“The Rules,” a new poem by Anisfield-Wolf Fellow Leila Chatti, graced the inboxes of more than 350,000 subscribers, a landmark accomplishment for a rising poet. The American Academy of Poets has offered a daily dose of poetry, delivered digitally, since 2006.
Chatti reads “The Rules” in her mellifluous, thoughtfully inflected voice in the audio clip. She states that she “wanted to write about the walk I took . . . in Madison, Wisconsin, and the brief, vital moment of joy that indicated my year-long depression might finally lift.” To do so, Chatti knew she would need to break the conventions of her craft, the rules.
Fortunately, the poet is already adept at upending expectations. “This poem has no children; it is trying/to be taken seriously,” she writes in “The Rules” with characteristic puckishness.
Chatti, 28, splits her time between the United States and Tunisia. She is midway through her two-year term as the inaugural fellow in writing and publishing at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Copper Canyon will publish her first full-length collection, “The Deluge,” in 2020.
The Rules
There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we
can agree
we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now
realizing
they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem
are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.
You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing
whatever
they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—
forgive me,
I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional
pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking
as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take
place
at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing
moment
of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and
everyone in it is still
at work. This poem has no children; it is trying
to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or
fairy tales,
no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers,
no mothers—God,
no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit
it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no
body
referred to as the body, no one
dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty
okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists
calling a thing what it is. So what
if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the
first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I
mean. Oh hell, before
something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them
all.