22 pages • 44-minute read
Again Later
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Again Later” is a free verse poem, meaning it doesn’t follow a fixed rhyme scheme or a fixed metrical pattern. Just because the poem is free verse, however, does not mean that it is formless. To the contrary, there are two important formal features that organize “Again Later.” First, the lines are all very short. This radical concision suggests that the poet’s desire to speak and perhaps even her breath have been cut short by her grief. Second, Collins includes a line of white space between each of the poem’s lines. Thus, the poem is as much absence as presence. This fits in with the poem’s occasion (the death of Collins’s husband). It also suggests that despite writing the poem, the speaker has not found a replacement or substitute for her loss. The loss and the absence it left in her life are there in the form of the poem.
Sonnet
“Again Later” is not a traditional sonnet, but the poem is having a conversation with the sonnet form. “The sonnet,” as Paul Fussell explains, “is a fourteen-line poem [typically written] in iambic pentameter: the rhyme scheme and the mode of logical organization implied by it determine the type” (Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Random House, 1967, p. 119).
There are two common types of sonnet: Italian (also known as Petrarchan) and English (also known as Shakespearean). An Italian sonnet typically rhymes abbaabba cdecde, an English sonnet rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. In both cases, the poem includes a “turn” where the rhyme scheme shifts (in an Italian sonnet, the turn happens between lines 8 and 9; in an English sonnet between lines 12 and 13).
Early sonnets, like those by Petrarch and Shakespeare, were love poems, but later poets used the form to treat other subjects—John Donne wrote “Holy Sonnets” addressed to God, and William Wordsworth wrote a sonnet addressed to Milton that scolded English people for being crude and morally bankrupt (Donne, John. “Holy Sonnets.” Naxos Records; Wordsworth, William. “London, 1802.” Poetry Foundation.).
Modern and contemporary poets, however, push the traditional confines of the sonnet even further. Nowadays, many poems that are 14 lines are considered sonnets, regardless of whether they are metered or rhymed or include a turn; and several poems that aren’t exactly 14 lines, but are close to 14 lines, are considered sonnets, too (Burt Stephani and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. Harvard University Press, 2010).
“Again Later” is not metered or rhymed, but it is exactly 14 lines and includes a turn. Moreover, this turn happens in the same place as a traditional Italian sonnet—between Lines 8 and 9. At this point in the poem, the identification between the recording, the speaker, and her husband shifts slightly more towards the husband: “Your / person is not accepting” (Lines 8-9). Her husband was the speaker’s person, thus these words from the intercept message refer to him, as well as to the speaker herself. Following this turn, the rest of the poem expands on what it means that the husband is in the message, as well as the speaker. Collins writes: “Your person is this / number” (Lines 10-11) and “Your person / is a recording” (Lines 12-13). Expanding on the turn is exactly what would happen in the last six lines of an Italian sonnet.
Finally, while “Again Later” is a poem of grief, not love, the poet’s grief is for someone she loved deeply: her husband. Love is in the poem and connects it to the sonnet form, which was originally used for love poems, and nowadays is used for poems on many subjects.
In Because What Else Could I Do, Collins expressed regret at not writing her husband sonnets, “my love though / not the sonnets I’d meant to write” (Collins, Martha. Because What Else Could I Do. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, p. 23.). “Again Later” is not a traditional sonnet, but it is a very slim 14-line poem. A sliver of the sonnet form exists in these lines and that sliver slices the speaker’s heart.
Erasure
In “Poetry Under Erasure,” Brian McHale writes that an erasure poem is akin to painter Robert Rauschenberg’s literal erasure of a work by Willem de Kooning, which Rauschenberg exhibited as “Erased de Kooning Drawing”:
Just as, thanks to the caption and certain traces left on the page, one could tell that the de Kooning drawing had been there, and in a certain sense was still there, so in the case of placing words under erasure one both admitted and excluded the concepts in question (McHale, Brian. “Poetry Under Erasure.” Theory Into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, edited by Margaret Rubik and Eva Müller-Zettlemann. Rodopi, 2005, p. 277).
This is a broader definition of erasure poetry than some, but one that helps illuminate Collins’s “Again Later.” The implication behind the poem is that the speaker used to call these numbers and get her husband. Now, however, she gets the phone company’s intercept message. Her husband’s voice and his words are an absence present throughout the poem; and, as McHale writes, they are “both admitted and excluded.”
Moreover, the poem includes a more traditional erasure, because as well as cutting up and rearranging words from the intercept message, Collins also erases words. The intercept message says, “Please try again later,” but Collins erases the word “try” from between the “Please” and “again” on Lines 3-4 from both Line 13 and the title. The intercept message also says, “The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time,” but Collins does not include the word “reach” in her poem. Erasing “try” and “reach” suggests the speaker has tried these numbers again and again, and hasn’t reached her husband. No matter when the speaker tries these numbers—again or later—she will always get the same result. Thus, the title is “Again Later,” and the poem depicts multiple attempts, not a single attempt.
Erasure, Mary Ruefle writes, is a form, just as the sonnet is a form:
In the erasures I can only choose words out of all the words on a given page, while writing regularly I can choose from all the words in existence. In that sense, the erasures are like a “form”—I am restricted by certain rules (Ruefle, Mary. “On Erasure.” Quarter After Eight.).
Moreover, erasure is a form that leads poets to contemplate loss and the limits mortality places on us:
[L]ife is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don’t know or haven’t experienced, and on our deathbed, even that limited and erased “whole” becomes further diminished, if you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others having been erased; if you are lucky you will remember one place or one person, but no one will ever, ever read on their deathbed, the whole text, intact and in order.
First your life is erased, then you are erased (Ruefle, Mary. “On Erasure.” Quarter After Eight.).
“Again Later” engages in erasure as a form.
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