Contributor’s Marginalia: Caitlin Doyle responding to Lisa Russ Spaar’s poem “Little Humanities Carol”

In her striking poem “Little Humanities Carol,” Lisa Russ Spaar combines lyric and narrative impulses to explore a range of subjects, including suffering, compassion, misfortune, endurance, cruelty, and the nature of perception. She weaves together the literal and the figurative, the abstract and the concrete, while immersing us in language that is dense with memorable imagery and sonorous echoes. Spaar starts the poem by asking readers whether “brutality” or “kindness” impacts us to a greater degree:

Brutality or kindness, which latches—bleak—
   and lingers longest after the jolt to the craw,
the bright spring of tears? It’s like the sea, …

Spaar continues the sea simile in the second and third stanzas, to which I’ll return later, but it seems important to first examine the central images here, “the jolt to the craw” and “the bright spring of tears,” in relation to the rest of the poem. Though we initially encounter the physical jolt and the effusion of tears as visceral reactions that might occur in any number of situations, Spaar prompts us in the final stanza to view those reactions as pertaining to a specific event. She inserts readers into the aftermath of a bicycle accident involving two riders. Addressing us directly with the second-person pronoun “you,” which places us in the role of one of bicyclists, she describes a scene in which “a stranger” who has “righted your bike, // your shaky heart, your book, calls over a shoulder, already, / also, up & away: Hope you’re okay!” Through her description of the accident and the stranger’s response, Spaar invites us to ponder which aspect of the human experience shapes us in a more profound manner, the “brutality” of misfortune or the “kindness” that another person might show us after we’ve dealt with a hardship.

Yet Spaar also makes it possible for us to read the situation in a different way: Perhaps the “stranger,” instead of displaying “kindness,” engages in a form of “brutality” as jarring as the accident itself. After all, though the stranger does a good deed by righting the knocked-over bike, he or she pedals in the opposite direction immediately after that, looking briefly “over a shoulder” to call out “I hope you’re okay.” The stranger doesn’t stay to make sure that the other bicyclist hasn’t endured any serious injuries, and there’s also a chance that the stranger may have caused the accident in the first place, a detail that Spaar leaves ambiguous. Does she intend for readers, placed as we are in the position of the fallen bicyclist, to hear the stranger’s “hope you’re okay” as an expression of genuine concern? Should we view that possibility as underscored by the fact that the stranger, in helping to right the bike, also rights our “shaky heart”? Or should we experience the phrase “hope you’re okay” as an inauthentic statement tossed off in haste, and does Spaar aim to point us toward that interpretation through the image of the stranger pedaling away?

The more I contemplated the stranger’s behavior, the more I sensed that probing Spaar’s use of the word “carol” in the title would help me further tease out the poem’s implications. Because most readers think of carols as connected with Christmas, a connection with which the poem doesn’t engage, I wondered: Why did she choose “carol” instead of “song,” “tune,” “melody,” “ditty,” or any number of other similar terms? This question drove me to the dictionary, where I encountered multiple definitions of “carol” as a noun, including “an old round dance with singing,” “a song of joy or mirth,” and a “popular song or ballad of religious joy,” along with a few definitions of “carol” as a verb, such as “to sing especially in a joyful manner” and “to praise in or as if in song.” Considering the nuances of the word “carol” beyond its association with Christmas spurred me to see the artful complexity behind Spaar’s decision to place “Little Humanities Carol” in the context of the carol tradition.

A case can be made that the poem evokes the look, feel, and sound of a carol through its neatly balanced stanzaic structure (which only varies once), relatively even line lengths, and colloquial language, as well as through numerous sonic repetitions that, though not perfectly regular, gesture at times toward a song-like effect. Spaar packs the language in “Little Humanities Carol” with every kind of aural reverberation, including assonance, consonance, internal rhymes, slant-rhymes, and occasional end-rhymes. The third stanza, quoted in full below, demonstrates some of these structural and sonic qualities. After presenting readers with an image of a person coming ashore in the second stanza (“the kissing crush of knees, mouth, greeting / terra firma: home at last. Home, home, yes!”), Spaar describes what happens when the tide goes out again, a “savage withdrawal” of water from the shore:

… shells, frags, paltry stone pelting the proverbial heel,
   as, naked & slick, the astonished sand
stares back, like the brunt of an out-of-the-blue bad deal.

While it is possible to argue that the language in this stanza, and in the poem as a whole, resonates with elements of the carol tradition, readers can also find an argument here for why we might understand the word “carol” in the poem’s title as at least partially ironic. After reaching the shore, perhaps having just survived a near-drowning incident, the figure in the scene immediately moves from joy to suffering when faced with the “sand” that stares back “like the brunt of an out-of-the-blue bad deal.” The imagery in these lines, which extends the sea simile introduced in the first stanza, evokes the experience of coming out of shock, or emerging from a state of fight-or-flight, and realizing how narrowly one has avoided calamity.

Spaar goes on, in the next stanza, to offer examples of other kinds of “out-of-the-blue” bad deals: “…a diss, a bad review, the suds & chemical salts of the soul / breaking up in the wake of an anonymous jeer—!” As we continue reading, we can’t help but associate the ocean scene in the second and third stanzas with what happens later in the poem, the “out-of-the blue bad deal” that knocks the bicyclist to the ground. When the stranger calls out “hope you’re okay” after helping to right the bike, Spaar creates a savvy effect by rhyming “okay,” the last word in the poem, with “away,” which appears just a few words earlier in the same line. While the two words don’t possess the full volume of an end-rhyme pair, the internal echo they make within the line chimes loudly enough to evoke the carol tradition.

Unlike in most carols, though, the rhyme on which “Little Humanities Carol” ends doesn’t offer us a sense of easy closure. Instead, the rhyme exists in a provocative tension with the fact that readers can’t be sure how to understand the stranger’s behavior. This tension bring us back to the question, raised by Spaar at the beginning of the poem, of whether “brutality” or “kindness” leaves a more permanent imprint on human beings. Through the ambiguity of the bike scene, Spaar suggests that neither brutality nor kindness can be placed in a cleanly defined category, which imbues “Little Humanities Carol” with a moral complexity not typically found in a carol, particularly when one considers the dictionary’s emphasis on a “carol” as a song associated with “joy,” “mirth,” and “praise.”

Just as Spaar creates the potential for us to view the word “carol” in the poem’s title as either straightforward or ironic, she generates similar possibilities through her use of “humanities” in the title. “Humanities” is generally understood as referring to a field of academic study that centers on examining human culture and society from a critical perspective, with English, history, and philosophy comprising some of the most common majors in the field. The word “humanities” also possesses an association with the arts, including literature, painting, sculpture, theater, music, and dance, and other artistic pursuits. Though Spaar doesn’t set “Little Humanities Carol” in the academic realm, and the poem doesn’t engage directly with the subject of art-making, her placement of “humanities” in the title implies that we might understand certain details in the poem as related to the role that the humanities play in society.

One such detail is the book that appears in the final stanza. After righting the fallen bicyclist’s bike, the stranger proceeds to “right” the bicyclist’s “book” as well. Spaar prompts us to imagine that the bicyclist has been carrying the book in a bag or pocket, or perhaps in a basket on the bike, and that the stranger has picked up the book from the ground after the accident. When contemplating the potential implications of this scene, it is significant to consider that much of the current cultural conversation about the humanities centers on the notion that they have become increasingly endangered, a situation largely attributed to the field’s relative lack of economic opportunity in comparison with the STEM field. Adjacent to this conversation is an ongoing cultural discussion about technology threatening to create a world where nobody reads book because of shortened attention spans. Given these associations surrounding the word “humanities,” the bicyclist’s identity as a reader carries weight in the poem, as does the fact that the stranger helps to “right” the fallen book.

A frequent argument in favor of reading books, and for engaging with the humanities in a broader sense, is that doing so helps us develop imaginative empathy by learning about the lives, inner and outer, of other people. Does Spaar mean to imply, through the book detail, that the stranger’s kindness, no matter how brief or hurried, reflects the importance of living in a society where the humanities possess value? Of course, the book doesn’t belong to the stranger, so we can’t make any assumptions that his or her momentary kindness toward the fallen bicyclist results from having read books or engaged with the humanities. But the very presence of the book in the poem, along with the description of the stranger picking it up after the accident, invites us to connect the latter’s actions with the reference to “humanities” in the title. How would the poem feel different, for example, if the object that fell during the accident wasn’t a book but an iPhone?

If we interpret the stranger’s behavior as kindness, it’s plausible to see the poem as a “carol” in the sense that it may comprise a praise-song of sorts, one that sings in tribute to the compassion-based values so often associated with the humanities. In light of that, we might regard the stranger’s decision to “right” the bicyclist’s bike as suggestive of the following possibility: By acting in a kind manner, the stranger has “righted” the temporarily overturned worldview of the fallen bicyclist, a worldview that has been shaped, as we can infer by the book detail, through engagement with the humanities. Conversely, if one sees the stranger’s behavior as insincere and hurried, the word “humanities” in the title joins the word “carol” as a potential source of irony.

A hallmark of a humanities education is the ability to resist overly simplistic binaries, to tolerate gray areas, and Spaar asks us to exercise this capacity while reading “Little Humanities Carol.” Through her use of the second-person pronoun in the final stanza, she positions us as the fallen bicyclist. Just as we must determine how to understand the stranger’s behavior, we must figure out whether we see the poem as arguing that kindness affects us more than brutality, as revealing the opposite, or as lingering somewhere in between those viewpoints. We also find ourselves, as both the bicyclist and the reader, compelled to seek an answer to the following question: Who is the stranger?

Among the stranger’s many possible identities, it may be particularly illuminating to think of Spaar herself as the stranger. If art-making can be seen as a gesture toward preserving the humanities, and by extension preserving humanity, Spaar temporarily rights our lives by offering us a work of art in the form of a poem. Maybe “Little Humanities Carol” suggests that the humanities can temper our world’s brutality, however fleetingly, so that we’re able to get back up after we’ve been knocked down. In this figuration, we might view the artist’s function in society as aligned with the stranger’s role in the poem. If art can’t save us entirely from falling off of our proverbial bikes, at least the artist, in this case Spaar, can glance over a shoulder to say “I hope you’re okay” before we continue on our journey.