The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-One): Mark Halliday [by Angela Ball]

                                    MERCILESS YOUTH

Merciless youth in the coffee shop
unaware that my mother died thirty years ago on this date
they study Marine Biology or investment banking
so they can thrive and win in a world of laws and bodies
they’re so not serious they have no idea what matters

okay that one over there is reading As You Like It
which is one of the Shakespeare plays I can never quite remember
but I guess it ultimately recommends humorous tolerance
which is fine but doesn’t correspond well to my wet raincoat
and my broken-spoke umbrella and how I feel

remembering what day today is
in a world of laws and bodies where my mother got so robbed
but okay I hope that one reading As You Like It
grows up and has kids if she wants and understands
what matters with the help of Shakespeare . . .

My mother could recite Lady Macbeth’s “Glamis thou art” speech
incredibly fast – she was funny
about ambition and about rote learning
and being funny she helped the neighbor girls Karen and Jeannie
not take things too seriously in their high school years

so they would survive and find the parts of life they could love
all right I forgive these students let them thrive I guess
and let them rethink (as I have to rethink) what serious is.

--Mark Halliday

"Merciless Youth" appeared in The Yale Review in 2010

My mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-two. This is the one gigantic wrongness in my life, a life otherwise mostly very lucky and happy.
I was twenty-five when she died. Her illness and her death became inseparable in my mind from the idea of seriousness -- of what is serious in life.
"Serious" is the key word in "Merciless Youth". In the poem I catch myself trying to feel superior (as I remember losing my mother) to the much younger persons around me in the coffee shop; I need to realize that this easy sense of superiority is itself un-serious.
--Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-One): Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday’s “Merciless Youth” is a perfectly informal, casually exact meditation on the poet’s mother, Shakespeare, mercy, the nature and quality of seriousness, and that biggest of questions, How to live? –all addressed in two continuous sentences featuring one ellipsis, one pair of parentheses, and one period.

The phrase “merciless youth” is formal, but also humorous—youth in itself can’t be accused, but those who lack it charge it with crimes: chief among them, “they study Marine Biology or investment banking / so they can thrive in a world of laws and bodies.” The trouble with youth, we all know, is “they have no idea what matters.” 

The poet’s thirty-year grief for his mother, worn like his wet raincoat and “broken-spoke” umbrella, is of no moment to them—bears no relation to winning. But one is reading a Shakespeare play; and that fact opens a new avenue of thought, leading casually to a dead-on perception of what the play does: “recommends humorous tolerance”; and back, in the poem’s looping progress, to the poet’s mother. As You Like It contains the axiom, “All the world’s a stage,” apt metaphor for a poem that happens both in a coffee shop and in the poet’s mind, as a kind of dramatic musing distinct from the far-flung associativeness of “ultra-talk.” Its questionings and connections resemble Kenneth Koch’s in such poems as “To My Father’s Business” and “To the United States Army”—both, post-facto meditations; but, like Halliday’s poem, active, in-the-moment sense making, with the nowness of theater.

The “Glamis” speech the poet’s mother recalls by rote (and comically accelerates) worries that Macbeth has too much of “the milk of human kindness”—a substance that the mother surely possesses. (Some commentators assert that, with all her imagery of suckling, Lady Macbeth is obsessed with her own absent motherhood.) That Mrs. H. recites a speech spoken by a woman full of toxic ambition--that is, her diametrical opposite--suggests playful flexibility and acceptance.

Here, reconciling loss has to do with discovering/reencountering/remixing connections: between youth and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Mrs. H., Mrs. H. and very specific young people, Karen and Jeannie—how she helped them, as Halliday expresses: “survive and find the parts of life they could love.” This “so robbed” mother empowers her son to do, in his own way, the same thing: “all right I forgive these students let them thrive I guess," the qualifying “I guess,” both colloquial and precise.

False solemnity was a pitfall Kenneth Koch recognized in certain poet contemporaries and memorably satirized in the wickedly funny “Fresh Air.” With its essential “is,” Mark Halliday’s “Merciless Youth” demonstrates that poetry, like a mother’s/neighbor’s attitude, can encourage us to eschew fixity and find respite from grief as the poem, poet, we, and even possibly the students, in future lives, reimagine “what serious is.”

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Jian Guaner]

Like the way of telling the story as if talking to someone sitting at the table or to himself as if in a monologue.

[David Lehman]

An altogether terrific post.

[Angela Ball]

Jian Guaner, I do, too--thanks for your comment.

David Lehman, thank you.