Robert Krut on Aaron Belz’ “Nameless” 

I was listening to “God.”  The penultimate song on John Lennon’s early solo record, Plastic Ono Band, at its heart is a repeating, gospel piano riff over which he reclaims himself in the face of mythmaking.  I’ve heard it countless times, and can still hear the scratches in my original vinyl copy from growing up, even when I’m listening to the cleaned up digital version, sitting in my car in Los Angeles traffic.

On this day, it had been a while since I played through the whole album, and got to the point where “God” appears.  Near the end of the song, after an exhaustive dismantling of legend, he sings simply, “now, I’m John.”  It’s during an exhaling passage of the song, and listening to it on this day, it took me by surprise, despite knowing it was coming.  I felt a wave of chills run along my arms as I drove slowly through a clogged intersection.  

We all know it’s John singing, and we know—with that album in particular, and its deep psychological roots—he is the “speaker” in those songs. But it is still flooring to hear him simply refer to himself like that, to use his name, directly.

This moment immediately reminded me of the first time I read poems by Denis Johnson, stumbling onto “Now,” from the classic Incognito Lounge.   In the middle of “Now,” the poem confesses, “Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,/and I am almost ready to/confess it is not some awful/misunderstanding that has carried/me here.”  

You could do this?  I remember sitting on my dorm bed, staring at the page, in the echo of that name.  You can just step out of the construct of the “speaker” of the poem to drop all artifice and look right in the eyes of the reader like that?  It was a big step, a real choice, a true dropping of the masks.  

All these years later, I have yet to have the guts to do this in a poem, to take the big swing of just flat-out referring to myself in this manner.  It is a risk, a risk of giving away too much, a risk of falling down, a risk of readers turning away once they know the real person.  It takes a brave writer to pull it off, let alone double, triple, let alone sextuple down on it.  

This is all to say that the very day I sat in my car, hearing the speaker in “God” tell me through the speakers “I’m John,” which then set me on a reminiscence of Denis Johnson introducing himself to darkness, I came home to find Aaron Belz’s “Nameless” in my email inbox.  The names clearly summoned a name.

Of course, this is a poem that begins by telling us that “there’s nothing in a name, friend.”  There may be “nothing in a name,” but there is something in the scaffolding of history surrounding it.  The name is neutral until it takes on the actions of a life, of Johnson confessing an “awful misunderstanding,” of Belz flat-out telling us that he “trashed Belz so hard my uncles/sent emails apologizing to pastors/in other denominations.”  This is no “speaker” of the poem, this is the poet as speaker, putting it all out there devoid of camouflage.  The directness is bracing, and presents us with new creation, somewhere between poem, prayer, and confession.

One inclusion of the name is enough to elicit that back-of-heart pressure, that thunder-in-the-veins, but to use it no less than six times in a single poem?  It is stepping further and further out onto ledge of vulnerability.  Only a poem willing to risk going too far can succeed like “Nameless” does—only a poem willing to bare so much honesty can elicit such an honest reaction.

In discussing Johnson’s “Now,” the wonderful poet Marie Howe points out that “a series of urgent questions lead him and us to the very brink of radical transformation.”  This, of course, is true—I, for one, felt changed the first time I read that poem.  And here, in “Nameless,” Belz takes a similar path and also winds up in a spot of change.  He repeats the name, over and over, trying to prove the point of that first line, “there’s nothing in a name,” but with each repetition, we step closer to a moment of repudiation, where the speaker denies the name altogether, only to weep at this moment of betrayal.  

By the time we read the last line—the pleading, the questioning—it is not an abstract moment. The speaker has been transformed, but it is still voice of the poet himself, the poet who has been named, who has named himself.  The poet speaks directly to us, bleeding. 

And we are back again to God, back again to a name.