Contributor’s Marginalia: Lisa Fay Coutley on “Private Room” by Jim Daniels

Let me begin by confessing that I’m obsessed with grief, though I’m certainly not alone. Historically, poets have addressed no two themes more than love and grief (arguably the same, strange emotion on opposite sides of one coin) which makes sense, given that they are among the most confounding feelings each of us will grapple with in our lives, yet each of us will experience them in unique ways. From our earliest poems we see the driving force of grief—Gilgamesh tearing out his hair when Enkidu dies; Achilles draping himself over Patroclus’ body to protect it from the crows; Orpheus’ severed head bobbing down the Hebrus River, still singing of Eurydice, which is the perfect image to demonstrate that to write of loss is to praise the love that was while making a stay against grief.

In “Interpreting the Elegy and the Work of Mourning,” Peter Sacks shows how a poet doesn’t relinquish grief but refigures it into a relic that signifies the love, loss, and grief therein. An elegy is a poem meant to honor the dead and to convey grief, but the poems that make effective relics, in my opinion, are those that place readers in the experience of the speaker’s unique grief. Grief, as I’ve said, is complicated enough, but to trouble relic-making even more, consider Jacques Derrida’s claim that language is always already an approximation of meaning, so words can never precisely describe feeling (and there is, in my experience, no emotion more difficult to describe than grief). Grief is also a-temporal, as Dana Luciano asserts in Arranging Grief—it knows no time, and it stops progress.

A poem is a rhetorical framework built from a pattern meant to be broken at a poignant moment. Grief is the ultimate rupture in the pattern of a person’s life. We all experience it in our individual ways and differently given varying distances from the loss. How, then, can a poet make an effective relic that conveys loss and recreates the unique and visceral experience of grief, knowing that grief is an unexpected rupture in the pattern of a life and is an emotion felt in endless ways depending on the stages of mourning and is expressed using words which can only approximate? In part, by using form and structure to enact the rupture in the pattern as well as the speaker’s distance to the loss.

For example, in her poem “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes,” Emily Dickinson describes the way a heart keeps beating in the face of great pain, even when it feels as if it should stop (as does time in mourning). Dickinson most often writes in hymn meter (8-6-8-6 syllabic), so this poem, with its 10-syllable opening line—“After great pain a formal feeling comes”—is a rupture from her typical pattern, which is its first enactment of grief. The line opens on a trochee (AFter) which feels forceful and abrupt (like news of a loss), moves into a spondee (GREAT PAIN), which slows down with those long a’s and masculine ends and hits the ear hard (as immense hurt hits the heart), then picks up iambs and a traditional, formal meter (enacting a heart’s “formal feeling” and beat). Brilliant.

Similarly, Jack Gilbert enacts grief in various ways. In “Finding Something” he uses figurative language to enact the confusion his speaker feels as he cares for his dying wife and is unable to name his emotion: “I say moon is horses in the tempered dark / because horse is the closest I can get to it.” In “Michiko Dead” he employs 3rd person POV (creating greater distance, suggesting a later stage of mourning) and an epic simile (taking us out of the action of the story/life) of a man carrying a box, as one navigates carrying grief, in a poem one line short of a sonnet (showing something is missing without his love). Wielding various craft devices means creating different distances, enacting varying stages of mourning unique to those experiences of grief.

As a mother, I feel confident saying there is no greater grief a human can experience than the loss of—or the threat of losing—a child. Nothing consumes a mind like that worry. Poems born of that concern are among the most complicated to craft, especially if—like me—you ascribe to the idea that a poem’s content should dictate its form, though Jim Daniels makes it look easy in “Private Room” by employing (and purposefully breaking) the villanelle’s fixed form and enacting via repetition the speaker’s anticipatory grief and deep-seated fear for his bedridden, teen daughter.

The villanelle is an ideal form for exploring loss (clearly Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop, et al, would agree), given the refrains which lend themselves to obsession and progression yet with the possibility of circling and ending without resolution, as well as the musicality which, when used in a poem exploring dour material, creates necessary tension. Upon first glance, however, a reader might not identify “Private Room” as a villanelle since Daniels hasn’t broken the poem into its expected five tercets and final quatrain. Instead, the poem is one, block stanza—

My daughter got sick and nearly died—
fall of ninth grade. She combed her hair out.
I kissed her goodbye and goodnight
every time I left, and she had no choice,
attached to grim tubes, prone, ashen.
My daughter sick and nearly dying
of embarrassment as doctors probed
the mystery and fought among themselves.
I missed her goodbyes and goodnights.
We watched an old movie from child-
hood. No game shows or reality. Fourteen.
My daughter. Sick with worry she
would die, I slept on the floor and wept.
I threw ice packs at her to stop the tremors,
then kissed her, since I could. Goodnight
seemed insufficient. So did I. No curfew
in that moonless room without boys.
My daughter got sick. Death passed her by—
I snuck her home. We did not kiss. Goodnight.

This doesn’t mean that the poem’s form isn’t important. In fact, denying the poem breathing room between stanzas adds to the gravity and density of the poem, thereby enacting its emotion. What could make it harder to breathe than this constant worry? What could feel heavier? Daniels also fragments syntax (“Fourteen. / My daughter.”) and forgoes all but the A-refrain rhyme, lessening the musicality, stripping the villanelle of its easy fluidity. While the tension of melancholy against music is missing, the poem gains tension through a weightier form and a secondary loss and grief.

The speaker’s immediate concern is his daughter’s illness, though this experience foregrounds the loss every child and parent must face during adolescence—she is no longer daddy’s little girl, ready (or able) to hop up on his lap and kiss him goodnight. The teen years mean a new distance between parent and child, and by removing the space and distance in the poem’s expected form, the tight fist of the stanza against the unspoken distance between them both emphasizes that loss and shows how in this time of anticipatory grief that boundary is temporarily inapplicable. Until the poem’s final line.

The second refrain—“I kissed her goodbye and goodnight”—which Daniels alters with each use to show the ways in which the boundary is set, crossed, and set again, points toward Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.” A villanelle refrain ending with “goodnight” is enough to call to mind the son’s plea to his father not to go, though of course here the dynamic is reversed, and the father never pleads. We know from line one his daughter won’t die, and the past tense creates the distance necessary to feel this grief as less of a threat, even if we do sense the father’s helplessness and frantic gestures—“I threw ice packs … I snuck her home”—when met with her helplessness—“attached to grim tubes, prone, ashen.” Instead, the refrain exposes an intimacy lost between father and daughter and heightened by the fact that for a moment he has been able to bridge the distance once again.

The speaker admits: “I missed her goodbyes and goodnights.” This, the only line in the poem that is its own, full-end-stopped sentence, draws attention to itself as a rupture in the poem’s pattern and points toward the loss that lingers even after “Death passed her by.” This loss is at the heart of the poem—erased for a moment in the wake of a greater, possible loss, then acknowledged, mourned, and welcomed in the end, as read through the final, changed refrain: “We did not kiss. Goodnight.” This can be read as a painful break, indicated by fragmentation (not—We did not kiss goodnight), though this final gesture, in its broken syntax, creates an ambiguity that reveals the complexity of the speaker’s grief. He accepts (and likely rejoices for) the renewed boundary; they “did not kiss” because she has agency again and can leave “that moonless room without boys,” but the temporary closeness her sickness has allowed is gone again. His final “Goodnight.” is spoken to that bond (between child and parent), to the daughter, and to the reader—as likely to respond as a teenage girl—though it seems to be a mixed farewell—a final goodbye to his child’s youth and to himself as the only man (and possible hero) in her life, and the relief that this is, in fact, a very good night.