Calling Card
(i.m. Marina Keegan, 1989-2012)
At the last party,
the punctual, the late arrivals,
the ones who never made it
are all one and the same.
Girl in the vivid, yellow peacoat,
with hands tucked into your sleeves,
bangles upon bangles; only
in a photograph, could you be silent.
Your life comprised 8,252 sunrises
and one less sunset.
You are at the top of your
radio tower, speaking
out into the universe.
Your words, considered and private
will travel outwards forever
… thoughts that wander
through eternity …
The car hit the guard rail,
Dennis, Mass, on Route 6,
with your boyfriend asleep at the wheel,
prosaic details you’d have discarded.
They meant nothing, just
a mess of metal and broken glass.
Your words couldn’t protect you,
but they never left you,
swirling around your body like moths.
It’s us they’ll haunt, bearing
their bright, yellow buds.
I’ll never be able to look at
a yellow rose again
without thinking of you.
Your ashes were scattered
against the wind, your body
burned into charred scraps
of paper, random phrases,
all we are in the end.
But you, you were rare. Your words
are up there with the stars,
still travelling outwards
with the occasional earthbound sigh.
This eulogy for the young American writer, Marina Keegan, killed in a car-crash at the age of 22, forms the final poem in Tracey Herd’s new collection, Not in This World. The collection has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and Herd will be reading from it at the Southbank Centre on 10 January 2016.
Although Herd, born 1968, belongs to a generation considerably senior to Keegan’s, the tone of the speaker in Calling Card is that of a peer – young, breathless, excited and admiring. There’s an air of sisterly solidarity as well as writerly discovery. To identify the speaker with Herd might seem presumptuous, but the dedicated eulogy, like the elegy, usually presupposes elements of personal engagement. So we may fairly assume that Keegan has been a significant discovery for Herd.
I must confess that Marina Keegan’s name was completely new to me when I first read the poem’s epigraph. Now, curiosity aroused, I’ve seen the pictures where she wears the yellow jacket the poem describes, and read a little of her work – not enough to form a proper judgment, but enough to get an impression of her articulacy, honesty and vitality.
It was her student essay, The Opposite of Loneliness (later providing the title of her published collection of essays and short stories), that triggered her “discovery”. “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness,” she wrote, “but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow after Commencement and leave this place.
“It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s 4am and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.”
This is engagingly, colourfully written, although arguably a fairly standard expression of the fears and longings felt by any bright student soon to graduate. What intensified Keegan’s attraction was her idealism, and her conscious determination to take her ideals with her into the world and apply them. But isn’t it a strange society in which youthful idealism seems rare and notable? Of course, that is all the more reason to cherish it, and to recognise the terrible power of institutions to tame and distort it. Herd’s generation, coming of age during the 80s and 90s, missed out on the anarchy and activism of the 60s and 70s. Hers is the generation Keegan criticises, in fact, when she remarks that some of her own students have the attitude of 40-year-olds. But the poem has no message to preach: the portrait is of an artist, not an activist.
Herd’s poem shows no trace of middle-aged sag. It’s a struggle between death and language – language evoked as ineradicable life. The opening quatrain is brisk, almost throwaway in tone. Death is “the last party” – an apt metaphor. Student parties are random affairs: people arrive at various times or never arrive. It’s the same party for everyone, eventually – perhaps including those who were never born (“the ones who never made it”). Non-existence, sooner or later, equalises us all.
But the next quatrain breaks out of the potentially elegiac mould to confront the living woman. After that, the structure loosens into longer stanzas. With the colour yellow flickering through its fabric, the poem catches light. From the “peacoat” to the sunrises and sunsets, the moths “bearing/ their bright yellow buds”, the yellow rose and the “charred scraps” of paper (and, implicitly, cremated flesh) it creates warmth and light. Calling Card seems very much a “refusal to mourn”. While she finds metaphors for the wrecked car and body in spoiled language, fragmented into “random phrases”, Herd posits against this earthbound, temporal devastation (which, again, is the common fate) the soaring “radio tower” of announcement, or annunciation. “The universe” and “the stars” signal continuity and onward travel: what has been written will be eternally remembered.
The poem counterpoints its elevation with documentary, listing the number of sunrises accumulated in Keegan’s short life, the manner and location of the accident. Despite such details and the slightly slower pace they set in stanzas three and four, the poem as a whole moves fast, with an air of spontaneity. It sometimes seems improvised. Essentially oral, it takes the genre of the funeral poem off the page and back to its vernacular roots.
Hyperbole comes with the genre, and is part of the rush of mingled public and private feeling. It’s as if Herd were speaking not only to Keegan, but to an audience of Keegan’s readers. She speaks with that audience’s own clear, intense but casual voice, saying its “enormous yes” without hesitation – not in ignorance of suffering but in defiance.
For a writer of Herd’s age, there’s the satisfying knowledge of previous achievements, but more piquantly the vision of a still extensive future, a deliciously bright and empty page. Calling Card is dedicated to a writer whose bright future became compacted into her present, and who had been forced to leave the major part of her life’s work unstarted. Instead of lamenting predictably, dutifully, the loss to literature, Herd insists that the work already extant will endure and even change its meanings over time. Perhaps we can view this as a justifiably self-reflexive angle, signalling the defiant energy of a living writer for her own future, her own new explorations and achievements. As she imagines Keegan’s words “still travelling onwards/ with the occasional earthbound sigh”, the poet’s own words undertake a mirroring journey, earthbound still, but responding to the “calling card” of the distant starlight.