BAP 2009: “Ringtone” by Bruce Bond

December 4, 2009

The first poem from Best American Poetry 2009 that struck my fancy was Bruce Bond’s entry:

"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.

I chose Bond’s poem because it provoked a visceral reaction. I read the poem, moved on, and then it haunted me, calling me to return and read it again. Many contemporary poems invoke artful language, and a few are built on new and interesting ideas. But few put them together without resorting to overt experimental approaches. Bond’s poem grabbed me because it was an interesting idea full of crunchy truthiness. I can imagine a scene where the now-ubiquitous cell phones on the bodies of the dead are ringing simultaneously as parents and friends try frantically to see if their loved ones are among the dead, wondering if they are part of the tragedy they’ll have heard about instantly (as we all have and will).

And along with the arresting image, Bond’s poem is very taut, the words feel more carefully chosen and the poem more conscientiously constructed (more than I realized, as you’ll see in my last paragraph) than many. I love "…the startled chirping / in those pockets, the invisible bells / and tiny metal music of the phones, / in each the cheer of a voiceless song" as much for their truth and hint of the deeper image of the poem as for the juxtaposition in situation and song. Not to mention the alliterative echo in the "chimes" to come.

The lines "shibboleths of what a student hears, / what chimes in the doorway to the parent / on the line" are wonderfully ambiguous. In what way are the pop songs shibboleths of what a student hears and in what way are they shibboleths of who they are? And what kind of doorway are we talking about… a metaphysical doorway or literally a doorway a parent stands inside, blocked off from the crime scene, calling for their child?

Perhaps overly influenced by recent discussion here regarding potential parallels between pop music and contemporary poetry, I ruminated for a while over the significance– if any– of Bond’s use of music and artists in the poem. Bond explicitly names two pop artists– Timberlake and Shakira– while the dead students go unnamed. Is this a statement about the unfinished and ultimately (perhaps) unmemorable lives of the students, a nod to the student milieu and the lives we on the outside can’t know (shibboleth!), or simply a choice of two well-known enough artists whose names have the right sounds to fit into the poem? The tinny sounds of the music that will cease and can never change are finally no more meaningful or powerful than the implicitly more sophisticated voices of those who survive and have gone silent…

I’m also a bit puzzled by the questions in the form of statements. Bond’s poem is made of three sentences. Two of them ask questions ("who could have predicted the startled chirping…" and "who could have answered there in proxy for the dead…") but they aren’t posed as interrogatives, making the last lines a bit of a muddle for me, though the last sentence is one of the best parts of the poem (I’m a sucker for a powerful closure, that clicking close of a well-made box, as Yeats put it).

Coincidentally, Jared Stein chose the same poem and provides an acute, insightful analysis– two qualities that don’t characterize my method– including a significant point I missed: "Ringtone" is a modern sonnet. Looking at the poem this way, I can see a turn starting with the seventh line (an inversion of the traditional octet + sestet structure?), when the poem moves from the consideration of the physical setup of the scene, including the "they" who load the bodies onto the gurneys, to the lives of the students and survivors.

Tags: bap09, poetry