Contributor’s Marginalia: Aaron Krol on “Silence is Golden” by Rochelle Hurt

How do you make a one-trick poem worth your readers’ attention? Rochelle Hurt’s “Silence is Golden—” has one trick almost from start to finish: scrambling old proverbs and maxims into odd new contortions. “[A] bird in the fist is the worth / the whole wedding,” she kicks off in line three, and hardly stops for breath again until the poem swings to a close, little blocks of cliché rearranging themselves around her voice in a flurry of creative destruction.

If you’ve got one trick, it had better be a good one, and Hurt’s rejiggering of broken-down truisms taps into one of poetry’s core pleasures: its ability to toy with our expectations about language. “Never count,” Hurt begins a sentence, and already our minds are thirty feet ahead and around the corner, only to trip when the next line serves up “your bones in the bathwater.”

The reuse of these old saws also brings with it a more purely sonic pleasure, in the cadences and rhymes that give these proverbs their staying power. Hurt has a knack for the kinds of densely-packed, unpredictable rhyme schemes that have made, for instance, Kay Ryan so popular, and there’s a childish, nursery-rhyme joy in sentences like “good / things come to those who flock together, pluck their own / feathers & stock their pots with birds of bad weather.”

Still, a clever word game does not a poem make. I have a notion that a good poem, like a good metaphor, happens when two unrelated ideas cross synapses. You might enjoy a poem once for a great image or turn of phrase, but you read it twice because something is going on in that collision that you can’t quite reconcile, though your subconscious recognizes that it coheres. Or, to answer the question I opened with—if your text has just one trick, your subtext should be waiting with a second.

In “Silence is Golden—,” the subtext is hardly a nail’s depth below the surface. As the poem opens, mothers and nuns “teach us never to appear / as smart as a man can,” and having first read that, every gendered or sexualized reference in the rush of aphorisms reads as sinister and diminishing. The clichés seem to be pushing the reader down a factory line of winning a man, marrying him, bearing his children, tending his house. Some are blatant—“You catch more men with the honey jar open”—and some, like quick references to babies or a mouth, just leave an uneasy feeling. But the cumulative weight of these little pressures gradually gives the impression that all the messages are really one message.

Well, we even have a saying for it, don’t we? A woman’s place is in the home.

The effect is all the more chilling because Hurt has reconstructed the patriarchal order from nothing but little snatches of everyday phrases: it appears baked into the fundamental units of our language. At the same time, it has to be carefully seen to, passed from generation to generation in the form of these commonplace little quips you can’t help but know. It’s no accident that the figures speaking in the poem are women themselves. The sexist tilt of American English is at once elemental, and something that makes us all complicit.

Another big tip for writing a one-trick poem is, know how to change it up. As the pressure builds and the poem leans toward its close, Hurt breaks the singsong rhythm of her language and lets her mutilated maxims give voice to her own frustration: “Left idle, one hand just watches the other / clench & unclench.” The game is varied, not abandoned, yet a shift in perspective has occurred—by the last line, Hurt has gone from parroting bad lessons to a refreshing sincerity.

And it’s worth starting again at the beginning. Having read the poem once, what are we to think of the expression that lends it its title?