Good Bones

Strange, isn't it, how things can "go viral" and yet pass you by. But then, not everybody catches a real virus like flu either, even in an epidemic. An inoculation against the latter helps, of course – I had mine months ago – and keeping well away from social media is a sensible measure if you don't want to get coughed over by me-too merchants anxious to share whatever it is they've just caught off the web.

So when I came across a poem recently, "Good Bones", looking for something quite different, I was surprised to learn, according to Wikipedia, that:

Smith's poem "Good Bones", originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents" and noted that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, England, the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. PRI called it "the official poem of 2016".

Who knew? Maybe you did. Certainly, not many poems get that sort of distribution; most poets would kill for 1% of that million. In fact, they'd give it serious consideration for just 0.1%. Here it is:

Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

It's a good poem, although it could be better – you  might say it has the bones of a very good poem – but I can see how the way it wears its world-weary heart rather rhetorically on its sleeve meets a certain need that would cause it to go viral. I like those opening five lines best, a little reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop with an astringent dash of Ashbery, and the subsequent repetitions of "though I keep this from my children" are nicely-judged and will speak to any parent who put some youthful effort into having "a past" worthy of a little evasiveness.

There's an awful lot of self-styled poetry out there on the Web; most of it that I have seen (which is not much, admittedly, not even anywhere near that homicide-worthy 0.1%) being little more than some "beautiful" or "sad" sentiments broken up into lines without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. It may be unfair, but take the line breaks away, even from a poem like "Good Bones", and you're often left with what amounts to a passage of heightened prose or perhaps a soliloquy from a play. Although it's interesting how, in the case of "Good Bones", the repetition of "I keep this from my children" now becomes rather odd, perhaps a sign that reads, CAUTION! POET AT WORK. Here it is again:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

The genre known as "found poetry" makes the opposite move, of course: by inserting line breaks into prose text it can be rendered into poetry, or at least something very like it. I have always been susceptible to accidental poetry myself, ever since stumbling across the haiku-adjacent mantra "There is no ozone by the sea, only the smell of rotting seaweed" in Clyne and Williams' General School Chemistry at the age of 15, followed a few years later by the discovery of the "Accidents" section in Palmer's Index to the Times (e.g. "Henry Ford, Sawn Asunder by a Circular Saw at St. Pancras Steam Saw Mills"); see my post Quiet Fun.

Then there's the form known as the "cento" (pronounced "sento", not "chento", apparently, something I can never remember [1]), basically a poem made up entirely of lines lifted from other poems. There's a good one, "99 Poems", in Stephen Knight's volume The Prince of Wails (downloadable PDF here):

The last poem, called "99 Poems" ... is a collection of 99 lines borrowed with great affection from elegies and epitaphs and maybe other sources too, perhaps film, across the centuries, and arranged by first letter from A to Y, starting with the beautiful line (possibly Thomas Hardy?) – A face that, though in shadow, still appears – and ending with the simple physicality of Your hands. Both images – the dead who re-appear and the father’s hand which holds his child’s – recur throughout the book, gaining power along the way. And it can be no accident that this last poem ends on the letter Y, not Z: there is no final letter in the alphabet of this wonderfully haunting collection.
Chris Beckett, londongrip.co.uk

But for me the ultimate example of finding poetry where none was intended is A Humument by Tom Phillips, in which an entire novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, is repeatedly ransacked for a secret narrative hidden among the Victorian verbiage, exposed by burying the rest of the page in decorative art, and linking islands of text together by following typographical "rivers":

If you've never come across A Humument, then I recommend that you get hold of a copy of at least one of the "trade" editions published by Thames & Hudson (there have been six such editions since 1980, all different) before they become collectors-only items following Tom's death in 2022. And if anyone out there has a copy of the mustard-yellow jacketed third (a.k.a. "second revised") edition they'd be willing to sell me – it's the only one I haven't got – I'd be very happy to hear from you.

In a way, you might even see found poetry as an analogue of "art" photography (hey, "only connect..."). How? Well, you find poetic little jewels lurking among the prose of the world, isolate them in your frame and, in the case of a book or sequence, link and present them as a new, coherent whole that generates a new, greater significance. Or not. Obviously, most people do not use photographs in their lives as an art medium, of course, any more than they use a pencil or, indeed, language itself that way. Rather, they see and use photographs as unique records of something important – family, friends, holidays – or as stimulation – a gaudy sunset, adorable cats and dogs, or (so I'm told) scantily-dressed young people. In a very similar way, certain popular poems are used not for literary purposes, but to add a little sprinkling of dignity, or as a stimulus for tears or laughter, at special occasions. A poem is a pre-packaged, high-impact selection of words that, like a ready-meal, can save a lot of effort at a difficult time. Of those million-plus readers of "Good Bones", I wonder how many went on to see what else Maggie Smith had written?

In the same way, W.H. Auden's poem now generally known as "Funeral Blues" has had an afterlife similar to "Good Bones" as a reading at funerals, due entirely to its use in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. So although to speak of "popular poetry" is something of a contradiction in terms, it is instructive to look at the results of a BBC poll of the 100 most popular poems in Britain, published as an anthology in 1996. The only list of the book's contents I could find is here. "Funeral Blues" is already in with a bullet at no. 19 (still with the title "Twelve Songs IX"), just two years after the release of Four Weddings. But 1996 is a long time ago now, and I'd be surprised if many younger folk today have ever come across most of those poems, not least those that were, in my day, primary-school poetry favourites such as Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners", or even anthology perennials and "poetry corner" regulars like, well, pretty much everything else on that list. I get the impression that most of those surveyed had probably encountered the same few anthologised poems in the course of their school studies – the time when poems make the most lasting impression – but never actually became poetry readers.

Of those few that did become poetry readers, of course, their choices of "favourites" will have been so diverse as to render them statistically insignificant in a poll like this. Such is the nature of statistics, if not of poetry-reading. To anyone for whom poetry is as important a part of their life as, say, music, this sort of ranking is completely beside the point. To resort to this sort of off-the-peg Big Occasion poem is to regard poetry as something rather like the empty church visited in Larkin's poem "Church Going": a place where "all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies". Or perhaps even like the football World Cup, when everyone suddenly becomes an armchair pundit for a few high-stakes games every four years, and then moves on; a very different thing from following your team from the stands through every wet weekend of yet another disappointing season.

But ours is a game of two halves, and this game
the semi they went on to lose; from here
it’s all down, from the First to the foot of the Second,
McGrandle, Visocchi and Spankie detaching
like bubbles to speed the descent into pitch-sharing,
pay-cuts, pawned silver, the Highland Division,
the absolute sitters ballooned over open goals,
the dismal nutmegs, the scores so obscene
no respectable journal will print them; though one day
Farquhar’s spectacular bicycle-kick
will earn him a name-check in Monday’s obituaries.

Don Paterson, from "Nil Nil"

So, seeing as we've just had a Big Occasion, here, once again, is  a strong candidate for my own favourite Christmas poem, by Thomas Hardy:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so. 

(Published in The Times, Christmas Eve 1915)

In the end, there's virality, there's popularity, and then there is longevity. A work of art like a poem or a novel might achieve all three, probably at different stages in its life, but in the end it's only longevity – a high score in the Test of Time and a certain imperishable quality – that counts. Who now would ever have heard of W.H. Mallock if it were not for Tom Phillips' appropriation? Will anyone have heard of Tom Phillips, either, 100 years from now? We'll never know. But we can be pretty sure that "good bones" alone or a blunt appeal to our emotions will never be enough to ensure the longevity of a work of art, and these are the chief characteristics of all those perfectly decent poems and pictures piling up in the wastepaper baskets of history.

1. It is pronounced "sento" because the name is derived from a Greek word for a patchwork. Why it is not therefore "kento" I don't know. Worse, being derived from Greek, some people claim its plural is not "centos" but "centones". Pedants! Do they also refer to several octopuses as "octopodes", I wonder? The cento is hardly one of the mainstream poetic forms, though, and gets taken out of the versifier's wardrobe even less frequently than some virtuoso straitjacket like the villanelle.