BY: SALLY CONNOLLY

David Melnick studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and focused his graduate studies in literature at UC Berkeley mainly on Shakespeare; his PhD dissertation was on Louis Zukofsky’s writings on Shakespeare. He worked from 1984 until 2000 as a copyeditor at the San Francisco Chronicle and died in the Bay Area on February 15, 2022. A Pin’s Fee is an extended elegiac sequence on his lover David Nelson Doyle’s illness and coming death.[1] The poem was published in 1988 and was his final work. Doyle died from AIDS related causes on July 28, 1992.[2] The title is taken from Act One, scene 4 of Hamlet, when the grieving prince is advised not to follow after his father’s ghost by Horatio, lest the sight drive him insane. Hamlet responds: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee, / And for my soul, what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?”[3] The poem is a profound meditation on preemptive grief, the breakdown of language in the face of inescapable loss, and the state of the human soul in the wake of epistemological schism.

R. Clifton Spargo uses Hamlet in his book The Ethics of Mourning as one of his key literary case studies, arguing, “Hamlet teaches us, the time of grief has everything to do with its ethical dimension: grief is organized by the very possibility of a time in which the other remains meaningful.”[4] It is this very relationship between time, grief, and meaning that that Melnick explores here with particular reference to Hamlet. T. S. Eliot argued that Shakespeare’s play was a failure since it lacked an adequate “objective correlative” for Hamlet’s grief, that is, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”[5] Spargo finds this failure to be anything but and instead considers the play to be an exploration of ethical mourning. Thus, it is fitting that Hamlet functions as an objective correlative for grief in Melnick’s Pin and, in particular, how grief both preemptive and belated operates through time.

Melnick starts his poem gesturing towards this state of temporal suspension with a highly informative intertextual allusion in “A SOLIDIA ESPERIENZA D’AVANGUARDIA,” the first of the poem’s twelve sections. Each of these sections is broken into three smaller subsections; in all save the first and, penultimate, and last poem these sections are titled “1. FABLE,” “2. SUJET,” and “3. MORAL,” which suggests, but by no means adheres, to a narrative structure. In their Introduction to Melnick’s Nice: Collected Poems, Fraser, Friedlander, Jullich, and Silliman argue, “plausibly the poem is a story in twelve parts, each part broken down for formal analysis,” going on to ask since, “ambiguity and the mixture of the languages make fable, sujet, and morale unstable as a unit. Is the structure then a parody of analysis?”[6] I would assert that rather than a parody of analysis that Melnick is staging a critique of the cause and effect of narrative time, particularly in the first and twelfth poems in the sequence, which do not adhere to the fable/sujet/morale structure. Instead, in the first poem, we find subsections titled, “1. THINK DEAD,” “2. NEO-AFTERS FOREVER,” and “3. FAT BOY UNUSED TO BRAIN DAMAGE.” The center of this trinity, “2. NEO-AFTERS FOREVER,” addresses itself to the span of the human life:

‘Basically,’ you’re dead for four to six billion years, then

Alive for about seventy years,

Then dead again

Four to six billion years, minimum.

Most of the time, you’re dead.

Thus, Melnick lays out central temporal focus of the poem by way of an oblique allusion to Venerable Bede’s parable of the sparrow, from Chapter 13 of Book 2 of Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, in which one of the King’s men notes, in reported speech:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.[7]

Melnick’s poem is a profound meditation on our sparrow’s flight through life, its significance (is it a mere “pin’s fee”?) in the face of the ineluctable fact of our own deaths and those of people we love, and how human language is incommensurate to the task of adequately understanding or describing grief and mortality.

The poem is radically disjunctive; lines and words disintegrate under the pressure of confronting loss, letters jump around within words like overheated atoms (good becomes goo becomes goog), and words are smashed into to their constituent morphemes and then reassembled like linguistic kintsugi. As Brain Reed correctly asserts, “if it serves – recalling for a moment Carl Phillips’s comments on the genre – as a ‘documentation of, and witness to, the effects of a particular plague on a particular time in human history,’ one must conclude that it withholds what it supposedly documents and stands witness only to the impossibly difficult, doomed work of witnessing (2004, 165). It may give insight into ‘something more timelessly true about the human condition, namely, that we all come to know death,’ but its truth is the inability of language to convey truth.”[8] And yet, poetic language would seem to come closest to conveying this truth, for as Silliman and co argue in their introduction, “What the poem’s language does convey is the sheer fact of living: disjunct, in suspension, under erasure, fragmented, making no sense, making too much sense. There are isolated words, expressive in their non-articulation, as if their sentence had torn itself apart.”[9]

Melnick contrasts his radically experimental poetics with a prosaic narrative of lost love which runs through the titles of sections 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, and reads, when each sentence/title is spliced together: “SINCE YOU QUIT THE ‘Y’ AND MOVED AWAY, YOU HAVEN’T SPOKEN TO ME FOR MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES AT A TIME. NOW WHEN YOU DO COME OVER TO VISIT WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY TO EACH OTHER. I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU WANT TO THROW ALL OUR YEARS TOGETHER AWAY. I DON’T WANT TO BE ANYONE ELSE’S LOVER. I FEEL SO ABANDONED BY YOU I’D LIKE TO DIE. NOBODY WILL REMEMBER US ANYWAY.” This would appear to be an importunate direct apostrophe to David Doyle, who was still living at the time of the poem’s publication in 1988 and who was a swimming instructor and an associate director at the Central YMCA in San Francisco in the mid-1980s.[10] Rachel Hadas has pointed out the dangers of apostrophe in AIDS poetry, identifying a “subtle and dangerous form of falsity […] likelier to seep into poem which address themselves apostrophically towards another, for the illusion of intimacy can both shape and be shaped by a dangerously seductive lyric mode with soars on nothing but its own eloquence.”[11] Melnick’s “solid experience of the avant garde” poem is placed in radical contrast to this “seductive lyric mode,” and uses the former to critique the latter. There are lucid moments of clarity, for example, “NEO-AFTERS FOREVER,” or, as here, the “Fable” stanza from “We Zonked him into being Whormless,” “He said he was trying to start in the middle of a sentence/ And move in both directions at the same time.” It is noteworthy that some of the most direct lines in the poem have to do with temporality and causation, and here Melnick borrows from Wayne Shorter’s memory of John Coltrane’s comments on what he was trying to achieve as a saxophonist as a kind of ars poetica.

Silliman et al identify an allusion to the “truth Edda” (p. 217, li8) in the “sujet” of “We Zonked Him into Being Whormless” as a reference to “an Old Norse term for a gathering of poems,” asserting “Melnick’s Edda [is], a product of ‘turth,’ not truth” (xxxi) but do not trace the allusion further. The Poetic Edda is a collection of Skaldic alliterative verse, but significance of the reference goes beyond “Edda” in the sense of a poetic anthology for there is also Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth century Prose Edda, which could be considered one of the earliest examples of poetry criticism with its glosses on poems and lists of kennings and verse forms. Again, in this allusion, we find Melnick considering the respective strengths of poetry over prose. The Christian Snorri anachronistically systematized Norse myths about what happens to humans after death, and, as Daniel McCoy explains, “Snorri took pains to present his forebears as having anticipated elements of Christianity. He therefore bent and stretched his data to make the Norse myths and beliefs seem closer to those of Christianity than they actually had been, as well as to account for them within a Christian historical framework.”[12] Thus, Snorri’s Edda distorts the “turth” of death, whereas Melnick seeks to confront it, most notably in the twelfth and final section of A Pin’s Fee, “DEATH.”

“DEATH” consists of eleven lines of four identical iterations of the capitalized word “death” for a total of 44 instances of the word. The first line appears above the section’s title (the forty fifth repetition of the word) and the second immediately below, thus death (title) is parenthesized by death (poetic lines). The poem is then subdivided into three sections (as are all the other poems in the sequence) but the sections are numbered rather that named. The line immediately preceding “DEATH” is the final one in the section entitled “NOBODY WILL REMEMBER US ANYWAY”: “to get share, of Death                                                           ’Tis.”[13] Reed argues that Melnick here wishes to “partake in” death, and “To do that, he suggests, it is to enter a prolonged moment of suspension, a white empty lacuna between ‘of Death and ‘’Tis.’ Death is, and it is not. One can share it, and one cannot.”[14] I would agree and add there is also a page-turning lacuna between “’Tis” and “DEATH” on the following page. The Elizabethan contraction ’Tis – it is – the third person present singular form of “to be,” an assertion of existence, function’s much like Bede’s sparrow, with the darkness of death before it and after it. It also brings us, in the closing pages of Melnick’s poem back to Hamlet, for Shakespeare often plays the seeming insignificance of “’Tis” off against madness and mortality, for example, Hamlet thinks death “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” Polonius muses of Hamlet, “That he’s mad ’tis true: ’tis true, ’tis pity / And pity ’tis ’tis true: a foolish figure” the only instance of a redoubled “’tis” in the Shakespearean corpus and a foolish figure of speech. The most significant instance of this contraction for Melnick’s purpose comes in Hamlet’s brief soliloquy at the close of Act 3 Scene 2: “Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world.” Melnick does not once mention AIDS or Doyle’s illness in A Pin’s Fee, but contagion enters the poem through the existential assertion of ’tis by way of Hamlet.

Of “DEATH” Reed writes “Such rote empty repetition says nothing and achieves nothing,” which he argues, is the point of Melnick’s “radically antihumanist” AIDS poetry which “cannot share.”[15] Yet, unlike Lear’s assertion that “nothing will come of nothing” Melnick’s “DEATH” does make something happen. This effect is not the Shklovskian defamiliarization and alienation of Lear’s devastated trochaic pentameter line “Never, never, never, never, never” (5.3.307) in the wake of Cordelia’s death but rather one of epitaphic intent. Kaplan Page Harris is right to assert, “The ‘death’ page recalls the material constructedness of concrete and visual poetry, where normative grammar and semantic meaning are deliberately minimized or deferred. That is not to say that the poem is impossible to read; rather no syntax is necessary because, in a climate of hostility, the poem’s arrangement can articulate without explicit articulation.”[16] Melnick’s Pin remarkably and repeatedly articulates through linguistic disarticulation that life is the lacunae in an all-consuming and inescapable sea of death, and, in a poem published six years before Doyle’s death in 1992, manages, like Coltrane and unlike the sparrow, “to move in both directions at the same time” through his powerfully experimental poem. The final page is a monumental epitaph for the AIDS dead. There is one “DEATH” for each of what were to be Doyle’s 45 years of life.

[1] David Melnick, Nice: Collected Poems. New York: Nightboat Books, 2023. “A Pin’s Fee,” 205-227. You can find an online version of the poem here: https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/melnick/Melnick_David_A-PINS-FEE.pdf

[2] “Private Languages: David Melnick and Gordon Faylor in Conversation.” April 15, 2019. https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/04/private-languages-david-melnick-and-gordon-faylor-in-conversation/. Retrieved June 3, 2024.

[3] Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4, line 73-75.

[4] Clifton R. Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 114.

[5] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” Selected Essays. London, Faber and Faber, 1949, 141-146:145.

[6] Nice, xxx.

[7] Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Chelmsford MA: Courier Corporation, 2012. 117

[8] Brian Reed, “Show Me the Color of Your Flowers: American AIDS Poetry Today,” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 21, Number 2, Fall 2021, pp. 99-126: 110.

[9] Nice, xxx.

[10] David Nelson Doyle 1947-1992, Bay Area Reporter. Volume 22, Number 32, 6 August 1992, 17.

[11] Rachel Hadas, Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop, New York: Faber and Faber, 1991. 162.

[12] Daniel McCoy, The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion.

[13] Melnick. Nice. 266, li. 19.

[14] Reed, “Flowers,” 110.

[15] Reed, “Flowers,” 110.

[16] Kaplan Page Harris, “Avant-Garde Interrupted: A New Narrative after AIDS.” Contemporary Literature 52,4. 630-657: 638.

♦

Dr. SALLY CONNOLLY is an authority on American, British and Irish verse from the modern period to the present day and Associate Dean of Student and Faculty Success at the University of Houston.

Her first book, Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets After Auden,was the first ever critical study of the elegies that poets write for each other. Her second book, Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetryconsiders the (sometimes vexed) nature of transatlantic poetic relations in a series of wide-ranging essays. She is currently finishing a book about the poetry of the AIDS epidemic, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press.