In the Cosmic Theater: On Fady Joudah's "Tethered to Stars"

Fady Joudah | Tethered to Stars | Milkweed Editions | 2021 | 104 Pages

If the major symbols of a poet’s life change, over time, in their intensity and focus—if change is even a verb close enough to describe that ongoing act of rendering—one’s vision seems to double: an image made so accurate to the idiosyncrasies of a life that its details almost disorient in their clarity. The symbol stuns, overwhelms, and its witnesses cannot immediately account for why that happens; we’re asked to experience something before we have the words for that experience. In Fady Joudah’s fifth collection of poetry, Tethered to Stars, the poems transpose almost-unimaginable images, from the ever-expanding cosmos to the unspeakably private parts of our lives, into something articulated, navigable and recognized: “That you have nothing to say. / From the unrequited to the unconditional / to the imaginary.” You have nothing to say, yes, and to confess that is to say something: you have everything to experience, “that a heart remains a heart in its beyond.” 

The earth, we know, is tethered to stars—other stars tethered elsewhere—and at one point we believed the stars were tethered to Earth: Joudah’s collection asks its maker and its readers questions of scale, of proximity. Who believes themselves to be near the center of such beauty, a world generated outwardly; who recognizes their lives as participating in the lineage of passing observers? If, as Joudah writes, “a secret’s only secret is its form,” how do we arrange the patterns of language to articulate something so particular it’s been obscured? If the scale is unfathomably large, how do we make our time impactful, what does impactful mean, does it matter? Because one cannot answer these questions either/or, because the answer is always changing, or because asking the question enacts the beginning of an answer, one hopes to free themselves to experience some degree of ambiguity: “Between nuance and essentialization I sing myself. / Between cost-benefit ratio and the unattainable / I see freedom in amendments I further amend.” In the optic movement between nuance and essentialization, Joudah foregrounds process, the constant act of situating our lives as in-between, as compelling us from ambiguity into a clarity-to-be-named. 

If “nuance” seems limited in scope, “essentialization” becomes self-effacing: “how much / of me is you / and you is we?” These lines are from Joudah’s poem “Sandra Bland, Texas,” a town the poet invents after the eponymous tragedy. “We have nothing / named after you,” Joudah writes, and for every Black woman murdered by the police, the poet names a new town. Another question of scale: while this lyrical sequence considers only the death of Sandra Bland, one immediately envisions an implied, imagined civilization built through the towns which Joudah names in that selfsame manner:  

Will you excuse me
for naming a poem
an imaginary place that,
as with any home,
one doesn’t inhabit
all alone  

The made poem charts a place which one doesn’t inhabit alone: readers who follow these poems into the future, the experience they design in their formal arrangement, are now stated in Joudah’s pronoun we: “Those of us / who didn’t play a part in your disintegration know / that we play a part.” Here, and throughout the collection, the poems name evil through a sort of civic recontextualization; how to account for the particulars of one tragedy while speaking to something structural, or even larger; something about the human capacity for annihilation.  One’s distance from tragedy depends on how they might answer the poem’s question, “which ‘we’ is it I speak of?” Tethered to Stars does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself. 

Likewise: against insulation, or against the licensed detachment often heard in poems which exclaim their rhetorical overcurrent from the very beginning, this collection states some of its models for asking and answering plainly. One example is astrology, its cosmic patternmaking. The astrological signs prompt several of the collection’s poems—“Taurus,” for example, or “Calligraphy for a Sagittarius”—returning the book to the symbols one attaches to their life. In “Postcards from a Virgo,” the poem’s speaker ostensibly resists a manifested future, a lifetime which has not yet occurred: “My lifespan doesn’t clarify my consciousness. / And my revolution is in hours.” An hour becomes measurable after the fact, like a lifespan, but clarifying one’s consciousness isn’t precisely the task stated throughout this collection, but rather experiencing how that may or may not occur. The poem continues, “Between a sunflower’s florets and the galaxy, / cellular and solar, I am outgrown,” and again the self—the poet, the speaker of the poem—is positioned between symbols of extremity: the flower, billions of stars.   

Somewhere between the sunflower’s florets and the galaxy, one finds themselves following along in real life. The poet himself needs reminding: “That’s when my wife shook me. / ‘For real, Fady, this is for real,’ she said.” Tethered to Stars is positioned between the icons of its era—the COVID-19 pandemic, LSD, Home Depot, the swelling evils of America—and the archaic world: the latter never fixed, resounding into the present. Symbols adopt different contexts and are paired with different technologies, encouraging newer formulations of how one recognizes their past and the past before that: “Your silence was a mask. / I read from it.” That you have nothing to say is an articulation of what might, or should, or can never be said: an impossibility of language which leads, perhaps, to one’s private symbols. Who does our “we” include and exclude, and who is reading our masks which withhold something made explicit, something clarified? In these configurations of real life, in the attempt to find equilibrium between nuance and essentialization, these poems waiver between another set of extremes: love as both self-effacing and as self-motivated. And again, between this set of extremes, another question is asked of us and we: “a life is wasted / that did not love, / so how can we perish?” Knowing how to pose this question, or even become capable of its asking, motivates each poem in the book. 

Louise Glück, who chose Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2007, wrote in the introduction to that first collection: 

The Earth in the Attic confuses these rituals of classification: Fady Joudah is, in one sense, a deeply political artist (though never an artist who writes to manifest or advance convictions) and, in another sense, a luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements.

Glück explains why these categories cannot account for all of what makes Joudah’s poetry so skillful. This has only become truer since 2007: the lexicon of Joudah’s work so far continues to complicate his recurring symbols, just as the precision of that language dizzies us—not into confusion—into an understanding which can only be articulated in the future. The categories Glück sets forth, like the optic extremes between which the poems of Tethered to Stars operate, are boundaries which might be transgressed, stared at from a distance, in other contexts ignored entirely, willed into an identity. Whatever one prefers. These poems do not choose between extremes and categories; they stare at both a sunflower and a galaxy and imagine what to do in between:   

You’re mostly 
of this earth, and more cloud
than ground. There’s
what drinks you for life.
You’ll be everywhere.