Contributor’s Marginalia: James Arthur on “Stroll the Venice Canals” by Jessica Piazza

“Stroll the Venice Canals” immediately caught my attention with its confident first line: “A simulacrum of a copy of a Saturday …” That dry double remove (“a simulacrum of a copy”) makes it clear that the poet has an analytical sensibility, but there’s also something luxurious, even reckless about the unbroken surge of those first seven iambs. And maybe there’s a plaintive note, too; instead of rising, the iambs seem to tumble into a fading, falling rhythm.

I love encountering that kind of emotional ambiguity in poems, and it’s a difficult quality to create, both on a technical level (Piazza seems to be in full command of both rhythm and rhetoric) and on an emotional level: to create meaningful ambiguity, you have to resist your own intelligence, your own wish to interpret. For every claim you put forward, you have to at least accept the possibility of a counter-claim.

As it turns out, “Stroll the Venice Canals” is also thematically concerned with the resisting of intelligence. The narrator understands that Venice has been built on “years of disrepair … neglect that led to concrete fills, closures, / ruins, experiments that failed,” but she wants to suspend this awareness so that she and the person to whom the poem is addressed can walk there, hand in hand in spring, and believe that everything is good.

What is the poem saying? That we create a false reality for ourselves because we’re hungry for it? That we can enjoy the present moment only if we turn our eyes away from history? Maybe the poet is suggesting that the love between these two people can work only if they avoid reexamining past mistakes. If the Saturday in this poem is “a simulacrum of a copy of a Saturday,” does that mean that the lovers are stuck in an artificial world, a Groundhog-Day version of Venice where nothing can ever change?

Maybe the poet is saying all of these things, but we can’t really be sure, since “Stroll the Venice Canals” implies much more than it tells. It’s artful, evocative, and emotionally honest. Instead of fully interpreting her subject, Piazza seems to have anticipated some of the ways in which it might be interpreted, and then she’s left those avenues open for readers’ own explorations. I wasn’t familiar with Piazza’s work before reading this poem, but I plan to read more.