People fall in love about as often as they speak in perfect rhyme. Neither is unheard of, but also neither can be assured of. Yet once in a while, a rarity occurs. In her remarkable debut, Couplets: A Love Story, Maggie Millner portrays love in rhyming couplets, and finds in them a kinship. With deft execution and sharp bite, Millner constructs for her speaker a form just as absurd, just as artificial, just as arch, just as rare as what she calls a “second first love.”
Couplets tells the story of two loves and three unnamed lovers — all doomed. The speaker, a late-blooming young poet, lives in Brooklyn with her devoted boyfriend, whose love is “the organizing system / of [her] life.” One night at a bar, a woman we’re told is “queer and edit[s] periodicals” finds the speaker alone and reading Middlemarch (reading Middlemarch at a bar being an act more rare, perhaps, than either falling in love or speaking in perfect rhyme) and charms her. Smitten, the speaker soon leaves her boyfriend, who warns her, “She’ll make you suffer in the end.” He’s right. After a feverish, violent affair, the other woman leaves the speaker.
Their love’s failure is not meant to surprise the reader. From the book’s first “Proem,” we know that it fails. The speaker writes from the other side of two breakups in a row, alive. “I didn’t die,” she says. “Instead, I went to therapy […] stayed with friends, and drank a lot of tea.” The book doesn’t depend on the arc of the speaker’s relationship for its tension. It’s ordinary, and anyone can see it coming, which makes it more honest and painful. The speaker is almost ashamed about how ordinary her experiences are, in fact. “There’s nothing so profound / about my dating life,” she admits. Falling in love is rare, so splitting up is common.
The uncommon aspect of Couplets is its use of form. The book is structured not just in couplets but with an acute awareness of numbers and symmetry that goes matryoshka-deep. It’s made of a “Proem,” four “Books,” and a “Coda.” Its “Proem” is formed of six couplets, the first five of which end in the same repeated word. Each of the four books contains twelve sections. Three of each book’s twelve sections (that is, ¼) take the form not of couplets but of a long paragraph or stanza, the last sentence of which forms a rhyming couplet with one standalone line below it. Such depth rewards close attention. Yet the unfolding drama moves at a fast pace and never lingers a moment too long on each of its beats.
Millner’s use of couplets draws attention to her astonishing facility with rhyme. Even when her speaker quotes from what she’s read — Nathalie Léger, Jamaica Kincaid, Adrienne Rich, and others — she maneuvers the quotations so they fall into her rhyme scheme. After a page or two, as the story takes hold, the form disappears onto the page, but if you want to see it, it’s breathtaking. She never rhymes like Dr. Seuss or a bad rapper, never June/moon or “The rain falls mainly on the plain.” When they can’t be exact, Millner’s rhymes are approximate (“anyone” and “heroines,” “Atlantic” and “misunderstanding”), yet they’re never forced or shoehorned.
The significant accomplishment of Couplets is to make an antiquated form feel natural and fresh. Millner is not the only poet making greater use of bygone forms, to be sure. One can see the desire in A.E. Stallings’s work in classical forms in Like, Matthew Rohrer’s narrative poems in The Others, and the recent spate of YA verse novels by Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds, Elizabeth Acevedo, and others. Millner’s work differs from those examples, though, in that there’s less of a sense of refurbishing, less of an intention to reclaim the beauty of older forms — an admirable intention in itself —and more that there was no other form appropriate to give a voice to her speaker.
Millner’s speaker is herself split into mirrored and rhyming halves, caught between inherited structure and fresh discovery. Her relationships must follow suit. In some sense, what troubles her in her heterosexual partner is a lack of rhyme. “[I]sn’t love itself a type / of rhyme?” she asks. By the same token, one could say that not only love but queerness itself is a kind of rhyme. “Mostly I can’t see myself at all,” the speaker declares, on the other side of her coming-out, “until I sense in someone else a parallel.” When the speaker’s new relationship ends, her woundedness rhymes as well: “‘How dare you do to me the very thing I did to him.’” In fact, the speaker’s identity as a poet is wrapped up in couplets, “these imperfect sets / which constitute a self, the lie of sense.”
In a subtle, elegant undercurrent, Millner’s rhymes can provide a key to the speaker’s troubles. During the book’s middle sections, when she’s most reaching beyond herself and most in love, the rhymes are stretched and novel (“Loretta Lynn” and “redolent” or “Petit Meunier” and “sniffed bouquets”). In the book’s “Proem” and “Coda,” however, when the speaker is alone again, she often rhymes a word with itself. To rhyme is to find a resonance, a harmony, and for poets a kind of love. When the speaker’s looking for that in someone else, she’s most compelling. When she settles for herself, she’s most relatable.
Throughout, she’s concerned about “the nauseous question / of whether or not I was in possession / of a clear and unified self.” On the one hand, it’s true that her story is one of a splitting in her own identity, a crisis of stability in self-conception, and an unraveling misdiagnosed as uncoupling. Yet at the same time, though it might not be “clear and unified,” for a good portion of the book, it seems that all the speaker does possess is an ever-expanding, all-consuming conception of herself. Both of her lovers become subsumed in her own presence. The term narcissism sounds tired and reactionary, but the speaker’s aware of it, right from the start:
Proem
I became myself.
I became myself.
No, I always was myself.
There’s no such person as myself.
I wouldn’t have to turn my eye
inward, I thought, if I could train my eye
on him — the one I loved.
But I was wrong. My eye loved
everything it fell upon.
And then one day it fell upon
a mirror. And he was nowhere
in the mirror. And she was everywhere.
For the speaker, this self-love is inherent to her hunger for someone else. Her own wants are so overwhelming that she can’t see her lovers “through the cloud / of myth my adoration made.” Her own loneliness is what drives her from her boyfriend and toward another woman. As she puts it, “You can’t be lonely, / after all, if you’re not inside yourself.”
This honesty about the narcissism of her love, too, contributes to the fresh feel of the form. (Maybe nothing’s more contemporary than self-absorption.) Traditional love poems involve two presences, the speaker and the addressed lover, in a long apostrophe, a communication between the I and thou. A love poem was a way to reach another. Millner’s book does make use of a you, in the sections written not in couplets but in paragraph form. But the thou or you of Millner’s sections is not the love object but the same speaker addressing herself. “[I]t occurred to you that it might be better to write the account in the second person,” the speaker tells herself. The speaker doesn’t address the other woman or ex-boyfriend, speaks only to the mirror. What was a form for connection becomes a form for involution, providing an internal rhyme in the truest sense.
In one of the book’s second-person sections, the speaker puts her finger on a change in the way she reads, or the way we read in general. The Internet and markets, she claims, have allowed “a peculiar kind of literalism [to take] hold.” One has to identify with what’s being written, or one has to identify it somewhere close by. One thinks of autofiction’s impulse to connect writer and protagonist, or of pop culture’s prizing of a writer’s lived experience, whatever that means. Yet for Millner’s speaker, this obsessive identification can also provide a shift in her perception, a rarity on par with love or rhyme. “Once in a while,” she tells herself, “there would flash before you an image of yourself from the outside — toward whom, for the briefest moment, you’d be able to feel something like indifference.”
[Published on February 7, 2023 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages, $25.00 hardcover[