Here you go, a forlorn occasion to keep this semi-promise from a few weeks ago, but when else, I sup

Here you go, a forlorn occasion to keep this semi-promise from a few weeks ago, but when else, I suppose?—Maybe someday I’ll post the other good poem I wrote in that period, “and Aphasia and,” written in a daze the day after Columbine and within an hour of first reading “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”Pretty overwritten, overwrought, but I still like it. I don’t know what I was thinking really. It was a Wednesday night, April 21, 1999, of course. I always had Wednesday nights to myself. That was the night my mother and stepfather would go out to “play nine holes”—in quotation marks because this phrase holds no reality for me—with their friends. I was between bouts of relationship drama, so no two-hour phone calls with their squalls of laughter and tears. I was watching the news, one of those weekly shows with Diane Sawyer or whoever, replaying the disaster footage, a helicopter shot of kids spilling out of the school, grainy footage of Dylan and Eric. That morning, at my school, all the goth kids had been called in to speak with the principal. I think he just asked them if they were okay, not murderously alienated. I only dressed all in black and wore glitter on my face on Fridays, what I called my “goth day”—I didn’t want to be entirely pinned down—so I didn’t qualify for the summons. Our curmudgeonly first-period teacher, an old physics savant pressured to make a statement, told us, and little did he know, “You don’t want to live in a society where something like this is impossible”—because it wouldn’t be a free society. Two weeks later the rumor went around that somebody was going to shoot up the school on May 5, that it would be—where did rumors come from before everyone was online?—the “Cinco de Mayo Massacre.” It was supposed to happen between fifth and sixth periods. Many parents kept their kids out of school that day. (Not mine: my immigrant mother’s son was going to work for the American dream every day of the week. This is a terrible literary cliché but also the way it really happened. Some people will see what I mean.) The assistant principal came over the P.A. and in his nasal whine said they had no evidence there would be any such massacre. He pronounced “Mayo” as in “mayo,” the condiment. We took the whole thing in a spirit of solemn hilariousness; somehow this was thought to be a credible threat, by us if not by the administration, I don’t remember why. Fifth period was art class, my friends and I exchanged half-serious, half-ironic sentimentalities, what we meant to one another, just in case we went out and didn’t come back. When I got to sixth-period English, the teacher congratulated us for having survived. She passed out candy to celebrate.But back on April 21st, a Wednesday, alone in the house on golf night, I read, for the first time and aloud, Whitman’s great elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and then I leapt up from the couch and got a pencil and notebook and wrote this poem. I’d found the word “aphasia” scrawled on an English textbook; after I looked the word up in my enormous unabridged dictionary, I thought the gesture was ironic, and that the word, purely as sound, not as meaning, would be a pretty name for a girl. The observation about the word “and,” and maybe even its association with rivers, I think I swiped from a passage in a critical essay about Hemingway’s use of parataxis (I wrote my junior research paper on A Farewell to Arms). And that’s that. I edited the high school literary journal, so I put it at the end of that year’s edition, granting myself the privilege of the finale. (I already warned you: I’m not Simone Weil. I’m not trying to starve myself here. I will never be a saint.)  I suppose there’s some adolescent male rescue fantasy at work in the poem’s implied narrative, but whatever, that’s a real feeling too. Mostly I just wanted to put words together in that way. You don’t have to have Peter Thiel money to be fucking sick of the exterminationist fantasy of eliminating “ontological evil,” this belief that whole fundamental states of human being and feeling can just be sheared clean off the world and then everything will be fine, because they can’t and it won’t. I mean, somebody left a comment on that Ethel Cain profile in the New York Times saying, and I quote, “Sounds like J. D. Vance.” What goes through people’s minds? It’s a poem. It’s not that it’s not important—it can be the most important thing in the world—but only if you relax. I miss those days of innocent creation, when the world felt newer, when it just came right out of your fingers. Ethel gets it:grew up under yellow light on the street putting too much faith in the make believe[…]say what you want but say it like you mean it with your fists for oncea long, cold war with your kids at the front I’m not going to put up all my juvenilia, don’t worry, just whatever I come across that holds up. If I resent autofiction, it’s because I think the calculated lack of filter disrespects the purpose of a book, which should be shapely. So I would never in a million years write something like Knausgaard or, for example, Fuccboi (I finally caught up with his Contain episode and he did seem like a cool guy so I read the first chapter online but something in me still resists). Out here online, though, where we distribute our personae over the stream in a thousand bits and pieces, that’s a different type of art, of necessity a bit formless, of necessity an art of the self, or anyway a self.Some people come here, I’m sure, for the politics not the poetry, but I have no grand theory or rhetoric about the occasion. Mostly I think reporting local crimes as apocalyptic national news events is actually causal in these matters and that journalists should stop. I have grimmer fears beyond that, but that’s all they are, fears. I only ever skimmed Programmed to Kill. Really, I don’t even want to know. I recently wrote a novel set in 1999, The Class of 2000, but I thought it would be cheap and tasteless to go on and on about Columbine, still less to echo the events with similar happenings in the narrative. There are two blink-and-you’ll-miss-it allusions, separated by more than 200 pages, when two different adult characters fear that my teen hero is a danger. First,“What if there’s something wrong with him after all this? What if violence runs in that family? You know, think about those two little shits out in Colorado.”And then:What if Jack’s serious, furtive, troubled son had finally snapped, gone on the full Dylan and Eric ride, and set fire to a house in which he had never been happy? She liked that about the kid, though—she could never predict what he would do. He might do anything. It added a bit of excitement to her life.Just emotional coloring, as it is to the poem it inspired and with which it has nothing to do. More than the poem I see something in the memory: jump up off the couch and try to create something beautiful! -- source link
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