"Non Quis, Sed Quid" by Matthew Daddona
The first poem I ever dedicated to someone was entitled “Poem for Leaving” wherein the dedicatee—referred to as K.B.—is about to embark on an international trip to France from our quiet hamlet on Long Island’s North Fork. Before K.B. left in real life, she said to me, “I feel like I’m 4,000 miles away and have left my oven on.” In the poem, I turned that statement into a question, thus instigating a conversation between me and the now fictional K.B. “Is it the feeling you’re 4,000 miles away/ and have left the oven on?”
“Poem for Leaving,” which was the first poem I ever published, ends with a series of questions meant to ruminate on the physical and emotional distance between the writer and the person to whom he’s writing: “Do you want a Siamese twin,/ someone to ensure that nothing has happened?/ … Or do you want a distant relative, someone to write the story/ of the one who got away?”
The poem, as much as it is an occasionally overblown and comical indictment of friends leaving for more fanciful places—“I want to galvanize the long-winded passages/ that flutter in your absence,/ busier than Joyce winning at pinball”—is also a rueful reminder of the emptiness they leave behind.
Now, nine years after writing it, and having not spoken to K.B. in a few years, I am thinking about the role of the dedication poem and its function over time. I ask myself whether the poems we dedicate to others need to purport a vision of authenticity or if the mere act of writing them is real enough. Does the dedication poem say more about its writer than it does its subject? Does writing a poem for someone mean it’s necessarily for them? And if it’s not, then whom is it for?
In the 14th century, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, among the first progenitors of the sonnet, dedicated many of his poems to a woman named Laura, though this mysterious woman was not—in the parlance of modern poetry—his dedicatee. In other words, Laura’s name was neither spelled out in the title nor in the epigraph below it. She was, in essence, his invisible muse—the spirit that molded his adoration and romantic language but who did not receive credit on the page.
Centuries later, in England, John Keats’ poem, To Fanny,” also reads as a supplicative doormat for his muse, his fiancée Fanny Brawne, and whose passion is as tempestuous as the one to whom he’s writing. In the penultimate stanza, Keats writes:
I know it—and to know it is despair
To one who loves you as I love, sweet Fanny,
Whose heart goes fluttering for you every where,
Nor when away you roam,
Dare keep its wretched home:
Love, love alone, has pains severe and many;
Then, loveliest! keep me free
From torturing jealousy.
Keats is mourning—in the metaphorical sense—the possibility of his love falling into the hands of another (as if Fanny is a weather-vane whose adoration is controlled by the hearts of men; as if she hasn’t a choice in the matter), and perhaps, for Keats, there is no greater power grab than in writing a poem for someone; no, in titling a poem for someone—in this case for Fanny, whose presence within the poem is also preceded by Keats’ framing. She is mine, he seems to declare. This is about her as much as it is for her. She belongs to me. (A century and a half later, Bob Dylan would write the song “She Belongs to Me,” in which the identity of the ‘she’ in the song can only be conjectured. Many critics believe the ‘she’ is intentionally obscured because the subject is elusive to all and belongs to no one.)
In 1962, William Carlos Williams penned “To Elsie,” a poem that is hardly a dedication to a woman as it is a dedication to an entire social class—“the pure products of America/ go crazy”—a take-down of a distorted suburban malaise that points America directionally forward but spiritually backward. The lines “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car,” end the poem—an elegiac suggestion that no one can stop this perceived downfall because no one, rightfully, can claim it.
If “To Elsie” buries its dedicatee, only naming her once in the middle of the poem, where does that leave the topic of the muse? Is Elsie less a muse because she represents a demoralizing vision of America? Or is Williams claiming, as a Modernist pioneer who is peering into the future rather than the past, that dedication poems don’t have to be so much about love as they do about the feelings that people and places inspire? Is he suggesting that it is not who but what (non quis, sed quid) that is the most essential part of the dedication poem?
In Williams’ case, Elsie’s social class—and the stolen innocence she represents—is as real as any person to whom he could’ve supplied flowery, obsequious language. That she inspired a poem about a social class as opposed to one of a million about thwarted love makes it all the more unique.
I’m not suggesting that verisimilitude should be the aim of poetry, but that dedication poems, to the extent that they will always exist, will continue to be mired in a struggle for true representation of its subject amid a more exaggerated symbolism. The dedicatee, in turn, whether aware or not of the poem’s overtures their way, can shape-shift on account of how a reader interprets the writer’s work. Sometimes, they will be gone entirely.
When I wrote “Poem for Leaving” at the age of twenty-two, I was painfully unaware of how the world works. I was, I like to believe, like most twenty-two-year-olds. I wanted to believe that my poem, which I read to my friend near her bedroom window before she left, was an attempt to safeguard her from the world outside, an attempt to get her to stay. The cognitive dissonance found within the title—“Poem for Leaving”—and the dedicatee—“For K.B.”—supposes that two things can be true at the same time: that I know she’ll be gone and yet, I don’t know how to say goodbye.
But now, thirty-one years old and on the verge of marriage, I find myself needing to say goodbye to that poem in order to write a poem for my fiancée that will convey my feelings in a way that is neither saccharine nor flimsy, extravagant nor basic. She has asked for the poem, but I also want to give her one. The problem is that I find myself comparing the poem I plan on writing with the poem I originally wrote for K.B., the only poem I ever dedicated to another person. That the latter was published makes it all the harder to shed.
Each time I start writing, I recall how “Poem for Leaving” came to me in a gust—written on notebook paper in an hour and typed up on a library computer in thirty minutes. When I try writing the new dedication poem, I jam up against my own limiting expectations. I convince myself that whatever I’m writing is not good enough because it comes neither fast nor easy. Then I think that, maybe, nothing about “Poem for Leaving” was fast or easy either. Perhaps, in my younger, more naïve years, I sacrificed perfection for the pure joy of writing. For the freedom to express something symbolically rather than realistically. I had cared more about the what than the who, which made all the difference.
Matthew Daddona is a writer and editor based in New York. His debut collection of poetry, House of Sound, was published by Trail to Table Press in 2020. He works as a senior editor at Dey Street Books, where he has published numerous New York Times and national bestsellers.
