Poetic Conversations: Seeking Joy in Wrongness ~A Review of Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness

When I first happened upon The Poetics of Wrongness, I was looking for instruction. I had — have — a thesis to write in the next four months, and before I defend it, and before I can move on from my MA, it has to be written. And I feel overwhelmed by it. I have four months to write a thesis about the poetry of Aria Aber and Solmaz Sharif, and I feel as though nothing I write will do justice to the beauty of the poetry I write about, and I feel as though there is so much work to do and that none of what I am doing is good or interesting. I am drowning, and I have no idea how to write a good thesis in four months. And then, I happened upon The Poetics of Wrongness, and I wanted instruction from it. I wanted it to be permission-giving, hoped that it would be the thing that would propel me forward, allow me clarity. I read it on the bus, on my way to a café in Amherst to spend my day working on a first draft of a chapter, already four days overdue. And, perhaps surprisingly, I did find the permission I wanted in The Poetics of Wrongness.

The Poetics of Wrongness, published by Wave Books in February of 2023, consists of four lectures by Rachel Zucker, on the poetics of wrongness, confessional poetry, the ethics of poetry, and the poetics of motherhood. In these lectures, Zucker approaches writing with a generosity and compassion that is so necessary and moving. There is joy and sadness and delight all in equal measure, all afforded the same care. But most crucial to this collection of lectures are the first and fourth lecture, which are overlapping and nuanced and interesting that make motherhood the center on which these lectures hinge — motherhood is where Zucker’s voice is most striking, most interesting, most necessary. Wrongness and motherhood converge, and wrongness and motherhood are both afforded care.

“With frustration and boredom and anger, with familiarity and adoration and gratitude, the writer and reader spend time together. The poem is their meeting place — the place where they become visible to each other and begin to have a relationship that is both imaginary and real, full of faults and failure and desire”, writes Rachel Zucker in the first lecture in this book, called “The Poetics of Wrongness, an Unapologia”. I find myself incredibly moved by the way Zucker conceives of writing, as a space to be, not a space to aspire to, particularly in her conception of literature as a space of “faults and failure and desire.” There is a magnanimity and a kindness to writing and literature that Zucker conceives of here that is both beautiful and bountiful.

Opening her first lecture, Zucker writes: “My body is wrong; my presence is wrong. The only thing more wrong is my absence. When I am present, it is embarrassing. When I am absent, it is wounding.” (1) And so here begins the premise that this collection is in response to, is moved by. Zucker is declarative, right from the start, aware always of her selfhood in relation to the world, aware of the other, aware of the reader as the other. In this lecture, Zucker constructs the self of the four lectures, a self that challenges the ideas of beauty, truth, timelessness, and universality of poetry, declaring that her poetics of wrongness moves past these ideas of poetry, and instead holds space for generous, expansive ways of being in poetry. “A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, complicit [,]” (5) writes Zucker, and this ultimately is the self that will shape these essays, the self that is declarative and compassionate and loving and seeking joy in wrongness.

From the start, Zucker emphasizes motherhood and daughterhood as central to the way she conceives of wrongness, confession, and ethics — even before the lecture on motherhood, motherhood is always haunting the text. Zucker writes: “I’ve learned from being a daughter and a mother that finding your parent wrong or being told how wrong you are is a complicated act of attachment, separation, individuation, and love. A parasitic sort of love perhaps, but love — a way of paying attention, of giving a shit. The alternative to being wrong is being ignored.” (6) As Zucker here conceives of motherhood in four parts, so too does she conceive of poetry itself in these four ways for the self she constructs through these lectures — through wrongness, confession, ethics, and motherhood, the poet’s self is always shaped by the acts of being a daughter, of being a mother. The throughline of these lectures is Zucker’s reckoning with what motherhood and daughterhood mean for her self as a poet.

The second lecture, “What We Talk About When We Talk About The Confessional And What We Should Be Talking About”, Zucker reckons with her own publication of her memoir about her mother, tracing the tradition of the confessional form and what this means for her own poetics. Zucker draws on the history of critical work about the confessional alongside exploring women’s movements and confessional poetry. And most compellingly, Zucker is always generous, to herself, to poetry, when exploring these histories and lineages.

In her third lecture, “A Very Large Charge: The Ethics of ‘Say Everything’ Poetry”, Zucker draws on poets like John Murillo and Sharon Olds to interrogate the ethics of poetry that is about another’s self. Here too, motherhood is central — Zucker’s central ethical concern in this lecture is her memoir about her mother. “Perhaps I hoped that she would see that writing was my way of paying close attention to her and to our relationship and that close attention was an act of love. But, of course, such attention can also be an act of retribution, damage, appropriation, and violence[,]” writes Zucker (96). Again, always, motherhood is critical to Zucker’s self as she approaches these questions, drawing on poets and theorists including Foucault and Eve Ewing, among others.

Most moving is Zucker’s fourth lecture in this book, “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood”. A lecture in the third person, this section is an account of Zucker’s attempt to write a lecture on the poetics of motherhood, repeatedly interrupted by acts of mothering, whether they be with her children as a mother, or with her students as a teacher. Motherhood interrupts the poet’s self here, but motherhood is also the poet’s self here. In lyrical, precise language, Zucker attempts to both define a poetics of motherhood and situate and seek a literary lineage for it, including CD Wright and Adrienne Rich. “She could give that lecture, but the truth was that nothing, nothing could compare with the feeling of brokenness and terror she felt when she felt she had not been a good enough mother, and this was her poetics of wrongness. No, this was her poetics of motherhood [,]” (130) writes Zucker. Her poetics of wrongness and her poetics of motherhood are always shaping each other, always shaped by the other, always the same.

The Poetics of Wrongness is an incredibly generous, moving text. It is one of those rare texts that gives you permission to be honest, to be generous with the self, to move and be moved, to be. It is a precise text, a text that knows exactly the work it aspires to do. Zucker’s lectures are kind and compassionate and wholeheartedly love literature. And now, having read it, I feel more at home with the idea of writing an imperfect thesis in four months, more at home with the idea that rather than good, my thesis can be full of “faults and failure and desire”. And The Poetics of Wrongness is contagious in its love of literature, its devotion to literature despite everything — it is devoted to literature as the space, perhaps the only space, where one can be one’s full self. The Poetics of Wrongness will give you permission for whatever you are seeking.