Poetry Thinking: On Adrienne Raphel’s “Our Dark Academia”
Adrienne Raphel | Our Dark Academia | Rescue Press | 2022 | 138 Pages
“First, I wept.” Three words, subject, predicate, ordinal number that changes our sense of time: first this happened, before the next thing happened. Three words, and because these words happen in a poem where lineation takes its lead from clause, these words mark the end of a line. We pause for a moment. Then a new sentence, another line, the next of “Daily Lies,” the first poem in Adrienne Raphel’s new volume of poems Our Dark Academia. “First, I entered my name into a daily form and declared myself clean. // What does this mean?” Because this is a poem, the habitual fib does not belie acts of weeping or declaring oneself clean—does it matter that we believe these things happened in the context of the poem?—but complicates how one answers the follow-up question of meaning, if the question is answered at all. When the poem seems to end, after the end of the poem marks itself, “Daily Lies” suddenly continues: the guise of explication as a counterpoint for the act of lying, for the question of meaning. The poem explains itself with self-annotation:
Lines 1-4: Opening Lines
“Daily Lies,” a play on “lines,” and Our Daily Bread. If these are all lies, the poem throws the relationship between speaker and reader immediately into jeopardy. What the reader does in the poem might directly contradict what she does in reality. Why would anyone lie about these tasks? And yet, we know from the first that they are not true. What are they masking?
Are these lines the poem or its aftermath, or the poem inclusive of its aftermath, or the poem breaching itself? Is the jeopardy between speaker and reader healed by the tone of explication here, a tone which disappears by the next stanza: “Ficus to follicles to form, alphabetical progress. ‘The daily form,’ indicating the repetition. The plant, indicating growth. The hair, hair.” By the end of this second half of “Daily Lies,” the poem promises no answers, no meaning except for our engagement with the performance of lying: “Divided into fourteen segments roughly the length of lines, the poem drips sonnet.” The poem “drips” sonnet but is not sonnet; these segments are not lines but “roughly the length of lines.” The poem resembles a poem. Finally, after the guise of explication which does not elaborate but figuratively extends the poem through its own question (“What does this mean?”), the poem is and is not itself: “A dangerous relationship—this is the lie that tells the truth, or is this the lie that tells the truth?” This is the lie that tells the truth: both and neither.
Just as the poem resembles a poem, the self-explication of “Daily Lies” resembles, at first, something like an act of close reading performed in the classroom. What happens when a poem intellectualizes its own making, when the poem concedes to throwing “the relationship between speaker and reader immediately into jeopardy”? Later in the volume, in the “Dark Academia, A Wikipedia” entry of the long poem titled “Workbook”—thirty-four pages that feature quiz questions, descriptions of character archetypes and cut-outs for paper dolls, a crossword puzzle—our titular aesthetic trend is articulated: “Dark Academia is academia’s black swan and shadow self, a mirror that reflects and opposes: it’s how academics want to see themselves, the apotheosis and the parody of who they always already are.” Encyclopedic information rarely introduces itself in figurative terms, almost never through the tongue-in-cheek clash of “black swan” and “shadow self,” yet this definition is staged as knowledge accessible to the same people who hunt for facts on Wikipedia. Dark Academia, the poem clarifies, is understood by the way cultural objects constellate around it, not by the expression of a particular idea: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which the poem calls an “ürtext”; a Post45 cluster on Dark Academia and their charmingly nerdy podcast; Harry Potter and its several offshoots into different media, into video games and interactive websites; Dead Poets Society, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Rebecca. This list is, perhaps, how Dark Academia extends into the possessive Our of the title, the possibility for academia’s “shadow self” to extend beyond its own restrictive hierarchies. The way Dark Academia belongs to this volume—the my against the our, the “surfeit of gold stars: valedictorian, Princeton, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, Princeton Again”—culminates in COVID-19 pandemic isolation, the near-complete shutdown of the systems that continue the production of gold stars. Our Dark Academia, a volume of poems which in part dramatizes those first months of lockdown, is Adrienne Raphel’s third book.
Raphel’s second book Thinking Inside the Box, a cultural history and personal meditation on the crossword puzzle, was published on March 5, 2020, six days before the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. Attention paid to the crossword puzzle depends on attention paid elsewhere, Raphel explains, the mind working to resolve what it already knows but cannot quite articulate. The game impresses itself on devoted cruciverbalists through a kind of lyrical knowledge, what is unknown and omitted most important for recognizing patterns of language, or as Raphel puts it:
One of the best places to see the crossword-puzzle mentality in action is in its relation to writing. Many authors use word puzzles as a scratch pad—the poet James Merrill doodles his own name in anagrams—but when the crossword becomes folded into the work itself, it reveals a basic paradoxical mental process: You have to tighten connections even more rigorously at the same time as you let a few screws loosen.
Like a poem, one does not seek out the Saturday crossword for information—to learn through context and deduction the name of 2007 three-time platinum Alicia Keys album (answer: As I Am)—but for a particular experience with language and with time. What’s a good time to complete the Monday puzzle, and what’s a good time for the Saturday puzzle? Do you care, or do you simply want to finish? Where the crossword prioritizes usage and, for serious puzzlers, expediency, the poetry of James Merrill or Adrienne Raphel won’t be made overwrought by readers. The poem happens through us, regardless of how we understand the words on the page; the poem will reach fewer people than the Saturday crossword.
Like poetry, the crossword puzzle has inhabited a fraught place in English-speaking culture. Between America and Britain, at times symptomatic of intellectual elitism or a leisurely working class, upper-crust New York and access to exclusive education, the crossword puzzle approaches the mainstream from a distance. “The form necessitates abstraction from social context,” Raphel argues while addressing the gender gap in crossword construction, continuing, “But crosswords are not divorced from the world—as the complex history of women and the crossword demonstrates, the crossword is fundamentally porous as literary form. Though crosswords seem utopic, the assumption you didn’t know you were making continues to creep in.” The pervasive assumption and utopic vision, the pressurized social context through which patterns of language happen: how many crossword puzzles are completed on the site of Dark Academia? Thinking Inside the Box began as Raphel’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard, advised by Elaine Scarry and Stephanie Burt, while Our Dark Academia remembers publication at the onset of the COVID-19 shutdown:
And manically I try to launch my book.
What else do people have to do
But stay inside and read and read
And do the crossword—so say I—although
I haven’t read a book in weeks
And cannot do the crossword now for shit.
Suddenly, so much time might be devoted to language without the guise of communication, of meaning and impressing meaning on people not ourselves. Suddenly, attention becomes unavailable to us, and the speaker of Raphel’s poem feels personally responsible: “It is my great and utter karmic fault the book comes out / In this literal end of days.” Hyperbole translates a feeling: the crossword happens now and becomes the past, while the poem happens now and stays the present.
“What the reader does in the poem might directly contradict what she does in reality,” Raphel writes in “Daily Lies,” then asks: “Why would anyone lie about these tasks?” If a poem thinks, a poem thinks compulsively. If a poem thinks, the poem does not accumulate ideas but impressions of a mind working toward, never quite arriving at, ideas. Our Dark Academia in part enacts this process by making mistakes, ordinary slippages that seem more impactful in isolation—“The spine says The Physiology of Tatse and I have owned this mistake for a decade. Am I a non-taster?”—and by attending to small solutions: “The things I’ve bought myself online again: / Drain Weasel, pulse oximeter, so much gum, / I cheat and add a book.” The recurring image of Our Dark Academia is a three-way tie between green juice and a bottle of ibuprofen and a Peloton bike—the sense that, during the COVID pandemic, tiny objects and actions might lend tiny permission over our bodies in an otherwise unknowable state of living. Listen to these lines from the final poem in the volume, “Corona II”:
Good evening, Adrienne, says the screen inside
The hotel room inside the picture in my phone
On April Fool’s, the Day of Dignity.
The hotel, apparently, has accidentally
Inserted another ex into my room,
So he’s inside my body before I have arrived,
And texts me a picture of the television screen
Inviting me to already be where I have been before.
Make this journey even more rewarding.
A fire burns in the fireplace on the screen.
He still has a girlfriend, who isn’t me.
I swear I didn’t plan it, I swear, says he,
But if you want to come? I do. I don’t,
But six days later my body is alive.
The playfulness of April Fool’s Day paired with the corporate idiom of hotel marketing makes the jarring unreality of the occasion seem a little less jarring. The ex’s not-so-subtle hubris like a virus, the palimpsest of screens, the willful miscommunications all leading to the labyrinthine realization: “he’s inside my body before I have arrived,” to a place she has been before. Our Dark Academia is a book of repetitions which refuse to stay the same.
Just as Raphel imagines literary form as “porous,” the structural ambition of Our Dark Academia is peerless from recent volumes of poetry: a mind map titled “Road Map”; the previous mentioned “Workbook,” which includes a crossword puzzle and cut-outs for paper-dolls; two sonnet crowns appropriately titled “Corona.” Yet the diversity which patterns this structure does not generalize a focused, idiosyncratic arrangement of words on the page. The style is as playful as it is dire, manic, at the precipice of malfunction, as the poem “Trebek No.5” attends: “What is Kitchen Aid. What is mother’s little helper. What is the Mekog. // Who is King Kong. Who is a mineral. What is not mine, is mine. What is / a mimeograph. What is a mom. Who among us has one.” This version of Jeopardy! is not so much fun, and the poem makes sure we play along. Are these isolated questions, or do the questions in context begin to answer each other: the answer to “what is a mom” becoming the question “who among us has one”? No answers, no points, no prize money: a little bit more like life than game show knowledge. While a poem happens in the present, the sense of time enacted whenever the poem is read, a game happens once then changes, or what Raphel describes in Thinking Inside the Box as a “link to the past and future.” The experience of a poem is unmistakably different from that of a crossword, yet the impulse to participate in these acts of language, perhaps, comes from a similar place, to realize time in different terms:
The crossword creates stress to release it, getting you back to baseline frustration. It’s a link to the past and future without needing to trouble the present. At the end of the day, an abandoned puzzle is the same as a completed puzzle. We tell ourselves games in order to live.