It Is What It Is

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, so I’ll put it off. I always find plenty to appreciate in The Rake. On picking up 17 Voices [April], I turned first to Robert Bly’s “The Book You Can’t Find,” and then pondered the coincidence of its being immediately followed by Oliver Nicholson’s “Halls of Memory.” Quite a few years ago I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation under Oliver’s inestimable guidance, and I am currently writing a book with Robert’s generous cooperation and encouragement. Then I flipped through the rest, happy to see other writers I admire and enjoy. The photographs of “Written on the Body” caught my eye. It so happens that I have written a fair amount on tattoos in Greco-Roman antiquity (the Nicholson connection) and I love modern poetry (the Bly connection). So I was doubly struck when I saw the photo of a forearm marked with the words of a familiar poem by Galway Kinnell. Now the bad news. One thing I have learned: It is very important to be careful both with tattoos and with words, especially words in poems. Unfortunately, the tattooed poem is missing one word, another “is.” Kinnell’s poem “Prayer” (from his book The Past [1985]) is correctly printed as follows:

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
That additional “is” turns out to be crucial to the meaning of the poem. And the series of three of them, “is is is,” something that practically never occurs in English, gives this short poem its particular buzz. If the message of this poem, with its attitude of welcoming and acceptance, has gone more than skin deep for the possessor of the inscribed arm, maybe this is not bad news after all. It’s just what is. I mean, shit happens. Whatever.
–Mark Gustafson,
Minneapolis

Editor’s note: That wasn’t the only mistake on the literary-tattoo front. The tattoo which purported to be John Steinbeck’s Latin motto: “To the stars on the wings of a pig,” actually reads, due to a mistranscription of the Latin somewhere in literary history, “To the stars on the other things of a pig.” We won’t speculate on what the pig’s “other things” are.