The poet Erica Funkhouser grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, and it was there—many times while wandering through the woods—that she grew enchanted by language. She loved the music of words, “the kind of clang of them together and the sound and the playfulness of them,” she later said in an interview. Throughout her career, she has continued to describe, joyfully, the natural world, “where all the discoveries, wondrous or desperate, come without names.”
At some point, though, she also realized that writing can fail to capture real brutality. “The risks are innumerable: sentimentality, over-generalization, over-simplification, distortion, and preaching, to name a few,” she wrote in a 2005 essay on war poetry. The same year, she published “The Pianist Upstairs,” a poem in which she sounds exhausted, doubtful of the essential goodness of language or even of the possibility that art can heal much at all. Listening to her neighbor play the piano, she’s moved by the way he expresses emotional truth without trying to wrangle it into words. But his song, she notes, won’t change anything beyond the stairway where she sits.
It’s a bleak notion. And yet, as deeply as I feel her disillusionment, I don’t find myself convinced that art is meaningless, or that music is “wasted” in the face of suffering. After all, the pianist upstairs impelled her to write a poem—and nearly a decade later, the poem impels me to write this. The world remains a jagged place, filled with injustice. But that injustice is at least engaged, not ignored, by such cascading layers of listeners and readers. Better for the echo of Brahms to fill Funkhouser’s hallway than for the hallway to remain silent, and better for her poem to take the place of an empty page.
You can zoom in on the page here.
