Few poems give their readers permission to stop reading, and fewer do it inside a single sentence that never reaches a full stop. Lewis Warsh's "Goodbye to All That" runs through seventeen short lines. It begins by tolerantly sizing up poets, turns sharply on a certain kind of poetry, and ends by sending you off to bed with another person and a book.
The opening is easy to read past but odd when you slow down. "Each does a little / more than what / he does best" suggests people reaching beyond their strengths, overreaching a little, perhaps out of ambition or generosity. Yet the speaker stays calm about it: he "trusts / his genius," and "hers / shines through nonetheless." The pronouns matter. Two geniuses, his and hers, sit side by side in one clause, which quietly sets up the pairing that returns at the end. "Nonetheless" carries the tone of the opening. It admits flaws, shrugs, and says real talent survives them.
Then comes the "&," and the poem turns on a conditional: "if it hurts the eyes / to wade across the tonsured / head." The image is strange and well chosen. A tonsure is the shaved crown of a monk's head, an emptiness made on purpose and with ceremony. "Wade" is a surprising verb for crossing a scalp, because you wade through water or mud. It turns the bald patch into a wide, sluggish landscape you have to trudge across, and "hurts the eyes" works twice, as glare off bare skin and as the strain of reading something dull. Then the poem points at its own device: "a metaphor / for poetry." The line break gives "a metaphor" a moment alone, almost a wink. What the metaphor stands for gets the poem's harshest phrase, "barren of truthfulness." The complaint is not clumsy craft but a lack of honesty. "Barren" also fits the bald head, a place where nothing grows.
There is no rhyme scheme, but sound holds the poem together quietly. "Nonetheless" and "truthfulness" share an ending, so the generous opening and the severe middle are linked by an echo. "Best" in line three finds a near-rhyme in "blessed" near the close, joining the talk of talent to the language of gratitude. Most neatly, "head" and "bed" rhyme across the poem, and the shaved, barren head of bad poetry gives way to the head on a pillow. The lines are short and the enjambment keeps tipping the reader forward. The comic hesitation of "the member of the / species" comes from the break after "the," as if the speaker were searching for the driest possible phrase. "Member of the species" is deliberately deflating, a deadpan, almost zoological way to say lover or partner. Yet the next line brings in "blessed," which belongs to the same religious vocabulary as the monk's tonsure. The poem takes the monk's ritual emptiness and replaces it with a different sort of benediction, an ordinary and warm one.
The title promises a farewell, and the poem makes clear what is being left behind. Judging by the text, it is the empty, untruthful poem, and perhaps the whole business of reading anxiously for value. The instructions "close the book / turn off the light" are brisk and almost casual, with no commas between them, as if putting the book down were the easiest thing in the world. But the poem is itself a poem, so it is saying goodbye to poetry in poetry's own voice. The last words, "reading in bed," also hand reading back to the reader. The book is closed, yet the final image is of reading still going on, now shared and physical and unperformed.
That is where the poem earns its significance. It sets truthfulness as the standard for poetry and then refuses to rank poetry above the life it is supposed to serve. Its offhand voice, its ampersand and its lack of grand punctuation all show that preference. It is a poem confident enough to tell you, if it isn't doing its job, to go and be with someone you love.