Almost Forever

Maria Testa

First off: the sentiment that lies behind these pieces is not a bad one, certainly. This probably would have made a good book of short stories (or, god help us, this decade's literary buzzword: "flash fiction"). When reading a book of poems, a reader should be looking at the sentiment behind the pieces last of all.

Why? Because writing, and poetry more so than most writing, only starts off being about the conveyance of sentiment-- or ideas, or feelings, or anything else. Reading solely from the perspective of gleaning the sentiment, the ideas, the feelings, etc. is not a bad thing-- after all, if you're reading for pleasure at all, you're still ahead of the game-- but you may not be realizing what you're missing.

I'm not talking about all that stuff they told you in English class when you were in high school about symbolism, deeper meanings, that sort of thing. That's all analysis that you do consciously. And while deep reading makes that sort of analysis easier, I'm talking about something even deeper: the way you experience reading on an instinctual level, how you read subconsciously. How you feel the words, rather than simply how you process them.

No book has ever conveyed a feeling perfectly, and certainly not to every person. However, some books, without doubt, convey feelings better than other books to the vast majority of people who read them. Think about the enduring significance of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Whether or not you're a fan of Shakespeare's, you have to admit that four hundred years after its premiere, Romeo and Juliet has stood the test of time; snatches of its dialogue have been cultural touchstones for the idea of forbidden love for centuries. Now compare it with the flash in the pan that was Robert Gover's The Hundred-Dollar Misunderstanding. This, too, was a piece of writing about forbidden love. It has been out in the wild for about a tenth of the time that Romeo and Juliet has, and there are, perhaps, as many people alive in the world today who remember it as there are number of dollars mentioned in the title (and I can guarantee you at least one of us does not remember it with anything approaching fondness). Why has Romeo and Juliet endured and The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding died a relatively quick and painful death? Because of the way in which each is written, more than anything. Romeo and Juliet is full of insight into affairs of the human heart. It's witty, clever, it coined some phrases the we still use in common speech. It presents its young lovers as Everyman and Everywoman and surrounds them with a strong cast of supporting players; no one who has ever read the Nurse can forget her. Shakespare tells his story by telling his story; while his characters are wont to pause and explain a point or two now and again, the amount of time spent explaining points compared to the amount of time telling the story is small. (Compare to, say, Moby-Dick, in which a full, and horrible, third of the book is devoted to stopping plot for advancing theme-- one of the single most unreadable passage in the history of literature. But I digress, and as I'm already inside a lengthy digression... but I digress. Again.) The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding first makes the mistake of being half-told in thick, garbled dialect, and is fully concerned with relating the events as they're being reflected upon by the participants. (Yes, folks, nothing actually happens in this book, we're just told about it.) When you stop and reflect on something that's happened to you, what do you do? You editorialize in your head. Of course you do; this is human nature, the mind's way of attaching significance to memory. What this style of presentation allows an author is a way for said author to also editorialize. This leads to the "message novel," where the author, believing you are an uneducated imbecile, will assume that you are incapable of understanding anything presented subtly, and proceed to ram his points home with all the style and grace of someone hammering a dead mackerel into your eye with a rubber mallet. Romeo and Juliet, to get back to the original point of this never-ending paragraph, is a play that allows its viewer to feel what Romeo and Juliet are going through; The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is a book that is quintessentially incapable of making its readers feel anything but annoyance and disgust with its writer that he could have produced such forgettable, inane, unreadable tripe.

"What does all this have to do with a young adult book of poetry?", you're likely asking yourself. Well, it's a very long way of saying that some forms of writing are more effective than others. Writers down through the ages have identified effective ways to write-- things one can do that heighten the conveyance of emotion to the maximum number of readers. And while it's an easy enough thing to list them, it's more effective to point them out. Consider:

"Mama was listening
carefully
to the news
on the radio
as she drove,
and raindrops were
drumming
loudly
on the roof
of our car,
and my brother was humming."
(--"Backseat Conversation")

First off, adverbs (here, "carefully" and "loudly") are widely, and correctly, considered weak words: they're easy to throw in and convey their feeling in the laziest of ways. Can you think of a better way to say "carefully" or "loudly"? Of course you can. Second, putting a single word on a line gives that word a sense of great importance in a poem; being set off by itself, a single word on a line requires great weight, often being the crux of the poem. (This is a great way to get one's point across subtly, by the way.) In this case, in a single strophe of this poem, we have three single-line words. How important can any one of them be? (And two of them, to top it off, are adverbs.)

Most importantly, perhaps, is the prose test. Take the poem and rewrite it as prose. If it does not lose any of its power being presented as prose, what you have is not a poem:

"Mama was listening carefully to the news on the radio as she drove, and raindrops were drumming loudly on the roof of our car, and my brother was humming."

What you have is a run-on sentence.

The book jacket calls Almost Forever "...a taut and tender American ballad...". First off, "ballad" is a particular style of poem, not a synonym for "poem." And were this actually a ballad, which involves a strict rhythm and rhyme scheme, it might well have been a better book. That it is tender is not something that can be disputed (and shouldn't be); "taut," on the other hand, is very much a function of form, and here the book fails. The single passage quoted above should be more than enough of an example of why, for the reasons stated.

Testa has good raw material to work with, but these poems are first drafts. They have the potential to be extremely effective, but at this point, potential is all they have.