You don’t need me to tell you that three days ago, there was yet another mass shooting. You also don’t need me to tell you that “another mass shooting” is no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to American news in the past couple decades, and especially in the past two years.
And you definitely don’t need me to tell you that there have been thousands of people having thousands of unique conversations all weekend about this – about any of it: the six victims, seven including the killer himself; mass shootings; gun violence; the need for (or overblown concern about) gun restrictions; treatment of mental illness (or lack thereof); 24-hour news cycles and the media’s glorification of lone killers…the list goes on.
Maybe I’m just deflecting from the real issues here, but… I don’t want to write about any of it at the moment.
I want to write, actually, about a poem.
On Huff Po yesterday, poet and poetry reviewer Seth Abramson shared what he describes as a “remix poem,” using every word that Elliot Rodger spoke in his final YouTube video, and nothing more.
I’ll let Abramson describe for himself his motivation in composing the poem:
The aim of this metamodern poem is to turn on their heads the words of hatred Elliot Rodger left behind him as he exited this world. The author condemns in the strongest terms the actions of Elliot Rodger; the aim here is to rescue language from the perversion of language, not to glorify an individual whose actions were incontrovertibly evil. Note that this poem is intended as an address to, not an address from, Elliot Rodger.
I’ll also let you decide, using your own parameters, how “successful” the poem is – if you found it moving or trite, persuasive or simply meh.
After writing my own poems in response to current events – one of which was a remix in response to the Newtown shooting – what I want to know is this: how useful are poems in politics? And not just any politics, but tragedies?
And are those even the right questions? Is the ideal for any political poem to be “useful”?
I don’t know.
But I also can’t shake the first reaction I had to Abramson’s remix, which was: nothing.
And that’s not meant as a judgment of the quality of Abramson’s poem, or of Abramson as a poet. The simple explanation might be that Abramson’s poem was more cerebral and removed from the people most affected – the victims, of course – than I expected it to be, the poem having appeared so quickly after the shooting itself.
And while I don’t buy into the complaint that Abramson is glorifying Rodger, I don’t think he’s exactly condemning him either. Rather, his poem focuses on the redemption of language as it was used by Rodger, but not on what Rodger’s words represented: a vitriol that executed much more destruction than words ever could.
I can’t speak to what a political poem “should” or “shouldn’t” be, but maybe I’ve at least answered the question for myself:
A poem, in my mind, is useful in politics to the extent that it can help us (either as an audience or an author) to see a situation more complexly.
I suppose that in the end, Abramson’s poem did just that.
Talking Leaves 