Here’s the second installment in the weekly blog post we’re calling “Why we Like it.” The first post, by Jason Nemec, explains what it’s all about. This week, poet and UC PhD student Les Kay perched on top of our swaying, manuscript-stuffed filing cabinets to sing the praises of Hailey Leithauser’s “Schadenfreude” from our summer issue.
Les Kay: If I were to write a poem about the too-long tradition of taking pleasure in the pain of others—Schadenfreude—the result would either be some perverse analogue of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or a self-important plea for compassion when faced with the next YouTube video of a child being beaned by a baseball. In her poem, however, Hailey Leithauser gives us neither of these unsubtle extremes. Rather, through remarkably delicate construction and enviable precision, the poet eases us into a more complex understanding of this common phenomenon while gently suggesting the ways it touches all of us.
With dexterity reminiscent of Plath, Leithauser weaves multiple rhymes and half-rhymes across brief two-line stanzas, occasionally including internal rhymes. Although those rhymes, like “ironic / caustic / despotic / Teutonic” and “sight / quite / contrite,” suggest the comic, Leithauser’s spacing and line breaks slow progression from one rhyme to the next, one brief line to the next. Thus, the potential of the comic is ever present, but mitigated, pushed aside—much like our tendency to think about Schadenfreude. The nonce construction of the poem, with a roughly iambic meter ranging from one to three beats per line, suggests a diminished ballad or children’s song, yet the explication of Shadenfreude through the final figure of “parfum” sold in “bottles/shaped like a tear” makes clear both the seductiveness and pervasiveness of this frequently felt, but seldom expressed, emotion. Moreover, the final fragment, strung across three stanzas —“An attar/of pleasure, a tincture//of voyeur/dabbed coyly,//adroitly,/at the back of the ear”—resolves the seeming paradox of Schadenfreude itself by returning to the body with those final, loosening anapests.
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