Beyond Resolutions: A Closer Look at “The New Year Poem” as an Act of Resistance

Like much of my favorite poetry, Kim Addonizio’s “New Year’s Day” found me, seemingly of its own accord, from within the entropy of a physical bookstore’s shelves. I was determined to conclude a dream-like December in Buenos Aires, the city boasting the most bookstores per capita of any in the world, by exploring those abundant shelves for Argentine poetry. Despite my best intentions to bid farewell to the city via its verse, it was the very American Addonizio’s voice that kept calling to me from within a bilingual anthology (Antología Salvaje, translated by Marina Kohon) on Librería Norte’s overflowing shelves.

Addonizio’s New Year poem deals in the intimacy of the few. The speaker briefly recalls the geographically-distant “few loves I’ve been allowed // to keep” while walking through a rainy Virginia field “with only / a few young cows for company,” the spare bodies mirroring each other across their separation. Though the poem operates in a language of questions—wondering, for instance, about grown girls from the hometown’s junior high, “how their lives // have carried them / this far without ever once // explaining anything,” this poem for the New Year is not a question but a statement of desire. Addonizio’s couplets deliver the reader through a ladder of symmetrical enjambments, claiming as the poem progresses “I don’t know” / “I don’t care” / “Today I want” before confessing: “Today I want / to resolve nothing.”

Resolution shines when the year turns. The New Year promises, or asks us to promise, resolution in its various forms: resolution as resolve, determination to change. Resolution as closure, solving the old year’s pains, answering a question. Resolution is the satisfying tying of a knot. Questions resolve into answers. Resolution knows.

The speaker in Addonizio’s poem wants no answers, no resolution. “New Year’s Day” lets its questions hang in the “cold / blessing of the rain”—where the “big-boned and shy” girls from junior high are now, who it is that “used // to make them happiest.” Addonizio doesn’t simply negate resolution but instead replaces it with desire. More important than “resolve nothing” is the declaration on the enjambed line before: “Today I want.”

Addonizio’s desire to leave the New Year unresolved reminded me of the closing line of Natasha Rao’s “In the New Year”: “No resolution in any of it.” In Rao’s poem, a disoriented speaker confronts myriad warped reflections of themself: in a train window, in a bathroom mirror, “distorted / through the stemmed glass” of a martini. “How easy it is to hurt / someone,” the speaker muses, repeatedly attempting to “face what comes after” through distorted images of the self. The bifurcation of the speaker’s face across various reflective surfaces yields no answers, brings the speaker no closer to coveted resolution.

What is it about resolution, whether we mean the all-too-familiar language of annual personal goals or the closure of mending past love, that warrants poets’ resistance, that bears opening up? Though poetry has long been the language of resistance, resolution is a non-obvious target for poetry’s grappling: what are the dangers of conceding to resolution, anyway? Why is resolution worth resisting at all?

New Year poems, which often acknowledge if not celebrate the season of resolution, offer some insight into how poets have resisted notions of resolution over time. If we look carefully enough, New Year poems can even conjure alternate visions of what dreams to dream in place of resolution—what might happen when we choose “to resolve nothing” instead.

*

The first New Year poem I ever read begins “Never take yoga from a woman named Pretzel.” Staci R. Schoenfield’s “Advice for a New Year,” first published in the now-defunct Amethyst Arsenic, masquerades as a list of classical New Year Resolutions glorifying wellness and self-help. “Swallow words like one-a-day-vitamins,” it advises, before cautioning, “If the words taste bad, spit them out.” Schoenfield’s increasingly surreal list of resolutions (“Invest all your money in chaos”) ruptures the idea of self-improvement, even of yearning for the possible.

These resolutions were never meant to be followed; how would one “spend 53 minutes of every day wrapped in a cloak of impossibility,” anyway? Though this litany proceeds in a commanding second-person voice, the poem itself resolves in a gesture of asking: “If you can’t remember what to do, ask the squirrels. They know how to find what is hidden.”

Like Schoenfield, many poets writing about the New Year explore the relationship between question and answer implicit in resolution. In place of resolution’s self-assured knowing, many New Year poems speak from a place of not-knowing. They break open answers. They open questions up.

Lia Purpura’s compressed “Resolution” deals almost exclusively with its namesake. Entangled in the language of productivity, temptation, and moralizing resolutions (“There’s the thing I shouldn’t do”), the speaker calms themself by chanting “morning, morning, / morning.” Here, even the language of meditative productivity (“think more calmly, / breathe”) gives way to an irresistible, cosmic asking, a raising of energy and entropy rather than a calming down: “it isn’t even / hidden, hear it in there, / more, more, / more?”

Like Schoenfield and Purpura, Christopher Merrill’s “Lines for the New Year” replicates the language of resolution by questioning it. Following two stanzas filled with tidal marine detail (kelp fronds, stingrays, tuna-filled boats), the speaker moves through a foreign land via an embassy, security detail, and a taxi driver before finally arriving at a question that evokes and challenges the clichés of the New Year: “What to do / Until the Champagne, resolutions, Auld Lang Syne?

It has long been a poet’s job to write from a place of asking. Writers raised on Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” may be familiar with the exhortation, “Do not now seek the answers… because you would not be able to live them.” If resolution is a form of seeking answers, we find New Year poems resisting resolution in the same way Rilke implored young Kappus to resist answers, to instead “live the questions now.”

How ought we to “live the question?” If a question is an anti-resolution, how do New Year poems invite us to continue asking? Jane Hirshfield’s “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me,” opens with a question the world asks daily: “And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” Toward the end of the poem, Hirshfield’s speaker confesses: “Today, I woke without answer,” recalling Addonizio’s “Today I want / to resolve nothing.” As in Addonizio’s poem, where the speaker is answered by “the cold / blessing of the rain,” in Hirshfield’s world, “The day answers.” Alone on New Year day and exhausted by the need to answer and resolve, these speakers choose to resolve nothing. They let the world answer for them.

This move away from the enormous abstractness of answered questions and toward the intimate specificity of the world persists across many New Year poems. June Jordan’s manifesto-like “On a New Year’s Eve” beats its refrain: “Infinity doesn’t interest me.” What interests Jordan’s speaker instead is “the temporary sacred”; in place of infinity, the speaker recalls opossums in a persimmon tree, a bird eating sandflies, children scattering after the schoolbell.

For Jordan, celebrating the temporary goes beyond cherishing the moment or grappling with mortality. The world’s fleeting nature and sacred ungraspability heighten the intimacy of Jordan’s images. Repeatedly, the speaker longs for not just the beloved’s arm, but for “your brown arm before it / moves.”

W. S. Merwin’s “To the New Year” also explores the intimacy of touch by personifying the New Year itself, comparing the way the sun reaches down “to touch the tips of a few / high leaves” with the speaker’s hopes “invisible before us / untouched and still possible.” Here, touch renders things real. The speaker’s untouched resolutions remain out of reach, “still possible,” while the New Year day itself, struck with sunlight at the edge of a valley, is alive to the senses.

Just as Merwin and Jordan regard the intimacy of the senses above “that / abstraction that enormity” of resolution, Philip Appleman’s “To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana” celebrates the everyday. Recalling Jordan’s “temporary sacred,” the garbage men in this poem are not just rendered real through sensory detail—heaving huge cans, moving past “a solid chunk / of garbage truck”—but made sacred, more worthy of worship than infinity’s abstractness. Appleman’s devotion to the garbage men transcends ordinary language. Running from house to house on New Year’s day, the garbage collectors are a manifestation of something larger than life, like Jesus becoming human—something in which “people everywhere have faith” as they “confidently bide your second coming.”

Though resolution’s conclusiveness bears resisting through asking questions and celebrating the intimacy of touch, there can be a place for resolution in New Year poetry. The end of a year can function as a rehearsal for death, prompting poets to write about the New Year by elegizing the old (Joseph Fasano’s “Elegy for a Year”; Naomi Shibah Nye’s “Burning the Old Year”; Muriel Rukeyser’s “Elegy in Joy”; Lisa Richter’s “New Year’s Lament”; among others). Few New Year poems concede to resolution’s call for closure without also exploring mortality and death, as if to suggest that one cannot resolve something without resolving it for good.

R.S. Thomas’ “Resolution” begins with “the old resolve / to be brave” and quickly encounters the body’s mortality: “the bones ache, the blood limps / like a cripple about the ruins / of one’s body.” One cannot think about the year without also thinking about “the telescoping of the years,” as Thomas does. At times this meditation on mortality manifests as a somber reminder of the lost, as in Greg Delanty’s “A New Law.” “No ringing in the new year,” it proclaims, resisting the New Year outright, “For many are not here who were here before.”

Sometimes a poet can salvage from within the New Year’s reminder of mortality a cherishing of life, a determination to keep going. A resolve. David Clewell’s “New Year’s Eve Letter to Friends” does not shy away from the improbability of an easy life: “Mostly the letters you’re expecting never come.” And though “another ring shows up / when we lay open the cross-section,” Clewell hopes against hope. “Walk onto the planet tonight,” the speaker urges friends. “Here’s the best part, coming last.” Death is not evaded, as the speaker’s friends take their places “at the top of the sky.”

But this poem still hopes for “the longshot [to] come home,” for “the letters [to] pour in, full of the good word / that never got as far as you before.” Clewell asks the reader to resolve to keep going. To pursue the letters, the lovers, the borrowed light that might appear impossible from the midst of one’s real and finite life. To continue at all requires belief in the improbable, perhaps even to be “wrapped in a cloak of impossibility.

As the New Year opens with its influx of resolution-oriented language—self-help guides, discounted fitness equipment, tips for following through—I choose to follow the poets. Like Addonizio, today I want to resolve nothing. Except for one: I resolve to spend 53 minutes every day wrapped in the cloak of impossibility of being alive.