Tragipoetics IV

On Seth Abramson's "Last Words for Elliot Rodger," or Timeliness

from KTLA

Tragipoetics I
Tragipoetics II
Tragipoetics III

NB: I realize in writing this post I am wading into a proper quagmire. There are lots of issues here which I feel very strongly about and I understand that I am also addressing an audience for whom these issues are also the source of heavy emotional response. I myself had a strong emotional response to Rodger’s mass murder as well as the reasons for it, which I admit will be hard to escape while discussing his words and his actions.

I also accept that I am not fully capable of expressing all sides of this issue, which is also not my goal. My goal in this post is to look at Abramson’s poetic examination into Rodger’s language and how we as poets (and people) process trauma and tragedy through poetry.

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Rarely do we get such a comprehensive view into the words of a killer. We are often left wondering what the motivation for a heinous crime could have been. Equally often, it seems, we are left covering the entire incident as purely a mental health issue and moving forward without investigating further. In the case of Elliot Rodger, we have various forms of media, specifically videos and text, from which to extrapolate and discuss his actions in Santa Barbara. What is simple here is the basic motivation: Rodger blamed women as a whole for his problems. Whatever mental health issues he had were exacerbated, it seems, by the company he kept, by how he viewed himself and his life. And he targeted women due to his own sense of entitlement towards sex and other intimacy.

Ultimately, Rodger’s actions have led to a discussion which we should have been having all along about gender and entitlement in our culture. Patriarchy hurts everyone and it seems that while Rodger’s anger, mental illness and other issues directly led to these events, the systemic views held up by much of society provided him the artifice by which to act. It is not one group or one person at fault here: it is the whole of society who must evaluate and respond to the cultural causes of this horrendous crime. Rodger found other people online who either introduced him to or reaffirmed his pre-existing ideas about how women somehow owed men their sexuality and bodies. While Rodger’s mental health issues caused the hyperbolic violence that took place, the various groups with which he associated provided the language and tone Rodger used in his various messages. That Rodger had mental health issues cannot – and should not – be denied. But nor should the cultural context in which his thoughts and actions appeared.

As people were just beginning to process this tragedy, Seth Abramson’s poem, published by Huffington Post, emerged to “remix” the words of Rodger into a poem to explore the nature of this tragedy via its linguistic attributes. Abramson, it seems, sees this work as a sort of “first responder” poem, the initial salvo into the discussion of Rodger’s language and motivations. However, the uproar caused by Abramson’s work has led to, at best, a murky response in which the simple posting of the poem is being examined versus the goal of the poem. At worst, Abramson has been referred to as opportunistic, taking advantage of the tragedy in Santa Barbara as a way of furthering his own career/web presence while displaying his own privilege via the poem and its location of publication.

Abramson’s poem raises a critical question: Is poetry really about “first response” capability? I do not believe it is, as I have written over the course of these trauma poetics posts. What process has Mr. Abramson gone through to understand Rodger’s motivations and emotions via his language within the few days between Rodger’s actions and Abramson’s publication of the poem? While the rest of the poetry community, along with the general public, is attempting to discuss the cultural issues which led to Rodger’s crime, Abramson is already posting a poem which attempts to use the killer’s language against itself.

The issue I hope I have been delving into in these posts is the role of poetry (and its exploration of language) in the processing of tragedy and trauma. I do not believe poetry is the first response but rather the last, the culmination of thought and experience at the point where it has settled into the mind. We must first take stock in tragedy, to try and understand the depth and reach of that tragedy and I question the idea of poets as first responders. We must begin to process tragedies and our emotional response to them before engaging in poetics to respond to them.

Poetry is, in part, a process of thinking through, a way of seeing all things around and boiling them into the main artifice of communication and expression. Language is not the oldest form of expression but is one which allows us to articulate our most complex thoughts, which is to say that when an event with complex grounding occurs.

As Abramson asks in his introduction “Can hateful words be turned against themselves and become, instead, a vehicle for amity and compassion?” I think for Abramson, this was an attempt at thinking through, of processing, but I believe there were several issues with his efforts:

1) His work came too soon, before we as a poetry community or we as a society could really even discuss the range of interrelated issues involved in Rodger’s thoughts, commentary and actions. For many, the tragedy in Santa Barbara brought the issues of sexism and misogyny into the public view for those who were generally ignorant of it. For Abramson’s poem to be published in such a public manner so quickly after the tragedy had occurred contributed to the reaction the work and its author received.

2) His poem does not truly attempt explore the issues at the heart of the mass murder and cultural significance surrounding it, perhaps as a result of his zeal to get the poem published quickly. The poem attempts to appropriate Rodger’s language but feels in reading as though there is no in-depth exploration of the cultural themes surrounding the events. As a result, the poem feels not only exploitive of tragedy but also seems, at points, to sympathize with Rodger’s views. I believe that Abramson’s rush to publish the poem in the midst of the tragedy led to a lack of seeming awareness of all these issues in the poem, leading to a negative response from many in the poetry community.

3) He did so while being Seth Abramson. Many in the poetry community seem to have negative feelings about him. This is not to say that the poem would have been praised had it been published by someone else but I believe that Abramson’s role in the poetry community did affect the response to his work. Also, it seems that not only the timing of the post as well as the venue in which it was published led to this response. A poem, normal publication of which would have been ignored by the public at large, was suddenly on Huffington Post and seemingly representative of a community which is also generally ignored. Was this the poem we wanted front and center in the wake of such an event? Even if Abramson’s goal was only to present his work, this was now the most visible poem in response to Rodger’s manifesto and “Elliot, you slay me/And I love you,” regardless of its attempt at empathizing with someone who was brought to this point by his mental health issues and the hatred of those with whom he found a sense of community, is not the sentiment anyone wants to see in a public space regardless of context.

I do believe Abramson was correct on this: poetry should be free to attempt dismantling ideas and events. I doubt there are many who would disagree with him on this front but the question remains as to whether or not his poem truly manages this. While I take Abramson at his word that he was not attempting to offend (though he says a poem has the right to offend, with which I agree), it seems the poem was not fully engaging with the situation. Abramson’s desire to be the voice of poetry in the public sphere seems to have collided with the need to be among the first to respond.

Abramson may say that my questioning of his timeliness is an attempt to rein poetry in and he is probably not wrong. However, I do believe that, in context of tragedy, poetry has an important role to play in processing and recovery.

Tragipoetics III

"Prose" v "Poetry"

Berlin, 1945

Tragipoetics I and II

First, I should say that the divide between prose and poetry is not one to be worried over, at least not for this post. In fact, it seems that the hybrid nature of genre pulls out amazing work. I do not want anyone who might be reading this to think that I am attempting to draw some line in the sand between prose and poetry. Indeed, I believe any attempts at drawing a line are superfluous. The lines between genre are blurring further every day, as they ought, and I think we need to think beyond genre in general.

That said, for the sake of this post, I am thinking of prose (fiction/non-fiction/etc.) as a thing versus poetry as a separate thing. Where the line is will likely vary in this post. I assume you have your own line by which you divide things and I assume we can use either definition as we move forward. Again, this is not a series of posts concerned with the divide of genre but rather with how we process trauma and tragedy through art in general.

So, where does prose differ from poetry? We generally think of prose, whether fiction or non-fiction, as some kind of narrative-driven form. There are characters and dialogue and a definite beginning and end which to work from and towards. A poem, of course, does not need to have ANY of these things- a poem can go beyond these stricter definitions and work without them just as easily. Now, some would argue a poem ought to have these things as well but I quite obviously do not feel that way.

No, a poem need not resolve anything. A poem is a space in which a question can be raised, an issue can be brought in, some trauma revealed, without ever having to deal with it directly. As written in earlier posts on this subject, a poem has the option of being the saturated form of experience, focusing more purely on sense than on any of the structured artifacts that prose writing provides. Of course, some of my favorite prose works also ignore all of these rules and regulations, so something to consider.

Poetry, to me, however, is pure language, a distilled version of our developed and evolving construction. It is concerned with how words and meaning work, rather than attempting to create some kind of progression out of them. And because poetry has the option to be concerned with language alone and not with these other factors, I believe poetry has a unique ability to deal with processing experience. This is, again and again, not to say that other forms of art cannot do the same, just that I believe the poetic work is situated in such a way as to allow for it to thrive in this kind of processing.

What do I mean by "pure?" I am not suggesting that poetry is by any means "clean" or "unadulterated" -- far from it. Poetry can delve  into things that I believe may not be able to delve into otherwise. Nothing can stop a poetic work from getting gritty or muddy -- what would be the point? All I mean by pure is that language is generally what it is, the base of other thoughts and images. It is in placing words together that we create. Maybe we can even boil down and say that it is letters which are atomic and words which are molecules, etc. They are the building blocks and bring meaning along with them inherently.

All that said, I believe it is prose which allows for the set up of tragedy. It is in prose where the description of an event can create a therapeutic result. In Robert Coover's "The Babysitter," there are traumatic events wrapped up in the mundane: the girdle, what seems to be the rape of a young woman-- these abnormal things begin with a perfectly normal evening. Coover's language is Charles Bernstein's "chaotic thought" that exists in poetry and there is nothing but chaos in "The Babysitter." Coover here, perhaps better than a lot of poets, captures trauma through language versus narrative, its hybrid nature only adding to the trauma for the reader because there is very little to latch onto here.

Obviously, there is no "therapy" to be had in Coover's work: "The Babysitter" is void of any true resolution, which brings it closer to the realm of experience than narrative for me. However, whereas it is designed as a work of fiction (there is a narrative and characters and dialogue, etc.) we have to look at it as though it is the retelling of a tragedy in the lives of an American family and their employee. This retelling is what prose can do that poetry would find difficult to achieve: it can give us the moments in vivid detail without giving us the experience of these events. We get no sense of how these characters are processing, either during or after, these events. That, I believe, is where a poem can come in.

Tragipoetics II

Trauma

Thomas Hoepker's photo from Brooklyn on 9/11/2001 http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/09/i_took_that_911_photo.html

The earlier Tragipoetics post

Trauma is the aftermath of tragedy, though plenty of tragedies continue over a time period. It is in the long-term that poetry could have a more important role to play for it is poetry and art in general that can be tied to memory and become the artifice for the rendering of memory. While art has a role in the direct aftermath of tragedy, it is in trauma where art dwells.

In many ways, we can heal tragedy: bandages, surgery, whatever it takes– there may be some way of moving beyond an event. Even emotional tragedies, where the body is uninjured, allow for recovery: things return to normal, etc. But in trauma, there is no "normal." It is the mind which cannot recover from tragedy, even if a person has attempted to move beyond consciously. Here, poetry has the ability to allow someone to work through the experience, even as they relive it, without having to give an audience the direct marker of that event.

The abyss hides in trauma. Consider the number of suicides by those who have witnessed tragedy. From soldiers returning from wars (especially the last decade) to survivors of the Sago Mine Disaster, it is those reeling from the effects of tragedy who are unable to cope, to move on. Obviously poetry cannot help those who are severely emotionally damaged, but it seems poetry here might be a way of working through an event, no matter how painful. When we are faced with tragedy and forced to encounter the abyss, it is like trying to escape quicksand: struggling only sinks one in further and poetry ought to be the rope to pull the victim out.

Like absurdity, the fourth method for handling trauma must be simply ignoring it. We as Americans are getting used to gun-related violence, either the shooting of an individual or mass shootings. Yes, they are on television endlessly, but as Americans, we seem to cope best by ignoring and moving on. However, for individuals directly victimized by tragedy, the brain does not simply move on.

Strangely, though, it seems that through media, we experience a kind of play with trauma, in that we obsess over tragedy – we cannot look at it but cannot look away at the same time. We could discuss how much we are the media but ultimately, when events occur, television ratings go up. We may be disgusted by it but ultimately, we cannot escape. This is a function of collective trauma we have suffered in the television age and our ability to be sucked into the replay of tragedy is merely our access to that tragedy having exponentially exploded.

Poetry seemingly has a similar ability: to come back to tragedy and find ways of channeling possible trauma.¹ However, where television is entirely passive and the viewer is force-fed information, poetry is an active engagement with trauma. It is through this active engagement that those suffering with trauma can have agency in dealing with their issues. Whereas trauma forces the sufferer to lose agency, poetry allows for a space in which one can directly take on tragedy and trauma that comes from it.

John Berryman is an obvious example of a traumatized person writing poetry, though it is hard to say if there was any intent. The suicide of Berryman’s father no doubt casts a long shadow onto Berryman’s life and creative output. In The Dream Songs, Berryman revisits the death of his father on several occasions, including in Song 145:

                                              he only, very early in the morning,  

                                              rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window 

                                              and did what was needed.

Berryman shows the hallmark of trauma here, an inability escape the event. Even as he offers his father forgiveness in the lines that follow, Berryman’s life is so warped by the tragedy in Florida that his poems must spend a portion of their time wrapped up in the event and its meaning to his life.

This is not an admonishment of Berryman– far from it. Obviously suicide is one of life’s most traumatic events and the death of one’s parent by their own hand even worse to the child affected by it. Berryman is not complaining or attempting to take advantage of this traumatic event by any means. He is merely attempting to deal with through the artifice which he, by the 1960s, had placed himself within.

Berryman’s work up to Dream Songs generally did not deal with his father’s suicide or, for that matter, personal events. Coming from the New Critical mold, Berryman generally avoided personal discussion and, even when he was later lumped in with the “confessional” poets around him, was disgusted by it. It is, however, safe to assume that Berryman was dealing with his own trauma in the work he did in the last decade of his life before his own suicide.

It is hard to say if Berryman’s central trauma led him to write poetry but it is difficult not to see a connection. Between poetry and his vices, it seems Berryman was somewhere between burying his traumas and attempting to justify them, again, not outside the realm of normal response. Berryman’s road to poetry seems to have been fairly normal, having read the works of Yeats as a teen and then coming to the writing of poetry in college under Mark Van Doren at Columbia. Perhaps the arts really do attract with the greatest inner turmoil.

Poetry can be a tool for those dealing with trauma in the aftermath of tragedy but it also attracts those traumatized by what it can reveal without revealing directly the nature of tragedy. In abstraction one can mask, cut and cover, trauma because it is abstraction which allows for one to maintain a barrier between themselves and event. Poetry, through its use of our most basic system of communication gives us the ability to deal the events which are most agitating to our psyches.

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1 Again, this is not exclusive to poetry. Indeed, people use painting quite often or music to deal with trauma but expression through poetry is perhaps the more common trope.

Tragipoetics

I edited the image from this article http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/boston-massacre-article-1.1317652

Whereas art is the experience of a thing and poetry is the essence of art because it uses language, poetry seems to be the primary method for handling trauma because it forces us to deal with the derivation of fact (experience) through our own constructed and evolved tool (language). Poetry is the tool for looking into the abyss and as trauma and tragedy expose us to the abyss, it is the poet's job in trauma to pull back away from it.

Another way to look at the abyss is to consider it the realm of the absurd. In that we have a difficult time reconciling that we can know nothing about the meaning of life, therein lies the abyss, an unending drop into the quest for some kind of greater meaning. As we know, there are three ways of handling the absurd, simply, religion, suicide or, most paradoxically in time of tragedy, acceptance of the absurd. This is to say that one must accept not only the existence of the abyss on its own terms but also accept that it is nearly impossible to combat, leaving us with the other two readily available options.

Religion and suicide are easy forms of denial, a fourth but seemingly unfocussed on approach to the absurd. Why Camus did not note our ability to blow things off and ignore them is beyond me. Perhaps religion can be seen as a blindness towards the existence of an abyss but religious faith implies that one has seen into the abyss rather than avoided thinking about it. You could say that most humans take none of the three routes Camus gives us and simply exist without long-term consideration of abyssal studies. Perhaps religion's true goal is to indoctrinate at an early enough age that the absurd never becomes a factor.

Regardless, if one is aware that life is absurd, the three possibilities make sense, the first two more so (out of ease, really) and despite our feelings on them, can we blame others for being unable to accept the absurd? It seems that insanity can be the outcome of looking into the abyss and not being able to pull back out of it, but it is an involuntary decision. Religion, it can be said, is involuntary as well: one does not choose to believe, one simply believes. While all faiths suggest choice is the manner by which one arrives at religion, it seems that the fanatic has no choice but to be pulled into religion and do the bidding of those who control that aspect of religion for them. It seems that this is one form of terrorism.

Tragedy and the traumas that inevitably follow are the moment in which we are faced with the absurdity of life and the abyss simultaneously. "Why me?" people are inclined to ask, whether or not they are the direct victim of a tragic event or if they are affected by it indirectly (loss of a loved one or perhaps the witness to a tragedy). This is, of course, life's absurdity, that anything bad could happen at any moment and that ultimately, life has a way of continuing, assuming that is the path chosen. When faced with the abyss, there must be some moment in which the routes are either rationalization, accepting that there is no reason this happened to the victim, or for the mind to be incapable of understanding why. Long-term, it seems the subconscious is the one unable to rationalize and accept the absurdity of the situation, causing systemic issues after the event. Even if we are able to say to ourselves "There is nothing I could have done," it appears as though the subconscious is less forgiving of trauma, choosing to replay the event or look for markers in other activities or symbols of the tragedy and bringing the trauma boiling back to the surface. Obviously a psychologist or psychiatrist is much more capable of discussing how we process trauma, consciously or subconsciously.

If it is the poet who is to pull us back away from the abyss, then it is because poetry exposes the absurd because it does not have to contain statements or explanations. Poetry is allowed to avoid direct comment and gives us, as mentioned, the derivation, or the measure of change. While writing already provides the way of thinking through complex thoughts, it is in poetry where language is pressed beyond this and must strive for more than the retelling of event or concept. It is poetry that has the ability to obfuscate event and force focus to experience. When Mark Nowak went to the Ford plant in St. Paul, Minnesota to have laid-off workers share their experience of being laid off, they did so through poems because it was poetry that allowed them to express their emotions in a more complex manner. While they could have simply (or maybe it is not so simple?) expressed anger or sadness, it was through the act of writing poems that the workers were able to relieve the tension that their personal trauma created. In the case of the workers, we knew their story but we could not know the experience without poetry.

So in larger tragedies (there is no good way to word this), those that more directly influence a whole community versus a public within it, poetry continues to be a way to respond to those events. Whatever our personal beliefs, Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" is a response to tragedy through poetry. Obviously it makes some sense for the poet to turn to their craft when faced with a catastrophic event, but it seems poetry was already at the far end of the journey in Baraka's case. While the tragedy of 9/11 is depersonalized in Baraka's poem, his anger is directed towards the establishment who, in his opinion, allowed the event to occur. Again, while disagreeing with this view, it is a response regardless of its merits as a poem or Baraka as a poet.¹

In Baraka's case, poetry is already his outlet, but here it serves a variety of purposes such as political statement, accusation, catharsis, and others. Poetry, in its nature as derivative, is what allows room for tragedy and cataloging of experience versus time-line of event. Surely expression does not have its only outlet in poetic speech but it is in this speech act that layers are expected and provided.

[to be expanded]

Works Cited:

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.
Heidegger, Martin. "...Poetically Man Dwells..."
". What Are Poets For?

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1 Perhaps an idea for another time- it was amazing to see a poem be met with criticism in the public, considering poems are, at best, ignored by the public.^↩