Dan Chiasson, in his review of Brenda Shaughnessy’s new
poetry collection Our Andromeda, in this
week’s issue of the magazine, quotes several lines from Shaughnessy’s poem
“Artless,” and says:
A rationed vocabulary, an imagination thinned by worry and
obligation, a new consciousness of death (the “smoke/in the old smokehouse”),
and, most of all, this strange antique music, like a dreamed stanza of Robert
Herrick: these elements create the subsistence beauty of “Artless” and much of
Shaughnessy’s new work.
That “subsistence beauty” is inspired! As a result of
reading Chiasson’s review (titled "The Cild In Time"), I went back to
"Artless" – it appears in the August 8, 2011 New Yorker – and took a close look at it. It is ingeniously structured: seventeen brief three-line
stanzas, each line no more than four or five words in length, each stanza
ending with a word containing “less” (e.g., “tartless,” roofless,” “bless,”
“meatless”). In this intriguing poem, Shaughnessy professes artlessness (“No
poetry. Plain”) as her aesthetic, but she does so in such an artful way that
she undercuts her message. Her words are plain, but they’re also beautifully
arranged and patterned. No poem worth the name is truly “artless.” What
Shaughnessy means, I think, is a sublime of pared-down language
(“less/substance, more rind”). Chiasson’s “subsistence beauty” describes it
brilliantly.
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