{"id":231779,"date":"2024-01-08T04:51:35","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T09:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=231779"},"modified":"2024-01-08T12:49:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T17:49:54","slug":"beyond-resolutions-a-closer-look-at-the-new-year-poem-as-an-act-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/beyond-resolutions-a-closer-look-at-the-new-year-poem-as-an-act-of-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Resolutions: A Closer Look at \u201cThe New Year Poem\u201d as an Act of Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like much of my favorite poetry, Kim Addonizio\u2019s \u201cNew Year\u2019s Day<\/a>\u201d found me, seemingly of its own accord, from within the entropy of a physical bookstore\u2019s shelves. I was determined to conclude a dream-like December in Buenos Aires, the city boasting the most bookstores per capita of any in the world, by exploring those abundant shelves for Argentine poetry. Despite my best intentions to bid farewell to the city via its verse, it was the very American Addonizio\u2019s voice that kept calling to me from within a bilingual anthology (Antolog\u00ed<\/em>a Salvaje<\/em>, translated by Marina Kohon) on Librer\u00eda Norte\u2019s overflowing shelves.<\/p>\n

Addonizio\u2019s New Year poem deals in the intimacy of the few. The speaker briefly recalls the geographically-distant \u201cfew loves I\u2019ve been allowed \/\/ to keep\u201d while walking through a rainy Virginia field \u201cwith only \/ a few young cows for company,\u201d the spare bodies mirroring each other across their separation. Though the poem operates in a language of questions\u2014wondering, for instance, about grown girls from the hometown\u2019s junior high, \u201chow their lives \/\/ have carried them \/ this far without ever once \/\/ explaining anything,\u201d this poem for the New Year is not a question but a statement of desire. Addonizio\u2019s couplets deliver the reader through a ladder of symmetrical enjambments, claiming as the poem progresses \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d \/ \u201cI don\u2019t care\u201d \/ \u201cToday I want\u201d before confessing: \u201cToday I want \/ to resolve nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Resolution shines when the year turns. The New Year promises, or asks us to promise, resolution in its various forms: resolution as resolve, determination to change. Resolution as closure, solving the old year\u2019s pains, answering a question. Resolution is the satisfying tying of a knot. Questions resolve into answers. Resolution knows.<\/p>\nThe New Year promises, or asks us to promise, resolution in its various forms: resolution as resolve, determination to change.<\/span>\n

The speaker in Addonizio\u2019s poem wants no answers, no resolution. \u201cNew Year\u2019s Day\u201d lets its questions hang in the \u201ccold \/ blessing of the rain\u201d\u2014where the \u201cbig-boned and shy\u201d girls from junior high are now, who it is that \u201cused \/\/ to make them happiest.\u201d Addonizio doesn\u2019t simply negate resolution but instead replaces it with desire. More important than \u201cresolve nothing\u201d is the declaration on the enjambed line before: \u201cToday I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Addonizio\u2019s desire to leave the New Year unresolved reminded me of the closing line of Natasha Rao\u2019s \u201cIn the New Year<\/a>\u201d: \u201cNo resolution in any of it.\u201d In Rao\u2019s poem, a disoriented speaker confronts myriad warped reflections of themself: in a train window, in a bathroom mirror, \u201cdistorted \/ through the stemmed glass\u201d of a martini. \u201cHow easy it is to hurt \/ someone,\u201d the speaker muses, repeatedly attempting to \u201cface what comes after\u201d through distorted images of the self. The bifurcation of the speaker\u2019s face across various reflective surfaces yields no answers, brings the speaker no closer to coveted resolution.<\/p>\n

What is it about resolution, whether we mean the all-too-familiar language of annual personal goals or the closure of mending past love, that warrants poets\u2019 resistance, that bears opening up? Though poetry has long been the language of resistance, resolution is a non-obvious target for poetry\u2019s grappling: what are the dangers of conceding to resolution, anyway? Why is resolution worth resisting at all?<\/p>\n

New Year poems, which often acknowledge if not celebrate the season of resolution, offer some insight into how poets have resisted notions of resolution over time. If we look carefully enough, New Year poems can even conjure alternate visions of what dreams to dream in place of resolution\u2014what might happen when we choose \u201cto resolve nothing\u201d instead.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The first New Year poem I ever read begins \u201cNever take yoga from a woman named Pretzel.\u201d Staci R. Schoenfield\u2019s \u201cAdvice for a New Year,<\/a>\u201d first published in the now-defunct Amethyst Arsenic, masquerades as a list of classical New Year Resolutions glorifying wellness and self-help. \u201cSwallow words like one-a-day-vitamins,\u201d it advises, before cautioning, \u201cIf the words taste bad, spit them out.\u201d Schoenfield\u2019s increasingly surreal list of resolutions (\u201cInvest all your money in chaos\u201d) ruptures the idea of self-improvement, even of yearning for the possible.<\/p>\n

These resolutions were never meant to be followed; how would one \u201cspend 53 minutes of every day wrapped in a cloak of impossibility,\u201d anyway? Though this litany proceeds in a commanding second-person voice, the poem itself resolves in a gesture of asking: \u201cIf you can\u2019t remember what to do, ask the squirrels. They know how to find what is hidden.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Schoenfield, many poets writing about the New Year explore the relationship between question and answer implicit in resolution. In place of resolution\u2019s self-assured knowing, many New Year poems speak from a place of not-knowing. They break open answers. They open questions up.<\/p>\nIn place of resolution\u2019s self-assured knowing, many New Year poems speak from a place of not-knowing.<\/span>\n

Lia Purpura\u2019s compressed \u201cResolution<\/a>\u201d deals almost exclusively with its namesake. Entangled in the language of productivity, temptation, and moralizing resolutions (\u201cThere\u2019s the thing I shouldn\u2019t do\u201d), the speaker calms themself by chanting \u201cmorning, morning, \/ morning.<\/em>\u201d Here, even the language of meditative productivity (\u201cthink more calmly, \/ breathe\u201d) gives way to an irresistible, cosmic asking, a raising of energy and entropy rather than a calming down: \u201cit isn\u2019t even \/ hidden, hear it in there, \/ more, more, \/ more<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Schoenfield and Purpura, Christopher Merrill\u2019s \u201cLines for the New Year<\/a>\u201d replicates the language of resolution by questioning it. Following two stanzas filled with tidal marine detail (kelp fronds, stingrays, tuna-filled boats), the speaker moves through a foreign land via an embassy, security detail, and a taxi driver before finally arriving at a question that evokes and challenges the clich\u00e9s of the New Year: \u201cWhat to do \/ Until the Champagne, resolutions, Auld Lang Syne<\/em>?<\/p>\n

It has long been a poet\u2019s job to write from a place of asking. Writers raised on Rilke\u2019s \u201cLetters to a Young Poet,\u201d may be familiar with the exhortation, \u201cDo not now seek the answers… because you would not be able to live them.\u201d If resolution is a form of seeking answers, we find New Year poems resisting resolution in the same way Rilke implored young Kappus to resist answers, to instead \u201clive the questions now.\u201d<\/p>\n

How ought we to \u201clive the question?\u201d If a question is an anti-resolution, how do New Year poems invite us to continue asking? Jane Hirshfield\u2019s \u201cCounting, This New Year\u2019s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me<\/a>,\u201d opens with a question the world asks daily: \u201cAnd what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured<\/em>?\u201d Toward the end of the poem, Hirshfield\u2019s speaker confesses: \u201cToday, I woke without answer,\u201d recalling Addonizio\u2019s \u201cToday I want \/ to resolve nothing.\u201d As in Addonizio\u2019s poem, where the speaker is answered by \u201cthe cold \/ blessing of the rain,\u201d in Hirshfield\u2019s world, \u201cThe day answers.\u201d Alone on New Year day and exhausted by the need to answer and resolve, these speakers choose to resolve nothing. They let the world answer for them.<\/p>\n

This move away from the enormous abstractness of answered questions and toward the intimate specificity of the world persists across many New Year poems. June Jordan\u2019s manifesto-like \u201cOn a New Year\u2019s Eve\u201d<\/a> beats its refrain: \u201cInfinity doesn\u2019t interest me.\u201d What interests Jordan\u2019s speaker instead is \u201cthe temporary sacred\u201d; in place of infinity, the speaker recalls opossums in a persimmon tree, a bird eating sandflies, children scattering after the schoolbell.<\/p>\n

For Jordan, celebrating the temporary goes beyond cherishing the moment or grappling with mortality. The world\u2019s fleeting nature and sacred ungraspability heighten the intimacy of Jordan\u2019s images. Repeatedly, the speaker longs for not just the beloved\u2019s arm, but for \u201cyour brown arm before it \/ moves.\u201d<\/p>\n

W. S. Merwin\u2019s \u201cTo the New Year\u201d<\/a> also explores the intimacy of touch by personifying the New Year itself, comparing the way the sun reaches down \u201cto touch the tips of a few \/ high leaves\u201d with the speaker\u2019s hopes \u201cinvisible before us \/ untouched and still possible.\u201d Here, touch renders things real. The speaker\u2019s untouched resolutions remain out of reach, \u201cstill possible,\u201d while the New Year day itself, struck with sunlight at the edge of a valley, is alive to the senses.<\/p>\n

Just as Merwin and Jordan regard the intimacy of the senses above \u201cthat \/ abstraction that enormity<\/a>\u201d of resolution, Philip Appleman\u2019s \u201cTo the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana\u201d<\/a> celebrates the everyday. Recalling Jordan\u2019s \u201ctemporary sacred,\u201d the garbage men in this poem are not just rendered real through sensory detail\u2014heaving huge cans, moving past \u201ca solid chunk \/ of garbage truck\u201d\u2014but made sacred, more worthy of worship than infinity\u2019s abstractness. Appleman\u2019s devotion to the garbage men transcends ordinary language. Running from house to house on New Year\u2019s day, the garbage collectors are a manifestation of something larger than life, like Jesus becoming human\u2014something in which \u201cpeople everywhere have faith\u201d as they \u201cconfidently bide your second coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though resolution\u2019s conclusiveness\u00a0bears resisting through asking questions and celebrating the intimacy of touch, there can be a place for resolution in New Year poetry. The end of a year can function as a rehearsal for death, prompting poets to write about the New Year by elegizing the old (Joseph Fasano\u2019s \u201cElegy for a Year<\/a>\u201d; Naomi Shibah Nye\u2019s \u201cBurning the Old Year<\/a>\u201d; Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s \u201cElegy in Joy<\/a>\u201d; Lisa Richter\u2019s \u201cNew Year\u2019s Lament<\/a>\u201d; among others). Few New Year poems concede to resolution\u2019s call for closure without also exploring mortality and death, as if to suggest that one cannot resolve something without resolving it for good.<\/p>\n

R.S. Thomas\u2019 \u201cResolution\u201d<\/a> begins with \u201cthe old resolve \/ to be brave\u201d and quickly encounters the body\u2019s mortality: \u201cthe bones ache, the blood limps \/ like a cripple about the ruins \/ of one\u2019s body.\u201d One cannot think about the year without also thinking about \u201cthe telescoping of the years,\u201d as Thomas does. At times this meditation on mortality manifests as a somber reminder of the lost, as in Greg Delanty\u2019s \u201cA New Law.\u201d<\/a> \u201cNo ringing in the new year,\u201d it proclaims, resisting the New Year outright, \u201cFor many are not here who were here before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes a poet can salvage from within the New Year\u2019s reminder of mortality a cherishing of life, a determination to keep going. A resolve. David Clewell\u2019s \u201cNew Year\u2019s Eve Letter to Friends\u201d<\/a> does not shy away from the improbability of an easy life: \u201cMostly the letters you\u2019re expecting never come.\u201d And though \u201canother ring shows up \/ when we lay open the cross-section,\u201d Clewell hopes against hope. \u201cWalk onto the planet tonight,\u201d the speaker urges friends. \u201cHere\u2019s the best part, coming last.\u201d Death is not evaded, as the speaker\u2019s friends take their places \u201cat the top of the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this poem still hopes for \u201cthe longshot [to] come home,\u201d for \u201cthe letters [to] pour in, full of the good word \/ that never got as far as you before.\u201d Clewell asks the reader to resolve to keep going. To pursue the letters, the lovers, the borrowed light that might appear impossible from the midst of one\u2019s real and finite life. To continue at all requires belief in the improbable, perhaps even to be \u201cwrapped in a cloak of impossibility.<\/p>\n

As the New Year opens with its influx of resolution-oriented language\u2014self-help guides, discounted fitness equipment, tips for following through\u2014I choose to follow the poets. Like Addonizio, today I want to resolve nothing. Except for one: I resolve to spend 53 minutes every day wrapped in the cloak of impossibility of being alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like much of my favorite poetry, Kim Addonizio\u2019s \u201cNew Year\u2019s Day\u201d found me, seemingly of its own accord, from within the entropy of a physical bookstore\u2019s shelves. I was determined to conclude a dream-like December in Buenos Aires, the city boasting the most bookstores per capita of any in the world, by exploring those abundant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15596,"featured_media":212991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43069,43074,11,43070],"tags":[57102,3628,17849,43497,7254,62080,92929,212,92928,92927,4860],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/new-years.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-Yin","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}