In the aftermath of tragedies, people often turn to poetry—to find expression and be consoled, to grieve or rage, to remember and even reanimate the dead. The poem can also be a powerful critical blade to cut through political reverberations that hang over and distort certain events. Following September 11th, the New Yorker, for instance, published a well-known poem that includes the refrain “try to praise the mutilated world,” and since last week’s terrible news of bombings in Paris and Beirut and elsewhere, as the war machines continue on, more than one person on social media could be observed touting this very poem as a necessary response. And yet I cringe, though the public grief of an individual should not, under normal circumstances, be appropriate matter for scrutiny. But overwhelming structures and patterns? I would hope so. I say this because so often poems are quick to sentimentalize tragedy; to cheapen suffering by leaping over it. That is, to avoid the mutilated, disfigured, empty aspects of a catastrophe while emphasizing their sensational, didactic or comforting appeal.
All year poets have been intensely debating aesthetic and ethical boundaries, especially centered around questions of race and representation, but branching out to almost every aspect of identity and mode of formal experimentation imaginable. As the culture at large begins this conversation, too, in the wake of protests around college campuses, it should be remembered that no activist, no theoretician, no critic I know is advocating for an end to encountering otherness; for speaking to/across historically determined power dynamics; for re-imagining and witnessing. In Joyelle McSweeney’s excoriating elegy for a brutally murdered Mexican woman whose death underscores a global women’s issue we see little coverage about, I see no rote presentation of suffering, nor rush to evade the unsavory, difficult aspects of this very specific history. The poem is, however, terribly disturbing, uneasy making. And yet I think McSweeney—an acclaimed anthologist, essayist and teacher and publisher of politically/aesthetically challenging work—is very shrewd to foreground Baudelaire in such an elegy. His presence might, in fact, represent one too-familiar mode of aestheticizing violence that McSweeney cannot pretend to be completely detached from, even as her work importantly acknowledges a system of violence against woman that includes questions of money, labor, locality as well as histories of slavery and death. (Such acknowledgement certainly not what I associate with traditional Euro-American elegies.) Still, there is no checklist for an “appropriate” elegy, per se. But I do think in our social-media age, now more than ever, it’s humbling and humanizing to see poets of considerable gifts as hers confront crises in their complexity without succumbing to the mechanics of objectification, of rhetorical charades. Whoever you are, I dare this poem to reach you. It does not ask for your praise. Be warned: Joyelle McSweeney is a radical citizen-poet of the world.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
Alejandra Negrete
bleat bleat
I get my neck out for the knife scene
a green smell, a green scene,
because the nose bone’s so close to the brain bone
and the brain doesn’t have a bone
only a series of sea walls and sea barriers
tennish balls roll oafishly over the sea
and knock against the blood brain barrier
a tennis brat oaths and curses
every kind of lapsus
every slip of the tongue
marshy
licky
metacarpals
flight of women chased into the sky
commingled
constellations
spine bones and breast bones
fingerbones and ankle bones
skyline and strip mall
stape and stirrup
platform sandal, skinny jean
Alejandra Negrete
executed in the bathroom
on her first afternoon
the sound we call static
is really full of activity
percussing
and injuring itself
and sending the message back
through the sea shell
to the ear canal
to beat against the heart
how long can it beat itself up
a fucked-up clock radio
broadcasts its handful of beats like gravel
hurled at a seawall
bursts its plastic carapace apart
the heart of time
hurl the phrase like money
from the coach of Death
made of pulp, germs and linen
the blood of slaves
the work of women
even Baudelaire in his crown of syphilis
wanted to work harder
every day
wanted to become a clock of work
it rains, it hurts
crown of thinking, jacket of spleen
jacket of little complaining proteins cossetting the nerve
full metal jacket, magazine
of coquettes touring the Louvre
on the arm of Baudelaire
blushing into his notebook
blushing into a squib
even a kind of cream dissolving into the soup
even a kind of t-shirt
around the torso of the teenager
who is taking a break in the grave
in the mass grave like a mall
breaking up with her boyfriend
reclining
in her little plastic sheathe
it’s raining ropes
which teen will fly out on the rope swing into the soup
her body
jerking the afternoon thick as carrageen
its album of albumen
its cream laid pages
jerkoff
azimuth bitumen
bitter secretion in the back of the mouth
wing of madness
mass carapace
that spasms
all the bones lock together
and wing into the air
as a clock strikes
as a thought strikes
its crazy gong
the rope breaks the teen plunges
into the same river
sound keeps traveling
then it is gone
then it comes back
like an aftertaste
how much Death
can swim
how long after eating
il pleut
it rains
ropes
of cardiac tissue
time ropeswings
credit union
bone fragments
platform sandals
two hour commutes
it rains
all Death’s afternoon
