The Thing Said Well

…There is a time
in the long affliction of our spoken lives when,
among all the verbal bungling, stupidity,
and general disorder that burden us
like the ragged garment of flesh itself, when,
beneath the vast and articulate shadows
of the saints of language, the white dove of genius
with its quick, wild wings has entered our souls,
our immaculate ignorance, and we are,
at last, redeemed. And so is conceived and born
the thing said, finally, well nay perfectly—…

                                                —B. H. Fairchild

I sit in a lecture hall filled with anticipation. Each seat occupied, the accumulative noise of a multitude of murmured conversations gives rise to a buzz greater than the sum of its parts. Or perhaps the buzz is just me, a mixture of energy and excitement that brews into something like nervousness. I am about to meet my artistic hero. Like Dante learning that Virgil will be his spiritual guide, the thought of hearing the poetry of B. H. Fairchild read by B. H. Fairchild leads to a shock of humility and joy.

Granted—poetry readings are not rock-concerts; they do not turn out a crowd. But tonight the hall is full. The fuzzy pop and crackle from the speakers tells us the mike is turned on, and we quiet. Stepping to the podium, Fairchild ask us to call him Pete, and begins to read.

On first pass—and many don’t get past the first—poetry seems to be inherently inaccessible. Its brevity of language, its reliance on literary allusion and complex metaphor, and the seemingly pretentious austerity of the author leaves the reader grasping for understanding, like a fish out of water gumming at the air. No slight irony, if art is to do what it claims to do: communicate experience and/or new understanding.

But the “flaw” is entirely absent in the poetry of Fairchild. After finishing his first poem, he explains his next before reading it, concluding, “I’m one of the few and dwindling poets who actually want you to understand his poetry.”^[1] And we do. The hall is silent, and after each poem the air tightens with the desire to clap or shout or at the very least weep. Not only do we understand his poetry—his language, his images—we understand with electric clarity what his poetry is trying to help us understand.

Partly we understand growing up in the plains of Kansas during the post-war era, where being a man meant working hard and finishing well and never pulling a punch. Hope was for Sundays and Beauty never spoken of. But we also understand our own lives. We better understand our fathers, our cultural ideas of masculinity, and Beauty itself. In short, we better understand what it is to be human. And that is exactly what art is meant to do. Music, painting, a good story—whatever the form, art is meant to point towards the ineffable, to look up at the stars and when I say “Woah,” you know exactly what I mean. And when it is really well done, as it points towards the ineffable, it becomes nearly ineffable itself. Thus the difficulty of poetry: it is hard to walk the line between ineffable and unintelligible. Yet somehow Fairchild pulls it off:

“What He said, What She Said”

When Candi Baumeister announced to us all
that J. D. was in love with Brigitte Bardot,
drawing those two syllables out like some kid
stretching the pink strands of Dubble Bubble
from between her teeth, J. D. chose
not to duck his head in the unjust shame
of the truly innocent, but rather lifted it
in the way of his father scanning the sky
in silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant
upon his doomed soybeans or St. Francis
blessing sparrows or the air itself, eyes radiant
with Truth and Jesus and said Babydoll,
I would walk on my tongue from here to Amarillo
Just to wash her dishes.

There is a time
in the long affliction of our spoken lives when,
among all the verbal bungling, stupidity,
and general disorder that burden us
like the ragged garment of flesh itself, when,
beneath the vast and articulate shadows
of the saints of language, the white dove of genius
with its quick, wild wings has entered our souls,
our immaculate ignorance, and we are,
at last, redeemed. And so is conceived and born
the thing said, finally, well nay perfectly—
as it might be said by that unknowable Being
for whom we have in our mortal linguistic
incapacity no adequate name.
Candi Baumeister bore her own virginal
moment of absolute poetry: Babydoll,
I’ve a got a sink full of dirty dishes.
Why don’t you wash and I’ll dry,
and then we’ll do it again.  ^[2]

I may just be speaking for myself when I say I know exactly what he’s talking about, but I doubt it’s true. We have all experienced the frustration of miscommunication and misunderstanding; we have all felt the damage to our relationships. And as Fairchild said before he read this poem, we all deserve, at least once in our lives, to say exactly what we mean. For me, the poetry of B. H. Fairchild is precisely this. It is the thing said well, nay, perfectly. He says exactly what he means, in every poem, and we understand. This is the goal of art, so far as I’m concerned. A goal rarely attained.

As Fairchild drew to the close of his reading, I longed for poetry readings to be more like rock-concerts: they should have encores.

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in B. H. Fairchild, read his poems “Beauty,” “Body and Soul,” or “The Deposition.” If you want to take a bigger plunge, check out his book The Art of the Lathe or the anthology of his work which Norton recently published, Blue Buick.