In any age of poetry, most contemporary works are not only boring and bad, the considerable number of them are almost always total travesty, at least by the standards of the past. Poetry, being the leading publication of poetry in the world, is not exempt from the inevitable accommodation of the less qualified poems to be ousted only by time. In every issue, however, there are at least two or three poems that are not only interesting to read, but also aesthetically achieved in their formal construction and practical function of providing some sort of pleasure for us. Among those poems is Janice N. Harrington’s elegy “Is It Beauty That We Owe?,” published in June, 2023.

The poem begins with the poet scoffing at perfection, embracing fallibility, discrediting the capable inventiveness of the creative self against “the gods[’],” while forcefully asserting the critical and influenced intention behind these restraints. With this apparent antithesis, the poet achieves, quite marvellously, the reverse of those rhetorical insistences. By relinquishing her creative power and executive competence, for instance, in lines of flawless syntagmatic structure; by choosing to subordinate her inventive strength to the absolute expertise of “the gods”; by consciously relegating, upon a remembrance of an intimate admonition of the addressed, her competence to a secondary form that is accommodative of errors made consciously “to free the maker” from the shackles of perfection, the least of what the poet is, in her sophisticated irony, is humble:

I stir a glass bottle filled with glass beads
and remember your lesson: to leave a flaw,
a bead to break the pattern, to free the maker.
Not an error but humility: We are not gods.

This claim of modesty is a classic manifestation of reverse condescension. What the antithesis achieves is the speaker’s slick elevation of the poet, the inventive character, beyond the highest creative perch occupied only by “the gods,” who — as is faintly but ingeniously suggested by the poet’s decisive concision to “error” in her own creative process—in their creative and inventive streak, are unrestrained, impulsive, and, hence, lacking form.

And what kind of a poet of controlled and measured impulse, unlike “the gods,” would this poet be if there is no exemplifying element of her cultured restraint in the body of the poem? It is this technical necessity that perpetrates the ending of the poem in which the flawless syntagmatic structure of the beginning is transformed to an “odd and ugly” one:

I purposely
err, as you taught me, and choose
odd and ugly and unlike, and into every making
I weave fault: Erotic disruption or ember.

 The technical—hence, the aesthetic—accomplishment of the rhetorical move does not require a special attention beyond the italicization. The claim for the poem as an elegy attains authority when we quarry from the hyperbolic phrase “into every making” the expensive currency the poet places on the admonition of the addressed. The ontological status of the addressed is implied by the imperfect connotation of the ending word “ember” with mortal finality as opposed to “Erotic disruption” that suggests intense vitality. Also, her convictions, like accepting and creating our own imperfections in the world, live on in the acts of the living, in which, for example, this poem can answer its own question by saying that: It is, indeed, “beauty that we owe” the dead.

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“Is It Beauty That We Owe?” by Janice N. Harrington, published in Poetry 223.3, June 2023

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