It’s Almost Not Me: Effacement, Dexterity & the Confessional Utterance in Jack Myers’ I’m Amazed that You’re Still Singing

Recovery Project by Nate Pritts

In the field of lyric poetry, where dinosaur-sized egos stomp over the plains smashing up the sensibilities of readers everywhere with heavy-handed references to actual life as if experiencing something automatically evolves a poem ready for flight, Jack Myers was & still is an anomaly. In Myers’ work you find a deft language, lines & poems that touch on the personal & merely use the self & its travails as one more ounce of raw material for a poem that is ultimately not as connected to the actual “cred” of the situation itself as it is to something overarchingly human.

I came across Jack Myers & his understated revelation I’m Amazed That You’re Still Singing in the summer of 1999 while working towards my MFA in the low-residency program at Warren Wilson College. I was, at that point, writing confessional cluster narratives, poems that were fluent & flexible in the way they strung together bits & pieces of my experience but which were also limited by this subject matter, trapped in the self. I was not, nor have I become, a particularly interesting person so you can imagine the string of poems I was producing & how esoterically devoted to the cult of (my) personality they had become. My every move / thought was mythologized, dissected & ultimately connected to something within me. My teacher for this semester was Tony Hoagland & he had passed along a list of books, 50 or so “essentials” for our times & Jack Myers was listed. I dug up a copy, probably through Powell’s or ABE Books, & instantly saw a new path, one that actually led somewhere.

It’s my contention that so much of our first person poetry doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, or anywhere at all. These poems quickly get bogged down in the particular and actual self of the author, trying to dazzle readers with stunning achievements, exotic locations or categorical identities that rely more on accidents of birth than anything earned or accomplished in the poem itself. There is so much more potential in a poetry that communicates sensibility, a thought process rather than particular thoughts, poems that reflex the living of life. Certainly personal experience is one of the tools available to communicate this, but the danger here is always that the poem will substitute experience for insight, rhetorical flourish for the sympathetic utterance. Myers, especially with this book, shows us one way to go.

In the poem “Thanksgiving Day,” Myers demonstrates how the use of personal materials can be shaped through the forge of lyric insight into something that is transcendent of its particular concerns. Ostensibly located in the inertial haze engendered by the holiday of the title, the poem tracks around to larger questions of identity:

My parents called today and asked me how I am. Boxcars and boxcars

of blunt questions have been clacking over me, so I’ve lost

even the feel of what I am. In a few days, you’ll drive back

and knock me out again.

The implication here is that the self is something that is generated in response to, that the questions of the parents elicit & produce one more separate version of the self that threatens to subsume any sense of an identity with integrity. Later, when the “you” comes back to “knock me out again,” the speaker indicates another falling out of the self, another clarification.

The speaker is left with a world in which he’s prohibited from a distinct & lasting conception of the self, as a result of outside influences:

I will have changed another thousand times and still be

terrified of the glare of your approach. I will be still

standing here in layers, trying on selves as if I were

a fire sale—This roar must be me going up in flames.

There’s such amazing power in experiencing these lines, feeling our own way into them precisely because they are not intricately coded. They do not depend on your understanding of this particular Thanksgiving, or even Thanksgiving in general; these poems employ a sensibility—deep uncertainty over the unity of the self, an insider’s view of person struggling towards hope & a reconciliation between the inner needs of the individual & the constraints placed on us by others. We’re left with a poem that is decidedly confessional & personal while not being limited by that, a sensibility that is generous in letting the reader understand the larger conflicts rather than forcing them to simply witness one person’s triumph &/or failure.

In the poem “Knock Turn,” Myers directly addresses the subject of maturing into manhood, of learning to live in the world:

Everything’s important and nothing matters.

That’s how I learned to be a man, years of

hanging in the streets, learning how to

stand and take it, give it, get it back.

Each night we’d go for something big and crazy

at the wide end of experience, so we’d have something

famous to talk about, make the sun shine off our teeth.

That idea of having “something/famous to talk about” is exactly the folly I’m talking about. It’s a young person’s mistake, thinking you can dip into the well of experience & bring up something that, on its own, will make you more than what you are. Throughout this collection (it’s 1981, from L’Epervier Press), Myers engages the reader quietly, through direct & bare utterance with the realization that life is just life. Uncomplicated by any substantial dependence on particulars, we’re given an actual consciousness, poetry that demonstrates a living self for the reader to inhabit on the page. Surrounded on all sides by poems that try to convince us that the writer is more cultured or interesting or various than we are, & that, by extension, their poems are worth reading, we need Jack Myers & more poems that take the risk of stripping away recitative biography as a way of leaving the reader with something more luminous.