levelheaded: Don’t Look Back

“Don’t Look Back” puts innovative language on display right away. A “backglance” may be a noun packing up the action of glancing back into a physical state. Such disposition is attached to a “muddy skirt,” one being glanced at, or one describing the person who is glancing. The “muddy skirt” evokes a sense of contradiction or criticism, and stays with us as we explore the poem’s reflective content.

In the second stanza the backglance is replaced by “the moral” as the muddy skirt gives way to “curling yellow nails.” Here too a bodily occurrence evokes a mental state or perception. In the third, similarly, “backglance” becomes “gaze,” moral becomes what “the street teaches.” We can’t yet tell with precision what values are under examination, but the imagery gives us just enough to guess. Where a skirt is being gazed at, where moral precedes the shaking of shoulders – the idea of being observed, of examining worth through physicality – is up in the air.

The phrase opening the fifth stanza, “stray / & you are salt,” brings together the ideas explored thus far. Evoking the story of Lot’s wife, we are reminded of the punishment and the perversion associated with, well, glancing back. Unlike the biblical story, the criticism here is of the consequence rather than of the person that “stray[s].” The woman who gazes is, in derogatory fashion, a “hag,” whereas the male gaze in a contemporary sense is a manifestation of oppressive force.

The final couple of stanzas offer overt criticism of this ingrained myth as well as hints at female experience and consequence. The poem’s language turns back to grammatical innovation as the speaker concludes the aforementioned ideas and sayings are ”another piss-poor / mytho-way of saying” – and before we move on to reveal what’s being said – piss-poor mytho-way already says it all.

The stanza ends, but the sentence continues, and ends with: “where a girl goes / when she doesn’t go woman.” It’s neither a big reveal nor a relieving clarification. But with “girl” and “woman” juxtaposed in the closing stanza, Becca Klaver gives us just enough to put together the pieces through a second read. We can sense all that’s implied by the scent of little pockets of air our nose follows.

– The Editors