Tangled Rope

The first poem from The Best American Poetry 2009 that I’ve chosen to discuss this December is Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone”, a rough sonnet which presents a curious phenomenon connected with a massacre at a university, likely a Virginia Tech-style incident. The focus of the poem—the tingling of pop music ringtones emanating from dead students’ pockets as they are wheeled away—is inventive and unsettling, a new perspective on a type of tragedy that is now too familiar in the US.

Ringtone

As they loaded the dead onto the gurneys
to wheel them from the university halls,
who could have predicted the startled chirping
in those pockets, the invisible bells
and tiny metal music of the phones,
in each the cheer of a voiceless song.
Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes
never more various now, more young,
shibboleths of what a student hears,
what chimes in the doorway to the parent
on the line. Who could have answered there
in proxy for the dead, received the panic
with grace, however artless, a live bird
gone still at the meeting of the strangers.

More disturbing than the fact that the phones go off in the students’ pockets after they are dead, they go off in many pockets simultaneously, as if an orchestrated practical joke. Considering the tragedy, we must conclude that the calls are from worried friends or relatives, who heard about the event too late, probably from the news, and are calling to see if everything’s alright.

The reader knows everything’s not alright, and that gives tough irony and a helpless sense to the reader. “Who could have answered there / in proxy for the dead, received the panic / with grace…” The undetected fear, concern, and predictive sorrow that those calls might carry casts greater irony on the fact that the calls are signaled by “Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes / never more various now…” This variety is defined by the clashing of the ringtones going off simultaneously, and reminds us that though the students are identified as little more than “they” by the narrator, each was individual, took pleasure in music, and defined one part of themselves through that music by the act of choosing it as a personal ringtone.

Finally, these “invisible bells” suggest a death toll, one which the students carry with them, indeed might always have carried with them, though that the ringtones may be so portentous would never have occurred to them.

Now that’s what I’ve found to be clearly in the poem. But I thought I sensed something more, that the pop music ringtones are a more cynical indicator of the students’ transience, and perhaps their failure to distinguish themselves by anything more than the tastes they adopt. The narrator doesn’t give us much more than a general category for these students—indeed, doesn’t even define that they are students (an implication I made from “university” and “Pop mostly”). Neither does the narrator look at them beyond their ringtones—I admit this may be due to the constraints of the form, or a desire to keep a tighter focus on the items I’ve mentioned above, or even simply because the identity of the students is uninteresting or unimportant to the poet’s purpose (indeed this may say something about how we the public view victims of a tragedy: “not us, them“).

Yet there’s a pretty significant contrast in the nameless, faceless, inanimate students carrying a lively set of pop tunes by artists who, though surely doomed to be victims of changing pop tastes and, inevitably, their own dying, are named by the poet, creating at least a glimmer of their survival beyond death. The students themselves have contributed to the artists’ defiance of time and death, carried beyond the students’ lives even as they are literally carried by the students. And that’s all we know of the students; indeed, and at risk of sounding callous, that may be all they’ve left behind.

Form

I suggested that “Ringtone” is a rough sonnet, and I’m sticking to that. Composed of 14 lines that more often than not have 5 feet, though rarely iambs, the most convincing evidence that the form is sonnet is the slant, assonant, and other near rhymes. Surprisingly, it was the musicality of the slant rhymes that tipped me off (certainly not the rhythm, which I had a very hard time scanning), which means it works. It is an English sonnet, with the scheme abab cdcd efef gg. In the “a” you must find the “ur–ee” in “gurneys” and “chirping”; in “b” its slant rhyme of “halls” and “bells”; and so on. The final rhymed pair is perhaps the most disparate of the poem: the “ur” in “bird” and “strangers”. Does this signal the poet’s understanding that the poem, like the vent described, can not be neatly concluded with any of the finality and import that sonnets usually bring in that final rhyming pair?