Contributor’s Marginalia: Eric McHenry on “Rigidity” by Amit Majmudar

In a brilliant essay called “Another Way of Breaking the Pentameter,” Stephen Kampa uses the term “disguised form” to describe poems that take pains to conceal their structural complexity—a Shakespearean sonnet chopped into 28 lines, for example, or a poem whose rhymes are so distant as to be inaudible.

At first, “Rigidity” looks like it’s going to be one of those. It opens with a pair of perfect iambic pentameters broken across two tercets:

The spider / knows the window / screen he picks
his way / across is nowhere / he could live.

But that turns out merely to be a feint in the direction of disguised form. The rest of the poem is much looser, metrically, with an incidental pentameter here or there but nothing systematic. “Rigidity” isn’t an elaborately patterned poem pretending not to be, after all; it’s a poem pretending to be an elaborately patterned poem pretending not to be.

But that turns out to be a deception, too. Hiding among the many internal rhymes and assonances is a pair of couplets: The poem is composed of four end-rhymed sentences. They’re full rhymes (“live”/“give,” “done”/“spun”), and each sentence spans exactly one more stanza than the sentence before it: two, three, four, and five tercets. So the distance between the rhymes grows, and as the poem progresses it seems to be both circling back on itself and spiraling outwards. Majmudar has laid down his lines in a series of ever-widening, almost-invisible rings. A spider lives happily in this poem, and for good reason.

It’s a pretty obsessive approach to form for a poem who seems skeptical of obsessions with form. But there’s no contradiction there. A spider web isn’t an argument against premeditation or symmetry. How could it be? Show me a spider opposed to those things and I’ll show you… well, something that’s not a spider (possibly a daddy longlegs). “Rigidity” is a critique of rigidity only—of form without function, of webs that are inflexible because the web-maker was. The spider, like the poet, hopes to spin lines with enough tremble, spit, and give to ensnare its unsuspecting prey. Majmudar’s poem, with its hidden template and surface tensility, gets the killing done.

Richard Wilbur is the author of the only other poem I know about a small creature traversing a window screen: Like “Rigidity,” the marvelous “A Measuring Worm” is a short lyric in tercets, although Wilbur’s are syllabic haiku with an a/b/a rhyme scheme. Wilbur is also the only contemporary poet I can think of who was sometimes accused of making his poems “too perfect”—all right angles, no rough edges. (He may have been the only poet masterful enough in fixed forms to invite such criticism.) Randall Jarrell’s early assessment was typical: “[Wilbur’s] impersonal, exactly accomplished, faintly sententious skill produces poems that, ordinarily, compose themselves into a little too regular a beauty—there is no eminent beauty without a certain strangeness in the proportion.”

I can’t say whether Wilbur is one of the “brilliant / & distant / & orderly” minds that “Rigidity” has in mind. I certainly don’t think Majmudar is accusing the late master of passing wire mesh off as gossamer. But I do know that he’s always up to seven or eight different kinds of mischief in his poems. And if there’s one thing I remember from Charlotte’s Web, it’s that spiders are good sources of commentary on Wilbur.

Of course it’s worth remembering that Majmudar’s spider is wrong—amusingly, endearingly wrong— about the window screen. It’s a successful barrier, not a failed trap. The spider even acknowledges this, unwittingly, when he allows that any “gnat / or midge” is “sure to // stop / short at this / grid.” He’s applying the principles of his profession, which is web design, to someone else’s, and is sounding a little oblivious in the process. It’s the sort of mistake animals often make in jokes. (What did the elephant say to the naked man? “How do you eat with that thing?”) “Rigidity” may also be a critique of critics—specifically those who assume that every artist’s designs are identical to their own, or ought to be.