Bunch Of Stuff - Analysis

A love note that keeps slipping out of its own hands

The poem’s central drama is a speaker trying to address a you—intimately, almost conspiratorially—while the language keeps skittering away from stable meaning. The opening gesture, To all events I squirted you, is both comic and bodily, like an overfamiliar affection that immediately becomes untrustworthy. Even the next phrase, knowing this not to be this, cancels itself as it arrives. What results is not pure nonsense so much as a mind insisting on connection while also refusing the usual contracts of clarity. The speaker wants the other person to receive something—an “outlook,” a memory, a piece of guidance—but keeps swapping the object out mid-sentence, as if sincerity can only survive as a series of feints.

The house that is also a machine for being human

Early on, the poem offers an image that feels oddly precise inside the drift: your house, a former human energy construction. A home becomes an infrastructure—something built to channel “human energy,” now “former,” as if its purpose has expired. That house then crashed with us for a few days in May, a line that makes the building sound like a guest, a vehicle, or a party that collapses into the speaker’s life. The mood here is lightly pleased—and it looked good—but the pleasure is unstable, attached to a wreck. The poem’s affection keeps arriving through damage: the desire to preserve a “fresh piece / of outlook” is paired with a house that can’t hold its form.

The polar “inscape” and the suspicious ease of making poems

When the speaker says the polar inscape / brought about some easier poems, he admits that certain conditions—cold, distance, a stripped landscape of attention—make writing come more smoothly. But the poem doesn’t celebrate that ease without unease. The phrase which I guessed was a good thing sounds tentative, almost guilty, as if “easier poems” might be a kind of moral compromise. The speaker offers a modest consolation—At least / some of us were relaxed—and then undercuts any intimacy with a vaudevillian name drop: Steamboat Bill included. Relaxation is real, but it’s also a performance, a movie-still inserted into the scene. The tension here is sharp: the poem wants to be a record of days in May, yet it keeps admitting it can only hold those days as props and overheard phrases.

Steamboat Bill’s purity, and the problem of accepting the “challenge”

The second stanza turns slightly harder. He didn’t drink nothing has the bluntness of a moral credential, but it’s said in a double negative that muddies the claim, as if even virtue can’t be stated cleanly here. Then comes an ethical distinction that feels like a true hinge in the poem’s thinking: It was one thing / to be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it. Read plainly, the speaker recognizes a gap between preparedness and consent—between bracing yourself for conflict and choosing to let the conflict define you. This matters because so much of the poem’s language feels like “challenge” without acceptance: it keeps confronting the reader with non sequiturs, yet also seems to resist turning that confrontation into a single, owned position. The speaker is circling a kind of self-protection: staying agile, never letting the world’s terms become final.

The “advice” that sounds like sabotage

The poem’s most direct move—if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it—immediately delivers counsel that is both actionable and baffling: Poke fun at balm, then suffer lethargy / to irradiate its shallow flood. “Balm” suggests comfort, cure, sentimental soothing; the advice is to mock that comfort, then endure a heavy tiredness until it “irradiate[s]” the balm’s “shallow flood.” The verb is crucial: to “irradiate” is to expose with harsh light or even contaminate with radiation. Comfort is treated as surface-level packaging, and the poem recommends a deliberate dimming of oneself—lethargy—as a way to reveal how thin that comfort is.

Then the target sharpens: this all happens in the new packaging / our enemies processed. The poem suddenly claims an antagonistic world of branding, messaging, pre-made consolations—“enemies” who “process” experience into consumable form. Yet even here the speaker’s confidence wobbles into ambiguity: They should know. Is that defiance, or resignation? The advice sounds like resistance, but it also risks becoming another posture—another packaged stance. The poem’s contradiction intensifies: it warns against “balm” while offering its own quasi-prophetic balm in the form of advice.

Pop mascots and American regions: prayer turned into marketing

The final stanza floods the poem with names that feel like cultural cutouts: The Gold Dust Twins, Hoosiers, Shakespeare, Casanova, Lincoln. The Gold Dust Twins—advertising mascots—are described as if they’re religious figures: never stopped supplicating Hoosiers / to limn the trail. “Supplicating” makes marketing sound like prayer; “limn” suggests tracing or illuminating a path, as if the nation’s story is being drawn by product icons pleading with Indiana. The poem’s earlier anxiety about “new packaging” comes back here as a whole cosmology: American identity rendered as a loop of advertisement, regional myth, and historical tableau.

Then the poem makes a stark, almost petulant erasure: There’s no Shakespeare. In a poem stuffed with cultural debris, the canonical symbol of literary depth is declared absent. Immediately after, though, we get Through the window, Casanova—not great literature, but a figure of appetite, voyeurism, and story-as-seduction. It’s as if the poem is saying: don’t expect the noble tradition; what you’ll see instead is desire peering in, half-glimpsed. The window matters: it implies distance, a view you didn’t ask for, an intrusion that is also a spectacle.

Insomnia and the cramped body of history

The ending turns bodily again, but now in discomfort rather than comic intimacy: Couldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incident / of those days. “Dumb incident” makes lived time feel both arbitrary and numbing—something that happens without meaning, yet still has weight. The final phrase, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln, is startling: Lincoln becomes not a monument but a body with “frozen feet,” and those feet are being “crimped,” bent awkwardly as if stuffed into a too-small story. History is not elevated here; it’s immobilized, mishandled, made uncomfortable. The poem’s broader claim comes into focus: the culture’s big figures—heroes, lovers, geniuses—arrive as stiff props inside a restless, sleepless present. And the present can’t rest because it keeps inheriting these packaged, cramped forms.

A harder question the poem leaves hanging

If There’s no Shakespeare, what exactly is the speaker offering the you in his place—besides this “fresh piece / of outlook” that keeps dissolving? The poem seems to dare the reader to accept that the only honest gift may be the unsettledness itself: not balm, not tradition, not a clean narrative, but the jittery consciousness that can still notice when language has been processed by “enemies.”