Poem of the week: Not It by Caitlin Doyle

Not It

“Not It!” we’d shout before a round
of backyard hide-and-seek,
the last to say it left behind
to count down in the dark

of covered eyes from ten to one,
from one to Ready-or-Not,
the Here-I-Come that comes too soon,
the day that turns to night

because the game’s gone on and on,
and now you’re It, you’re It,
and now you’ve always been alone
without a hiding spot,

with friends to find who can’t be found
because it’s late, too late
for anything but how the wind
makes ghost-chimes of the Not

as night turns day and day turns night
and you’re not not the one
in grown-up clothes that don’t quite fit
who can’t stop counting down

from ten to one to Ready-or-Not
to Here-I-Come again
as night turns day and day turns night
and you’re not not the one

who’s never not been running out
of breath the more you count
from ten to one to Ready-or-Not,
who’s counting backward now

from Here-I-Come to Ready-or-Not,
and you’re not not the one
in grown-up clothes that finally fit
who shouts “Not It! Not It!”

Not It marks a return visit to the work of the award-winning Irish American poet Caitlin Doyle. I first discovered her writing in her remarkable collection, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honouring Gwendolyn Brooks, in which she published an inventive response, The Parrot Man, to Brooks’s poem The Bean Eaters. Not It, like Carnival, Doyle’s first appearance on Poem of the week, is fast-paced and fear-provoking, but circuits a bigger dimension, a compressed “coming of age” where time incessantly makes out-of-time demands. Whether the demands are only destructive or simultaneously announce a distinguished destiny is a particularly interesting question.

The poem begins with children in a backyard, about to play hide and seek. To select the child who will be “It” (the seeker), all have to cry “Not It!” The last to say these words is the one who will be “left behind / to count down in the dark / of covered eyes” while the other children disperse to find their various hiding places. “Not It” is a phrase that also brings a suggestion of the snub in TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, when the woman the narrator wishes most to impress remarks in a seemingly bored but decisive manner – “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it at all.” The Prufrockian dismay of apparently failing to “get the message” about social and sexual acceptability is hinted in the anxious story as Doyle’s young character grows up.

Another “call” is an essential part of the game’s ritual, and emphasises the importance of building suspense among those who are hiding. The seeker’s shout of “Ready or Not, Here I Come” gains menace in the second verse from its division into two segments, each with its inexorable-looking set of hyphens, reminiscent of the poem’s spelling of hide-and-seek. Time increasingly becomes uncontrollable: first, “day turns into night”, and then, in the fifth verse, “night turns day and day turns night” as if a wheel were accelerating around the speaker (the “you”). This figure is necessarily isolated, “without a hiding spot” and “with friends to find who can’t be found”. Will friends ever be found again?

Death hovers in the dark; the word “Not” becomes a tocsin and a toxin. When “the wind/ makes ghost-chimes of the Not”, that brief allusion to the supernatural is a reminder of the ballad form Doyle has adapted for her story. The traditional fatalism of the ballad is imported with marvellous effect. The structure, though, doesn’t hold things reliably in place, as it might in a historical ballad-narrative, and the boundaries of a child’s game have soon melted away – if they were ever fully established.

“Not” performs its usual negative role until verse five when, at the crucial moment, it’s overturned by doubling: “and you’re not not the one / in grown-up clothes that don’t quite fit/ who can’t stop counting down…” Repetition earlier has meant emphasis – “you’re It, you’re It”, “it’s late, too late” – so the double “not” also carries the echo of that insistent distress and the reader suddenly realises something else, differently distressful, is occurring. If you’re not not the one, then, of course, you are the one, and still the one “who’s never not been running out / of breath the more you count …”

There’s a panicked sense of pursuit captured in the rhythm and syntax, of literally running, as well as running out of breath. The “call” is reversed in the first line of verse eight (“from Here-I-Come to Ready-or-Not”), adding urgency and enacting the reversal of time, though the countdown has always embodied that possibility. The speaker confronts adulthood, now, “in grown-up clothes that finally fit” and repeats the child’s cry with a new vehemence, “Not It! Not It!” The rhyme scheme changes here to a couplet with the full rhyme of “fit” and “It”.

Elsewhere, Doyle’s consonantal para-rhymes, patterned ABAB, seem to make a little extra space in which isolation and panic can operate: full rhymes would suggest too much tight control and self-defence. By creating a single continuously flowing sentence across the eight verses, using frequent repetition and denoting the time frame with terms like “now” and “as”, Doyle blurs past, present and future. And she reveals the umbilical connection of childhood to adulthood. In the poem’s interpretation of “coming of age”, there’s no transfiguration. The old patterns, newly intensified, must be repeated. But perhaps there’s also a certain consoling pride in a role that uniquely includes being both It and Not It.

• Not It first appeared in the journal 32 Poems, which has since featured a prose response by Forester McClatchey. You can read more about Caitlin Doyle and her work on her website.