Contributor’s Marginalia: Matthew Buckley Smith responding to Nida Sophasarun’s “Violent Femmes”

Of all the poems in Issue 43, the one I’ve returned to most often is “Violent Femmes” by Nida Sophasarun. I enjoyed it right away, but in contrast to, say, Christopher Childers’s “There” or Eleanor Stanford’s “I Too Had a Childhood,” I couldn’t right away explain why. Re-reading it, I’ve asked myself the same two questions I always ask about a poem I enjoy: (1.) What does it do to me? and (2.) How does it do this? I ask these questions, of course, in hopes of stealing its secrets for myself. A scholar analyzes poems in order to say smart things about them later. A poet analyzes poems for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, because that’s where the money is.

What does “Violent Femmes” do to me? First it draws me in, then it stirs my sympathy. Beyond this, it inspires a certain admiration for technique, specifically for having conjured so convincing an impression in so little space.

How does it do this? The virtues that produce the above effects might be termed charm, poignancy, and elegance.

The charm I can chalk up at least in part to my having, like the poem’s speaker, grown up in Atlanta during the ’80s and ’90s and having, also like the speaker, heard of the Violent Femmes from a distinctly cooler peer to whose coolness I never quite caught up. This pleasure, the pleasure of relating to a poem’s speaker—of identifying the circumstances of one’s own experience in the poem’s subject matter—is genuine, but only so replicable. That is, Sophasarun can’t (and surely doesn’t) count on her readers having shared the milieu of her upbringing and thus, upon encountering references to that milieu, feeling a sympathetic twinge of nostalgia. She merely benefits from the twinge felt by those readers who happen to feel it. So charm in this case is a virtue the explanation of which is clear but not of much use, at least not to me, at least not as a bank robber.

The poignancy of “Violent Femmes” is due in part to the poem’s occasion, namely the death of a childhood friend. However effectively Sophasarun addresses the fact of this death, it is the death itself—with its aura of really-having-happenedness—that gives the poem its blood-drawing edge. The line announcing the bad news ends with an enjambment that calls to mind Auden’s sonnet “Who’s Who,” which likewise gains strength from the seeming historicity of its subject. Sophasarun tells her friend, “When you’re gone, your dad returns some / of my old letters.” In Auden’s poem, it is revealed that the deceased’s beloved “answered some / of his long marvellous letters but kept none.” In both cases, the circumstances’ authenticity and the record’s incompleteness (the latter set off by a line break) provoke a blend of longing and despair. But the exploitation of really-having-happenedness is, like that of local color, hard to plan for. The more one sweats for serendipity, the less serendipitous it feels. Sophasarun handles her true story beautifully, but as a poetic asset the truth of it is non-transferrable.

Which leaves elegance, a virtue I might define as efficiency raised to the level of beauty. The pleasure one takes in elegance is arguably a secondary one. Less immediate than sensory or emotional response, it is a pleasure taken not directly as a reader but vicariously as a writer. Elegance, unlike decoration, does not exist for its own sake. It is, to borrow another phrase from Auden “a way of happening.” But Sophasarun relates her scenes so skillfully, with so few stray gestures, that the performance exceeds its purpose and becomes a thing of beauty in itself. Heidegger remarks that one tends to notice the tool in one’s hand only when it stops working. From time to time, though, one may also take note when it works extraordinarily well. Still, even if the casual reader is aware of nothing but a clear—and perhaps especially satisfying—bit of storytelling, Sophasarun has done her job. Despite the insistence of English teachers everywhere, the purpose of poetic technique is not to be observed but to give pleasure.

Throughout “Violent Femmes,” Sophasarun does much with little, making the diction, syntax, and imagery all serve plural, simultaneous functions. Consider her framing of the poem’s opening scene, which calls to mind not just the carefree play of children but also, indirectly, the threat of injury and the inevitability of change:

Summer, Atlanta, 1989, handstands
in your pool, and after Marco Polo
we rest elbows on the concrete lip,
and ask each other what it means
to lose your teeth in dreams.

The two friends speculate about the meaning of loss in an imaginary world. But the succession of “handstands” by “concrete lip” suggests—if only in the back of the reader’s mind—a more immediate risk, particularly when followed by the image of lost teeth. Unlike Mr. Flood, who handles his jug “With trembling care,” these girls have not yet learned “that most things break.” Meanwhile, the image of children losing teeth serves as a reminder that the girls are growing up, are subject to physical change as a matter of nature. The poem continues:

                                         At night
we play Contra and pluck carrot sticks
radiating from a bowl of ranch dip.
Skip to 13. We chug gatorade and gin
and you walk a straight line in the kitchen.

“Contra” is for these girls just a video game, free of the political associations the word would have carried for their parents at the time. The girls’ snack too (Who but a parent would choose carrot sticks, would lay them out so carefully? One thinks of Bishop’s dictum, “Somebody loves us all”) suggests that their apparent independence is in fact dependent on a grownup world, which for the moment stays conveniently offstage. Even in 1989, at the end of the Cold War, a word like “radiating” has for the girls no connotative menace. All these secondary shadings are, however, present for the reader, whom Sophasarun trusts enough to leave her subtext unexplained.

The sentence “Skip to 13” might be the poem’s tidiest display of elegance. As a segue from one age to another, it replaces the ubiquitous “fast-forward to,” a tic I won’t be sorry if I never see in another poem. It also nicely echoes the game controller’s skip function. And it calls to mind the physical activity of skipping, native to early girlhood but outgrown by puberty, say around age 13. Several lines later, an even simpler sentence, “Sleepovers end,” communicates in just two words the evanescence of childhood pleasures, the loss of a cherished friendship, and the emergence from one stage of life into the next. Like Humpty Dumpty, Sophasarun pays her words extra for the extra work she gets out of them.

More impressive, though, than Sophasarun’s ingenuity is her self-restraint. Whether the scope of an elegy is private, as with Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane,” or public, as with Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” it is exceptionally difficult for a poet to resist the opportunity to offer wisdom. This difficulty is apparent even in dramatic monologues, in which the poet often allows moral conclusions to go technically unstated, as with Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” or even leaves their drawing up to the readers, as with Brooks’ “the mother.” Seldom does a poet fully let a poem’s characters speak for themselves, least of all when one of these characters is herself the poet. But that is precisely what Sophasarun does in “Violent Femmes.”

The speaker’s final insight is merely a groan of mortification. Given the chance to re-read her old letters to her dead friend, she finds her own writing intolerably embarrassing. She has received this correspondence as a gift from her friend’s grieving father, but all she can think of is her own awkwardness as a teenager and the judgment her friend must have passed on her because of it:

It’s your last prank where
instead of hearing your voice, I’m forced
to hear me, pretending not to need
anyone, and worse, misusing curse words.
You’d laugh at the desperation.

This is not the voice of a level-headed public thinker, writing from an equilibrium attained after the fact of grief. It is instead an expression of fleeting but acute self-centeredness, of a private person thrown off balance by loss and by the sudden opening of an unwanted new perspective on herself. Wisdom may be the past tense of folly, but this folly is still a work in progress. And the poem is better for it.

How much weaker, how much blunter, might the loss feel if the speaker had given herself a chance to sober up and meditate on it like a responsible adult? The closest the poem comes to a well-considered wisdom statement is the comparative fragment that brings us to its closing scene: “Almost as desperate as our first meeting.” The same desperation that makes Sophasarun cringe at her old writing has been present in the friendship from the start. Rather than trying to provide a final diagnosis, she simply offers up her wounds for our examination, declining in the end to hazard commentary, or even comprehension. Sophasarun herself may have perfectly reasonable insights into her childhood relationship. But sharing them with us is not the business of “Violent Femmes.”

And that is the loot I’ll take away from the scene of this particular crime. In “90 North,” a poem about the grownup realization of a childhood fantasy, Randall Jarrell offers a memorable motto for the disillusioned: “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” But Jarrell’s insight may undermine itself: The recognition that pain is not wisdom is itself a kind of wisdom. Sophasarun arguably shows more restraint. She gives the last word to the blindered past. “Have you even heard / of the Violent Femmes?” the dead friend asks the speaker, on the day the two girls meet for the first time. In answer, the speaker confesses, “I lie and say Yes.” It’s a hopeless bluff, and heartbreakingly familiar. But even if the speaker doesn’t see it yet, the answer reveals no more naïveté than does the question. The dead friend is bluffing too. “Have you even heard / of the Violent Femmes?” The inclusion of that “even” tells us everything we need to know. The speaker, at least, knows that she is lying.