Leveler Poetry Journal
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from The Bird in Guernica


Objects keep

emptying;

I market

myself to them.


This is my

current location

I say.

It is my

purest expression

to date.


Palette

of debt,

vertical

grief,


I can’t afford

all these words.


I can’t

get out of here

in time.


I could

succumb

to anything.




Chris Tonelli

levelheaded: from The Bird in Guernica


Have you seen the 3D version of Picasso’s Guernica posted online a few years ago? The video is worth watching, as it gives a few seconds of screen time to our titular bird, which can be difficult to see in thumbnail images of Guernica on the internet. That’s because the bird in Guernica blends into the background of the painting. More on that in a moment. First, let’s look at the poem itself.


The first phrase we encounter, “Objects keep / emptying,” is vague. The word “objects,” like the word “things” or “stuff,” tells us almost nothing about what is emptying. And we can’t be sure whether the “objects” are “emptying” something, or whether they are “emptying” themselves. The next lines, “I market / myself to them,” give anyone who’s ever embarked on a job search something familiar, if unexpected, to hold on to. “Marketing” oneself is a concept that comes to us out of business culture, so its inclusion in a poem shakes any implicit staleness out of the phrase. The line, “I market,” read singularly and aloud, brings to mind a host of “i” products (iPhones, iPads, iRobots, etc.). The same kind of repurposing is used with the lines, “This is my / current location.” The idea of a “current location” in the context of a smartphone app or Google maps is familiar. But the phrase reveals its emptiness when it becomes part of a poem.


Coupled with these recontextualized phrases, moments like “palette / of debt” and “vertical / grief” are made even more beautiful and confounding. The word “palette” might come from Picasso’s gray-scale color scheme in Guernica, but what makes this a palette of “debt”? And what makes grief “vertical”? Then the phrase “I can’t afford / all these words” implies language has real value. The speaker views language as a component of a capitalist marketplace, as one more resource to save, invest, and exploit. The poem’s overall helplessness seems critical of such thinking, though the underlying idea—that language is valuable and perhaps worth using concisely—is a nice one.


In our superficial, literal reading of the poem—our specialty!—we follow a speaker who, in a perfect reversal, markets himself (via Facebook? Twitter?) to the products he will buy. Debt weighs him down, but he can’t escape the marketplace. The speaker’s inability to escape, his passivity, in some ways makes him complicit in the world’s washing over him. This brings us back to the bird in Guernica. Like the speaker in this poem, Picasso’s bird is a tiny, passive part of a large, oppressive machine. For 1930’s Spain, this machine is war. For 2010’s America (and the poem), this machine is self-perpetuating cycle of apathy and consumerism. The bird, in both cases, is the world’s small conscience, chirping ineffectually to put a stop to it all.



– The Editors



levelheaded: poet’s comments


“Thanks again for the careful reading. Every time I’ve tried to respond I’ve felt a little petty. I guess the only thing I’d like to add is the idea of objects, not only as items of commerce, but as units of art, as victims or constituents of politics, etc. The bird in the painting, for example, is all of these. And as an artist that has trouble creating, because of private neuroses and public policy, I often feel that I’m imploring objects to separate themselves from the infinite and overwhelming number of other objects that I might write about. To make my choice to include a particular object seem less arbitrary. You should see me at the mall.”



Chris Tonelli