Of Course And Yet: A Review of ‘You Do Not Have to Be Good’ by Madeleine Barnes

You do not have to read poetry. No one does. And yet we do. We always have. Poetry is as old as language. In the opening paragraph of her famous and brilliant essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes: “It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt.” 

As its title makes plain, Madeleine Barnes’ lovely collection You Do Not Have to Be Good is very much concerned with this question of what we have to do, or what we do not have to do but do anyway. The book is organized into many sections, most containing two to four poems, each titled that same way, proclaiming things you do not have to do, things you do not have to be: You Do Not Have to Keep Time, You Do Not Have to Be Mighty, You Do Not Have to Generate Capital, You Do Not Have to Be Innocent, You Do Not Have to Know. This structure shapes the book as an act of resistance, which perhaps is a defining characteristic of poetry: a challenge against obligation, requirement, expectation, a refusal to conform, to be easily defined, to be ordered around. 

You Do Not Have to Be Good by Madeleine Barnes. Trio House Press, 2020. 132 pages. $16

So, no, you do not have to read this book. But you should, though as one of section titles makes clear: You Do Not Have to Take My Word for It. How excellent is that section title as an ars poetica? How well it captures the contradiction inherent in poetry, the impossible tension of making sense of the human experience through a language that is both wholly inadequate to the task and our best chance at it. And, too, it speaks to the tension of being a poet, a single voice, making claims or songs about a world we don’t come close to understanding ourselves. To contain those nameless, formless ideas Lorde references with the confines of a poem? Impossible. And yet the attempt itself is an act of faith. 

Perhaps the central resistance is this collection is to the patriarchy. A poem in that You Do Not Have to Take My Word for It section, titled “What Happened,” opens with this couplet: “It’s what she won’t tell you. / A man you’ve never met.” Later, these lines: “It’s a man telling a girl / to use the word ‘I’ less.” The anger implicit in these words becomes explicit a few lines later: “It’s the fury she feels every time / she has to make herself compact”—another moment when the tension of the act of poetry itself rises to the surface in this book: the “she” of the poem bristling righteously against obligation or expectation, refusing to be diminished, experience fighting against the constraints of language. But what pleasure in that language. There’s a formality to the diction of this collection, an elegance to its sentences. The language elevates the subject matter, even when the subject resists. 

One of the greatest sources of pleasure in this book is its attention to the sentence—to grammar and syntax as meaning-making devices. Barnes often builds her sentences by piling up language in series and sequences. Sometimes, as in a poem titled “Volta,” the sentences accumulate verbs and verb phrases:

I buckled my boots, rolled my heart in firedust,
Walt Whitman’s sunset bleeding through the folds

of someone else’s map. My map was soaked through 
by the time I found you, told you I tried to kick love,
pull love from the spine of midnight. 

We made no mention of what we were doing,
transcending the borders, consoling each other

as the barriers fell. We made no excused, entered 
the vacuum of listening, caring for one another … 

Buckled, rolled, bleeding, soaked, found, told, transcending, consoling—this is a poem in motion, a poem with a kind of relentless forward momentum, a poem trying to keep pace with life. The syntax becomes a metaphor for what it’s like to be alive, time dragging us ever forward, one reason for grief after another. 

Elsewhere, the poems stack noun phrases, adjective-noun combinations, questions, entire clauses, as in this breathless section from the poem “Don’t You”: 

You slip
your notecards into my dress, they fall out one by one,
we’re dancing and then we’re walking to the diner,
and you have quarters for a song, 
you choose the longest one of all, the worst,
maybe I’ve learned all I need to know,
and our friends black out on the apartment floor,
we draw constellations between their shoes,
their party clothes, we scratch their elbows
with a fine-tip pen, and no one knows the name
of the person sleeping in the corner, he’s holding
my pillow and looking at peace with some greater part
of the universe, that kid’s gone, you say, and 
he is, he is. 

Whew. As with the accumulations of verbs, the effect of all these series and lists is to give the poems an intensity and a pell-mell sense of motion. The poems plow ahead. It’s akin to the way our bodies move only one direction through time. To live is to acquire: memories, loves, losses. These poems embrace that accumulation, celebrate it, linger in it. And this is certainly a book for lingering in. Barnes has a built a collection that rewards you for spending time in its lines. 

The more time you do spend with these poems, the more you see in them. These are not only poems of resistance, but poems of resilience. How we survive, how we carry on—not how we move on from grief or from trauma, but we move on with grief, with trauma, with the weight of our past experiences carried into our present, our future. “Defenseless, grief is a fired gun,” one poem offers, and that image positions grief as violently, loudly belonging to the past and the present at once. The poem extends its metaphor: “it’s a form of order, // a relapse, an echo that travels / from screen to screen, star to star.” The poems in You Do Not Have to Be Good are not all sweeping societal critiques, despite the social commentary implicit throughout the book. On the contrary, so many of the poems are personal, intimate. The opening section—You Do Not Have to Be Earthly—establishes this book as partly an elegiac project. The poems in this section explore how it feels to lose someone close. The first poem, “Forty Black Ships,” invokes the Iliad and preparing for an impossible battle, one certain to end in loss. The second, “Surround Her with Colors,” offers step by step guidance for saying goodbye, closing with this line: “Bring your relics. Step seven: sing.” This is the elegy in a nutshell—bring your traditions, your rituals, your history—and sing. The third poem of the opening section, “A Fire,” begins thus: “At her funeral I wondered / if I wasn’t really dead, too.” Then there is snow, then the fire: literal, metaphorical, both:

When the blaze closed in, 
I did not want to talk 

about things to come 
or comfort others. 

I kept my anguish close, 
set foot in the fire as if 

I could simply remind “her,” 
a her “undone,” that I was 

molten at my very core — 
and she’d appear by my side. 

There’s such tender hope in these lines. Of course a poem about grief doesn’t end grief. Of course an elegy doesn’t bring back a lost loved one. And yet—for a moment—sort of—maybe it does. That’s the act of faith, the reason for poems, the kind of beauty that permeates You Do Not Have to Be Good from start to finish.