stupid hope
BY Jason Shinder
(Graywolf Press, 2009)

The late Jason Shinder’s last book, stupid hope, documents mortality and the failing beauty of the body, with a particular focus on his own ailing body and that of his aged mother. Shinder’s diction frequently lends itself to lyric grace in this collection, which reflects an intention he is all-too-aware he can never completely fulfill: “I want to be lifted above the walls of my cell / But I’m scared I can only be this body // that casts one shadow” (“The Story,” p. 28). These lines very gracefully speak of the perennial Cartesian struggle, preparing for other poems in the book that, of an almost palpable necessity, give in to the non-Romantic version of embodiedness that can only “cast one shadow.” No place, no institution enforces this necessity more than a hospital, and so, in a poem with that word as its title, the diction pocking Shinder’s lines is at turns clinical, at turns scatological:

Much of the diction in the above passage is already understood as socially graceless because it refers to body parts and processes that fall outside of polite conversational parameters; I won’t belabor that point here. Instead, I’d like to focus on what the presence of those words does in relation to other words in the passage. The phrases I’ve marked with italics are traces of a more graceful lyric diction and impulse trying to “lift above the walls” of this particular textual moment, to pull a more reflective thread through the puckered fabric of this “other” diction. Yet these more reflective lyrical notes — specifically, the repetition of the end-word “lonely” — struggle rather than flourish, and in no way are they able to subsume the grittier diction, even if “lonely” would appear to get the last word in these lines of the poem. The phrases beginning with “But” weigh down the impulse to transcend or lift up, both semantically and syntactically: semantically, the do so so by failing to offer concrete images to counter or ameliorate the yuckier ones; syntactically, they do so by being stillborn utterances that never unfurl into full clauses, a sense of futility dramatized by the way in which the transcendent “brave” is juxtaposed with, and canceled out by, the persistent “lonely.”

Words like “brave” and “lonely” gesture toward transcendence (a kind of thematic grace) insofar as they attempt to lift the messy particulars up onto a more universal reflective plane. They are also, because of that universalizing impulse, instances of abstract and flat diction, which leads us to the other extreme of productively graceless diction: the deliberate use of flat diction in the interest of attaining certain effects in a poem. Whenever I work with the Frost standard, “The Road Not Taken,” in introductory literature and writing courses, I’m always amazed at how the poem, because of flat diction and equivocating syntax, lulls readers into not really reading the middle two stanzas of this four-stanza poem; it’s all the more striking when you consider that those two stanzas are crucial to understanding that the poem is not so much an anthem to individualism as it is a wry commentary on how we retrospectively impose significance to even the most muddled of our choices. Here are those two middle stanzas: