I asked poet and tattoo artist Ruth Awad to share some of her favorite pieces she’s done with us in our most Infoxicated of internet Corners. The results are so fabulous. Check out these samples of her tattoo work, as well as a poem by her that she says is her current favorite! I couldn’t be happier to feature her here. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Lessons in Grief

If you’re gone I mean
really gone, then whose
voice is that veining through
the shower drain – no, it’s
only water, but here I am,
half wet and stung
with the mercy of living
where your robe trailed
like a thought across
the kitchen floor
and my hands are filling
with dirt. Or is it water?
Tell me a well is enough
to hold me. Or is it just
the bats sweeping low
enough to feel like comfort?
I’m a clockwork animal tied
to fading light, but the days
never stop coming.

Hear the audio version of this poem .

Ruth Awad has a MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, Southern Indiana Review, CALYX, Diode, Anti-, Rattle, The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, The Drunken Boat, Copper Nickel, RHINO, KYSO Flash, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her two Pomeranians.

NOCTURNE IN WHICH WE FAIL YET AGAIN TO HAVE SEX IN YOUR PARENTS’ HOT TUB

Your breasts at the surface of the roiling water. The smell of chlorine
and desire. We divide and assign the space between us.

Your specialty is keeping score, mine is pretending not to.
We are not supposed to stay in water this hot

more than 15 minutes. Plenty of time to pretend
we could not drown here or anywhere

in the middle of our own lives. Three walls away
our children dream of life without us,

your parents sleep with their television on. One of us
slides closer. One of us places a finger in the other’s mouth,

one of us stands, dripping, to reach for a towel.
The tub’s motor falls quiet. The air suddenly cold

against overheated skin. Absence swells to fill absence,
water closes in over the holes our bodies once filled.

_______________________________
Amorak Huey is author of the chapbook The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) and the forthcoming poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress Publications, 2015). A former newspaper editor and reporter, he teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, Gargoyle, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, Stirring, and many other print and online journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.

The Size of Things, Decreasing Scale

1) An invitation
2) The gap between the door open and latched
3) Your open hand resting on my hip
4) Kittens past weaning
5) This human heart quickening
6) A young fist full of garden dirt
7) The curve of your lips
8) The tip of my finger brushing your ear
9) Flat headed worms aerating the soil
10) An avian heart beating
11) Your pupils grown wide soaking light
12) A bean seed to be planted
13) My pupils when fixated
14) The distance between your thumb and my neck
15) Bristles on my paint brush, dried slate clinging
16) Strawberry seeds set to germinate
17) How close my lips hover above yours
18) Capillaries dilating
19) Rushing red blood cells
20) A droplet of sweat drawn from the pores
21) The width of a strand of spider silk
22) The wavelength of an x-ray
23) The distance between nuclei in a white dwarf star
24) Any hope that the children will sleep for just fifteen more minutes

_______________________
Jen Stein is a writer, advocate, mother and finder of lost things. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia where she works in family homeless services. Her work has recently appeared in Rogue Agent Journal, Menacing Hedge, Luna Luna Magazine, Nonbinary Review and Stirring. Upcoming work will be featured in Cider Press Review. Jen is currently serving as assistant editor for Rogue Agent Journal and for ELJ Publications. You can find her on the web at jensteinpoetry.wordpress.com.

Letter from the Back Porch

Quiet things are passageways
to other quiet things.

One cracks, another grows.
Grass gives up to dust.

Somewhere, clocks advance
while other clocks reverse,

the hissing continuous,
a slow release.

I would never ask you
to come back

as I don’t contain ideas
like come back

or I,
or you.

In the space below, snouting
visitors, they come, they go.

Something scrapes and once–
the hollow beat of dancing.

_________________________________________
Sara Biggs Chaney received her Ph.D. in English in 2008 and currently teaches first-year and upper-level writing in Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her most recent chapbook, Ann Coulter’s Letter to the Young Poets, was released from dancing girl press in November, 2014. Sara’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Sugar House Review, Columbia Poetry Review, [PANK], Juked, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. You can catch up with Sara at sarabiggschaney.com.

All The Rage: The Fashion in Our Fury is Little More than a Refusal to Engage
by Saba Razvi

Slate.com features a gallery on its website called “The Year of Outrage,” in which it showcases a breakdown of the trending topic of outrage for each day of the year 2014. Yes, that’s right – each day. There are no date-gaps in the gallery, and it is easy to see that on every single day of the year, someone was outraged about something and took to the Internet to make that rage known by way of action. With so much impeccable anger, one might think that some significant progress may have been made on at least one of those 365 fronts, that beyond a trending melodrama of expression, some change or activism might, at least, have been seeded in the collective community to address so much grievance in meaningful ways. One might, in some important ways, be wrong. (One might also be right, in other ways, but that is a consideration for another time.) You see, it is fashionable to be worked up about things. It demonstrates to others what deeply-thinking, passionate, socially-conscious individuals we are – except, not really. It is not quite as fashionable to move into the realm of activism, something that borders dangerously on concepts like “revolution” or “radicalization” or other fanaticisms; we can abide a fandom more readily than a fanatic – and we do draw a distinction between their two domains.¹

Fandoms are generally received as harmless obsessions, developing ideas with favor and positivity instead of challenging them with dangerous criticism, whereas fanatics remind us of the ephemerality and instability of all things – our power, our privilege, our comfort – by raising the stakes of conviction and obsession into some desire for change or action, whatever the cost. Outrage among fans and fanatics may both be born of a sense of betrayal of ideologies, but the latter often leads to broken bodies and kinetically energetic anger, whereas the former usually reminds us of broken-heartedness within otherwise static conditions. The extent to which we “mobilize” our passion, the stakes upon which its dealings are found, and the scale of influence of that volatile energy do matter. And so, the reception of outrageous sentiment must also be considered alongside the sincerity of its expression.

Similarly, we can draw a distinction between rage and outrage by examining the discourse of cultural controversy. In the acclaimed Smashing Pumpkins song, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” Billy Corgan sings, “despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,” expressing the melodramatically woeful frustration of an inexhaustible feeling: here is so much rage that it typifies the singer, and yet the singer has no agency to do anything about that feeling, however much he may repeatedly express it. In the aggressive, politically charged lyrics of Zack De La Rocha’s riotous band Rage Against The Machine, feeling moves beyond expression and into action (as the band is known for its activist leanings, we recognize that their words carry weight, that their energy is meant to strike instead of just ring out); its iconic song, “Killing in the Name,” moves beyond an expression of anger about police brutality, channeling it into a frenzy, achieved through the use of chant-like repetition and insistence alongside frenetic performance.²

This linguistic combination incites the listener to action, to embody an outrage that demands interventional action beyond simply the performative expression of feeling, to address the issue.³ Songs today do what poems have done for years; in our recent past, the political gestures of the 1960s were culturally disseminated through musical subculture, and in our contemporary world, the global communities that struggle against the strongest oppression find outlets in lyricism and poetry, even today. By examining lyrics that have transcended the page into idiomatic expression or cultural representation, we can connect to these intersections between complex sentiment and motivation for action, if not outcome. Dylan Thomas reminds us that sometimes life is typified by the rebellious desire to hold tight to what is ephemerally alive, that passionate feeling can be productive, and that we should “not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”⁴ Unfortunately, less psychic affirmation presents itself in current trends involving inflammatory sentiment, where participants and spectators alike find less struggle and more shouting. In the conversation surrounding rage, outrage, and intellectual discourse in general, it is important to think about both context and aims, as well as to consider what attitudes about the contemporary human condition emerge from these phenomena.

At the heart of our outrageous zeitgeist seems to be a tension between a cultural willingness to confront ugliness or darkness with compassion and a desire to repudiate its existence with vehemence of voice; the former makes for constructive discourse, while the latter shuts down not only discourse, but any hope of progress by means of spectacular obfuscation. If we think of Debord’s idea of the role of spectacle in modern life ⁵, imagining the disruption between social relations and the ways in which situations are perpetuated, we can make sense of the use of rage or outrage as elements of progress. However, as our feelings about literature and culture have been filtered through the legacies of postmodernism, detachment, and skepticism, and as our contemporary experiences have become mediated by allegiances to technologies and empirical evidence that amplifies our desire for instant gratification, our senses of connection have become conflated in a meta-modernist capacity. We seek a proximity borne of distance, and a detachment made from intimacy. We, as a culture, tend to gravitate toward the sensational and respond in dramatic ways, focusing on domination or escalation instead of compassion or acceptance, perhaps because it simulates a sense of frustrated agency left to us by our experiences of instability, insecurity, precarity, and obligation.

Confrontation breeds the possibility of contamination, the ultimate collapse of separation. Literature and culture that bring us too close to the uncomfortable seem to create not dialogue but clamor. So, instead of that confrontation enabled by a discourse about those incredibly difficult, complicated topics, we choose demand and complaint – a simple, reductive cry to dispel the monsters in the shadows, and all the shadows besides. Where are all the men who must account for the violence of the patriarchy? Where are all the non-European immigrants who must decry terrorism and pledge obvious allegiance to each member of the country? Where are the women who shed their damsel-in-dress couture for the sexless androgyny of the power of denial?⁶ And why do all of these things seem utterly ridiculous?

Well, aren’t they? Is that all we’ve come down to – a false binary of “with us or against us” that must be worn on every sleeve or sound-byte? Somewhere in the wake of the very real atrocities in the world – in the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the massacres in Gaza, in the video game-like violence and cruelty of Elliot Rodgers or its meta-modern reflections in poetry, in the Open Letters to accountable women or foreign nations, in the question of whether three young professionals were murdered in a hate crime or a parking dispute – we have discovered that everything is equally atrocious and that instead of the painful act of addressing any of it squarely, we should simply refuse to engage in discourse, instead ranting and raging about the words carried by the messengers over the issues their words signify.⁷ After all, if we repudiate the ugly, it won’t have a chance to infect us.

Ugly, unpalatable, unpleasant, and painful stuff exists in the world – and being mad at it won’t make it go away. People sensationalize things to distance themselves from the implications, consequences, or ideas associated with the questionable; this is where rage shifts into outrage. Not only must the idea be repudiated, but there should be no way to mistake that repudiation, and so “allegiance” is demonstrated by action. Is dissent the same thing as defiance? Or is there some way that honoring a sincere examination of events with some intellectual distance might afford something more than a waving flag wrapped around a fist waving a gun as an affirmational gesture of righteousness? Just as binary distinctions between accepting the monstrous unconditionally and rejecting the monstrous unquestioningly are insufficient, the refusal to engage with the ugly side of life, obfuscated by anger, is the result of giving in to rage and outrage. Rage at the right of a thing to be expressed or to exist, or outrage that intervenes based on the self-righteous assumption that the rage is universally shared, are refusals to face the demonic, the bestial, the monstrous.

In the face of so much darkness, many feel utterly helpless. Perhaps displays of outrage, however ultimately futile they may be for most of us on the internet, have begun to gain greater appeal because they afford us a sense of hope and potential power, instead of just shame and helplessness. Passion and conviction have long been held as key in resisting defeat by obstacles, in fighting an obstinate struggle, and in pushing back against oppressive ideologies. And, while we may not really like our sentiment to be unironic anymore, we certainly want our passion to be sincere!

We express our feelings as if doing so will effect change; our culture’s sense of entitlement and privilege has conditioned us to believe that a complaint will be met with action and remediation, especially when it is expressed passionately and angrily, in a way that makes a spectacle or a scene. Why write an open letter instead of a private one? There is strength in numbers, there is support in strength, and that support creates a kind of pressure, one which implies that non-action is a non-possibility. So we expect that when we complain loudly and angrily, something will change – and when it doesn’t, we turn to outrage, to an expression that seems interventional and deliberate. When acts of outrage committed in response to literature, culture, and life are hyperbolic, they divorce themselves from the consequences that a more directly motivated expression of activism might make possible. Is it self-sabotage or defiant militarism that asks us to behave in egregious ways, compliant with the spectacle rather than the thought? Those latter gestures of activism or outreach are usually quiet, though – reasonable discourse on Twitter or the Blogosphere is either dominated by keyboard warriors or largely unnoticed by the wider audiences – and they do not make as much fuss — which matters when the world is full of so much soundbite and fury. Professors reading YikYak complaints or Rate My Professor reviews on YouTube videos are funny, but they don’t stick in the mind as much as the insults themselves; individuals on viral videos reading hate-mail posts about their communities with incredulity entertain the audience, but only as long as there is an open-minded audience to listen. It’s the outrageous that generates attention, audience, and propagation. People who catch “outrage fever” feel the need to express themselves, exert themselves on a world stage, often doing so through the pseudonymous, detached planes of cyberspace. It is easy to be an armchair critic because so little is at stake; the un-reality of virtual life and cyber-connections encourages a sort of activism without consequence or thought – and it often looks like condemnation, like an outrage summoned in order to push away an ideological boogeyman.

After all, rage looks a lot like passion; it gets people worked up. It rallies them out of their complacency. It implies that caring about our world and the people in it is worthwhile. And that’s the kind of hope that we can hang on to – without admitting too much vulnerability — vulnerability that might lead to setting down arms and relinquishing the catalytic fear that supports our banners of hostility. Both rage and outrage feed off of the insecurity of the contemporary condition. When rage moves into the realm of outrage, when it blends into the concept of outrage, it manifests almost as an obfuscationary tactic that garners a lot of support and can easily fit into the agenda of zealots (secular and religious alike), fear-mongers, and panic merchants. It blows up the idea of taking a stand and often does so without even questioning whether a stand should be taken. In the lessons of classical rhetoric, one learns that it can be helpful to meet in the middle in order to solve a problem or discuss a problem with an eye toward resolution, but a cool head makes for a pathetic spectacle, and without a spectacle, what is there to entertain?

Meeting in the middle, however, whether one intends to discuss an issue or consider its dimensions, whether one intends to compromise one’s power and privilege or simply exert it, comes with risk. Consideration of the other side of the discussion requires vulnerability. And, in some instances, an empathetic conversation can do more to connect the disparate ideas of opposing viewpoints than a willful wielding of power and privilege can do. You don’t talk a man off of a ledge with a SWAT team, but with a psychologist. Unfortunately, among highly charged issues, people are afraid of the consequences of losing power, losing face, or losing privilege, and vulnerability is perceived as weakness. When dealing with reproductive rights, marriage equality, gender equity, and racial equality, especially in arenas that have been long troubled with inequality and oppression, the conversation becomes highly charged, inflammatory, and unintentionally volatile; in these instances, guilt and guile are not the best opportunities for growth or development, as they reduce the issue into a rudimentary polemic. Defensive, reactionary, affronted language does seem to achieve certain outcomes; while it isn’t the case that every offended or outraged person is actively seeking change, the two are conflated in our culture, at least in popular discourse. At times, discussion is seen as negotiation with undesirable others. And, yet, sometimes, instead of taking a stand, it can be useful to deliberate, to consider the other side in the context of discourse as well as action. Rage is a refusal to see the other side, to examine the issue with compassion or empathy, a desire to push aggressively forward the refusal to engage in meaningful discourse. Rage is a refusal to come to the table to talk because one risks not getting one’s way. Better to huff and puff and blow the matter down than to seem indifferent (or too vulnerable) to the condition of insecurity that pervades modern life.

Of course, I don’t advocate for the removal of passionate discourse; sometimes one needs to upset the apples in the cart, and sometimes one needs to upset the whole cart of apples to sort out the good and the bad; the approach varies with the occasion. Without passion and conviction, human experiences become flattened and lifeless. There is no beauty without the grotesque. Passion, engagement, sincerity, and criticism create dynamism in life, dynamism which might at times feel like instability for a short while. Critical inquiry and examination, however, are not anathema to a passionate experience of life or even certainty, though they may not provide an unconditional squadron of cheerleader energy. Whereas critical inquiry invites skepticism and investigation to discuss and bring forth a conversation, whereas it seeks to take a thing apart in order to make sense of it and then potentially move toward some action, rage and outrage do the opposite: in seeking to create harmony and shut out discord by way of compliance and blind obeisance to the loudest voice in the room, they shut the door on discourse. It becomes very difficult, then, to criticize individual responsibilities in acts of atrocity without somehow blaming the victim; the outrage bunnies seem to imply that we cannot even question one side without aligning ourselves with the other. This is a deliberate shut-down of discourse – and it serves no progressive, productive social end. Perhaps one key to progress is awareness: intellectual and cultural issues should not fall into the trap that equates passion with bluster.

Rage is important for revolution, but not all things are the basis for revolution; sometimes, “methinks the Lady doth protest too much” to seem credible. People are lately writing “open letters” without even stopping to question whether the open letter is the appropriate venue for that discourse. In the case of diplomacy, one might pause to think about implications carried by an interruption of otherwise appropriate means. Should people intervene without considering consequences? What is the value of the private appeal and what is the value of trying to garner a show of support by making that appeal public and pressuring the hand of the actors? Consent and compromise are complicated further by making a public spectacle or a display of power out of a conflict that might better be handled with less collateral damage; and that is worth considering because change doesn’t come from actions that are pressured constantly, though compliance does – sometimes carrying resentment with it. The problem with outrage in these cases is that it disrupts the process that is already taking place; sometimes that outrage is helpful because it can stall a problematic process and draw attention to a need for larger structural evaluation, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. In the case of Elizabeth Ellen’s, one might read the letter itself before railing against it.⁸ Along with critical inquiry, it seems that rhetorical awareness has fallen out of fashion. But really, can we not consider what Bradley’s poems ask us to question? Can we not seek the root of Hash-Berryman’s stance? And, can we chronicle the pain represented by Abramson’s verses without decrying an exploitation?

When the mob mentality takes over in response, people are in a frenzy and they do not stop to think about consequences of shutting down discourse in such an important struggle. Rage and outrage have a place in the discourse, but not every discourse needs to fall into the false binary of rage vs. acceptance, or outrage vs. endorsement, or us vs. them. This may be a difficult binary for us to overcome, as a culture: mob mentality, rampant in modern life and discourse, feeds from the open veins of all that rage. People get all worked up, and an idea gathers momentum, and that kinda feels a little bit like progress to people who can’t seem to access their belief in their own agency to create the changes they seek. And as the snowballing sentiment becomes outrage, people begin to feel that all this collected, shared emotion now must yield some kind of action – even if that action is condemning everyone who sees that sentiment in a contrary light. The problem is, that it isn’t progress.

In literature, as in discourse about literature, we can also find representations alternative to such a striking back of reactionary sentiment, a cultivation of diplomacy and discourse. Consider CP Cavafy’s famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which a city stands at the edge of collapse and takeover by barbaric foreign invaders, its leaders poised to hand over rule and riches alike, while its citizens watch the imminent exchange and question the terrifying, imminent dread that accompanies such a change, however expected it may be. When the barbarians never arrive, Cavafy leaves us with the echoing question of agency – not with revolution or battle cry, not with fury or aggression, but with the simple feeling as a result of inquiry and discourse that perhaps something can, after all be done. The discourse raises the issue of logic and acceptance, but is ultimately left unrealized in action, though it is present in language. All that fear and fury were brought to the surface in response to the barbarians beyond the borders, due to arrive at any moment, and yet without those barbarians to receive the action generated by that feeling, what will happen to all the fear, the energy, the motivation, and the mobilized feeling? Cavafy leaves us to think about the language that stands in place of any action. Through language comes consideration and possibility; through dialogue and diplomacy may come cooperation, some possibility for that energy and desire for change to be deliberately used in shaping a new structure for the society depicted in his poem. It is the kind of reasoned discourse that is capable of seeking resolution instead of just fanning the flames in fear of the potential of barbaric siege, one we seldom see in a contemporary public discourse so aggressively quick to turn any statement into a stand, unquestioningly, or into an Internet Flame War.

Rage and outrage make a place for progress, at times – when they fuel acts of art and expression, when they motivate movements of resistance against tyranny, when they stand against oppression and with community, when they catalyze discourse and real action. The kinds of rage that have become popular in discourse about human issues and literary ones, political issues and personal narratives – these are the kinds of outrage that burn up the light that might otherwise illuminate the shadows and the monstrous within them. They frequently reinforce our fears of vulnerability, and do not make a place for progress but place an obstacle before it. Rage is not passion. Outrage is not activism. Dominance is not power. Not every struggle must make a noisy clamor because discourse can seek resolution instead of spectacular escalation. And, a dramatic, sensationalized ruckus is not progress, just as a storm in a teacup is not a fucking cyclone.

 

¹The way I see it: we tend to see the former as support, culminating in the idea of the cheerleader or groupie, but we see the latter as tyrannical, imagined as the terror-peddler or kamikaze. The former speaks to hope, while the latter evokes desperation.
²It is possible to use words that are insistent in a performance that is muted. That combination of content and form is pretty common in our culture and comes across as a plaintive expression. It is possible also to use plain speech, simple words in a forceful manner, something we often associate with politics and propaganda. But, the combination of insistence in word-choice and reiteratively forceful performativity is a lot like the language of revolution and upheaval.
³Just as not every complaint needs to be addressed and not every problem that needs the same solution, so not every artist will create work rooted in a desire to make change. The registers by which we acknowledge these differences are apparent if we look carefully at both the content and the context of the work; similarly, people in our culture speak out frequently and sometimes in dramatic ways, but there is a difference between seeking attention and appealing to the interventionally protective spirit of the audience. Often, these differences have to do with how power is utilized and recognized among those uttering the expression and how it is received by their audiences.
⁴I’m trying to say that Dylan reminds us how important it is to fight for our lives, to remember that life is precious. However, not everything has the same stakes. We must choose our battles. Not every conflict is a battle against death. Not every gesture is an act worthy of immortal valor. We should rage against the dying of the light so that we don’t die before we have lived; but we should not rage about every light that we see shining before us in the darkness we define as the world. The contemporary condition is so shaped by fear-mongering and panic that everything is dark and dangerous, every light stands for a beacon of hope, only…allowing that to happen makes everything devoid of value, really.
⁵Links for reader reference:



⁶I suppose I mean repudiation of their rights to be either/both. Our society expects women to be either sexed or unsexed, but doesn’t really give women the equal option of being both. Women who hold power are expected to deny some essential woman-ness in order to hold that power, or they are expected to deny the desire for power in order to remain desirable. Not much has changed since George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, unfortunately.
We hold all of a group accountable for the fanatics and extremists of that group, simply because it is easier to demand order than it is to confront complexity of structure. Our zeitgeist’s desire to be overly binary in our choices and allegiances presents a “with us or against us” mentality, even in thought, which interferes with consideration of any depth. All questions become ultimatums in the public discourse because one is either a hero or an enemy combatant, one is either an enemy combatant or collateral damage. The grey is infectious, the ambiguity unacceptable. Not all men are violent, not all terrorists are brown, and not all powerful women are interested in dominating discourse; and yet, focusing on these things are what fuels outrage instead consideration. It is easier to be affronted and offended by things, instead of considering their complexities with open-minded discussion, especially when those things defy our labels, when they deviate from our expectations in arenas or zones that we consider dangerous. It is easier to reject the thing that defies easy categorization than to restructure ideologies, and outrage serves as the passionate conviction that protects the status quo, even as it behaves as if it demands attention. Note that activism requires that the attention be motivated, whereas in most public discourse today, the attention shifts on to the next calamity before that energy has become activated. We can rage against the dying light to hold on for a while, but we can’t become immortal; so we can choose to leave a legacy or we can choose to cry out in complaint. Today’s anger just wants to be vented, not harnessed. Most people won’t care enough to follow up on the things about which they are worked up.
⁷Our culture wants black and white, not grey, because it’s easier to negotiate a nebulous world at war when we know how to identify the good guys and the bad guys. The trouble is that life is never so simple. If we acknowledge that hate crimes against Muslims really do exist and that our free and ideal society contains social problems of racial identity, it’s harder to identify the enemy – because we must acknowledge that not all Muslims are problematic; and so the wars of the Middle East come into question, as do our ideas about inclusivity and acceptance in American cultural identity. If we question people’s obsession with Eliot Rodgers and violent spectacle, we must also think about the ways in which male privilege, white privilege, and mental illness intersect with criminality, with hate crimes against women, with the glorification of violence in a culture typified, of late, by warfare and traditional patriarchal values. These questions challenge the paradigms of gender, race, and power in our society. If we acknowledge that consent isn’t always a clearly discernible yes or no, then we have to question what power structures create conditions of duress that complicate consent, as well as individual freedom. If we focus only on the painful atrocity of the Charlie Hebdo killings and not on the context of warfare, oppression, and provocation in which they occurred, then we ignore the larger context within which we must consider free speech, which is essentially why free speech is so important. None of these problems can be split into easy binary schisms of black and white, but anger and outrage fuel the possibility of flattening our discourse into “good guys” and “bad guys,” making it easier to target one issue instead of the larger structural problems through which otherwise innocent and well-meaning individuals become complicit in social ills.
⁸Even if her arguments are sometimes troubling and unappealing, she does raise some important questions of awareness and consideration before action that are worthy of discussion. By claiming that she contravenes progress and damages solidarity just by asking those questions, by vilifying her discourse (which is what that mob mentality seems to be doing), we lose an opportunity for meaningful discourse that might be productive! “How dare you raise these questions!?” Well, let’s look at the questions before we answer that.

 

Saba Razvi‘s collection of poems, Of the Divining and the Dead, is available through Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and she has given readings in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Omaha, Honolulu, Glasgow & Stirling in Scotland, Lismore & Dublin in Ireland, Dallas, and in Austin, TX. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Texas. She teaches writing and literature at the University of Houston.

The World Is at Stake: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Internet Activism, and Reverberations in the Hyperbolic Chamber
by Saumya Arya Haas

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
(Translation: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”)
– Bad Latin / necessary advice from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

 

As a long-time Science Fiction/Fantasy (SF/F) fan, I’ve been following the controversy over this year’s . Two activist groups calling themselves the and feel that, in recent years, this prestigious SF/F award has wrongly honored more “literary” books, often by women and minority writers, which feature liberal social themes over “traditional” writers, styles, and themes. They organized a response. According to :

As usual, the [Hugo Award] finalists were determined by ballot; any member of the 2014, 2015, or 2016 WorldCons (that is, any fan who shelled out the requisite $40 to sign up for one of those conventions) could vote. And yet the names and works that rose to the top provoked a tsunami of controversy. That’s because a group of rightwing activists managed to game the selection process, proposing a fixed slate of nominees and feverishly promoting it. Since small margins are sufficient to secure Hugo nods, what emerged was what a strange, ideologically driven, and unrepresentative sample of fiction.

Who are these people? Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, organizer of the successful Rabid Puppies nominee slate, , and has some .

The Puppy activist groups are outraged, and they are doing something about it. To many people, myself included, their outrage is cause for outrage. I mean, really? It’s not as if straight, cis, white men have stopped winning Hugo Awards; the awards have simply become more inclusive of women and minority work and books with liberal social themes. As a geeky minority woman who wants to read diverse stories, I feel that this is a good thing. Being angry about, and fighting against, representative diversity is ridiculous. But it’s real, troubling, and in some ways, it’s working.

When women, minorities, LGBT folks, etc. express their outrage over being marginalized, many of the dominant (“mainstream” or majority) groups feel that our outrage is outrageous. Furious debate has ensued, playing out in many arenas. Rightwing groups like the Puppies have a name for people who support diversity: SJWs: Social Justice Warriors. This is not intended as a compliment. I should know: I have been granted a SJW ranking of 33,000 on Twitter; I have no idea what this indicates, besides that someone took the time to assess my tweets for mentions of “culture, racism, gender, rape, and transgender” issues.

I try to first believe someone’s truth and think critically afterwards. The gap between my reading about the Hugo Awards controversy and my outrage was about this long -. I immediately began posting my opinion all over social media. I followed people who shared my opinion. I retweeted. I got a few rude responses from Puppy supporters, which I ignored. They were not engaging me in debate, they were expressing their outrage at my outrage at their outrage at… you get it. As this issue has gone on, voices and stakes on both sides are raised. Critical blogs are posted; angry responses to said blogs are posted minutes later; rabid responses to the responses of said blogs…you get it. Now and then, someone cracks a joke; half of us laugh and the other fumes, feeling mocked. Angry responses to the joke are posted, and so on. So it goes. The hyperbolic chamber.

I love social media. It helps me connect to people around the world who share my concerns. It helps me hear other opinions. As a minority woman living on a little farm in the Midwest, it helps me form community that is as authentic as any community I have ever been a part of. As a writer, it gives me an audience that was very difficult to find twenty years ago. Most of all, it has confirmed my outrage when I felt alone with it. I’m not arguing against the internet, social media, or outrage. I’m just saying…be cautious. Be outraged (the world is outrageous), but be cautious. I try to decide where I put my energy, and I’m pretty good at it, but the internet sucks me in. On this issue, on many issues, it’s not surprising.

I admire people who are able to react thoughtfully and reasonably. There are some sharp but smart responses to the controversy. Twitter user @AidenRWalsh researched the history of Hugo Award winners, and came up with this graphic.

Of course you can find graphics like this in articles written for high-quality media sites that are covering this issue, but I am interested that someone decided to take the time to do their own research and present it as a perspective in this debate. I find @AidenRWalsh’s graphic a fantastic and useful response: cool numbers in the face of heated rhetoric.

Seeing this information baldly illustrated via graph just made me more outraged. 72% of Hugo Awards to men. Seventy-two percent, and the Puppies howl that men are being disenfranchised. What percentage would be considered fair?

This is not about a literary award.

SF/F was my first reading genre. My mother, a writer and teacher, introduced me to Stoker and Verne and (Mary) Shelley. My father, a Hindu priest and philosopher, introduced me to Asimov and Clarke, L‘Engle and McCaffery, Tolkien and Star Trek and superhero comics. I read the classics when I was too young to understand them. My parents taught me to be a critical reader and viewer. They pointed out themes that resonated with our tradition, and explained what resonated with other traditions. They identified the paucity of women, the coded or outright racism, the drumming in of Eurocentric white male perspective. When I raved about Lord of the Rings with all its different races, my dad gently asked me to re-read the section describing evil Easterlings and Southrons/Haradrim (dark-skinned, black-skinned, primitive, wearing bright colors and lots of gold, riding elephant-like creatures, and obviously coming from the Eastern and Southern parts of the world). “Which cultures do those sound like?” I started to notice that characters described as “swarthy” were inevitably villainous.  The trope of the swarthy-skinned villain is so pervasive in classic SF/F that it’s become shorthand my brother and I use to describe works that are a good read but fall into racist themes. “How is it?” he’ll ask about something I’m reading. My reply: “Swarthy.”

I was mad at my dad. Why did he give me this stuff to read, wait for me to enjoy it, then tell me it was racist, sexist, and horrible? How could I enjoy it? Because I did, and I do, enjoy these books. My ambivalence about enjoying racist, sexist books and films (see: Blade Runner) is an article for another day. The short version: I fell in love with flawed works; for years there were few other options. I’m grateful that that is (sloooowly) changing. As a very young girl, I read A Wrinkle in Time, and was delighted that the protagonist was a girl. I remember reading Andre Norton’s Lavender Green Magic and realizing that the kids in the book were African-American. I was stunned: there are black kids in this book! Lavender Green Magic dealt with prejudice that was familiar to me as a brown-skinned American. These books gave me something that I had not had before: SF/F heroines, and adventurers of Color. I needed them. In finding them, I realized that despite being 50% of the population, women were a minority of writers (it’s worth noting that “Andre Norton” is a male pen name used by Alice Norton; today, the male pen name has been largely replaced by gender-neutral initials, as in the case of J.K. Rowling). As characters, women were usually a nice pair of tits with either (a)a rescue/vengeance mission, (b) a sex scene, and/or (c)an expository device attached to them. (C) was my least favorite: a male character mansplaining pertinent facts about the setting to a female character (who clearly lives in that setting), for the benefit of the reader. Augh! Come ON.

This is the source of my outrage: Women and minorities have been here, part of this (literal and literary) culture, all along, but when people who look like us are included as characters in books, the portrayal is too often limited, unimaginative, and problematic. My favorite example of this is the Fantastic Four. Hey, there’s a woman in this superhero group! What’s her power? She’s invisible!

For every Wonder Woman, there are a dozen literarily and literally invisible, neglected, and/or caricatured women (see: Black Widow). The limited and unimaginative portrayals of women are as aggravating to me as the “problematic.” We are a creative species, and in a genre that is wide open for creativity, we can do better. We are doing better (in some mediums, in some cases).

We have to write our own stories. Yes, a straight, cis, white man can write diverse and complex characters who happen to be women, or gay, or whatever. That’s why we write, to explore possibility. But there are women, minority, and LGBT authors who also read and write stories…who have been reading and writing and struggling to be included and acknowledged in every genre all along. It is outrageous that as we gain any percentage of recognitions that that recognition is seen as taking away from so-called “traditional” authors and tales. This battle over a literary award is a reflection and refraction of the difficulties we face every day as a culture, and as groups within that culture. Women and minority voices need their signal boosted, not cut off. There are plenty of visible straight, cis, white male authors and heroes in real life, literature, TVs, and movies. They are not fading into oblivion. Look around you. Guys are still, for the most part, running the world.

Without diverse voices, and recognition of those voices, our culture and our literary traditions become their own hyperbolic chambers, amplifying certain perspectives to the exclusion of all else. It has taken our outrage to fuel us this far; being met with a wall of contrasting outrage is not going to push us into invisibility or silence. I feel that is the heart of the Puppies’ rage: they are losing power, and they know it. They might be able to manipulate a literary award, but controlling perspectives in the real world is more of a challenge; the strain is starting to show.

Personal outrage is loud: it makes its own noise that can drown out what we don’t want to hear. Outrage is righteous. Pushback against our outrage further convinces us that there is urgent moral necessity at stake, that we cannot give ground, that our world is at risk.

It is true. As in many SF/F tales, a world is at risk. The world of “tradition,” the world where straight, cis, white guys are the inheritors of the throne, the world where women and minorities have their identities dictated and blunted by a dominant narrative: that world is gravely at risk. It is slow erosion, but it’s real. The Puppies, caught up in the echo chamber of their own fantasies, see themselves as valiant heroes who must save this dying world. They want to control the narrative of the real world by symbolically controlling the narratives of a literary tradition. The world is being remade: by people living their lives out loud, by books, by outrage. We won’t be stuffed back into narrow margins. It must be terrifying to own the whole damn world and then feel it begin to slip away. No wonder they’re sad, and rabid.

We are not outraged about who wins a genre literary award; we are fighting over the world. We are outraged when our meaning comes in conflict with someone else’s meaning and there is a fight to subsume our perspective. We’re outraged because, for many of us, this is not a story about stories. This is the story of our lives. My sympathy with the other side evaporates because there is, very clearly, room for them in the new world we are building. There is room for everyone to have their own place and share their own stories and preserve their own traditions (there is not, however, room for them to impose their narrative on anyone else). Their world, the old world they are struggling to preserve, would grind me down into a minor character written by someone else.

 

 

Saumya Arya Haas is an ALB candidate in Religious Studies at Harvard University. She lives with challenges due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. Prior to this life-altering injury, she engaged in interfaith/intergroup dialogue and Social Justice projects, advising organizations such as and , and has worked with the Parliament of World Religions, The UN World Council of Religious Leaders, and The UN Peace Initiative. Her work has taken her everywhere from West Africa to the White House. She is a contributor at , , and . Her writing can also be found on various other websites and in print media. Saumya is a priestess of both Hinduism and Vodou.

 

Some Things Never Change: Outrage and Persuasion in Online Literary Debate
by Michael Simon

Recent events have provided plenty of opportunities to diagnose the culture of debate in our online literary communities, as well on the Internet more generally, from the controversial essay by Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart to the conversations prompted by Jesse Bradley’s poem “A Mother’s Advice,” published at Lockjaw, and the Ted Hash-Berryman interview at Queen Mobs Teahouse.¹ That the responses to these controversial works have entailed outrage is not a surprise, nor is this necessarily a bad thing. Outrage-based responses can be productive, but they are of limited value when used as part of a larger, forceful strategy for “winning” a debate that emphasizes rejecting an opponent’s speech out of hand, and the atmosphere they create can complicate efforts to persuade by putting participants on the defensive.

In response to recent allegations of abuse by men in the literary community, Elizabeth Ellen published a disjointed essay at Hobart that expressed anxiety about what she calls “the whirlwind of ‘taking down’ male writers/editors,” referring both to the allegations themselves and the subsequent online discourse around them. In a commentary for The Nervous Breakdown, Brett Ortler reads the essay as “an unorthodox attempt to empathize with the alleged perpetrators in the face of what at times felt like an online mob.”² On the other hand, Mallory Ortberg, writing at The Toast, notes skeptically that “criticism from other feminists is so frightening that [Ellen] will fall apart at the slightest provocation.”³ Ellen’s essay admirably resists the pressure to condemn out of hand the male writers named as abusers, but in pushing back she goes too far, endorsing the narrative that victims’ experiences, particularly women’s, are up for debate and appropriation.

When public discourse around issues of abuse and misogyny is perceived to be bellicose, how do writers who engage in the debate protect and ground their arguments? One strategy these writers use is to draw on their own personal experiences as a reality check, as well as a source of authority. Ortberg tests the logic of Ellen’s proposed standard for consent prior to a sexual encounter against dangerous moments in her own life and concludes, “it should not take everything you have to turn down someone’s offer for sex.” Ellen herself uses the strategy, to disastrous effect, when she confesses to having committed acts of physical coercion as a child against younger children. She brings up her own history ostensibly because “I think it is important for us all to remember our faults and those things we are most ashamed of” before casting stones against male literary figures accused of abuse—a call for restraint that might in another context persuade. But instead of supporting her point, her confession, which seems hastily assembled, shows a lack of introspection that leads Ortberg to understandably deem the essay “devoid of moral sanity.”

While it seems likely that Ellen brings her own disturbing childhood behavior into the essay (in addition to her underage relationship with an older man and her marriage to a younger man) to lend authority to her criticism of Sophia Katz’s disturbing rape account published at Medium it’s hard to say, given the essay’s disjunctive quality and tangents. Ellen remarks that she would never judge Katz “were we not being asked (by Sophia? By ‘the public’?) to judge the entire situation.” In the same spirit, then, she would seem to offer her own account as abuser for readers to dissect. Yet judgment of this sort is profoundly difficult. What would it take to decide that Katz could have done better? Not only a full grasp of who said and did what, but also an understanding of Katz’s mental landscape, including her motivations for initially staying with the man who assaulted her, her fears and trigger points, how she imagines herself (as a human, woman, writer, etc.), and the various other facets of her inner life that may have shaped or constrained her consciousness, statements, and actions, any element of which she may have left out of the piece or misrepresented, either intentionally or inadvertently.

Second-guessing Katz is, in other words, profoundly unproductive. Yet Ellen not only challenges Katz’s evaluation of her own experience, she also seems to expect that readers of her Hobart essay will turn the same scrutiny on its author. Concerning her own actions as a young abuser, Ellen remarks, “I know you’re going to say this doesn’t count,” thereby inviting readers to wade knee-deep into her personal moral dilemma. Of course, Ellen didn’t invent false intimacy as a writing strategy, but her direct appeal to and challenge of her readership suggests a certain apprehension about that readership, and about the quality of online discourse more broadly. And she has reason to be apprehensive. Ellen’s reading of Katz’s narrative reflects an unfortunate dynamic in our relationship to the Internet: a tendency to think we know more than we actually do. And when that tendency is directed digitally toward an alleged victim who has spoken up, it picks up on the common tactic of discrediting women’s voices when they threaten the status quo. Although Ellen may have had good intentions in writing her essay, and despite her attempts to avoid a rush to judgment of alleged abusers, her criticism of Katz and her own confession can be read as endorsing the misogynistic presumptions of male access that treat women’s bodies as contestable territory.

Of course, women’s bodies have long been treated in this way, especially in literary contexts. For instance, Eavan Boland notes the history of Irish male poets using women as “passive, decorative” emblems in their work, emblems that deny and destroy the lived experience of women they represent, even as the emblems themselves take on the mythical status of muse or national symbol.⁴ Featured in the first issue of the online journal Lockjaw, Jesse Bradley’s poem “A Mother’s Advice” envisions a woman as a passive subject of violent torment. Yet the poem offers no moral “context” for that treatment, as Die Dragonetti notes in a Luna Luna response, and in doing so it renews a longstanding trope of aestheticized violence against women for which other men are the intended audience.⁵

In another Luna Luna response to Bradley’s poem, Sarah Certa writes that the Lockjaw editors’ use of a trigger warning, intended to allow readers who may have suffered past trauma to skip over it, “still implies that it’s okay for Bradley to articulate—and aestheticize—the narrative of a violence that is not his to articulate.”⁶ Certa suggests, correctly in my view, that writers and editors have an obligation to recognize that the work they publish online shapes the digital environment for their readers. But saying a particular subject “is not his to articulate” wades into a more specific and problematic debate over ownership. Certa’s statement in effect claims that subject for “us” and not for “them.” As with any such claim, “we” gain and “they” lose. But the discourse on the ethics of writing women also loses, I suspect, when discussion about the context of a given work becomes a tug-of-war over a disputed narrative subject.

The impulse to resist misogynistic trends in contemporary literature can lead us to draw inappropriate lines in the sand. Dragonetti, writing about the Queen Mobs Teahouse interview with Ted Hash-Berryman, whose work has blatantly targeted women writers, argues that the interview validates his work and is “consistent with the oppression of dominant culture,” which “permits and justifies [Bradley’s and Hash-Berryman’s] actions as ‘art.’”⁷ An interview can certainly serve as a soapbox for an interviewee, and it can offer a neutral or even positive space for controversial or offensive behavior. But Dragonetti suggests an us-versus-them situation, in which offering an opponent the opportunity to speak is a strategic mistake. How much attention is paid to Hash-Berryman, rather than who is persuaded by what he or his critics have to say, seems the measure of success.

The Internet is especially conducive to us-versus-them types of engagement and has played a big role in unleashing the power of outrage. The New York Times recently covered the Twitter-shaming phenomenon and the devastating effects it can have on those subjected to it, including depression, PTSD, and job loss. The Times article describes an instance of Twitter shaming as a combination of “an ideological crusade against . . . perceived bigotry” and “a form of idle entertainment.”⁸ It then goes on to compare the phenomenon to older forms of public punishment like “the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post.” Our legal system no longer punishes criminals by forcing them into a hostile public environment; instead, for better or worse, we isolate convicts from public view in confined and often unsafe spaces. Yet the Internet, and especially social media, recreates some of the punitive qualities of our premodern public spaces, spaces in which misbehavior can quickly lead to overwhelming responses of outrage.

That outrage cuts both ways. A Twitter user expressing a racist sentiment (as in the story covered by the Times) may invoke understandable outrage from one audience, but a woman speaking up in a male-dominated subculture may get responses intended to “put her in her place” from another. The critic Anita Sarkeesian, speaking to NPR, describes the online harassment she experienced in response to her critiques of the depiction of women in video games as involving “everything from my social media accounts flooded with misogynist and racist slurs to trying [sic] to hack into my social media and email.”⁹ She also notes “a number of other women who are fearing for their lives and leaving their homes because they’re receiving threats as well. So this is actually a larger problem within the gaming community right now.”

As vigilante expressions of outrage become increasingly normalized in our online culture, entering into debate and speaking one’s mind means taking on, in many cases, an unacceptable level of personal risk. And although our digital spaces have acquired a punitive character, they remain at a distance from the justice system. How do we best engage with one another given these realities?

For one thing, we should acknowledge that personal safety is not a zero-sum game; that online acts of belligerence and intimidation toward “you” do not make “me” safer. Instead, we should recognize that our language and behavior online have the potential to confound or facilitate productive dialogue. We should also reconsider what good citizenship in digital spaces means, both for ourselves and for the next generation. The more we come to depend on the Internet for the public life of our democracy, the more urgently we need an ethics of digital citizenship than can accommodate rigorous exchange without endangering its participants.

Elaine Equi captures the persistence of the status quo in our digital age in her poem “Some Things Never Change.”¹⁰ Its speaker describes herself as

replaced by files, codes,

a social network
held together with pins.

Describing her own physical form discarded, her identity dismantled and uploaded to the Internet, Equi’s speaker seems to reconfigure traditional tropes of the female body. Yet despite the change, she remains strangely passive, “held together with pins.” Although her network’s “reach” is now much greater than that of her former body—although, in other words, she has a broader audience—the social realities remain largely the same. But there is a silver lining: her digital form, like her physical one, is just a representation “pretending” to be her; a useful reminder for anyone reading, writing, or publishing online. Let’s take a step back, remember that none of us can be reduced to our external identities, and temper our outrage toward a more productive and persuasive debate.

 

Sources
¹ Elizabeth Ellen, “An Open Letter to the Internet,” Hobart, October 3, 2014, http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/an-open-letter-to-the-internet; Jesse Bradley, “A Mother’s Advice,” Lockjaw 1, http://www.donotlink.com/framed?620607; and Kim Vodicka, “A Look inside the Dungeon of Ted Hash-Berryman’s Castle,” Queen Mobs Teahouse, December 30, 2014, http://www.donotlink.com/framed?617692.
² Brett Ortler, “Sympathy for the Devil: In Defense of Elizabeth Ellen,” The Nervous Breakdown, October 14, 2014, http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bortler/2014/10/sympathy-for-the-devil-in-defense-of-elizabeth-ellen/.
³ Mallory Ortberg, “On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes a Victim,” The Toast, October 6, 2014, http://the-toast.net/2014/10/06/deciding-counts-elizabeth-ellen-makes-victim/.
⁴ Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (New York: Norton, 1995), 134–35.
⁵ Die Dragonetti, “Writers and Editors Respond to the J. Bradley Poem and Ted Hash-Berryman Interview,” Luna Luna, January 23, 2015, http://lunalunamag.com/2015/01/23/die-dragonetti-writers-editors-respond-j-bradley-poem-ted-hash-berryman-interview/.
⁶ Sarah Certa, “Writers and Editors Respond to the J. Bradley Poem and Ted Hash-Berryman Interview,” Luna Luna, January 24, 2015, http://lunalunamag.com/2015/01/24/sarah-certa-writers-editors-respond-j-bradley-poem-ted-hash-berryman-interview/.
⁷ Dragonetti, “Writers and Editors Respond.”
⁸ Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html.
⁹ NPR, “One Feminist Critic’s Battle with Gaming’s Darker Side,” October 18, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/18/357194775/one-feminist-critics-battle-with-gamings-darker-side.
¹⁰ Elaine Equi, Click and Clone (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2011), 54.

 

 

Michael Simon is an editor in New York. His poetry and prose have appeared in the Atlas Review, Best New Poets 2013, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Epiphany, and elsewhere.

On Prioritizing My Rage
by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

To tell the truth spaceship can’t be so bad…I been on earth all my life and all my life I been mad.
-Henry Dumas

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, outrage and I have been close friends for some time.

Outrage: an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock or indignation at an injustice.

Yes, I know outrage rather intimately. I know outrage’s moans, its musky sweaty scent, its favorite colors. I know the graceless, determined way it dances. How it sometimes gets important things done. Being Black, a woman, and a poet means I often have to negotiate and prioritize the outrages I encounter. There are things that happen in the literary world that really piss me off but then there is the world outside of words that threatens my very life and could keep me in a constant stage of rage.

In terms of literature, one of the more recent things that had me ready to rumble was the . The statistics were dismal. While the VIDA Count shows that women are starting to be published and reviewed more in top tier literary publications (in part because VIDA has brought it to the attention of the publishers and writers that there is a problem) the VIDA women of color count shows that the voices of women of color are still being shut out of most top-tier literary journals. Now this is the thing: does anyone on my block know about that stuff? Does anyone in my old neighborhood give a damn about lit journals or what arguments we have about literature online? Does that stuff affect my parents? As angry as I get about the fact that the London Review of Books and the Paris Review scarcely review or publish Black women’s work, I’m also dealing with the reality that Black and Brown children are being murdered by police on a regular basis. So what do I do? The truth is that since I have to go out in the street yelling that my very life matters, I guess it stands to reason I’ll have to insist that my literature matters.

While my parents and neighbors and children don’t read literary journals and they’re not much affected by what happens in them or in the online debates I sometimes engage in about the literary scene, there is this:

Of 3,500 children’s books published in 2014, 179 were about Black people and 84 were by Black people, according to by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

I can see the impact of this on my children every time they come home with library books from school. I want my children to see their own reflections in the library. I want them to see themselves at the center of important stories. I want my children to know that their voices are valuable enough to be heard on the page. They are not just silent sidekicks or the main character’s best friend. Ever since my first child was born I’ve been on a mission to bring all the intelligent Black and Brown and Asian protagonists I can find into our house.

I’ve also written two children’s books and shared the work with rooms filled with children who told me they couldn’t wait to see the work in print. Despite the kids’ enthusiasm, for a long time I couldn’t find an agent or publisher willing to take on the books. This led me to be outraged about how few publishers and literary agents of color there are in the United States. When I pick up issues of Poets & Writers and Writer’s Digest featuring agents and editors, I’m often left shaking my head. Where are the people of color, I say to the magazine pages, which offer pale stares as a response.

I went online looking for answers. I found “.” This is an honest, important, and probably very difficult discussion that was published in 2013 on the Lee & Low website. Here are two exchanges from that piece:

Q. Why do you think you receive far fewer submissions from authors of color as opposed to white authors?

(Abigail Samoun:) From what I’ve gleaned from attending conferences, it feels like a large percentage of the people writing children’s books are white women in their forties, fifties, and sixties with at least some college education. This probably has been the case for decades. The children’s book authors I’ve met often share a few characteristics: they grew up with books, they’ve read a lot, they have some sort of connection to children, either through teaching, parenting, or a job that puts them in contact with kids, and they’ve had the time and money to develop their writing skills and attend conferences. So I think there is definitely a socio-economic factor in becoming a children’s book author.

Q. Since the number of books for children written and/or illustrated by people of color has not grown in the last eighteen years according to our , what could agents do to increase this number?

(Karen Grencik:) I don’t think many agents are actively searching for new clients, so I can’t see how an agent could have much of an impact on this issue unless they had a personal passion for it. I am grateful to publishers like Lee & Low who devote their lives to leveling out the playing field. I think the change is going to have to come from within those who are affected, who have the energy, the passion, and the drive to effect the change, just like any underrepresented group in any profession.

There’s quite a bit that’s upsetting about these exchanges, more than I even care to tackle, but the idea that change has to come from “those who are affected” is particularly disturbing. Aren’t all readers left impoverished when some of us are excluded from children’s books? Isn’t the world of literature lacking something when it places whiteness in its center? When a majority of books give children the subtle message that 30% of this country’s population is “other,” it affects us all. It’s deeply troublesome to me that the respondent seems to think that she is not affected when children’s literature is so myopic.

In his 2014 New York Times op-ed piece, “,” Christopher Myers writes:

Perhaps this exclusivity, in which children of color are at best background characters, and more often than not absent, is in fact part of the imaginative aspect of these books. But what it means is that when kids today face the realities of our world, our global economies, our integrations and overlappings, they all do so without a proper map. They are navigating the streets and avenues of their lives with an inadequate, outdated chart, and we wonder why they feel lost. They are threatened by difference, and desperately try to wish the world into some more familiar form. As for children of color, they recognize the boundaries being imposed upon their imaginations, and are certain to imagine themselves well within the borders they are offered, to color themselves inside the lines.

Clearly, all of this country’s problems will not be solved because there are children of color in books but could there be some connection between the dehumanization of Black and Brown people and our invisibility in literature?

And does this absence affect who we see ourselves being in the future? As a teenager, I didn’t know I could be a writer until I read Alice Walker’s work. Her presence let me know that writing books was something I could do. In My Feet Are Laughing, by Lissette Norman, the main character Sadie says that when she grows up she wants to be a poet. I can honestly say that until that book, I’d never seen “poet” put on the table as a choice of professions. Imagine how thrilling it was to be reading my daughters a book where the characters looked like they do, were the same ages they were, and dreamed of doing the same work that their mother does. Christopher Myers writes beautifully of the ways that books function as maps by helping us figure out where we can go and who we can be. Myers says when we don’t see ourselves in books our sense of possibility is stunted. My own experience leads me to agree with him.

And of course people of color are working to change things in publishing because we always work to change things. We can’t live in the narrow spaces assigned to us and stay human. That is why we have Lee and Low, that is why we have We Need Diverse Books, that is why my friend Zetta Elliott (who grew up reading books, has a PhD, has taught on more than one continent, and is not a white woman in her forties, fifties, or sixties) has self-published ten children’s books and three books for teens.

Those of us who write about the things that outrage us, those of us who wear our rage and passion for justice on our sleeves, those of us who write out of love often know that we’ll have an uphill battle getting our work seen. We could just be mad about that and talk about it online but instead we use our energy to create our own spaces. Journals. magazines, newspapers, presses, recordings, blogs, venues. Yeah. We do that.

Fortunately there are those who are not people of color who also know this reality must change. Right now I’m thinking of Claudia Zoe Bedrick publisher of Enchanted Lion Books. Her commitment to diversity extends to the types of stories she publishes, and the birthplaces of authors and illustrators. She believes in being out among writers–not just at conferences that cost hundreds of dollars to attend– but at book festivals and in her neighborhood. Bedrick says, “We all need books that encompass all of humanity, but in ways that are non-ideological and not issue-driven. We need stories in which the characters are brown-skinned or Muslim or Jewish or Native American or working class or homeless, but that’s not the main thing and that’s not what the story is about. Rather all of these human beings are characters with agency living fully human lives. To be fully human, we all need each others’ stories. Without them, we all are stunted and so much less than we otherwise might be.” It is Bedrick who has finally brought my search for a children’s book publisher to an end.

And yet, as James Baldwin writes: the world waits, “outside, hungry as a tiger.”

Rage? That, according to Merriam-Webster, is violent and uncontrollable anger. I’ve lived through a lot of difficult incidents, but when I learned about the murders of Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd, something I can’t describe happened in me. It was a time of sleepless nights and furious poetry. Phone calls to precincts in Florida and Chicago. Letter writing. Tears. It was the first time I took my children to a rally. Trying to explaining the murder of a child walking home, minding his business, carrying candy to my seven-year old and five-year daughters was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. But even all that paled in comparison to what I felt after George Zimmerman walked free. Two years later, Eric Garner’s murderers were acquitted. And so many lives have been destroyed in between. I entered a true state of rage. In that state of rage, I lost my voice. I had no words. I had visions of burning things and revenge. When I finally went into the streets, I did not burn anything or hurt anyone but I was literally shaking with anger. It was frightening.

I am a writer who cares about writing. I’m interested in what other writers are saying about our shared craft. But even more I am a writer who cares about life. When online debates go beyond writers and have an impact on people who don’t write, I’m more likely to get involved.

And what about folks who do get involved in online debates about literature? Well, I think it’s a good thing because it keeps the spaces they live and work in honest. I think that is the point. Those debates point out danger. They can be spaces for self-reflection if people are willing to do that work. I tend to think that face to face we’d work through issues a lot differently than we do online, but online there is an opportunity for people who would never meet to exchange ideas and create alliances and that could lead to some beautiful things.

More than anything though, I’d just like for my children–who are all of our children–to be able to walk down the street and be seen as human. I’d like for colleges not to be silent war zones on women’s bodies. I’d like for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to not have to walk around constantly looking over their shoulders. In other words, I’d like for those of us in the margins of someone’s page to occupy space in the center without death being the consequence. I’d like for all of us to able to live and love out loud. Once that happens, we can have literary debates online all we want and know that in real life, we did the work that needed to be done.

 

is the author of Karma’s Footsteps (flipped eye). She is the poetry editor of the literary magazine African Voices. Her poetry has been the subject of a short film “I Leave My Colors Everywhere” and it has been published in BOMB, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, & Black Renaissance Noire. Tallie is also the mother of two wild, wonder-filled daughters. Her next book, Dear Continuum: Letters To A Poet Crafting Liberation, will be published this month by Grand Concourse Press.

Photo Credit: Dominique Sindayiganza

We, the Riffraff: Why Feminism Needs Outrage, Focus, and Civility
by Lynn Melnick

Believe me, I’m exhausted with all the quick-fire, shallow, inconsistent, unfocused outrage that regularly appears on social media. The act of, say, “unfriending” someone, while often a wise move, is not actual activism and I’m weary of “activists” who find a Facebook comment to be as much of an effort as they can ever muster in order to change the injustices in our society. And I often worry that perhaps the rush of rage is what we’re inspired by, anyway, more than any particular cause.

That rush can be useful, of course, which is probably why it exists. If it weren’t for adrenaline, we might feel less empowered in threatening online situations to fight for our survival. But adrenaline is addictive, and those addicting qualities can make the constancy of internet outrage worrisome. The overindulgence in adrenaline can cause (what I will assume are) generally kind and reasonable people to start hurling invectives at anyone who doesn’t see their side exactly. Flight goes out the window and fight becomes the all-consuming focus; danger itself recedes into the background. Like with many drugs, the temporary high might feel invigorating, and sometimes anger can have a cathartic effect, but too often the rage is ultimately destructive.

I will readily admit, the multiple lit world social media dust-ups and blow-ups of recent months have left me shaken for many reasons — but I refuse to give up on the power of the internet to effect real action and growth.

Because, for all its myriad, exhausting, even dangerous problems, social media has been an unforeseen force for positive, progressive change.

Without it — because marginalized voices are so often ignored or silenced in the traditional media— we may not have been loud enough or many enough to locate each other in the fight. I find this very true in the contemporary lit scene, where the traditional gatekeepers no longer hold all the power in large part because they can no longer control the cultural conversation; the cultural conversation has been given back, to some extent, to us riffraff.

Jennifer Weiner  last winter, responding to author Jonathan Franzen’s not infrequent attacks on her. She writes: “I’d argue that Twitter is a lovely and appropriate medium for voices that have traditionally been shouted down, shut out or ignored by the places that court the Franzens of the world. There’s a long history – maybe Franzen doesn’t know it? – of women using the materials at hand, whatever’s available to them to make art or make a case. I’d argue that feminist Twitter, women writers advocating for their work, one hundred and forty characters at a time, is a part of that history. So I’ve used Twitter, and blogs, and Facebook, which are what you’ve got when you don’t necessarily have the New York Times. “

I know it can be frustrating to experience the various social media outrage bandwagons people jump on and then drop; the petty dustups and unkindnesses that thrive with the territory of limited Twitter character counts; the concern trolls and the sexist trolls and all the damn trolls. Social media makes easy the kind of throwaway let-me-shit-on-you-to-get-my-yayas-out behavior we see too much of online and people are sometimes dreadful and it’s easier to be dreadful when you’re not standing in front of the person towards whom you’re being dreadful because the effects of one’s speech cannot be fully seen. There also seems to be a disturbing sport to public shaming for some people, where one perceived misstep can cause a damaging pile-on that is often disproportionate to the “crime.”

A particularly grueling, polarizing, and brutal social media fight occurred recently among many feminists who, previous Facebook posts suggest, likely agree on most feminist issues. During this extended altercation, when one woman did not agree with another’s position on the issue of anonymously “outing” sexual misconduct by an editor, she commented: “I hope you choke on the long dick of patriarchy you’re sucking.” This was MRA-level verbal brutalization – I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m gonna shove a dick down your throat and shut you up. Comments like this have the result of silencing or, worse, triggering, not just the person on the receiving end of the vitriol but many other women bearing witness who might otherwise speak up. No one wins when we can’t accept that we are not going to agree with each other all the time; we need to treat our own allies with respect in such instances.

I realize that these situations become emotional, and often activate already-existing issues and feelings. But activists do themselves and their causes no favors when they hurl graphic insults or point willy-nilly or refuse to focus in a productive way.

Lately I’ve been trying to recognize how much energy I waste by engaging with causes and threads that are confined to an already-convinced population or are dominated by difficult participants who would gladly derail the proceedings in order to shut down the message. It can be hard to resist a middle finger to misogynists, racists, and other hateful people, absolutely, but my bet is they would love for us to expend our energy on minutiae rather than save it for major action. My guess is they would love for us to sit at our laptops and scold each other all day long. Let’s not do that. The saying “pick your battles” holds truth.

But I do get it: sometimes that’s all we can muster—a comment, a click, and then back to our overwhelming lives. And sometimes that works, sometimes the force of people, all together, does have the power to change minds and to change the way the world, and the lit world, works. The recent outcry about “hashtag activism” doesn’t take into account what the collective can do. It is far, far from enough, I know this beyond a doubt, but I think it becomes so easily dismissed because the powers that be (whether the political right or the so-called progressives of the literary world) . Suddenly, we are we may not even have realized were there the whole time. And there is panic from the establishment, the worry that perhaps they’ve accidentally given the riffraff too much of a voice, a voice at all.

I would find it amusing, if it wasn’t so, well, enraging, that, in recent years, it seems that when writers and editors feel the victim of this collective rage (most typically played out via social media), and/or when they are called out publicly for conduct which is frankly unacceptable, their cry is often censorship. Because come on now! Are some people that unused to being told no? A publication or publishing house exercising editorial discretion is not censorship. (If I don’t want to publish you, that doesn’t mean I am preventing you from disseminating your words and ideas elsewhere.)

Raising our voices is the opposite of censorship. The multiplication and amplification of our voices do not negate those mainstream ones with the often built-in platforms. If someone wants to publish shitty stuff, fine, that’s on them; and just as they can publish it, we can protest it with all the necessary outrage we can gather.

If journals aren’t publishing or reviewing women or people of color; if publishing houses find only a fraction of non-white male voices per season; if men are abusive and yet hope to still be embraced by literary and academic circles, then we can and should raise our voices, in whatever forum we have.

Our anger doesn’t have to be pretty, but it should be selective and focused. Our expression of it doesn’t have to be subtle, but it should be thoughtful. Our speaking doesn’t mean we are unable to listen—and too damn bad if it’s scary or you wish you could cover your ears—but we should all object to abusive rhetoric from any side.

I’ve started and stopped, revised and revised again this essay so many times over so many months (I think I almost literally said “stop the presses” at one point!). This is anathema to the “get that posted right away!” tendency of the internet lately, but I think the rapidly changing nature of the internet and larger world perhaps requires an extended thought process. Which all points to the fact that these issues are nuanced and have to be handled with care. A quick “fuck off” to people with whom you don’t agree isn’t going to get any of us anywhere, except a rush of relief for the speaker, a blip after utterance.

Still, through all the rethinkings and revisions, my core belief has held steady:

We do not have to tolerate unkindness and erasure from others. None of us owes a voice to misogyny, to racism, to transphobia, to any hate or oppression. So we’ll use our voices to combat the hate. And our voices might hold our rage. The end. Full fucking stop.

 

 

Lynn Melnick is author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012) and co-editor, with Brett Fletcher Lauer, of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). She teaches at 92Y in NYC and is the social media & outreach director for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

This week, TheThe’s Infoxicated Corner will be hosting the essay panel All These Things Are True. This panel has been six months in the making, and I’m really excited to be able to share it with everyone. I will be publishing one essay per day, Monday through Friday, in which five panelists will share their views on both the positive and negative effects of rage and outrage in public intellectual discourse. The lineup is as follows:

Monday: Lynn Melnick’s “We the Riffraff: Why Feminism Needs Outrage, Focus, and Civility.”

Tuesday: Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s “On Prioritizing My Rage.”

Wednesday: Michael Simon’s “Some Things Never Change: Outrage and Persuasion in Online Literary Debate.”

Thursday: Saumya Arya Haas’s “The World Is at Stake: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Internet Activism, and Reverberations in the Hyperbolic Chamber.”

Friday: Saba Razvi’s “All The Rage: The Fashion in Our Fury Is Little More than a Refusal to Engage.”

This panel is intended as a space for authors and readers to come together and carefully (re)consider their existing thoughts and attitudes regarding issues that are complex and generally difficult to navigate. I want their efforts, sincerity, and perseverance to be celebrated and honored. Constructive, thoughtful comments are absolutely most welcome in response to any and all of these pieces; however, everyone should remember that anger and cruelty are not the same thing. Anger may be involuntary, but aggression is a choice. To disrespect even one of these authors is to disrespect the entire project of this panel, and thus to disrespect everyone who has spent half a year working hard on it in order to offer something valuable to the world.

Please be mindful. Please enjoy.

 

Beatitudes,

Fox Frazier-Foley, Editor

Better Than Television

Her ankles swole up
and she leaned on a
sprinkler key like a cane.
My husband and me
had separate beds, she said,
but the rug was
wore out between ’em.

Will’s White Hen

He carried her under
his arm but when he
found her with her feet
up in the air he couldn’t
eat her. Of 150 lifetime
eggs she’d laid 108.
Pity.
 

______________________________
Alisa Golden writes, makes art, and teaches bookmaking with a side of letterpress printing at California College of the Arts in Oakland. She founded and edits Star 82 Review, and her work has been published in several magazines including 100 Word Story, NANO Fiction, Nanoism, and DIAGRAM, among others. She is the author of Making Handmade Books and lives in the one-square-mile city of Albany, California.

 

/move/

We are the sum of our choices in a boxing gym. Open your sternum, autopsy style. His
mesodermal layers boast, “I like to spoon.” Minute hands and low towel stock are enemies along
with The 52nd hour of the Today Show. It isn’t today anymore when it’s thirty for thirty. Glide
and Lift. Lift and separate. Self help yourself to see over that Basu ball wall. Matted hair
kingdoms swat team the locker room close out sale. Straddle, grind, sex shop the best ripped up
spots, or stay still like a vine growing inwardly – it doesn’t matter. I refuse to change my phone
number for that juiced up smoothie brain freeze cock tease. Everyone needs an extra downward
dog, a streamlined cubby, an organized pro-organizer, slow and fast twitch fibers.

 

/valve/

My xx balks at algebraic equations.
Variable “n” chooses storm shelter
over internet connection.
Big brains shut up in a shed.

We all went missing in university
basements. It is awful,
I know, until it isn’t
to float in a jam jar.

Formaldehyde hose humble pies itself,
twists into No Access Pass chromosomes.
Involuntary walking like a throat
changing its mind,
like hearing verses listening.

Which one? Or eight?
While we attend tag sales,
an open and shut barbed wire
purse mobilizes,

wants to see how it feels
on the outside,
shuns its own velvety walls.
Fluidize solids, or slurries,
seal a choice switch blade.

Open a mechanical greeting card.
Thieve my face, now
on a bumper sticker
even low pressure systems knew

I was lost and found on a milk carton.
The fridge door swings open-
poorly installed.

 
/statoblast/
(statoblasts are masses of cells that function as “survival pods”)

I obsessively count tentacles.
The sunburst feelers at the end – colicky muppet hair
Adorable in its minuteness
if it wasn’t attached to the parent colony

Your globule prism escaped pod into my time out.
Carried along on animals or floating vegetation,
like a shoplifter who stole my favorite lip glass
you stole my heart.

Blast me to the core,
hang onto my divided cells,
survive freezing and desiccation
I cannot cuddle you in diseased waters

A secret sedan lover- why are humans afraid of multiple, flailing limbs?
There is a center, a sun.
Long fingers taste, grope.
We are accustomed to the language of the torso.

A gooey center is the best part
in molten chocolate cake.
Synapse me a home,
a Guggenheim.

Veins are excruciating.
To see them lying in the road
or on the slab
or inside something’s something.

I gather you under the microscope
push you away from where you want to go.
A frog toe shaped algae waterbed.
Blind little bat.

Like Lear, you stumbled when you saw.

 

 

 

 

is the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications,) Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, 2014,) and Backyard Poems (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2015.) Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, The Poetry Storehouse, Bareknuckle Poet: Journal of Letters, Quail Bell Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Flapperhouse, and Hobart.

Jeffrey Pethybridge—Striven, the Bright Treatise
Noemi, 2013
Page Length: 194
Retail: $25

A reality of the postmodern milieu is that a work must be understood not only by what it does but also by what it cannot possibly do. Language, we know, is a flawed and failing vehicle, always falling short of the nonverbal reality toward which it might be directed. Poetry, then, as a radical engagement with language, is a radical, perpetual experiment in failure.

Jeffrey Pethybridge’s debut collection Striven, the Bright Treatise (Noemi 2013) is a monumental failure, but not on account of its brilliant machinery—rather, it fails because it must—because it seeks, quixotically, in Sisyphean adamance, to confront an impossible subject: the suicide of Pethybridge’s brother in 2007. Striven is mourning: a ritual toward acceptance—a stay against the effacement of history.

In the book’s Appendix we find a eulogy dated 3/17/07. It begins:

“We are speaking and praying today less in order to say something, than to assure ourselves with the human voice that we are together in the same thought and feeling. We all know with what difficulty one finds the right words when faced with this moment, when all the common usages of speech seem either inadequate or vain. Although speaking justly is impossible, but so too, would be silence, or absence, or some other refusal to share one’s sadness, for the work of mourning—and it is a particular kind of labor—requires bringing an end to the stupefying pain of this loss.”
(“Appendix”)

This statement can be understood as an articulation of the book’s project: to enact “a particular kind of labor” which seeks to confront loss beyond description. When words fail, to what can the poet turn for stability—for location—except form? Striven is a necessarily obsessive book, and what it lacks in topical range it exudes in formal ingenuity. This is not merely a collection of poems, it is an art book: a visual and tactile experience that pushes the limits of reading, and in so doing takes seriously (and as opportunity) the materiality of language.

“The melancholy science being now sovereign
Science the now sovereign melancholy being
Being now melancholy silence the sovereign
Silence the now sovereign melancholy being
Now sovereign begin the melancholy silence
Melancholy silence being the sovereign now”
(“The Chronicle of the King of the Lonely Grave”)

Pethybridge’s syntactic gymnastics subtly negotiate meaning, and in so doing nudge the reader into the interstices between language and that toward which language points (truth? reality? understanding?), which always eludes rational grasp. In the tradition of the avant-garde (and Oulipo in particular) Striven features a fleet of poems physically constrained by anagrams and visual arrangements reminiscent of Apollinaire’s Calligrams, the most remarkable of which is a fold-out poem in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge. This poem (titled “Striven, the Bright Treatise, being a vocabulary for Tad Steven Pethybridge (1962-2007)”) utilizes only the letters found in Pethybridge’s late brother’s name.

This formal strategy—combining anagrammatic transposition with concrete/visual symbolism—is also present in “The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book,” a serial poem that cuts into and out of the larger schema of the collection. “The Book of Lamps,” to quote the book’s Notes, “is composed of 128 lines, one for each of the 128 light poles on the Golden Gate Bridge.” It is presented in bursts of octaves sprinkled throughout the larger manuscript in sets of four, and makes use of the anagrams “palms,” “psalm,” and “lamps.” In taking form literally, Pethybridge attempts to construct objects against meaninglessness.

“Against the tide of definition, custom, ecclesiastical law, against the crown, against
the book, against the slanders written in self-homicide, self-murder,
against the slanders written in felo de se, against

even the bloody-minded warrior-cults, with their gorgeous Valkyries bearing the
reckless, cut-down bodies of heroes to Valhalla, that keg-rich heaven,
that would slander the lonely and exiled woman…

We wrote—operas, odes and propaganda, the usual fare—for the Griffin, what could
we do, we were defeated, and politically humiliated, we thought too
much, we were black-comedians happy that we weren’t widows, or

orphans, or amputees waiting for machine-limbs. ‘You there, poet’
the Griffin purred, ‘sing me a song.’ And because there should be no
war much less civil war, which is rightly called political suicide, I did.”
(“Against Suicide”)

In “Against Suicide,” Pethybridge offers a litany of strophes that work against suicide. This is a means of resistance—being against something in the political sense. But the preposition here also enacts a physical metaphor: these poems are written against suicide in the way that a painter paints against a canvas—against the blank, silent void, the artist makes meaning. Against suicide, Pethybridge constructs extravagant machines that do the work of mourning: the necessary, “particular kind of labor” in the book’s Appendix.

Against suicide Pethybridge offers excess: an excess of intellects and emotions, of perspectives and narratives, of words and forms. This excess is enacted formally with a series of pages blackened entirely with ink, which are often used to separate sections in the book. These black pages, in the 17th century tradition of “mourning pages” in which the printer pours out an excess of ink to honor the dead, are the opposite of the empty canvas, the void—the difficulty of their “understanding” rests not in what they lack but in their overwhelming presence: these pages say so much—too much—at once—that individual words and letters cannot be extracted from the whole to which they belong. This is the grief of abundance—and gratitude—which is also beyond words.

Against suicide Pethybridge not only paints in forms but in data.

“Radically insufficient: at the root,
incapable of making—the material
and sensuous forms of care and sense life
demands. And what really makes for
sufficient preparation for death? My own
practice consists, thus far, of some
training in research, a dull hope
in ascent through research, therefore,
the habit of reading, therefore
the habitat of schools, cafes, museums,
libraries trains etc.”
(“Written in Grease-Pencil on a Large Mirror”)

While there are passages of Striven imbued with incredibly moving emotional exposure, there is also a prominent intellectual apparatus that seeks to approach suicide in its philosophical, theological, sociological and political contexts. Accordingly, we encounter authorities as towering and varied as Dante, Milton, Camus, Augustine, Eliot, Durkheim, Deleuze, Cesaire, Zukofsky, Donne, Arendt, Sophocles, Lacan, Stein, Plato, Seneca, Homer, Virgil and Catullus. In all of this we see that language’s wrestling with meaning is inextricably involved in the mind’s impossible task of understanding. Against suicide Pethybridge positions an army of intellects, and in this opposition research becomes a grasping after knowledge suffused with apposite desperation, and its findings (and failings) produce a field of mourning that is experienced collectively. In this, Pethybridge calls attention to the public problem of suicide, and in so doing elevates private mourning into something that can be engaged collectively. 

This is ultimately the goal of any elegy: to create a symbolic structure that allows the individual or community to remember and encounter the dead, and thereby resolve the metaphysical tension between life and oblivion both for the lost and the living. In the eulogy in the Appendix, Pethybridge writes, “I want desperately to keep hearing him talk about songs.” Striven’s anagrammatic techniques quite literally build his brother into a poetics that takes seriously its presence as music. Time and again we are reminded that we are bodies, and that poems are bodies with singing parts. If the mind is wounded in its metaphysical wrestling, the body—the spirit—the human—is healed and held together in necessary song.

 

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning, is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).