Contributor’s Marginalia: Stephen Kampa responding to Sandra Meek’s “Even-Steven, v.”

I would be lying if I denied that one of the pleasures of responding to Sandra Meek’s “Even-Steven, v.” was acknowledging my serendipitous titular appearance, and this despite the fact I am a PH-Stephen rather than a V-Steven (a crucial distinction). Meek’s poem skitters from sound to sound through a carefully calibrated syntax, funambulistically walking the narrowest of lines before arriving at a conclusion both intelligent and wise. The poem exemplifies a subgenre I would call the Word-Study Poem: these are the poems that simultaneously celebrate and interrogate a particular piece of the language, savoring its resonances. (As far as other practitioners go, Heather McHugh comes to mind. So does Kay Ryan.) A poem this rich with music and wit reminds us how much can be packed into a single word.

For my own Word-Study Poem, I chose the work “meek,” of course, and while I know I have not even approximated the excellence of Sandra Meek’s poem, I found myself happy to meditate on a word I was surprised to discover I had never used in a poem. This was particularly surprising because of my childhood spent in the Evangelical tradition, where meekness is a celebrated virtue rather than the reason one gets cut in line. Perhaps the biggest surprise was discovering the way Biblical meekness reaches its apotheosis in the crucifixion: one knows it, of course, growing up in the tradition, but to discover it again through the divagations of a Word-Study Poem brought into focus how meekness becomes the point of connection for the people who suffer—the last in line, the unlovely, the ones who turn the other cheek—and the God who has been there, as well.

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Meek

Often overlooked,
antique yet persistent, this lean lexeme hums and cheeps
                                        and clicks and proves not
all four-letter words
carry a smell. Mouthed infrequently, mustered weekly,
                                        it haunts the checkout
line when someone cuts
in front of me, their seventeen items clearly more
                                        than the express lane
would call for. (Believe
me, I count.) Back in my bar-jam days, I played all those
                                        obligatory
single-verse solos,
succinct, tasteful, staid, tame: at the time, the musicians
                                        praising me made me
idolize restraint,
presenting silence as its own technique and as much
                                        a part of music
as syncopated
triplets or streams of sixty-fourth notes; and their advice,
                                        their tacit critique
of the showboating-
yet-chic virtuosity of the sheets-of-sound crowd,
                                        has stood me in good
stead these twenty years,
yet didn’t I suspect my low-key phrases and sleek
                                        licks were the relics
of playing it safe,
of being meek? Still, even amateurs distinguish
                                        two varieties
of the species: this
over-malleable, modest corner-hunkerer
                                        listening a blue
streak, and that other
recognized in Biblical Greek—earth-inheritor,
                                        the compassion-clothed
chosen, born yokel,
bread-hungerer, the finally fed, the finally
                                        satisfied, the seek-
first-the-kingdom geek
who knows, like any true Jesus freak, the kingdom is
                                        where the first and last
swap places, where pearls
of great price and field-concealed riches call you to sell
                                        everything you own,
where mustard seeds blaze
to bird-room-and-board branches of extravagant size,
                                        where banquets are thrown
for any beggar
on the street, and where the God so goddamn meek he was
                                        murdered mockishly
before his mother’s
eyes will turn to us uncalled for and wipe every tear
                                        from every turned cheek.