How Things Work - Gary Soto

HOW THINGS WORK



Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.


--- Gary Soto


Gary Soto's How Things Work:

We have control over our attitudes, over how we approach each day, over how we interact with others, over how we exercise our minds and bodies. Certainly, we have some mechanisms of control in our lives, but these pale in comparison to the large bulk of unknowns each of us encounters. We don't have control over the price of milk or which way the tides roll. We can't control when the sun rises or when we will receive a letter from a friend. These, and many other, surprises appear in our lives and we must adapt. The adaptability of human beings is fairly underrated. Yes, we've all heard about how we resist change, but if we absolutely must make changes then we do it. The smoothness of these transitions are attributable to analytical skills. If we can see the bigger picture then we just might understand why changes need to be made and why we must be flexible. Gary Soto flexes these all-powerful analytical skills in his poem How Things Work, explaining to his daughter (and all of us readers) how the economy works on a very personal level. Thankfully Soto doesn't bog down in a detailed cost-benefit analysis or burden us with high economic jargon; he goes to the root of our human interactions with money, the necessities for survival and the items that make life livable.

From the very first line, Soto's tone is very matter-of-fact and confident in the poem's subject matter. “Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars / To live.” The items are compiled into a random list with their price tags trailing behind the poetic string of images. Taking the list as a whole—a softball, a book,coffee, sweet rolls, bus fare, rosin for his mother's violin— Soto gives us a rounded picture of who he is a person. It might not be fair, but we can draw certain assumptions based upon the purchases that someone makes. Soto avoids this venue for social debate and sticks within the confines of his poem. This is not to say that later in the poem Soto won't make a clear and powerful argument on socio-economic issues. For now, Soto keeps on track, simply stating “We're completing our task.” Still, Soto demonstrates how completing our tasks has unavoidable and far-reaching impacts. “The tip I left / For the waitress filters down / Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child.” In showing our inter-connectedness, Soto blends poetry with political thought, but unlike some blatant, in-your-face poems Soto's How Things Work is natural. Nothing in this poem seems forced or for effect and for that simple reason I've grown to love this poem.

How Things Work has one clear shift, coming near the poem's middle section. When Soto directly addresses his daughter, he makes readers privy to the reason that he cares about issues much larger than himself. He is not overbearing in his interpretation, instead telling his daughter and readers “As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this.” There's an acknowledgement in that statement that the upcoming ideas are based upon Soto's own experiences and, thus, could be limited. Even so, he doesn't lose much in self-assuredness, moving forward with his poetic-economic theory:

You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.

It makes perfect sense! See, poetry can explain even the most complex topics. I'm getting fired up right now just thinking about the other things poetry could explain and the problems poetry could solve. With poetry we have the control to break down the mysteries of the universe. All right, I might be getting a little carried away.

Soto's zig-zagging path of money takes us through indelible images, ending on a strangely aggressive movie where “laughter / Is thrown into their faces.” This is the one image in this poem that I struggle with. Is this a critique of modern, popular entertainment and it's skewed focus on poor people? Rather than answer that question I'll provide an alternate view: I'm reading too much into this image. The laughter could very well be thrown in their faces because the movie has a cheesy laugh track and doesn't allow viewers their own freedom to decide when they want to laugh. The forced laughter is not the poem's endpoint. Soto provides a few more examples of his poetic-economic theory: “If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat. / If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.” We cannot escape our connection with the well-being of our neighbors here and halfway around the world. I considered highlighting this poem earlier this month in my blog because it seemed apt with the state of our local, national, and global economy. I chose to save How Things Work for the end of the month because it provides a positive message in showing how simple and human our problems and solutions are. We hear commentators use large words about the economic meltdown and we hear them debate the merits of varying levels of bailouts. The words these knowledgeable and intelligent people use are nuanced to economic theory, they are designed to prescribe the climate within our economy, yet they serve to exclude, confuse, and complicate matters. Gary Soto has a large vocabulary and he very easily could have exercised it in How Things Work, but he didn't. He used control and restraint to achieve a bigger impact by reaching the largest audience possible. That's not to say he doesn't dazzle us with masterful poetic skill in this poem. Gary Soto uses poetry to explain how things work, to explain that ultimately “things just keep going. I guess.”