Rae Armantrout just won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and she’s a pretty difficult poet to read. But one of her simplest poems, “Thing,” is about the beauty of simplicity:
Thing
We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,
for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles
and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"
though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.
For me, that phrase “self/regard,” with the line break, is the hotspot in the poem. “Self regard,” in another context, might mean self interest or egoism, which would imply the opposite of “balanced reporting.” But I’m seeing this cat’s “self regard” as a disinterested attention to details. The self is regarded, the dirt on the paws is regarded, the sun is regarded, but the cat attends to all of it without a drama about herself in contrast to the world. Right now, nothing is “personal” property that needs defending. Those claws (defensiveness and selfhood) will come out when they need to attack; but for now, we’ve got a Buddhist cat of sorts, licking passively as if “one” with the sunlight.
She’s not conscious or anxious about where “me” ends and the rest of the world starts right now. She lives around and inside things without competitive values: She pays equal attention to paws, dirt, sun, carpet.
The cat’s disregard for “me” contrasts with the couple’s sense of “us,” who know about ownership, with their references to “our” cat, on “our” rug. They say they “love” the cat, but it’s love with some envy in it. The cat engages in “self regard” by existing in space without staking a firm position. She dissolves into things because she plays an unconscious but functional role. Her calm oblivion echoes with lines from another Armantrout poem, “Yonder”:
Anything cancels
everything out.
If each point
is a singularity,
thrusting all else
aside for good,
“good” takes the form
of a throng
of empty chairs.
Or it’s ants
swarming a bone.
To me, that says that when we are conscious or think of a singular “me”—of what we own, value, or fight against—we separate ourselves from the world, and so can never quite achieve “balanced reporting.”
What do you get out of the poem?
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
