Contributor’s Marginalia: Jennifer Barber responding to Ben Gucciardi’s poems “A Poem Wants You to Be Broken” and “A Poem Wants You to Be Whole”

When I first came across Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem “A Poem Wants You to Be Broken” in issue #39, I got no further than the title. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “is that true?” This was before I had noticed that a second Gucciardi poem appears on the facing page.

The opening lines of “A Poem Wants You to Be Broken” are “At ease the mind is free of need / for poetry. In owl song, / it hears owl song.” So there’s the problem: if the mind is at ease, if life is going along smoothly, why would you seek out a poem at all? As for owl song: what could be wrong with experiencing reality as it is? But owl song as owl song eliminates metaphor—the means by which we come to grips with one thing in terms of another, and have access to the associations each part of the metaphor evokes.

The poem continues to makes its case, telling us to come to poetry “broken and alone.” If we do, the poem can open our clenched fist to show us the feather we’ve been holding “all along,” a feather that might remind us of Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is that thing with feathers.” Light and air flow in through the space our brokenness provides.

Convinced by the first poem’s argument, I was taken aback by the title of Gucciardi’s second poem, “A Poem Wants You to Be Whole.” Really? Didn’t he just say….But again the poet expertly makes his case. If readers are obsessed with their own personal torments, how can they pay the right kind of attention to a poem’s beauty and artistry?

This second poem, employing rhyme throughout, invites us into its “small, lavish palace.” And then—I didn’t see this coming—it unrolls a scroll for our delight, one that depicts “in black ink / a figure / in a rice field, a river / twisting south toward Beijing.” We have to be liberated enough from ourselves to be able to enter the scene, to merge with the figure in it. The poem isn’t trying to heal us. We’re free to take from it what we will, and it’s free to leave us at any time. I love the concluding imagery, in which “…the words / slip through your mind like wind / through silver leaves.”

It’s unusual to have a poem state an argument in its title, and startling to have a pair of poems in close proximity take on opposite perspectives. They fit together like two hemispheres. I’ll carry them forward in my reading, writing, and teaching, putting the question of brokenness and wholeness to other poems, and asking myself how a single poem might encompass both.