I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. —Duchamp
Duchamp
I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air
and watch them pop.
I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening.
I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.
Then to call it natural.
Then to call it supernatural.
I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.
I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.
I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them,
and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.
I had the happy idea to string blue lights from a tree and watch them glow.
I had the happy idea to call myself happy.
I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life.
I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do
and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes.
I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say
hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.
It was my happiest idea.
Copyright © by Mary Szybist. Printed by permission of the author.
Mary Szybist is the author of Granted (Alice James Books), which was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a 2009 NEA Fellowship and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
Arts & Academe poetry editor Lisa Russ Spaar notes: Mary Szybist’s anaphoric litany, “Happy Ideas,” arrives in this space at the start of the last week of the year, that liminal spell of days between the winter holidays and the Janus-blade of the new year. For some of us, this spate of out-of-time hours, often disordered by changes in routine, can be a welcome reprieve from quotidian demands, providing more than usual time for reflection, taking stock, and anticipation of a fresh start. For others, the week can be a toilet flush, a slough of despond, a time of unmet expectations, of feeling out of synchronicity with the celebratory acoustics of the season.
It is a cliché to speak of the holiday blues, but the reality of them, for those suffering from a clash between societal and domestic pressures and the experience of depression, disappointment, and unmet expectation, are not easily dismissible. The much trusted site WebMD offers advice for allaying this holiday dip (“8 Ways to Beat the Blues”), including laying off the eggnog, finding time to exercise or volunteer, and even suggesting that “writing about your holiday blues can actually change them.”
Szybist’s whimsical catalogue, threaded through with tempered accruals and incremental repetitions of the word “blue” that deepen the emotional stakes of the poem as it proceeds, takes its title from and opens through the lens of an epigraph from the dada artist Marcel Duchamp: “I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.” About his sculpture Bicycle Wheel (1913) Duchamp said in an interview, “The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn’t called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. … To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day.”
Szybist appropriates Duchamp’s notion of “Readymades” (objects manufactured for another use—snow shovels, urinals—and presented as works of art) to her own poetic purposes. Note how her understanding of what can constitute a found object becomes more and more metaphysical as the she makes her list:
I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air
and watch them pop.
I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening.
I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.
Then to call it natural.
Then to call it supernatural.
I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.
With each spin, with each line’s revolution, Szybist creates for herself some of the comfort of which Duchamp speaks in his interview, the repeated motions of turning the wheel allowing the artist both to transcend and accept the mire of the everyday. Eschewing sentimentality and quick fixes, Szybist takes (and offers) as much pleasure in broaching existential, wide-reaching historical ideas (“I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything”) as she does in conveying notions decidedly domestic and intimate (“I had the happy idea to string blue lights from a tree and watch them glow. / I had the happy idea to call myself happy”). Both the philosophical and the grounded give pleasure, as these rhymed lines that come near the poem’s conclusion demonstrate: “I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do / and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes.”
In his gorgeous, irreverent On Being Blue, a book-length philosophical essay on blueness in all its resonances and contexts, William Gass writes, “Being without Being is blue.” As “Happy Ideas” concludes, Szybist’s speaker embraces her blue soles, the intrinsic blueness of her being: “I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say / hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello. / It was my happiest idea.” Szybist’s poem is a call to accept if not celebrate the full menu of our “being”—blue-shod and dancing.
(Photo of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel by Wagner T. Cassimiro “Aranha” on Flickr)
