Where the Mind Really Wants to Go: on Sara Nicholson’s “April”
Sarah Nicholson | April | The Song Cave | April 2023 | 90 pages
Sara Nicholson was playing Ocarina of Time when she wrote the poem “A Link to the Past.” She revealed this to a small crowd in Western Massachusetts last year, at a reading from her third book of poems April. The poem is about playing a video game, yes, but she didn’t want to title it after the most famous game in the Zelda franchise: too stoner-ish, too obvious. She looked around for other ideas, titling the poem after the third game in the franchise, which has a more evocative name, but is also a much harder game to get. The poem begins with an epigraph from Psalm 35, also known as the Psalm of David: “Take hold of shield and buckler.” In the psalm, David implores God to fight for him against his persecutors, to take vengeance on those who seek to destroy him. The speaker in the poem rides her “avatar’s horse” through a game world with too much and also not enough death, tasked with killing an untold number of enemies and assigned an infinite number of lives to do so, leading her to:
[Q]uestion the ontology of such a world, one in which my death
Meant little since I found myself
Resurrected an infinite number of times, brought back
to where I’d begun my quest, only to combat
More of my enemies who themselves
Never died, but instead dissolved painlessly, it seemed to me,
Into the earth.
The poem’s speaker, as she controls her avatar, longs to slaughter not her approved enemies, but tempting NPCs, like the chicken flocks of peaceful, unkillable villagers. In other words: the speaker loses focus. Or at least, she loses the kind of focus she needs to beat the game. The speaker refuses her avatar’s destiny. She does not wish to progress within the game’s questionable ontology. The poem’s last four lines could read like God’s counter-lament to David: “Worst of all my quest / Is interrupted day and night by others / Who call on me to serve / Their needs.”
April is made of thoughts like this, inconvenient thoughts, outcasts from the game world’s—the world’s—needy, bad logic. Self-liberation involves constructing a personal logic, a different way of being, one arrived at through incessant, sometimes inconvenient lines of questioning. The lyric method is figured in the poems as a kind of recalcitrance, where worldly obligations are experienced as interruptions, even incursions. In “A Link to the Past,” there's a layered aversion to obligation. The speaker skirts her obligations in the real world by playing the game in the first place. Once there, she continues her refusal, rejecting even the fictional higher calling her avatar is meant to pursue.
“A Link to the Past” may be about leisure, but there is real gravitas in refusing to assimilate to the game world. Images of female spirituality, specifically female spirituality, proliferate in the work: Christina the Astonishing’s miraculous spontaneous lactation, St. Angela of Foligno eating the scabs of the poor. In the absence of an all-consuming love for God, where can one put one’s body, one’s mind? There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it. Distraction becomes its own kind of devotion. And in this recalcitrant, worldly piety, everything is in play.
The first sonnet in a crown for Iris Murdoch, and on the verso, lines about White Claw. Later in the crown: “If divinity is ordinary / There is only here, there is no beyond.” In the poem “The Goatherd and the Saint: “A woman / On her phone / Next to The Polish Rider / Playing Candy Crush.” Frank O’Hara would have rather looked at his lover, but Candy Crush also beckons. It takes us a while to look at what’s on the wall. “Goatherd” goes on to describe what it feels like to be next to and to observe the masterpiece, and to “pay $22” for the privilege, which seems like a good deal. But far from chastising the Candy Crush woman, Nicholson knows she is in lyric communion with her. The tendency to drift, itself a refusal, doesn’t dull the lyric impulse: it is the lyric impulse. In the Frick, the speaker prefers Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert: “Happy, well- / Educated, you find yourself / Waylaid by the forms / The sacred takes: / A donkey and heron, / A rabbit / Popping its head out / Beneath Francis’s right hand.” The sacred, and its capricious ways of showing through, does surprise.
Two pages into “The Archetype,” a poem about the Greek myth Leda and the Swan, the speaker’s research leads her into the YouTube comments on swan mating videos:
As you might’ve guessed
Swan sex is difficult
To watch—the male grabs
The female’s neck, holds her head
Underwater for so long
She occasionally drowns. A user named Geof commented “Um there
Banging” and not to kink-shame the natural
But with Mr.Bright68 I’d have to agree: “This is not normal not love.”
What the poem wants is not to be a poem about what Leda and the Swan is about. Unlike Yeats’s take on the same subject, “The Archetype” is not so much a focused ekphrasis, but a scrapbook-ish, rangy account of Ledas across the ages and which ones the speaker likes best. This omnibus ekphrastic mode also shows up in “Goatherd.” Yeats appears set on a raped vision of Leda; Nicholson is more open-minded. She is not obligated to decide, because art also hasn’t: “Each of the above / mentioned artists paints / The sex as consensual, as seduction rather than / rape. Therefore Leda’s story / Is the story of interpretation itself / in every possible style.”
The poem wants, and wants to be, a lot of things. Leda and the Swan and Cezanne and Yeats and horrifying swan sex and Geof/Mr.Bright68 then after that Twombly, the Old Masters, Odysseus, Circes and Medea. Importantly, in that order. There exists in the poem not an inability to stay on topic so much as an irresistible drift toward where the mind really wants to go. Nicholson embeds a faith in the lyric possibilities of the brain-snatched contemporary consciousness. The lyric leap mirrors the moving cursor. The overstimulated, information-addled brain may be more, or at least equally, equipped for poetry than it was when we could allegedly focus on one thing and allegedly used our hands to touch each other. Even more, this recalcitrant, ever-contrasting mind may have the power to blow the veil of coherence off the nearer-past’s classicizing themes, evoking the flattened wisdom of a Google Image search. The poem ends where it began, on Leda: a "Greek amphora” and “a fresco in Pompeii” “show her kissing and fucking the swan, respectively […] In one / She is naked, but in the other, clothed.”
What a sieve-like consciousness retains is expressed even in the subtle turn of a line, like this one, in “Weather Talk: “I know the things I know / Nothing about might be things / Worth knowing.” There’s a brief declaration here: I know the things I know. The immediate turn to “Nothing” may express the poem’s feeling about possessive knowledge. Even more so, in the poem “Nut,“ ownership and decisiveness go together, a state the speaker rejects but also casually longs for, expressed in another thin, suggestive break: “It must be nice to own / A strong feeling.”
The speaker doesn’t really own anything: she relays, to someone, in the book’s final poem “Ten Lyric Pieces,” a memory from when they both “adjuncted in the year [they] said they wouldn’t,” and later, “It’s a trick / I played on nature, our landlord / Who rents to us this furnished studio.” Poetry is a renter, not an owner. There is no beating the game of life, which is why it’s better to play on the margins of it, in poems, which are the ultimate side quests of existence. Not always for the better, as in this line, in the aphoristic, pandemic-era prose sequence “Lives of the Saints”: “Poets teach vice: remorse without pleasure, vanity without self-care, purposeless play.” A strong opinion loosely held, maybe (the whole poem is made of them), because the professionalized arts could learn a thing or two from poetry: “A friend once told me he thinks poets should be paid the same as fiction writers. This is backward. We should instead pay fiction writers the way poets are paid: very little, infrequently, mostly not at all.” Even if Nicholson is suspicious of poetry, she also maintains a belief in the potential of its vices, the promise of a lyric egalitarianism that might flourish inside a moneyless void. This latter vision is expressed in the aptly titled “Everyone’s Poem:”
Scarcity’s
A nail driven through the concrete
Slab in a garden, soon to be
Overcome by weeds, wildfire
Particles in the air. And so I
Willed for myself a life
Apart from you, one in which
Apricots fell freely to all
Who would eat them, no thirst
For money, the burnished coin
Of my rage.
Later in the poem, the anvil of obedience returns:
How I long
To live, as angels do, in utter
Obedience to a power, whose law
Provokes no rumor of music
Favoring the hush that follows
A shift tense of pronoun
On cool May mornings, likely
Milder than the present
Climate crisis should permit.
Renouncing ownership and its terrible objectives is good for poems, because it involves refusing to “serve [others’] needs,” which no one really expects of poetry, and which is what makes it worth writing and is also what causes there to be no money in it. The speaker may long to live “in utter obedience to a power,” but she wants to live in obedience to the total, freeing powers like the ones “angels” (or saints) live under, not in obedience to the hellish, specific powers to which humans are subjected to, and create, on earth. Nicholson enters into her poems the same way a campy speaker in the poem “Spain” approaches a vacation:
Having never been to Spain
I left for it
As one who
Hazards faith in vagueness.
Faith in vagueness is present in the collection’s entirety. Nicholson expresses a wager, or at least a wish, that renouncing closure (masquerading as exactitude) might bring us to a special clarity, one that exists not in possessive knowledge but in the potential for the distracted mind to world-build a different reality: “I’d tell the story / End-stopped by snow, the poem / of a world without pain / We are capable of imagining.”
There is faith here, but it’s melancholic, limited. The world of pain serves the needs, or desires, of others, others whose forces are much stronger and more diabolical than the comparatively slight visible force of poetry on the compromised earth. We might not be capable of picturing a world without pain. The writing of poetry may in fact depend on the world of pain, as Alice Notley suggests in this line from Disobedience, her first 21st century book: “In a good world / I might not feel like writing poems / would I be happy.” The poem of a world without pain: it’s that world, in that poem, that we can imagine.
Like Murdoch, Nicholson considers, in her own deadpan way, moral virtue and the relationship of ethics to aesthetics, like in this line from “Lives of the Saints”: “I like some things because I don’t like others. Rejection is affirmation. And affirmation is necessary for living well.” If living well means being good, Bradley Pearson, the compromised, wannabe-ascetic narrator of Murdoch’s The Black Prince, frames the issue this way, in part one of Murdoch’s fifteenth novel: “Most artists, through sheer idleness, weariness, inability to attend, drift again and again and again from the one stage straight into the other [...] This is of course a moral problem, since all art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.” Nicholson exhibits the true focus and fortitude it takes to stray, the negative affirmation of the drift. Later in “Lives of the Saints,” the speaker acknowledges the promiscuous slightness of poetry, and its powerful refusal to be bought and sold: “Sometimes I feel that I have so much to give, but no one to give it to. In reality I have nothing to give, and anyone can have it.” The sovereignty and strength of this nullity are so central to the book that these lines float in black, alone, on the back cover. We’re reminded of “A Link to the Past,” of Psalm 35: it is Godlike to renounce your own power.