Next Day (Randall Jarrell)

I flew back home, to Nashville, today and am feeling very tired. This poem and poet both deserve more time, but I think it'll just have to be the highlights for me tonight. Since I have come back to Nashville I thought I should pick a local poet. Well, Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville and he went to the same high school I did. So, he's very local.

I first came across this poem in an anthology back in high school. The person who had picked it wrote that they could not get over how well a man got into the head of a middle-aged woman. Not yet middle-aged, I can still marvel, even though I don't fully feel many of the emotions. It is incredible.

It's also an incredible poem. I remember back in poetry class how Professor Burt had loved that in each stanza of the poem a word is repeated. (Such as Joy, all, "see me") That is, nothing "is exceptional." All lives are common, after all. The tone is everyday tragic since that is sort of sad--the shared loneliness of life, but like the N in the poem there is an inertia too. It's not like N wants to shake up her life. She has children, a husband. She just wants the banal pleasure of having the check-out boy look at her. Perhaps, that inertia is also why words are repeated in the stanzas. Perhaps they're in there to show how common things are and how inertia keeps new things from arriving or anything from changing.

Favorite line: "Wisdom, said William James,/ Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise/ If that is wisdom."