levelheaded: Epiphenomenal Epithalamium

There is something at once off-putting and enticing about this poem’s densely Latinate title. It is essentially a kind of technical, academic jargon, but it also rolls off the tongue (the two words are both six syllables and the “ph” and “th” of their respective words lend an interesting parallel rhythm to the words). It is intriguingly vague, but without a dictionary of poetic terms and a handbook of Latin etymology (or both: Wikipedia!), it is impenetrable. As is the case with much technical language, we have very little connotative baggage to bring to a word like “epiphenomenal.” Even a word like “epithalamium,” which has served as a title or subtitle for numerous poems (1, 2, 3, and 4 for example), cannot direct a reader’s emotional or intellectual attention other than to say “this poem is about a wedding.”

As mentioned, “epithalamium” is a nice big word referring to a poem composed to honor a marriage. But the title’s adjective modifier, “epiphenomenal,” opens the poem to a bit more possibility. An epiphenomenon is simply one of two or more coinciding phenomena. Epiphenomenalism, though, refers to the dualistic notion that mental states have no effect on the physical world and that they are, in fact, the results—the “epiphenomena”—of the physical world. Either application of “epiphenomenal” goes a long way toward explaining the other obvious feature of Michael Leong’s poem: its structure.

Since our minds seem trained to identify groups of words as each having a collective goal, it feels natural to read the dual columns of Leong’s poem both together and individually. None of these three readings alone (left, right, and both together) is as strong as all three together. By separating the poem into two vague halves, Leong has enacted the “resonance,” “playback,” and “elongated echoes” mentioned in the poem. The speaker’s early claim, “the path of / least / resistance is / resonance,” becomes a blueprint for reading the poem. We are unable to lean on any one concrete point of reference, but instead can hear the poem swirl around us, bouncing off of itself across a chasm of white space. Apply this to “epiphenomenal,” and the poem’s bifurcation becomes a way to explain the conjoining of two extraordinary bodies and a way to understand that the separation of two ideas, here emotion and physicality, does not necessarily belittle one or the other. Despite the poem’s brevity, its philosophy is large. That such ideological breadth can be found in twelve very short lines about a wedding is surprising, powerful, and exciting.

And they are twelve short lines about a wedding—at least partially. The “eloping” of the final line is a peace offering to those searching for tangibility in a world of echoes. It sets the poem back into an explicitly “epithalamium” mode, and lets us feel like we might just be reading about an actual marriage between two people who love each other, ultimately helping the reader bring the two dearly beloved halves of this poem together in holy matrimony.

– The Editors