Rolling with the Reptiles
Rolling with the Reptiles
A discussion on Matthew Schmidt's "Little Hair"
Audio recording is Matthew Schmidt reading “Little Hair”.
Hair is everywhere. Genesis 25:25 describes Esau’s initial appearance in the world as red, as his body was like a hairy mantle (New Revised Standard Version). Esau is Jacob’s brother. Later in the story, he is depicted as oafish, a man of the field, skilled at the bow, while his brother Jacob was a contemplative home fry. Esau was his father Isaac’s favorite, while Rebekah loved Jacob more. Jacob cons his way to receive his father’s blessing, and claws upward to receive a divine dream from God.
In some manner the brain is trying to make connections and I’ll roll with that if it feels right. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it will work, but if it doesn’t feel right, it almost certainly won’t. - Matthew Schmidt on poetic imagery
“Little Hair” opens with the premise that in the burbs people would rather talk about something else. Anything other than hair.
A fair amount of my poems use parts of my life or witnessed interactions and spaces as beginning points or grounding material. That is, what is taken in is filtered out through writing in various forms. I don’t necessarily go into the writing process with anything concrete in mind besides an idea or image. What tends to happen is that as a draft is written, images and ideas assert and insert themselves into a poem.
The lone, little hair disfigures the speaker. The rebellious hair disgruntled by the internal state of the speaker appears outward as one pore is sick / of looking in. In one aspect, the hair appears out of emotional necessity. Multiple hairs appear and begin to occur. The verbs grows and curls are marked with a simple present tense ending -s. Often times this verb tense indicates that an action occurs unceasingly or frequently. Sprouting hair is a regular occurrence for the speaker. I’d suggest that it even leads to the disfigurement later a couple stanzas later.
The hair appears masked by tattoo. Due to the line break, readers can read it in a couple ways: the speaker has a reptile tattoo, or the appearance yet again of the wispy hair turns the speaker into a reptile. It’s easy to imagine a rogue hair on a back, just above the shoulder blades. It’s easy to picture a person craning their neck to catch a glimpse of the hair, and instantly self-consciously turning into a reptile, some sort of monster.
This transformative process is complicated with the housing situation of suburban residents. Blasted suburbs. Blasted as cursed, damned, or just freaking. Nothing more than exclamatory disappointment about suburban living. I expected bombed out buildings, yet only received neighbors fighting with vacuum cleaners. Enter Marge Simpson in the classic arcade side-scroller. That’s exactly as it should be though. Fights between who has the most museum-house and Yard of the Month, where the only blasted landscape is the speaker’s self-characterization of their lived world as the blasted suburbs.
Since we’re talking about internal states, the speaker may as well feel like a reptile. A creature living in a hostile environment with neighbors waiting above, below, and in-between to squash the things that do not belong. Especially if it’s a waif, which to be honest, I referred to a dictionary for the definition.
Waif refers to the following:
A homeless person, especially a forsaken or orphaned child.
An abandoned young animal
A person, especially a woman, who is young and gaunt.
People or animals we might have responsibility towards, yet things we tend to overlook as not our responsibility. Something merely discussed over dinner tables while CNN (voyeuristic, sexually violent, David Cronenberg-like porno news) is muted in the background. Something we carry on our back in this case quite literally. Especially with the speaker appearing in the last stanza with wax burn marks, as if they flagellated themselves in an attempt to normalize their appearance.
An attempt to castigate the child, woman, or animal seeking shelter on someone’s back.
One last transformative shift is the pronoun you, which in most cases is read as a perspective shift to an outsider looking in, but I’d like to ask the question: what’s the significance of the shift to second-person pronouns? Comment below with your thoughts on the shift.
Both this poem and “The City” feature speakers with a little disjointedness going on. Next week, we’ll return with another Liner Notes essay on more of Matthew Schmidt’s work. For the time being, please check out more of his work and an interview with Schmidt at OsmanthusTV.
I often write poems when I feel I need to, not because I have to. In putting together the poems for this submission and/or for a collection, I look for work that seems to be speaking to each other. “The City” was written in 2013 and “Little Hair” somewhere in 2018-19. It took a long time for them to pair up, but they eventually found each other.
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Thank you for reading. See you in our next installment of Liner Notes - same time, next week.