Famous

At the emotional core of Nye’s poem is her rumination on the complex dynamic between poet and reader. Given the necessary solitude of the poetic craft, where does a poet fit within the greater community whose illumination and inspiration they are dedicated to provide? How can the poet be at once apart and yet a part of that wide community?

The poem uses a pattern familiar to philosophers: if this is true, then so must be this. The opening seven stanzas set up the premise. When the speaker abruptly claims, “The river is famous to the fish” (Line 1), this observation upends conventional notions of fame by suggesting that the river is famous to the fish simply because the fish lives in the river and depends on it for survival. The speaker continues to notice all about her evidence of how things fit together, how things need other things to realize fully their potential, their utility, and their purpose. The open and hungry eye of the poet reveals the intricate design of the world using (and upcycling) the concept of fame and being famous. Everyday objects apparently strewn about the landscape carelessly and pointlessly are, in fact, quietly connected to things all around them, revealing an unsuspected design that in turn gifts each object with a radiant kind of connection.

The stanzas move recklessly from object to object without evident pattern or driving concept. That restless scatter is deliberate. To impose an order to the revelations would violate the very reality the poet is exploring. Random observations give the poet the opportunity to see what is so easily missed: how wonderfully, splendidly dependent every object is on every other object. The fish needs the river; the river needs the fish. That sympatico, that dynamic establishes the logic of the poem’s unfolding premise.

That dynamic of quiet dependence and deep cooperation illuminates each object the poet shares: “the loud voice” (Line 2) needs silence to give its sonic blast any impact; the “cat sleeping” (Line 5) needs the attention (and fear) of “the birds / watching him” (Lines 5-6) to define the birds’ identity as birdhouse terrorists; tears are casual and pointless drippings without the soft curve of the cheek to give them dimension and plot; and the function of the heart is to provide care and attention to ideas we may never express. Boots, durable and solidly working class, need “the earth” (Line 10) and dress shoes, a suggestion of wealth and luxury, need “only […] floors” (Line 12), while old photographs need the active and responding memory of the photograph-keeper—without that dynamic photos are meaningless paper decorated with empty images.

The proliferation of objects then encourages a kind of game for the reader, a challenge to add to this catalogue, to look around and seek out other dynamics in the world to further enhance the poet’s argument: Yes, the fork is famous to the steak; the window is famous to the eye; the door is famous to the knob; the bulb is famous to the lamp; the toothbrush is famous to the toothpaste—the comparisons exist gloriously and wonderfully forever.

It is at that point, when the world delights in revelation, that the speaker turns in Stanza 8 to the complex relationship between the poet and the world they illuminate. The poet, as it turns out, for all the solitude and the apartness the craft, hungers like everything (and everyone) else for a place—hungers for an audience. The poet does not long for accolades nor do they seek dissection and discussion in the hothouse of classrooms. Rather the poet finds connection with the unspectacular “Every Reader”: “men / who smile while crossing streets” (Lines 15-16) or children with fingers sticky from candy, with their parents hustling through grocery store lines. In this, the speaker does not dream of the typically prestigious fame, but rather of being a poet who is read by those who might find her poems impactful. That modest community, that dynamic between poet and audience would be sufficient to sustain the speaker. There, the speaker argues, is where poetry happens, and the speaker is the one who noticed it all—the one who “smiled back” (Line 18)—who, in turn, elevated their remarkable ordinariness to the radiant gentleness of poetry.

In the closing stanza then the poet is ready now to do what the poem has to this point refused to do. Committed to recreating the world observed and thus reluctant to indulge metaphor, the poet now steps away from the dazzling real-time world to offer a closing idea cased in the elegance of figurative language: the poet is famous like a pulley or like a buttonhole. Pulleys and buttonholes do their work without fanfare, without drama, quietly, their work as critical as it is mundane. That commitment in the end defines a famous poet—poets are like simple objects doing what they do, never indulging reckless ambition that might make such contentment and achievement ironic. Never forgetting that splendidly modest function, the poet here offers, in understated celebration, how poets, like pulleys and buttonholes, were designed to be exactly what they are and do what they do; modestly, humbly, quietly doing the business of a poet: elevating objects and making connections.