Brutal Empathy: On Henri Cole’s “Blizzard”
Blizzard | Henri Cole | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2020 | 64 Pages
On receiving the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück spoke of being drawn to “the solitary human voice raised in lament or longing” and gravitating to poets “in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.” She views this relationship between reader and speaker or poet as a sort of “pact.” Though Glück makes clear through personal anecdotes that these statements reflect her subjective affinities and prejudices, the end of her speech sounds like a declaration of victory—her worldview becomes legitimized by the award. Early in the speech, she confides that competitions “seemed natural to me.” This simple, introspective statement evolves by the end of the speech: “I believe… the Swedish Academy is choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.” She, and the type of poetry to which she is drawn, won.
Such statements form a small part of what makes her brief comments seem ill-considered to some poets. Glück writes, “In art of the kind to which I am drawn, the voice or judgment of the collective is dangerous. The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.” She clarifies that her concern amounts to “a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure.” I can empathize somewhat with a reader who finds this view of poetry concerning. In the United States’ current sociopolitical environment, one in which we’re still reeling from the oppressive policies of the previous president’s administration and the continuing economic and health dangers of a deadly pandemic—circumstances that almost certainly cause considerably more division and isolation for those of us less fortunate than Glück—a reader might understandably hesitate to embrace such a seemingly individualistic, exclusionary poetics.
But for those who have completely rejected Glück’s credo, Henri Cole’s most recent book of poems, Blizzard, might be cause for reassessment. These poems simultaneously embrace the privacy and specificity Glück lauds yet do not exclude the possibility and importance of a greater inclusive community. Cole’s poems demonstrate expansive empathy, the speaker contemplating the lives of animals, his family, his ancestors, and friends who have died—always leaving space for the reader to play a role in interpreting and relating to these intimate reflections. In “To a Snail,” after lovingly lingering over a description of a snail, the poem’s speaker moves its subject away from a busy road to the safety of a forest.
Glück’s ideal poet might have reasonably produced the first poem of Blizzard, “Face of the Bee,” which is one of the most exemplary expressions of Cole’s empathic idiosyncracies. The reader is placed in precarious relation to its speaker:
Staggering out of a black-red peony
you have been hiding all morning
from the frigid air, you regard me smearing
jam on toast.
The scene is described objectively, with the authority of a witness, while the use of the second-person “you” lends the utterance a conversational tone. Resulting from this tonality and descriptive authority, the poem’s two participants—or characters, as it were—become speaker and addressee, which, at one level of understanding, are also the poet and the reader. What confounds this surface-level apprehension is the surreal nature of the Glückean phrase “staggering out of a black-red peony” and the fact that the “you,” on another level of understanding, refers to the titular bee. Cole establishes a subtle metaphor, implicitly equating the reader and the bee, suggestion a degree of fundamental identification with the animal.
The speaker too, later in the poem, is implicitly equated:
With your fuzzy black face, do you see me—
a cisgender male—metabolizing
life into language, like nectar sipped
up and regurgitated into gold?
The parallels that shape the metaphor are never acknowledged explicitly; the speaker never directly confesses, “I am like this bee,” even while knowingly drawing the comparison of metabolizing life (as a bee does nectar) into language (like a bee’s honey, or “gold”). This is purposive, a sort of equivocation, leaving the equivalency between speaker and bee, poem and reader, tenuous, incomplete.
While equivalences operate in multiple simultaneous directions, the speaker seems to remain acutely aware of what differentiates one person from another (substitute animal, plant, etc., as needed). He is especially conscious of what separates him from his subjects. “Do you see me//…?” he asks, almost as if he, seeking a special attention, expects a bee to be surprised at his bee-like feat. The speaker states that he is “a cisgender male,” further emphasizing differences. Despite the dissimilarity, he acknowledges a unifying truth: “No one/ is truly the owner of his own instincts,/ but controlling them—this is civilization.” If Cole’s focus on difference comes from instinctual impulses, he chooses to draw comparisons that establish and communicate parity, thereby expanding empathy. It is telling that he never remarks on the most apparent distinction: that he and the bee are different species altogether. In fact, an equally-plausible interpretation of the line beginning in “do you see me//…?” is the equivalent of the speaker asking, in astonishment, “You—who are so different than me—do you see how miraculously similar we are?”
This drama seems to fit uniquely in our contemporary moment: a person who has learned to understand, or has willed himself to understand, empathy as an antidote to suffering, who yearns to be other than he is, and is compelled to try, but discovers the ultimate unattainability of completely understanding another being. This myopia of the Self, a voice underlining its own inherent isolation, is what brings Glück to mind when reading Blizzard; it is what makes the book read like a natural response to her comments, and is part of what makes the empathy portrayed in it expansive enough to also contain brutality and bleakness.
Brutality complicates, in explicit ways, the otherwise calm, often idyllic moments of Blizzard. Though “Human Highway” begins in a surreal, sinister register, there is resolution in the promise of sustained return to the stable, mundane topics of earlier poems: “Then, suddenly, in the kitchen,/ coffee percolated. A pussycat purred at my feet.” When violence does intrude on this scene, it is initially muted, amounting to mere culinary routine: “I cut open the throat of a grapefruit.” “[S]ummer rains came early to our calm house,” Cole writes, “and bread and education, too,/ as happiness unfolded…” But soon the tone becomes menacing, the specter of violence transforming the happiness of prior lines into
a strange
psychedelic moth, or the oldest unplayable
instrument, made from a warrior’s skull,
our happiness a little bone flute.
Both the imagery of the moth and the instrument fashioned out of bone suggest the primal nature of happiness, its instinctual underpinning; the association recalls the unownable “instincts” introduced to us in “Face of the Bee.” The “little bone flute” that happiness becomes by the end of “Human Highway” is an image that serves to offhandedly, though inextricably, link happiness and violence. In making this connection, the book asks: If both happiness and violence are instinctual and intrinsically connected in humans, must a sophisticated and complete understanding of empathy incorporate both? And: Does compassion necessarily entail an acceptance both of others’ happiness and their acts of violence?”
The ending of “Human Highway” foreshadows the violence that will complicate and refine Blizzard’s essentially empathetic posture. In the second section, Cole shows us the dangerous consequences of losing our care for one another. The gruesome poems “Goya” and “Weeping Cherry” make a pair, with the former an ekphrastic poem inspired by the goriest print in Francisco Goya’s series “Los Desastres de la Guerra,” titled “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!” and the latter poem referring to an unnamed violent historical conflict (Cole’s own maternal grandparents emigrated to Marseilles after the Armenian Genocide of 1915, as discussed by Cole in an interview for issue 209 of the Paris Review). Compare the parallels between the central scene in “Goya”—“Three corpses bound to a tree stump,/ castrated, one without arms, its head impaled/ on a branch”—and that of “Weeping Cherry”—“Heads impaled on branches./ Mounds of corpses, like grim flowers knotted together.” Both poems are distant yet local, simultaneously looking inward—to the speaker’s relationship to the artwork and the violence committed by the community of his recent ancestors, respectively—and outward—toward the objective description of the artwork or historical event.
“Goya” transitions from a description of the print to a reflection:
If I want the truth,
I must seek it out. The line between the inner
and the outer erodes, and I become a hunter putting
my face down somewhere on a path between
two ways of being—one kindly and soft;
the other an executioner.
Here, faced with the reality of sadistic violence, the speaker who seeks to empathize with humanity finds himself caught between Goya’s violence and the type of tenderness seen in the first section’s poems. “Weeping Cherry” follows a similar trajectory, moving from a description of distant historical violence to facts more closely concerning the speaker: “A passing ship transported a few [people] to a distant port/ where Mother was born, though now she, too,/ has vanished into the universe…” The movement in each poem from detached description to contemplative information serves to diminish the emotional distance between the speaker and the brutality of these scenes, emphasizing the connection between the speaker and a latent, instinctual impulse toward the expression of violence. Though this, too, is a sort of empathy: through the horrendous scenes in these poems, Cole becomes connected to the eponymous painter, Goya, the anonymous subjects in the print, and his ancestors and mother.
The last poem of the second section, “Land of Never-Ending Holes” embraces the complexity of the “obscure human soul,” acknowledging that “it is sad and happy at once.” The world containing the human soul “is swarming, venal, frivolous, vexing, crude, and/ hypocritical,” and is able to encompass diametrically opposed destinations along its “highway leading to spin rooms/ and war rooms…” The empathetic concern of the speaker increases in intricacy and scope, accommodating the possibilities.
More importantly, however, this accommodation becomes a way for the speaker to begin accepting his own, perhaps hidden, feelings. Repetition of the phrase “I don’t want you to leave” begins to seem plaintive, and the poem culminates in the prayer-like lines: “may God turn the hearts of those who cannot love you,/ and if he cannot turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles,/ so you will know them by their limping.” This anger is perhaps the first that is unabashedly and utterly the speaker’s, possibly directed at the blissfully ignorant and prejudiced—those lacking empathy—who have caused suffering to others, especially the speaker’s loved ones (think the lying “Mr. President” of the poem “Super Bloom” or, looking ahead to the book’s third and final section, the “hard-right” president of “Keep Me”). The empathetic framing that allows the speaker to acknowledge the array of human experiences noted in this poem becomes a conduit for the expression of the speaker’s own brutality; the speaker’s empathy, evolving as it does throughout the collection, becomes a way to participate in the human tradition of brutality it allows him to observe.
The poems of the final section are even more expansive—becoming devastating, as the book turns explicitly to examining personal loss. In the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, memory gives way to an examination of suffering by a speaker who reflects on the brutality of the past with the force and immediacy of autobiography; interpersonal loss is presented expressed in a way it isn’t elsewhere in the collection. The speaker imagines a dead friend urging, “Remember/ death ends a life, not a relationship,” and waits for “a deceased friend’s cat to die.” In the last poem of Blizzard, the speaker’s is a lone voice imagining the “shades” of his dead parents and reflecting on the past:
I think maybe my real subject is writing as an act of revenge
against the past:
The beach was so white; O, how the sun burned;
he loved me as I loved him, but we did what others told us
and kept this hidden. Now, I make my own decisions.
I don’t speak so softly.
Only through the expansion of empathy is the speaker able to arrive at this complete, self-assured understanding of the brutality of the past and accept it in an intimately personal way. No longer restrained by compassion, but instead made malleable by it, able to understand the possibilities of his distinct self, the speaker writes, “I resemble my mother and father, but if you look closer,/ you will see that I am different, I am Henri.” The beauty in this poem, and indeed this collection, isn’t owed merely to its interiority, but to the interplay between the temporal, social, environmental, and personal brutalities inflicted on us, and the speaker’s understanding of them and integration of them into a Self. To overstate the importance of the speaker (Glück’s “private voice”) would be to neglect the community that shapes him, an ensemble of others that create the life of these poems and ultimately that of the voice which utters them. The specific empathetic thinking that permeates Blizzard directs our attention to community, demonstrating public importance while presenting it in the private voice of the speaker. In the last line of the collection, note the passive voice our speaker uses as he reaches a final acceptance of both suffering and compassion: “pricked and fed, it [the heart] grows plump again.” Blizzard asks us to not forget who or what does the pricking.