On Commonplace Poetry

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By Cydni Thompson

What defines the average life is a series of routines, mundanities, and commonplace objects. What life does not include a phone, a bed, a faucet, a blanket, a house; the filth that accumulates by the simple exertion of living, and then its cleaning? And while some may believe that poetry should eschew these most ordinary happenings, I, like many, argue that the commonplace aspects of our lives are significant, and fodder for poetry, whether the poem glamorizes these truths or lavishes in their plainness, it’s through the ordinary that the poem can transform. 

Gwendolyn Brooks produced a body of work focused on the sheer normality of Black life. In the poem “I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s,” Brooks assumes the perspective of a white group travelling to Bronzeville (a Black neighborhood) to observe Black people in a restaurant. They are expecting to see something animalistic; they are looking for a spectacle, an extraordinary sighting of those mythic Blacks in their famous ghetto. They are disappointed. Brooks ends the poem: 

The colored people arrive, sit firmly down,  

Eat their Express Spaghetti, their T-Bone steak,  

Handling their steel crockery with no clatter,  

Laugh punily, rise, go firmly out the door. 

Note the generic verbs: “arrive,” “sit,” “eat,” “laugh,” “rise,” “go,” and the specificity given to common food: “Express Spaghetti” and “T-Bone steak.” These words have no connotations, and are used to describe all groups of people. This explains in necessary detail the ordinariness of these Black people, which symbolizes their humanity. One function of using the commonplace in a poem is connection between humans on the basis of our shared banality; we sit, we eat, we leave. Strategically, Brooks uses these commonalities to shame the racist group whose spectatorship had dehumanized the Black patrons. 

Another poem which uses the ordinary to interrogate racism, specifically colonialism, is Lorna Goodison’s “Reporting Back to Queen Isabella”. This poem follows a colonizer reporting to his Queen the treasures he’s found in Jamaica: “high mountain ranges, expansive plains, deep valleys…” The vast extravagance of these natural wonders is juxtaposed at the end with the line: “and yes, your Majesty, there were some people.” In comparison to the beautiful landscape descriptions, this last line is unadorned and plain; the people are “some,” and unspecified. The ordinary language is used to expose the underlying sentiment carried by the colonizers–––that the land is gorgeous and valuable, and the people are of no consequence.  

The commonplace can also be used to embellish the lives of the working class. Philip Levine’s poem “An Ordinary Morning” begins, “A man is singing on the bus / coming in from Toledo.” Already the speaker is in an unadorned place, the bus, hearing something we’ve all heard before. Eventually, the passengers being to sing together, an unnamed song about love (“love that is true, of love / that endures a whole weekend,”) and hardship (“O heavy hangs the head,”). These abstract emotions occur to all humans, and so all the passengers can relate. This connection between people, this instance of singing, causes the speaker to look at his surroundings in a new light. By the end, they are not simply passengers, but “the living / newly arrived / in Detroit, city of dreams, / each on his own black throne.” They have been transformed into royalty; the seats are thrones, Detroit is full of dreams, and they’re only just arriving. Levine has not eliminated the normality of the bus in Detroit, but has chosen to frame it in a different light. The “ordinary morning” is made extraordinary through song.  

Rita Dove is another poet who sees possibility in the everyday. In “Dawn Revisited” Dove writes: 

Imagine you wake up 

with a second chance: The blue jay 

hawks his pretty wares 

and the oak still stands, spreading 

glorious shade. 

Here, the hawk of the blue jay and the shade of the oak tree constitute “a second chance,” though these are stimuli one experiences nearly every day without fail. Later, Dove ends the poem romanticizing a routine: “You’ll never know / who’s down there, frying those eggs, / if you don’t get up and see.” This poem situates the commonplace in the world of hope and wonder: how “glorious” the shade, how “pretty” the jay’s wares, how wonderful the mystery of the egg-frier. The implied notion is that these sensations are special because they belong to the living, a sentiment found a year earlier in Marie Howe’s famous poem “What the Living Do”. Addressed to the poet’s deceased brother, the poem opens: 

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell 

down there.  

And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled 

up 

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. 

There is a gratitude in this poem as there is in “Dawn Revisited”, although it is for the everyday inconveniences rather than the birds and trees. The fact that the poem opens with a name of the dead means that all following details exist in contrast to death; in this case, they are a celebration of life, the clogged sink and crusty dishes alike.  

There is value in the universality of these, as there is in the poem “I’m Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest” by Paige Lewis, in which the speaker says: “A woman huffing up the trail behind / us says to her hiking partner, It wasn’t my size, / but it was only 9 dollars. And now all I want / is to see what it is.” There is an emotional weight to the ubiquitous overheard conversation, to the mutual recognition of a good deal, even between strangers. It is in moments like these that we see the poetic value in every second of our lives. The strategic use of specific verbs, embellishment and stripping down, the inclusion of the gross and the arbitrary; all these make for an authentic poem, a poem that exists in real life, on the ground, everywhere you look. 

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