levelheaded: Good Morning!

For those of us used to poems written in a single column of text down the page, there is some novelty in this poem’s structure. Despite reading innumerable successful experiments, we often still intuitively expect poetry to run neatly down the page as sprung from a single musical throat in a single lyrical voice. (Just look through our own archives if you need proof.) So, it is sometimes exciting for us to consider why a poet would so obviously and dramatically switch it up.

Perhaps the most famous example of a side-by-side text is John Ashbery’s long poem, “Litany.” In his author’s note to that poem, Ashbery says his two columns of text “are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues” (a great audio excerpt of the poem read by Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach can be found here). “Good Morning!” affords us no such author’s note. Nevertheless, “simultaneous but independent” seems an apt description of Behm-Steinberg’s paired stanzas. They give us a sensation of waking up just long enough to fall back into a dream. Those two sensations, waking and dreaming, happen simultaneously by their being oriented next to one another.

There is another explanation for the poem’s duality: the possibility of two separate speakers. We know from an early line—“My knee in the hollow of your knee”—there are two people in the poem. Later, ribbons of continuity run down either the left or right side of the poem. The speaker on the right is “resisting, commas, commas, resisting, co,mmas, Re,sis,ting c,omma,s,,,,,” until two stanzas later on the right s/he says “You tell me you’ve solved my punctuation problems. All of those commas, we’ll use them as earrings and troutlures.” On the left, the speaker tells us “Mary says I’m going to squeeze words out of your ass, and then we’ll have orange juice for breakfast!” A moment later the left-hand column refers to “the story about thirst.”

It’s never perfectly clear who or how many people are speaking. But even apparent crossover between the two columns seems to point to two separate speakers. In the fourth of the paired stanzas, the speaker in the left-hand column tells us “My thumb is a joyous crow.” Then immediately on the right we have “Lazily scratching your calf.” Does the “your” and the “my” refer to the same person? Is it the thumb that’s doing the scratching? Don’t know. But for a poem with such a cacophony of images, surreal sketches, choppy grammar, and symbolic dreams, not knowing is a big part of the fun.

– The Editors