Contributor’s Marginalia: Caleb Braun responding to Stephen Kampa’s “Kampa’s Guide to Flowers”

The poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
                    —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
          His ineffable effable
          Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.
                    —T. S. Eliot, “The Naming of Cats,” from Old Possum’s
                    Book of Practical Cats, 1939

Ironically enough, the idea of the poet as the “first namer” may sound cliché now—being, as we are, pretty far from the invention of most names. Still, occasionally a poet comes along to remind us how exciting that job can be. Like Eliot’s poem, Stephen Kampa’s “Kampa’s Guide to Flowers” revives an overused symbol (a flower, in his case, rather than a cat) and teaches us to think of it with a new language and under new names.

In the first few stanzas we encounter not only a playful, assured speaker, but one of keen awareness. Kampa’s self-confident title makes the poem initially seem low-stakes, imitative of a typical kind of field guide or how-to book: Joe’s Guide to National Parks, Hannah’s Guide to Adulting, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Steak. However, Kampa’s poem is, we soon realize, not simply a guide to identifying flowers. Rather, via visual and emotional similes, the poem is a guide to the flowers’ symbolic gestures, their “exchange rates,” their place in human expression. Further, as we move through the variety of symbolic flowers, the seriousness of such representation enlarges: from children’s drawings to cartoonists’ to the impressionists’; from apology to trouble to God.

Tone establishes expectation—like Frost’s voices behind the door, whose sounds, even if we can’t make out the words, signal if there’s joy or trouble on the other side. Kampa’s poem begins imitative, whimsical, and authoritative with its title and matter-of-fact, clinical suggestions about identifying children’s drawings of flowers. One feels intrigued and entertained, though ultimately at ease.

But as we reach the final sentence, Kampa charms us by breaking that expectation of whimsy, and, like most interesting poems, shifting the register and tone. The speaker moves his attention from commonly depicted flowers—roses, tulips, daisies—to flowers that “nobody / would bother to draw or paint.” The stakes are heightened as naming takes on eternal importance. Such flowers, Kampa suggests, are “probably God’s handiwork.” Why is this so? The most non-descript, artless flowers are raised to the highest importance in Kampa’s world. Naming and identification, Kampa (and Eliot) realize, is quite a serious business, and sometimes serious business can only begin somewhere seemingly silly. The title, which at first was boisterous and mock-serious, becomes by the final stanza somber. One can’t help but sense Kampa’s appearance in the title as more than just humor; perhaps, instead, it is an attempt at preservation.

Unexpectedly, the poem turns at the end toward loss, but not the tired, melodramatic kind. Instead, a Dickinsonian “Heavenly Hurt” arises from the poem’s process of identification. In the final stanza, it’s hard not to think of our own names, our own “forgettable” lives across the vastness of time. The poem’s end recalls that biblical adage: “all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.” This, the universal human condition: the longing for identification and meaning amidst the inevitable loss of that meaning. As the penultimate stanza flamboyantly suggests, names can only approximate, no matter how fun they are to say. But for Kampa, as for any poet, the belief that a “true” and “secret name” was given by “God alone” to each thing is somehow enough to continually reinvigorate poetic invention, the act of naming, even “across centuries of forgettable fields.”