Graceless moments in poetry are exercises in existential humility and contingency. By deliberately permitting chinks in one’s textual armor, one takes enormous risks as a writer. About a year ago, in a community poetry workshop I led, a poet presented a very moving draft about looking for her mother after her mother’s death. Since the search takes place mostly in dreams, the language in the draft is generally archetypal, with echoes of Lorca, and, at points, surreal. At one point, however, the poem breaks out of tone with this line: “Finally I stood in the vestibule of a childhood home calling “Mom!”^[7] With good reason, it came up that “Mom” (as opposed to the more formal “Mother”) feels a little too informal for a poem whose language, themes, and tone were much more ponderous. Yet I found myself defending it because it does break that ponderous surface to expose the vulnerability of the grieving-adult-turned-searching-child. But there’s a good chance that this will be that line that rubs some editors the wrong way once the poem is sent out. That’s another kind of risk.

Allowing graceless moments into the poem is a risk taken for the sake of authenticity and, at the same time, for the sake of artifice. I’d better explain that, since authenticity and artifice are commonly viewed as antithetical to one another. This is due to another post-confessional legacy: the distrust of artifice. At the same time, experimental poets have voiced their distrust of poetry that tries to sound too natural, rightly arguing that it takes a good deal of artifice to make a poem sound sincere (i.e. to make that epiphany sound as though it emerges organically from that gaze out the kitchen window, a gaze that is formed out of words on a page). Gracelessness can be the instance in a poem where artifice and raw expression meet, grapple, and perhaps even embrace. I like the idea of that, and I think most poets probably do, too, insofar as they like mining the spaces between opposites where the ore of complexity is lodged.

Allowing graceless moments into the poem is a risk taken for the sake of authenticity and, at the same time, for the sake of artifice.

And here, this essay’s evolution affords a nice full-circle sense of closure even as it argues that such closure doesn’t always make for a good poetic experience. The essay began with mention of my friend, Jeff Oaks, who introduced me to the work of Adam Phillips. Now, I talk again with him about “gracelessness” — at the same coffee bar where I first discovered Phillips putting my idea into clear words. Jeff says the concept sounds a lot like the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that, in acknowledgment of the transcience of life, demands some flaw be incorporated into any work of art. “The crack in everything” comes up, and I start singing a few lines from the Leonard Cohen song, “Anthem,” which probably draws its inspiration from Cohen’s time spent as a Buddhist monk. Then Terrance Hayes stops in for a cup of coffee to go, and he says that it sounds an awful lot like the duende. Yes, both Lorca’s duende and the Japanese wabi-sabi are aesthetic concepts that recognize the importance of fallibility as the necessary shadow to the light to which artistic effort aspires. Gracelessness is the manifestation of that necessary shadow at the level of craft. The examples I give here are only a few ways in which a graceless turn — a gaucherie at that level of line, word choice, or poem ending — can contribute to the overall sensation, upon finishing a poem, that the urn, though cracked, lets the light get in.