only ones who make poetry. There are for example the poetries of street signs in foreign countries, and particularly good shopping lists.

“Swiss street sign poem,” 2017

There is the poetry of coming across the lone bullet-point find alpacas in your notebook from decades ago, and wondering who inside you wrote that, and feeling quite fond of that person, who is both still here and not.

There is the poetry of the kindergartner who stands on his head, having thrown his underwear at yours, and says, “Grief is a tiny river with lots of water in it.”

And then there is the poetry of story.

Some people have it. I do not. When my children ask for “A danger story! How about the headless horseman?” at bedtime, I am courageous and decide to give it a try. Then I proceed to pith myself and everyone around me with a string of the boringest phrases I’ve ever heard, leaning into each “and thennnnnn” to buy myself time to come up with the next shitty idea.

Then there’s my husband, who manages to spin phrases into the dark of the children’s germy little room that engage and inspire their germy little brains. Phrases like, “And do you think Ichabod, a learned man, a fancy man, believed silly stories like that?” (No! They shout, willing as hot pie, that’s silly!) Yeah, he’s got the poetry of narrative.

And we all know what narrative is, more or less. But what do I mean when I say “poetry”? Am I referring to all pretty and incomprehensible things, or just the extra-crusty ones that crouch in the yew bushes outside your high school English classroom, ready to stab your dignity full of holes with red pens?

Well, these features—“prettiness” and “incomprehensibility”— are commonly associated with poetry, but we might do well to call them something more like “beauty” and “resistance to immediate and full comprehension” instead. There’s often beauty in the unspooling of poetry, and there’s often a certain level of effort required to receive it fully, on account of how the words are functioning a little bit more radioactively than usual. But whatever conclusions your high school trauma-scape led you to, this isn’t actually because poets are assholes.

It’s because the utterances of poetry have usually been distilled beyond where we tend to take words in everyday life, and so some participation might be required of us— a little bit of time and effort, some patience, and/or a bit of vulnerability, say, in order to ease the muscle of a poem’s taut being open and loose its full power. That very difficulty that calls for our attentiveness and participation is part of how poetry is able to do what it does best, which, as I see it, is to go beyond the ability of words to signify.

Why would you want to go beyond where words can signify? Isn’t that a little bit like saying “I’m going to put wheels on this car so it can go where wheels can’t go”? Not really. It’s not nonsense to use something to go beyond its own capacity, if you understand, for example, that we’re all mortal. We are comprised, in these bodies, almost entirely of limits. So it makes ferocious sense to me that we would be invested in using our abilities to transcend the limits of those abilities.

There’s something about poetry that speaks from and to this very place of paradox, from our simultaneous limitation on the one hand, and, on the other, the ability to sense, imagine, and experience all that lies beyond.

So a few days ago, when I was mulling over what poem I wanted to work with next, and my children started chucking books at me from a little free library at the orchard farm stand, and Circe by Madeline Miller was one of them, I was clobbered by the reminder that this particular novel, about an immortal, is one of the finer experiences of poetry I’ve had.

Since it’s a novel, and I struggle to get through even a few lines of an actual poem before the actual cows come home, I’ll just choose a few sentences to luxuriate in. But you should know that each sentence in this 385-page book bears and blooms a similar, shining potential.

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Part I: The meanings of words? Bah, mere cherries on top

“When I was born,” the novel opens, “the name for what I was did not exist.”

From the very first words of the book, music, or the sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience of sound, is established as primary. We are inside a song. This is fitting, given that the earliest performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey were, as poems, sung.

Miller clears her throat with “When I was born,” hooking into the fabric of an exact time and place, and then unspools a perfect phrase of iambic pentameter¹: “the name for what I was did not exist.”

What functional importance can iambic pentameter really have in a novel? Well, let me put it to you this way: what meaning can anything have if it is not also an experience?

Iambic pentameter unfolds as a specific constellation of sensation, emotion, and intellectual engagement inside our bodies. It does this by doing several things. First, the five-ness of it has a very satisfying, authoritative feel, in part because it contains enough stresses to feel like song. (Usually four stresses or beats will set up a song-like experience pretty handily.) And then it passes the song-mark with one further beat, or stress, as though to make clear that it contains not just the fluidity of music’s recurring pleasure, but also the more vertical, structural affirmations of active thought. There’s a certain learnedness to pentameter that nonetheless somehow refrains from becoming stodgy. One might call it the sound of wisdom. Plus, you can’t be a square if you’re working in fives. (Ha.)

So, in a matter of one sentence, our heroine has been set up as possessing both the seduction-to-surrender trajectory of musical fluidity and a lively, responsive intellect.

And that’s before you even look at what the words themselves mean! When we do look at their standard meanings in this opening passage, we read the phrase, “the name for what I was did not exist,” and we understand a certain part of the story: that this is a character who came into being unmet by an accurate designation for her “type” to help her interact with the world, and be understood, in a particular manner. Without a “name for what [she] was,” she is adrift and alone, in many ways— but also at the necessary precipice of invention.

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