Jack Underwood, Not Even This: Poetry, Parenthood & Living Uncertainly

 

An obvious analogy occurs: the similarity between the positioning of your miscellaneous objects, and the business of shifting a poem about on a page. Wait, OK, now I understand exactly what you’re doing: that need to go back over and over, resting configurations, rehearsing the through-lines and relations … the muttering and staring into space, and yes, admittedly, when I’m tired and feel that I cannot convey my predicament, or the correct formal arrangement does not materialize I, too, know that inconsolable frustration … Words have to be right, and in the right order and position.

Christine was good enough to gift a paperback copy of British poet Jack Underwood’s Not Even This: Poetry, Parenthood & Living Uncertainly (Corsair, 2021), thinking I might be interested in this blend of poetry, parenting and uncertainty, a book I spent the bulk of Christmas Day quietly reading as the kids disassembled their gifts and wandered into their corners (last year she gifted a memoir by Stanley Tucci, which I devoured in a day or two, but did not write about). I hadn’t heard of Jack Underwood prior to this, but his author biography offers that he is the author of a debut poetry title, Happiness (Faber & Faber, 2015), as well a follow-up, A Year in the New Life (Faber & Faber, 2021). Certainly, Underwood’s Not Even This provides a curious counterpoint to my own book on uncertainty: whereas mine focused on the central point of original Covid lockdown, Underwood’s essay-memoir focuses on the swirling (and natural) uncertainty—blending fear, curiosity, delight and bafflement—of becoming a parent for the first time, both books circling out from their central theses through a lens of writing, poetry and the structures of thought poetry allows. “Maybe uncertainty can be a positive position in knowledge, like Keats’s ‘negative capability’,” he offers, early on in the book.

There is a way in which Underwood speaks of uncertainty as both goal and approach. “I want to live more uncertainly,” he writes, “and to understand uncertainty as a fundamental feature of how I know the world. I want to be less wasteful and reductive through it. And I want you to have a fuller, more profound experience of being alive by also being able to be in uncertainty.” It is as though he is attempting to articulate wishing to be more open to speculation, the accident and a kind of unknowing, writing through and around subject in ways I find similar to American poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert; it is almost as though his argument opens from a foundation of reason, attempting to move beyond conscious reason. One might almost wish to introduce him to Canadian poet Fred Wah’s notion of ‘drunken tai chi,’ a notion of deliberately moving off-balance to reveal what the body, what the mind, already intuitively knows, but that might be an argument for another day.