Contributor’s Marginalia: Matthew Thorburn on “Faith” by Elizabeth Knapp


Little did I imagine way back in 1987 that someday I’d read a poem expressing nostalgia for George Michael’s “Faith”—let alone suppose that after reading the poem I’d feel the creeping pull of nostalgia myself. Then again, I was only an eighth grader at St. Gerard’s School when the album was released. There was much to come I couldn’t imagine. But it’s true: I read Elizabeth Knapp’s poem “Faith” in 32 Poems and quickly felt myself sliding down the nostalgia tunnel. Could that song really be from thirty years ago?

“Faith” (the song) begins in an offhand way, with the kind of line you can get away with when you’re singing, but that I’d probably cut from a poem: “Well, I guess it would be nice…” But then comes the twist that excited us Catholic school kids: “…if I could touch your body. I know not everybody has got a body like you.” Knapp’s poem captures the kind of speechless awe such lyrics stirred up: “The way George Michael sang it, / even I, an apostate, believed.” She describes him leaning against “the shrine of the jukebox” and immediately I can picture the music video I saw so many times on MTV—which produces another kind of nostalgia: how many younger readers need to stop to look up the word “jukebox”?

The poet goes on to describe how Michael’s songs played a role in not just her life, but her friends’ lives too, including one “who seduced our middle-aged / Chemistry teacher to the tune / of ‘Father Figure’….” And that’s true, too, isn’t it—the way songs form the soundtrack to our lives twice over: first as we live them, then as triggers for our memories when we hear them again years later? “[A]lmost / faded now, a track on the mix- / tape of someone else’s youth,” Knapp writes of another George Michael song: “One More Try,” which the friend listened to repeatedly after her liaison with the teacher led to him being fired.

I keep returning to Knapp’s wonderful poem because it feels like a keyhole (or maybe an ear bud) through which I can reconnect with these kinds of teenaged memories. I remember the song, can even sing parts of it, without ever really being a George Michael fan: the song was ubiquitous. But I also keep rereading this poem because I’ve been writing about faith—though not in the George Michael sense—for the past several years too: about losing it and maybe finding it again, about eastern and western ideas of spirituality, about what we want to believe even when we don’t, or can’t, quite believe it. Like the music of our younger days, faith can come back suddenly, unexpectedly, carrying with it strong memories and emotions, knocking us over and slipping away again, quick as a song.