22 pages • 44-minute read
Again Later
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Themes
A Portrait of Denial, Repetition, and Grief
In “Again Later,” Collins turns a phone company’s intercept message into a song of denial. The beginning, middle, and end of the poem all find the speaker “not accepting” her husband’s death (Lines 1-2, 8-9, 14). As many psychologists affirm, denial is a part of grief. And denial is at the core of this poem.
The speaker’s denial is, however, not perfect. “Is not” repeats four times in the poem (twice on Lines 2, 5, 9). That’s once more than “not accepting” (Lines 2, 9, 14). Thus, the speaker seems to know that her husband “is not,” and no matter how many times she dials his old numbers, she will not hear his voice, she will only hear the intercept messages.
Grief is often experienced as a cycle, with recurring emotions and images (Hentz, Patricia. “The Body Remembers: Grieving and a Circle of Time.” Qualitative Health Research, vol. 12, no. 2, 2002, pp. 161-72. PubMed, doi:10.1177/104973202129119810). That means that grief—like the intercept messages and like the poem—repeats. By cutting up and rearranging a pre-recorded message, Collins has created a deft and accurate portrait of grief.
Grief is Both Repetitive and Mechanical
Alfred Lord Tennyson famously compared writing an elegy to a “sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics, numbing pain” (Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 5.” Poetry Foundation). In “Again Later,” Collins takes Tennyson’s idea a step further. Her elegy is made up entirely of words from an automated message, so while Tennyson may have felt like a machine while writing, Collins is literally using a machine to help construct her poem. Tennyson also suggests that writing is not only mechanical but an exercise, and he likens this exercise to pain management. Collins knows her husband is dead; she has listened to the messages again and again. Her actions here are an exercise in trauma and not letting go. She says, “The person you are trying / is not accepting. Is not” (Lines 1-2), suggesting that she herself can’t accept the fact that her husband is gone. This isn’t the first time she turns to the messages to numb the pain, and the title suggests that it won’t be the last.
On the other hand, the poem suggests that dealing with pain and grief is a process, an exercise in letting go of trauma, something that is repetitive and that won’t change overnight: Just as much as it’s an exercise in dealing with setbacks (not letting go despite former progress because it hurts too much), dealing with pain is an exercise in dealing with time. There may be days where the loss doesn’t hurt as much, and then other times when the absence is particularly strong.
The literal mechanical component, the answering machine, works as a band-aid in “numbing pain.” Even without her husband’s voice, replaced as it is by the “sad mechanic exercise” that is a formal recording, Collins returns to the machine’s messages like returning to a narcotic that dulls the pain of loss. The machine itself is both a dull narcotic and a narcotic that dulls pain, just like its massages are sad stand-ins for the person now gone. By playing on the symbolism of mechanical, pain, and writing, Collins suggests that, as well as personal, grief is rote, repetitive, and mechanical.
Fragmentation
As one might infer from a poem made by cutting up and pasting back together an automated message, the syntax, or word order, of “Again Later” is often broken and fragmented. We, as readers, experience this disruption with every line of the poem.
On the first line, Collins writes: “The person you are trying” (Line 1). We might logically expect the sentence to complete with “to reach.” Instead, Collins writes, “is not accepting. Is not” (Line 2). The word “accepting” would logically follow this second “is not,” but Collins writes “at this time. Please” (Line 3) instead. The word “try” would then normally follow this “Please,” and “try again later” would usually follow “Please.” Instead, Collins writes: “again. The person” (Line 4).
Collins writes, “The person / you are trying is not” (Lines 4-5). We reasonably expect this to complete “accepting” again, or perhaps “accepting calls at this time,” but instead Collins writes, “in service. Please check” (Line 6). We might except this to complete “that you have the correct number,” but get only: “that you have. This” (Line 7). Readers might expect “is a recording” to follow, but instead get, “is your call. Your” (Line 8).
At this point in the poem, Collins has so consistently disrupted and mangled the expected word order that it becomes very difficult to tell what should come next. Nonetheless, the sense of interruption and fragmentation persists. Collins writes, “You have / not correctly” (Lines 11-12), which begs the question, Not correctly what? That question is not answered. Collins simply puts a period. The poem ends with two more fragments: “Again later / at this time. Not accepting” (Lines 13-14). This conclusion suggests that grief breaks us apart and leaves us in pieces.
The fragmentation in “Again Later” comes most directly from the process Collins used to write the poem—cutting up and pasting back together two separate intercept messages, erasing and eliding words along the way—but it is also a hallmark of Collins’s poetic voice and a theme of many of her other works.
In a New York Times review of Collins’s 2006 book Blue Front, Dana Goodyear wrote,
Collins has a story to tell, but she makes the reader work for it. She is, at least with regard to syntax, a language poet—she suppresses punctuation and traffics in fragmentary non-sequiturs; her shifts in perspective are abrupt. Therefore nothing about the narrative is straight. Her discursive, breathless, self-contradicting, breaking-off-and-circling-back technique makes the book feel like the testimony of a traumatized witness. Which, of course, it is (Goodyear, Dana. “A Face in the Crowd.” New York Times, 24 September 2006).
Here, Goodyear describes a much earlier work by Collins, but “Again Later” also exhibits a “breathless, self-contradicting, breaking-off-and-circling-back technique.”
Reviewer John Bonanni describes Collins’s Because What Else Could I Do in a similar way: “Anaphora, repetitive fragments, and incomplete declarative sentences create a tension which can only be likened to those lumps in our throats as we hold back our tears” (Bonanni, John. “Martha Collins and the Poetics of Grief.” DIAGRAM, vol. 20, no. 2). This could also be said of “Again Later.” As well as Collins’s larger body of work, the theme of fragmentation presents itself throughout “Again Later.”
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