What is Known
for my brother Michael
the office my desk phone
ringing our mother’s voice the news
the office my desk phone ringing
our mother’s voice
the news in my hand the office desk
phone ringing mother’s voice in my hand
her voice in my hand ringing
our mother her voice the news
ringing ringing
Elizabeth Austen
What is Known
Elizabeth Austen
what it means
A woman answers the phone. Her mother is calling to tell her her brother has died. I’m not sure you can get all that from this poem alone, but I read the poem as part of Austen’s book, Every Dress a Decision, and poems about the death are interspersed so eventually a fuller picture emerges.
Shock, death, grief create gaps in our lives. We don’t flow as we normally do. We speak and think in stutter stops and in fragments.
Death is so huge we cannot grasp it, so we grasp at tiny objects and sounds to ground ourselves.
why I like it
I’ve known about Austen for years because when I first came to Seattle, I took her workshop on reading poetry out loud—so helpful. She was recently the Washington State poet laureate and taught a workshop I went to on making great titles. All this has little to do with why I like this poem, but I just want to say, I like her whole book, Every Dress a Decision, and I just picked this poem.
Love, death. . . poets struggle to write about the big topics without being redundant, boring, or cliché. I think this poem does so.
craft
Simple words, repetition, white space in the lines, lack of punctuation. I mean, for heaven’s sake, this poem only has eight main words. How is it possible to tell so much with so little? The repetition reflects the speaker’s inability to find the words to talk about her brother’s death. The white spaces hold all that she isn’t saying. And the lack of punctuation reiterates that there is no control or closure over this moment.