Levelheaded: Nintendo

This poem begins by linking “confidence” with the ability to “soften.” Confidence has been cleaved from forcefulness or aggression. Here, confidence undercuts the speaker’s impulse to harden to people. As the speaker softens, she empathizes. She casts off her own preconceptions about what it means to be confident, and through her quiet, private monologue, she begins to “confide” in us.

The couplet that follows is practically a poem on its own:

Imagine every man you know

As a child playing Nintendo

It’s no surprise the poem’s title comes from these lines. They contain the “every man” the speaker reminds herself to empathize with. They contain the “son” she knows will grow into one of those men. And they contain her, as she must actively “imagine” something else to understand her reality. It’s a stretch, but these lines also harken to a refrain in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

Rhythmically, there are  similarities, but the final “o” sounds of both couplets are where the dotted line can be drawn most directly. We might read the Nintendo lines as a response to Prufrock, who is his own sort of man-boy. The speaker’s treatment of “every man” is softer than Prufrock’s distant dismissal of “the women.” But both couplets make sweeping, critical assessments that purposefully involve gender. They are both non sequiturs, vaguely connected to the rest of their poem by theme. Like we said, it’s a stretch.

Then we have the son’s “problem,” described as “birds / picking at his heart.” If the description is graphic, it also relies on its reference to the archetypal image that works its way from Prometheus through the Old Testament all the way up to Hitchcock. In short, it’s frightening. Still, the line “What he said was a big problem was actually a small problem” is grammatically paradoxical. It seems the son’s “big problem” is actually a small one. But we could also read the son playing down the size of his “big problem,” as if he himself has said his “big problem” wasn’t so big. It complicates what the speaker means when she says “big” and “small,” and it’s important because it underlines the poem’s concern with uncertainty. (On the other hand, “sky-sized” seems pretty big).

The poem shifts a bit as the narrative dissolves into phrases like “Past bedtime,” “Christmas lights,” and “A rainbow of lights”. These revel in and recreate the poem’s melancholy. The speaker understands there’s a big, bad world out there – outside of video games, outside of the minor tragedies of childhood. Later, she compares the innocuous “small new men” with “scorched and petrified girls.” But her distrust is deferred by the softened, small, new man baring his soul to his mother. It’s deferred by Christmas, by the rainbow of lights.

The speaker grapples for a conclusion. She starts with truisms like “Boys are small new men.” Yes, boys are small new men, but more importantly, the speaker reminds herself that there is continuity between the innocent boy with “small problems” and the reality of grown men. Women, by contrast, wear pieces of the “Chrysalis” of girlhood all the time. The speaker is wary of this dualism, so she conflates men and women by referencing a bit of Jungian nonsense about the genders of our souls.  But importantly, the speaker starts to look outward for ways to be. If the she corrects herself, it’s not because of pressure from outside, but because she tends toward a set of ideals that dictates empathy. Since there is a stir in these ideals, she reaches out to “Athena.” She reaches out to “Tarzan.” She reaches out to a “power-up” in a little boy’s video game. She reaches out (inexplicably) to a tooth. The formula begins to break down, and language and meaning, at least in their traditional sense, begin to part ways.

-The Editors