[Birds, LLC; 2024]
Ryan Eckes has an agenda in Wrong Heaven Again. In the first line of the collection, he finds one, if only one a little out-of-date: “a to-do list from a year ago.” Wait, actually, he tells us, “that’s still good.” Reading these poems is to re-encounter these everyday tools of so-called productivity and marvel at how Eckes finds ways to make them “still good.” These are poems about going to work, getting work done, and always having to find new work. The thematic summary implies a drudgery that Eckes does replicate and capture in his sparse play on administrative lingo and other found language, his penchant for repetition and a simple sentence, and yet the book—the physical book itself too—is something almost beautiful, immediately sensual, careening toward pleasing. Printed on textured paper, with smooth green endpapers, black and white photos as interlude to text, the invitation is to find across the poems where there might be something other than drudgery or in-between that drudgery, to find, if not an agenda, then something “good.”
Let me muse more on that image in the first line in the prefacing poem, “under the table”: estranged by time, the to-do list as a form can be seen for what it is, and we can see the to-do list as Eckes executes it. To-do lists already consist of a strange amalgamation of various casual shorthands, bringing together, in their own jargon, work tasks (“the labor-management committee meeting on job security”), our everyday errands (“pay for your subscription”), and sometimes wilder, more hopeful, aims (“buy lottery tickets for everyone in your family”). The to-do list holds together the work we are paid to do and what often invisibly subtends it, secures it even. There’s no distinction made here; the form has the difficult, perhaps, impossible task of holding these multiple and often contradictory kinds of labors. Perhaps because of this impossibility, the poem puts a thesis statement in the conditional: “it could be that you cannot fight for people and for the economy at the same time.” It could be you cannot do the errands and the paid work. I use “you” but the to-do list also has no explicit subject, only the implicit reader (or is it the writer?). Eckes replicates this effect in a more interesting way by constantly shifting the subject of each of his lines (“i” / “melissa” / “the dean” / “you”). These varied tasks he enumerates, while undertaken by more explicit, concrete people in real jobs accomplishes what he often really sets out to do: to take us between these subjects, to take us from our individual to-do lists to collective action. Only then will we be able to check anything off. The poem ends, “rent should be going down / when it starts to go down, i’ll cross that off my list.” To “cross that off,” at least momentarily, assuages the “horrible knot of an impossible situation,” as Eckes calls it, the endless work to “keep going.” The to-do list compels action through the satisfactions of productivity, our acquiescence to the demands of our workplaces and the demands of capital to do more and more, for endless growth in all domains of our lives. Eckes redeploys this form and this form’s feelings to different aims, as he names it, if a bit vaguely, the “fight for people.”
What a pleasure for a reader and especially for a critic when the first poem of a collection is well chosen. There is mileage here: I found the first line orients and drives you through the uncanny valley of this collection’s pastiche, disjointed, juxtaposed vocabulary, its words at once simple and weighty with euphemism, tone ironic and desperately serious, and referents that span our work responsibilities and our personal aspirations, the landscapes of inside and outside (a favorite couplet of mine that draws these registers together through a simile: “another addition blocking the sunset / like a teaching philosophy”). Some of these poems mine this language for puns, the pleasing relief of humor, as the rather compact, two-line poem, “the flu,” which hinges together the definitions of “affluent” and “effluent” and, by doing so, invites connecting, if only for two lines, sonic, material, and conceptual flows. (But as turns of phrase, some of these plays are less successful as with “the fox school of business”). Found things and language are always a resource to Eckes, something to roll with and work with. As he opens, “the reminder,” “my phone wants it to be moby duck / so be it.” To find a form or be given a form like the to-do list helps to wade through the whole collection, the voices, the carefully deformed prose that becomes poetry, and the free verse. It also promises to help us move through more spaces—urban and rural, home and work—that the collection insists on transversing. On the cover of Wrong Heaven Again, an old car sinks/emerges from a ditch in a field; most of the image is sky. In contrast, between sections are tightly framed photographs of textures, seemingly of paint peeling on walls and doors, completely without a horizon line. This poetry attempts to be the poetry of the modern delocalized factory—“it’s the gig economy,” Eckes writes at one point as a single, floating line—but also, the poetry of, as social reproduction theorist Tithi Bhattacharya puts it, “the processes that enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day . . . the public transportation system that helped bring her to work or the public parks and libraries that provide recreation so that she can be regenerated, again, to be able to come to work.” Eckes seems to pose for us, what does it take to get to the gig job? The poems themselves document some of these processes and experiment what shape might hold a job defined by its lack of borders. What literary “form” (a title of another poem) might ask as an unemployment form asks, “were you absent from work when work was available”?
Formally, Eckes tends towards the isolated line in this collection: each sentence a stanza, spaced out to appear at first glance like a bullet point, a note in a list. No punctuation, of course, and no capitalization: these are the to-do lists of a digital age. They feel thumb-typed in “Notes” apps (a space mentioned explicitly in one poem) rather than scrawled in notebooks or tacked around on Post-its. These are the notes that one writes on the move from one job to another: They use what is available. One medium holds business and pleasure, to become half grocery list, half poem. (“over easy” just reads “egg / skull / moon /milk.”) The digital materiality of the poem makes it both more and less disposable than paper: A line from a Notes app is one that “i don’t remember writing . . . but I remember feeling it.” My formulation is a little too narrow to capture the whole of the collection, and certainly some poems flow through run-on feelings rather than bounce from moments to moment. For instance, the last of the three poems entitled “injury music” promises “documenting nothing” and delivers the weighty feel of sighs, wanting you to “tell me you’re sorry,” and the “infinite line of trees.” But, just as certainly, he tends to a list. Even visually denser poems still allot a thought to a stanza, each thought interrelated but unfolding more as a series than as an argument. Quite literally, only labors accumulate in these lists, rarely things. Several poems, including the coda, riff on the anaphora, such as “direction,” which gathers examples of a variety of “director” job titles. The list makes items out of verbs: each activity is a thing “to-do.” This grammatical slip between actions and things is one Eckes himself identifies. In a stand-out poem for me, “headwaters,” he writes, “we call a building the same thing we call the action that made it, as if it were still being made—we are building a building.” The strange to-do list form makes strange these actions that become objects, the labors that become products: These poems are on their way to de-fetishizing.
There are risks to the agenda as a mode. The risk of the to-do list is that one does not complete the tasks, and it instead is a mocking reminder. The unfinished sits there, evidence of failure, ghosts of productivity; they do go out of date, reality falls behind expectations. (Of course, that assumes writing the to-do list, however beautifully, was itself never a goal.) The same risk of going out of date haunts this collection but never fully undermines it. Occasionally, Eckes will weave in political rhetoric, specific names, chants, the language of an email or a text blast. While his attention to the language of our everyday is mostly effectively integrated, jarring mostly to make punchlines, the slogans that appear (either to be sincerely reiterated or vaguely mocked) sometimes pop out like thesis statements (for example, “in the streets, they keep trying to isolate aesthetics from politics”). They pin the poems to a moment, even to an election cycle in which “every employer encourages you to vote” and “higher pay is not on the ballot.” Indeed, the poems repeatedly return to the empty gesture of the vote; perhaps, we might think of it as checking the box, coloring in the bubble, pretending to be done when the list asks us if it is in fact “still good.”
But he’s also right: Aesthetics does have a politics, and it has working conditions, and it has a language for processes that enable it. For poetry in particular, to get the worker to the factory, that is, to sustain the poet, relies on a particular form of reproductive labor, education—namely its edifices, academia, the university, and the cities that surround and interweave with them. A whole strand of these poems addresses this topic. Eckes puts it bluntly, “i became a teacher to pay my rent.” In this framing, “education is a gift to your landlord.” The collection particularly likes to pull from the niche language of academia, not its intellectual jargon but its administrative one, and pair it with its political demands and other textures of everyday working life. It is especially sensitive to its precarious rhythms and its regular indignities, such as university’s penchant for rehiring adjunct instructors and staff every year, even every semester (recently, at my university, I had to be hired in August and rehired again in September for a job I’ve held since 2021). Eckes finds rhythm, even a relief: “to be rehired every other breath / as if you were never there.” These are the working conditions for poetry. It begs the question that Eckes asks, “you think i work too hard for this lyric?” and what we might do to work less hard for it.
Lilith Todd is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a writer, and an editor.
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