"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Good Actors, by Sommer Browning (Birds LLC, 2022)
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, my dear,” a scam artist told me recently. “It’s never about the money. Okay?”
Impersonating a popular astrologer named Alice Sparkly Kat through direct messages on Instagram, the scam artist asked to “consider me” for an $80 reading. The tricky tone of this persona held me suspended between belief and disbelief for a full hour, an embarrassingly long time. The situation brought forth in me all of the attraction and skepticism, the thrall and resistance to thrall, so many of us feel when confronted by language that claims to teach us something about ourselves. I couldn’t help but think of the voice of this imposter, as well as the complicated response it elicited, as I encountered the speaker of Sommer Browning’s newest poetry collection, Good Actors, who also drew me in with potentially false promises of self-discovery and spiritual awakening.
One of the book’s recurrent elements involves the responses Browning collected to the pseudo-therapeutic question, “If you tell me which Twilight Zone episode you remember best, I can tell you what your problem is.” The poet asked this question to hundreds of people, writing “therapy-fueled aphorisms that ‘diagnosed’ their ‘problem’ inspired by their remembered episode,” as a footnote clarifies. Punctuating the length of Good Actors, these aphorisms are followed by brief meta-commentaries that—as becomes clear over the course of the book—are actual comments from the participants in response to their aphorisms. In this clever setup, the deeper we go into the psychology of the individual, the closer we come to finding that this is, in fact, a textual experiment in collectivity. Personality is a social document.
“An aphorist who hates aphorisms. A self-helper who hates the self,” goes a line in Browning’s poem “Life: A Draft (Prologue).” Yet despite this disavowal, Browning’s self-help aphorisms show a sharp aptitude for psychological analysis through the framework of television, which in turn frames the media itself as a kind of collective unconscious, capable of revealing nuanced sources of human suffering.
This makes sense from a poet, since readers have come to expect a degree of self-help from poetry. We want our poems to tell us something about ourselves, something that will make us better people, more enlightened, more evolved. But this raises the question: Why do we love so much to be told about ourselves? Why do we love to be told our flaws, our weaknesses, our failings—everything we deserve to be ashamed of? At what point does self-awareness undermine the very self we are trying to actualize?
The wording of Browning’s experiment assumes that every person’s fundamental problem is self-created and thus capable of being controlled, if only we become aware enough of what the problem is and what it means—an enlightened state that would make us bodhisattvas of the self. Browning addresses this issue cheekily, listing a host of her own favorite episodes when prompted by a participant, followed up by pages and pages of aphorisms written for herself.
*
After an hour of testing the astrologer’s impersonator to see if they were “real,” and then, once I was sure that they were “fake,” continuing to test them to see how much of an astrologer they could become when pressed, I blocked them, feeling my own powers of revelation waning. The astrologer’s impersonator did accidentally reveal that their real name is Jason.
According to Browning, it’s her mother’s theory that we are born actors into the movie of our choice. The ideal form of our character is our name; through our choices, we act out the rewards and consequences of a one-word script said to contain a self.
How did Jason feel, using social media to adopt someone’s else name (and identity) in order to convince me to send $80 over CashApp, while telling me it’s never about the money? It must have been sort of liberating, and very funny, acting like a guru and witnessing my fluctuations of faith in real time as we DM’d, as I nearly gave in to the role of follower.
In Browning’s title poem, “Good Actors,” the speaker wants to make a movie “about two actors exchanging money.” She gives them an evolving series of stage directions as they make their exchange: “Earnestly … Reluctantly … Hopefully.” When she finally directs them to fulfill this action “Lovingly,” the actors, having dropped the money at the speaker’s feet, move closer and turn off the camera. It was never about the money.
And yet, as one of the book’s epigraphs reads, “... it’s only in the movies that it’s easy” (John Cassavetes).
*
The Twilight Zone therapy aphorisms work as an extended joke throughout Good Actors because of their tight adherence to the form and their performative reach into the psyche curtailed by the absurdity of the premise. It’s a joke that recalls Dodie Bellamy’s highly original 2014 book The TV Sutras (Ugly Duckling Presse), another experiment in wacky yet banal self-help and spirituality through the mediated recourse of TV—it is, as Bellamy writes in her introductory note, “an inspired text born from a crisis of urban bombardment.” In The TV Sutras, the speaker’s routine includes doing yoga while watching Peaceful Weight Loss Through Yoga, meditating as if to get “into character,” then turning on the TV and channeling messages corresponding to whatever scenes arise. As with Good Actors, the media becomes fodder for psychological revelations that are both real and counterfeit.
But there seems to be something odd about “reading” actors the way we would read non-actors, since actors are conscious of being watched and scripts follow a preconstructed arc. Does life really imitate art? Bellamy’s Sutras read like subliminal messages from a marketing agency as much as the religious teachings of a guru. Browning’s experiment is more social; it is a Rorschach test, she herself notes, part Buzzfeed quiz, part psychonautic deep dive.
Perhaps what Browning resists more than “aphorisms” or “the self” is moralism. She writes freely of sex parties and other casual encounters, while Bellamy similarly blends spiritualism with a kind of comical pornography, as if to call out the fervor with which we attach ourselves to our spiritual leaders, cling to the words of our therapists, and relish our own moments in the spotlight, giving our friends advice and the like.
In Good Actors, there are instances in which the speaker seems to do things “for the story,” or because she identifies as “a poet.” This is a role Browning inhabits, a character she embodies, along with mother, gallerist, daughter, and friend. Maybe this kind of self-awareness in our roles is something we don’t talk about enough. When I do things with the goal of writing about them, which I do all the time whether it’s conscious or not, I tend to feel like an imposter. When Browning reveals herself as an actor of sorts, I understand this urge or even necessity to play the part, and recognizing myself in this phenomenon, I cringe, until I laugh.
“What is the connection between humor and excess?” Browning asks, following up with, “I don’t know.” The Twilight Zone aphorisms are funny to me because the speaker assumes excessive powers, giving her voice grandeur and conviction. The aphorisms are funny, too, because the speaker has mastered a voice she doesn’t necessarily identify with. They offer a kind of situational comedy next to the quippy lists that intercede them; without this juxtaposition it would be difficult to recognize the voice-throw, the deft change of register, when we return to our collective therapy session.
In one of the poems that take on an essayistic cast, schoolchildren ask Browning if she believes in the angels and muses some poets say speak through them. Browning says she believes in other people’s angels. Then she surprises, and terrifies, herself by saying:
I’ve been preparing for these angels my whole life.
The gravity of the statement, the irony of its potentially false characterization (an irony achieved through the intimacy of the text, no doubt, since I do get the sense that I know Sommer) creates a tension I find hilarious. The poet subsequently calls her to-do list “Prep for Angels” and begins to list the absurd choices and mistakes she’s made in preparation.
What’s an angel, I wonder, if not a voice that you trust to tell you what to do, a power that finds a way to justify itself to you? Angels are seductive, and they are everywhere, in this view.
*
I didn’t send the money to Jason. Instead, I paid to attend the “real” astrologer’s workshop, the one Jason was impersonating, the following afternoon. I went with the intention of writing about my experience there, for this essay. It happened to be a workshop on shame, and once in the Zoom meeting, I felt the expected shame wash over me. Much like Jason, I was an imposter, unsure of my own thoughts and feelings about astrology, attending less as myself than as a writer, a person of many masks, a scam artist for whom it—truly—is never about the money.
Halfway through the workshop, which entailed somatic exercises and journaling, I felt a deepening of attention, a shift. I discovered that in the construct of shame as it manifests in my body, one voice is always a god and another is always a believer.
Shame, I learned from the astrologer, can be transmuted, incorporated, for the sake of connection. With awareness of any conflict or contradiction between our various “voices” or “roles” comes the power to take creative liberties with scripts we’ve outgrown. It leads me to the question, what makes a “good actor”? If you recall, Browning’s title poem ends with the “good actors” turning off the camera. Lovingly.
Browning writes in “Single Mom,” “I want to make the mistakes / Famous people make … // I want to make these mistakes so well.” As Browning suggests, being beholden to another, even and perhaps especially through one’s mistakes, is also an aspect of love.
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Throughout Good Actors, Browning writes compellingly about intimacy through various angles—motherhood, sexuality, friendship—fulfilling her goal as a writer to communicate and connect, which is not the “given” it might sound like when it comes to poetry. One of my favorite poem-essays in the book revolves around the documentary Grey Gardens, about a mother and daughter who share the same name. What is the boundary between them, Browning asks? Lifting off from an exchange Big Edie and Little Edie have in the film, Browning ends the poem like this:
You’re free when you’re supported.
You’re free when you’re supported.
We measure love until everyone has it.
Elsewhere in the book, an observation about public land leads to these musings on collectivity:
And things that are ours
Abide rules we learn through others.
Yours and mine rules
Are boring. We’re born with them.
Browning’s love is radical, exciting, with an eye to public good, encompassing even the self her speaker claims to hate. Preoccupied with the inner workings of “the joke” and “the surprise” within the confines of our current media reality, in which all of us are characterized as “followers,” Browning seeks out openings for shared relief, leaving no friend behind.