What Is Lyricism? Part Two.
If lyricism is defined in part by musical language, its other essential attribute is resonance. Lyrical writing does not flit among the flowers — it strikes to the root, to the visceral chord. In that way, lyricism evokes intensity and resonance.
There is no template for resonance, no method by which a writer can reliably reach that bass note. Resonance is like laughter; it requires a leap of faith. The writer leaves a thought unresolved or an image incomplete so the reader can complete it within themself. We laugh the hardest when we connect two dots that are far apart; just so, the most resonant writing requires a reader to finish its meaning without the author’s help.
Resonance often comes from nuance: suggesting meaning rather than stating it outright, creating a mood or feeling without explicitly naming it.
Take, for instance, this poem by Ted Kooser.
A Blind Woman
She had turned her face up into a rain of light, and came on smiling. The light trickled down her forehead and into her eyes. It ran down into the neck of her sweatshirt and wet the white tops of her breasts. Her brown shoes splashed on into the light. The moment was like a circus wagon rolling before her through puddles of light, a cage on wheels, and she walked fast behind it, exuberant, curious, pushing her cane through the bars, poking and prodding, while the world cowered back in a corner.
Even though Kooser tells us later in the poem that the woman is “exuberant, curious,” he nuances those qualities earlier with light imagery and with her smile. We can see that this is not just literal light — it’s splashing on her shoes.
The metaphor opens up with the cage analogy for the “moment” that is “rolling before her.” And the last line packs a whallop, doesn’t it, when we realize that we are the world cowering in the corner of that cage? The poem detonates with a clear meaning: the woman with a disability isn’t the one with limitations; anyone who fears her condition is trapped behind those bars.
If the poem did its work well, you didn’t need me to spell all that out. You felt it, maybe as a flash in your stomach, when you read that last line. The vividness of the scene and the woman’s character prepares you for Kooser’s surprise reversal of expectation.
My friend Debra Marquart’s essay “Some Things About That Day” is another study in resonance. I’ll warn you that this essay might be triggering. It does its work so well that you won’t know immediately what it’s about (even the title is veiled). But when that realization creeps in, maybe from the placards, from the waiting room, or from the sounds in the fourth paragraph, an irresistible dread follows.
If you choose to read it, the full essay is available at Brevity (a mere 530 words).
The foreboding we feel when we first understand Marquart’s nuances deepens with what we learn about her marriage, and this is the sour note of the last line. But it’s the surprise kindness of a pharmacist, a stranger, the “softness dawn[ing] on his face,” that undoes me. The very tenderness a marriage ought to have, but so clearly lacks in this case. A brief moment when the author feels seen, emotionally safe, before she has to walk back into her inhospitable home.
I don’t think it’s possible to read an essay like this without absorbing a portion of the author’s pain into ourselves. Understanding like that, even if it remains incomplete, creates resonance.
Nuances are risky. They can be misunderstood, misconstrued. Some readers find resonance in making art mean whatever they want regardless of how far from the original mark they might have strayed, but I am of the Romantic school that believes epiphany can be shared. It’s the echo of my AHA in another’s heart that makes writing worthwhile. And so I’m always trying to assemble the raw materials for that epiphany without forcing it, hoping my reader can pick up the two wires and touch them together to discover the spark.
But in the worst case scenario, such as most of the poetry I read in The New Yorker, nuances lead to confusion, cryptic references, and the sense that a writer is either toying with you or not working hard enough to bridge the gap. Kooser and Marquart show it’s possible to be direct without being pedantic. The trick is to allow nuance to work by accretion, to keep showing the idea or feeling consistently, resisting the urge to name it or tell the reader all about it.
A fine example of this direct indirectedness is John McPhee’s “Silk Parachute.” McPhee’s opening conceit, that his mother’s 99th birthday calls for some reminiscing, is almost immediately undercut by a string of denials followed by vivid memories.
It has been alleged that when I was in college she heard that I had stayed up all night playing poker and wrote me a letter that used the word "shame" forty-two times. I do not recall this.
I do not recall being pulled out of my college room and into the church next door.
It has been alleged that on December 24, 1936, when I was five years old, she sent me to my room at or close to 7 P.M. for using four-letter words while trimming the Christmas tree. I do not recall that.
The assertion is absolutely false that when I came home from high school with an A-minus she demanded an explanation for the minus.
There’s a playfulness in these disavowals, and an obvious contradiction with the precision of each memory, that slowly dawns on the reader. Oh, these are all BAD memories. We don’t want to remember disagreeable things about our mothers, yet we do, and the tension between those truths and our guilt for holding on to them is part of what I hear McPhee nuancing here. It’s sweet in a way, and also funny, the son defending his mother even as he’s spilling their dirty laundry on the page.
At roughly the halfway mark, McPhee signals a shift in tone: “We have now covered everything even faintly unsavory that has been reported about this person in ninety-nine years, and even those items are a collection of rumors, half-truths, prevarications, false allegations, inaccuracies, innuendos, and canards.”
Thereafter, the voice is confident and affirming:
This is the mother who — when Alfred Knopf wrote her twenty two-year-old son a letter saying, "The readers' reports in the case of your manuscript would not be very helpful, and I think might discourage you completely" — said, "Don't listen to Alfred Knopf. Who does Alfred Knopf think he is, anyway? Someone should go in there and k-nock his block off." To the best of my recollection, that is what she said.
The first half of the essay includes more than a dozen bad memories, all abbreviated, all framed by denials. But the last half covers just three: the Knopf letter; a birthday trip to the theatre where McPhee’s mother gives him a spyglass, so he can see from their cheap seats; and an outing to watch planes at La Guardia, where she buys him a rubber ball with a silk parachute inside. Each of these memories draws out the accordion of time, emphasizing what McPhee wants to keep close about his mother: times when she had his back and made him feel safe and loved.
The pretentious poet or writer makes you feel like you can’t quite rise to their level, but the truly gifted writer makes the epiphany easy. We have no idea what the title “Silk Parachute” means until the toy is introduced, and McPhee takes pains to nuance its qualities as female: two breastlike hemispheres, each with a “nib” where a piece of string kept the halves closed until he threw it up in the air and “the string unwound and the parachute blossomed.”
The whole essay comes home in the final line, even all those unsavory memories at the start:
Folded just so, the parachute never failed. Always, it floated back to you — silkily, beautifully — to start over and float back again. Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard — gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you.
I’m not ashamed to say that this line makes me emotional every time I read it, because I’m completing its truth within myself. I hear the echo of 1 Corinthians 13 in that phrase “never failed.” No matter what I’ve done, my mother has always come back to me. McPhee doesn’t need to preach that truth, he just has to show it in his silk parachute.
We each find our own root chord in that final line. And that is resonance.
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