Place Poem: "Afternoon in the House" by Jane Kenyon

It's been a banner week for Houses large and small

After weeks of unprecedented tumult in Congress, the House of Representatives finally, apparently, has a Speaker. This historic clash of dunces, combined with the last few weeks of more general world-destabilizing nonsense, have left me in search of a poem depicting a House in equilibrium, and maybe even one without any “Speaking” at all.

A quiet, stable home while the world falls to pieces outside of its walls—would this bring us zen-like contentment, or just amplify the un-mutable noise in our brains? Here’s one of my favorites from the late, legendary Jane Kenyon to help us explore the question.

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Afternoon in the House
by Jane Kenyon

It's quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I'm writing about her:
head all petals, brown
stalks, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.

I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let's not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats—and even so, I'm frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.

from “Otherwise: New and Selected Poems” by Jane Kenyon. Graywolf Press, 1996.

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You may recall this strange little period of time a couple years ago where we all had to stay in our homes or else we’d all die. The peak days of the pandemic—especially the first few months, before the twisted “novelty” of lockdowns wore off—were a kind of opposite of “displacement.” It was, literally, forced placement in the locations we already thought we knew best: our homes, places that those of us who aren’t unhoused often take for granted. Many, including me, did our best to embrace the “perfect possibility” that such a change could wring out of us, including the time alone.

We all had that one friend who wouldn’t stop subtly bragging about how productive they were in 2020, or how they were just thriving because they loved being in their house (as an introvert, even I got sick pretty quickly of the “Introverts, we’ve been training our whole lives for this!” memes). But in the months and years since peak pandemic, we’ve all been adjusting, readjusting, and re-readjusting to what a healthy relationship looks like in the place we sleep, eat, and (increasingly) work.

Creative Commons / Josh Hild

On the surface, “Afternoon in the House” is a quaint little poem about a quiet house, daintily noting the plants, animals, and inanimate objects around the speaker. It’s so calm in this house that it feels almost like a caricature of what we might imagine an accomplished poet’s house to look, sound, and feel like (the only thing missing is a simmering pot of herbal tea). But as I read this poem for the first time, all I could be reminded of was the anxious habits I tend to fall into when working (or trying to work) from home. Let’s see what the pets are doing, what the plants are doing, let’s read somebody else’s work before doing my own.

My fellow work-from-homers might know this dance well. In the absence of inspiration, focus, or the motivation to answer even one single deranged email in your inbox, you decide to clean the entire house. You check the fridge to see if its contents have changed since 25 minutes ago. You check the mail even though you already got the mail today, and it consisted only of Amica Insurance’s thousandth failed attempt to win your business.

You sit back down at your desk, absentmindedly type “nytimes.com” into your browser, scroll the homepage just long enough to flood yourself with existential dread, and close it out. You talk to the plants. You talk to the dog. You tell him his ears are wonderfully crooked. You light a candle, or two, or three. You rearrange the candles.

You turn on the radio a podcast. “Wrong,” Jane Kenyon whispers in your ear.

The issue with this strategy is that it almost never works. It shocks me each time to learn that the dust bunnies under the couch, the unwashed dish, and the deficit of well-lit, dutifully-arranged candles were in fact not the things keeping me from being productive or creative.

This realization, and the undercurrent of anxiety that comes with it, sneaks through in the last couple of lines of Kenyon’s poem. The conditions are perfect for whatever it is the speaker in this poem is hoping to accomplish (writing a poem, perhaps). But “even so, [she’s] frightened” about this state. Even once you’ve fixed up your environment as nicely as you can, being “in the middle of perfect possibility” implies a kind of stifling precariousness. That if you move an inch, it won’t be perfect anymore. The result in this situation, at least for me, is often paralysis; a slow-burning panic in knowing I’ve done everything I possibly can to set myself up for a stroke of world-redefining inspiration. Panic, because if that stroke then doesn’t fall, the failure can only belong to me. Not the cat or the potted geranium, not the fifth cup of coffee that hasn’t finished brewing, and not the now-settled house.

Plenty of “perfect possibility” in my home office in the late afternoon.

How do neurotic knowledge workers like me escape this doom loop? That’s a much longer post, but I think Kenyon’s poem has some hints for us. All of these items and beings in our houses that we attend to in pursuit of ideal conditions are themselves modeling the behavior we could benefit from. “Sprawling” like the cats, “settl[ing] down” like the house itself; just being, and letting other things be, the way that they are. In the home, this might just mean taking a look around and observing—rather than constantly adjusting and tweaking—the conditions around us.

As someone who fails regularly at this task, I know that it’s easier said than done. But slowing down in search of a more durable (and portable) inner quiet is usually, for me, worth more than whatever quiet I can manufacture by flitting around the house checking boxes off a list that doesn’t matter.

Place Picks

We’re keeping with the “house” theme on this week’s place picks.

Music

“Come On Up To The House” by Sarah Jarosz (Apple Music / Spotify).

Sarah Jarosz’s cover of the Tom Waits original is wonderfully spare. It’s a song you could easily imagine building up steadily to this overpowering crescendo, but this arrangement—like the lyrics of the song itself—keeps things relatively simple and carefree. It’s a fitting arrangement for a song that generally is serving to remind us to stay our of our own heads, not make things a bigger deal than they are, and not create new hurdles for ourselves that weren’t already there:

There's no light in the tunnel, no irons in the fire
Come on up to the house

And you're singing lead soprano in a junkman's choir
You got to come on up to the house

However, my favorite thing about this song has to be this all-timer of a lyric imploring the listener not to get uselessly lost in self-pity: “Come on down off that cross, we could use the wood.” Wood, presumably, to build up a house where good company can help each other keep their heads and habits squarely in the here and now.

Art

In this section, I’ll commit my first and definitely not last act of nepotism and present a watercolor painting of (what else) a house by my talented and creative partner. It’s a replication of Andrew Wyeth’s “Sunflowers” (1982) that she did for her community art class at the local rec center, and I’ve been entranced by it since she brought it home the other day. The scan I made of it below doesn’t do it justice, but it’ll suffice for Substack.

Reading

“Mike Johnson’s Podcast Tells You Everything You Need to Know About Mike Johnson,” by Calder McHugh, Politico.

I considered being cheeky and putting this as a listening recommendation, but I’m not sure I could ever recommend our new House Speaker’s podcast (“Truth Be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson”) with a straight face. I just have too big a backlog of other great podcasts, you know?

Instead, you should consider reading this Politico Magazine piece pulling some true nuggets from Johnson’s podcast, which he hosts with his wife. For example, if you’re not feeling festive enough as we approach the end of October, you can rest assurred that there’s an episode dedicated to “protecting our kids from the culture’s darkness” on “the occasion of Halloween.” Spooky!

Like his fellow Republican Evangelical, former Vice President Mike Pence, Johnson has a background in talk radio:

Roughly 10 years after their appearance on ABC, Johnson was elected to Congress — but not before he established an important relationship with Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, an influential evangelical organization. Johnson guest-hosted Perkins’ national radio show, “Washington Watch,” and got positive reviews for his performance from local media.

Perkins is a lightning rod due to arguments like his insistence that natural disasters are divine punishments for homosexuality; Johnson’s political and religious beliefs dovetail with Perkins’ views.

That someone with the distinctive and self-defining Evangelical fervor of Mike Johnson could ascend to the Speakership in 2023 is pretty astounding when you consider the trends in religious affiliation in America over the past couple of decades. As the figure below from the Pew Religion and Public Life Survey shows, affiliation with no religion has nearly doubled since 2006, while Evangelical affiliation has almost halved. As tricky as the prediction business can be, I feel comfortable asserting that Mike Johnson’s defining characteristic—his religious views—are not in sync with where the country is heading.

We’re going to continue to learn more about The Most Generically-Named Man in American History as he settles into his role, of course. But if you need any weekend listening, at least you can learn more about Mike Johnson, straight from the Speaker’s mouth.