Read Like a Poet Vol. 2

Featuring Natalie Shapero's Some Toxin

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Office Hours. I’m your host, José Olivarez

This series is called Read Like a Poet. In this series, I hope to give some tools and insights to people who are poetry curious, but are afraid they don’t know how to read poetry. I’m excited to share poems I love with you, and I hope this series encourages you to deepen your reading of poetry.

If you are a writer reading this series, I’m sure you have your own reading practices. Perhaps, sharing my practices will offer you opportunities to expand your own. Selfishly, I hope that writing all this down helps me sharpen my reading.

Today’s poem is called Some Toxin, and it by Natalie Shapero.

Some Toxin
by Natalie Shapero

This is what we get. This is the penance
for extending and extending the human lifespan—
now some people live a hundred and twenty years,
but those years are increasingly spent being bombarded
with adorable profiles of the oldest people,
interviews about what keeps them ticking.
The secret is always some toxin, like bacon or vodka,
and the joke that ensues is always the same:
THE CHEMICALS PRESERVE HIM. That’s all fine,

but just once I would like to uncrumple the Metro section
and find that the key to long life is rage and trauma, 
that bitterness girds the organs in equal measure.
If I could choose to be born in any era,
I would opt to predate these longer lives.
There’s so much violence, always. Better to have it
visited on you back when your attackers
would end up dead much sooner. When you would die
sooner, too. All I want is for someone

to understand me, but it seems my keenest friends
and I—we’re scattered. We’ve struggled for peace,
for permanence, and somehow in that struggle,
we’ve ventured far from each other. This is what
we get. This is the penance. Back when even the powerful
died younger, they would lose one another and dutifully
wait to be reunited in Heaven. We wait for that 
still, but now in the absence of Heaven. We say someday
we’ll find each other, year after year on Earth.

What is the difference between a “good” poem and a “bad” poem? For me, part of the magic of poetry is that there are no set answers to that question. If you tell me that a “good” poem should show, not tell, then I’d tell you that you are correct. If you tell me that a “good” poem should feature striking images and avoid cliché, I’d say yes. And yet, there are poems that I love that break these rules. And there are poems that obey these rules that do nothing for me.

I use quotation marks because the language of “good” and “bad” poetry feels too economic. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a cop out, but I don’t know that it’s useful to think of poems as being good or bad. I read many poems that do not connect with me, but some of those missed connections are due to my own biases and imperfections as a reader. That doesn’t make those poems bad. It just means it's a bad fit. The other missed connections, I’d chalk up to polish. These poems are most often offered to me by students. The poems aren’t bad, there is a seed in the poem that is visible to both the poet and I, but the poet is still figuring out how to construct a poem with that seed.

One piece of advice I give to students often is to try a different angle. I’d like to dig a little deeper into that idea, and for that I return to today’s poem, Some Toxin.

The poem begins, “This is what we get. This is the penance”—penance is a punishment. Breaking the line here makes me wonder what are we being punished for? What of humanity’s violences are we being held accountable for? The next line reveals “for extending and extending the human lifespan—”I love this because it is so contrarian. I don’t ever hear the extension of the human lifespan approached as something that we must make penance for. Immediately, because of the reader that I am and my own contrarian instincts, I’m intrigued.

You don’t need to be a contrarian or pessimistic to write poems that connect with me, but you do need to find a way to intrigue me. If you tell me that love is good, I will agree, but so what? One of the challenges of writing is that we risk repeating something that is already apparent to the reader. Find a way to show me something new about love. Or connect new images and language to love. Find a way to make horses romantic. I don’t know. There are infinite ways to do it, but you have to find your way to your own approaches, language, and images.

Back to the poem: my favorite moment is, of course, the opening to the second stanza. Shapero writes, “but just once I would like to uncrumple the Metro section,/ and find that the key to long life is rage and trauma.” Here I’d like to offer my snaps, my enthusiastic nods, my own rage on rage. I don’t feel the need to decode anything here, but I do want to offer that it feels good to read those words. I want more poems to praise and ask for our rage because there is so much to be angry about.

Thank you for reading alongside me. You can find Natalie Shapero’s website here.

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As a reminder, I will be hosting Office Hours on Thursday, May 29th from 8pm EST-9:30pm EST. The date has been changed, so adjust your calendars accordingly. The meeting link is here. During Office Hours, you can bring a work in progress for feedback, ask questions about craft, wrestling, or anything else.

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What do you think? Do you believe there are bad poems? How can you tell if a poem if is good or bad? Tell me in the comments.