Today's American Lit class discussed poems of connection: Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" and "This Room and Everything In It," in which the poet reveals a rage for making connections between distant people and events, preserving important moments of meaning by transforming them into distinct images--an effort that faltering memory renders futile--and Amit Majmudar, whose poem "To the Hyphenated Poets" characterizes poets themselves as the hyphen that connect disparate people and cultures, the "tongue a hyphen joining / nation to nation."
"Splendor is spliced," asserts Majmudar, and that splicing is what's missing from our lives right now. How can we make fertile connections when we have to stand six feet apart or sit ensconced in our houses encountering the world through our screens? Perhaps we'll see a new poetry of separation arising from this experience, a new emphasis on drawing on inner resources to stand alone and indivisible, but what I really miss right now is the feeling of being part of something beyond the confines of my own screen, something that can't be muted or switched off at will.
Give me some spliced splendor, some accidental encounters with others who don't gaze suspiciously from a distance! I'm reminded of another Majmudar poem, "The Beard," in which the suspicious gaze of strangers locks the poet into a space of sterile stereotypes, a move that "foreclosed / the flux" of personal identity and left him with no way to bare his "true face veiled beneath his beard." The global pandemic has sequestered us all behind masks and machines and inspired us to look at others as sources of disease rather than splendor, and I only hope our poets are finding the words that will help us make new connections after the plague is vanquished.
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