Better Not to Say: Apology in Poetry
I loathe apologies, though I am quick to apologize for just about anything. At some point I got it into my head that one’s readiness to admit a wrong, to take the blame for whatever harm one might have caused, no matter how miniscule and regardless of intent, is part and parcel of being a decent person and a well-meaning member of society. In truth, I have no problem apologizing for the slight wrongs we bring upon one another in the everyday (a door we forget to hold open for the person walking in behind us, a drink we accidently spill on our dining companion). In these scenarios, to address the wrong and express remorse is enough. What I have issue with is the social relation created by the apology in instances of serious hurt or harm; when words matter only to the extent to which they serve as a place holder for future actions the offending party promises to perform to “make up” for the wrongs caused.
Apologies are, or should be, anathema to poetry. A poem, after all, is not contingent on anything happening outside of it. A poem is understood as a happening in and of itself: the words that make it up have done, are doing, something on the page. Whether the action of poetry is recognized or valued in a given socio-cultural context is another matter. The point is that poems happen; or they make something happen that is not contingent on any other action apart from the reader’s encounter with the text. Apologies, on the other hand, announce the speaker’s willingness to put themselves in the position where somebody else will dictate actions for them to undertake and/or will judge the actions they specifically choose to appease the other.
Judith Butler, in Giving and Account of Oneself, attends to the social context and ethical constraints and demands of what she terms “scenes of address,” where individuals are called on to explain their alleged harmful actions. She writes:
“I have been addressed, even perhaps had an act attributed to me, and a certain threat of punishment backs up this interrogation. And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an ‘I’ and try to reconstruct my deed, showing that the deed attributed to me was or was not, in fact, among them. I am either owning up to myself as the cause of such an action, qualifying my causative contribution, or defending myself against the attribution, perhaps locating the cause elsewhere.”
Following Butler, I am curious as to what “owning up to myself as the cause” of a harm might entail. Specifically, I want to question the ethical-political value of “owning up” considering that these scenes, as Butler notes, tend to occur under some sort of threat, whether it be legal action, social reproach, or the loss of esteem of a beloved other. While for Butler this scene of address leaves the addressee with three options (admitting guilt, qualifying responsibility, and defending oneself), there is, it seems to me, a social expectation that the addressed will assume total responsibility, apologize, and pledge some form of restitution. This pressure, I would argue, has been further augmented by debate and discussion on social media, where the tendency to “pile on” a perceived offender makes apologizing the only reasonable choice and chance for the offending party to be “forgiven” and/or allowed to move on with their lives. I have come to suspect that the social push to admit a wrong and apologize for it quickly (and often publicly) points to a deeper failure in our relating to the vulnerability inherent in our living together.
Jacques Derrida, for example, argues that scenes of apology are anathema to forgiveness, as their transactional nature and the severe power imbalance they create between parties, reduce forgiveness to a sort of contractual agreement. For Derrida, the impulse to forgive is unpredictable, remains latent outside of the self, an occurrence made possible only by the fact of our plurality, of our having to live with each other. As such, it cannot be subject to negotiation; much less can it be left to the whim of a harmed party who demands something — anything — from the offender as a condition for their forgiveness. For Derrida, it is up to the harmed, yes, to decide if they want to forgive or not. But this decision should not/cannot be premised on what the offending party offers in the way of apology or redress. To do so is to enact a harm — or harmful relation — on top of the original harm.
I am curious then as to how poems engage and/or enact the language, the scenes and/or the social relations that both lead to, and result from, apology. Poetic innovation and experimentation are in no way limited to a writer’s ability to press on or play with the confines on form, structure, and language, and on how this pressure and this play allow for new and intriguing sense-making — or sense-altering — possibilities. Poetic experimentation and innovation also take place at the level of its depiction of human relationships. The poem, insofar as it is not bound to the constraints of neither story nor argument, is an ideal space to essay what perhaps cannot be proposed in the prose form. The poem is perhaps a key site where we can afford to extend our ethical horizon.
In this essay, I will look at three instances of apology in poetry: “This is just to say” by William Carlos Williams, “If anyone was offended” by Jason Olsen, and “No Apologies: A Poemfisto” by Carmen Giménez Smith. Specifically, I am interested in exploring what the apology, as enacted or represented in each poem, becomes a generator for as it pertains to love, guilt, policing, forgiveness, and understanding amongst people.
The selection is purely idiosyncratic. I happened on Olsen’s piece (around which this essay is structured) by chance. The poem was included in a journal issue a friend gave me in lieu of discarding it. Reading this poem led me to question how else poems have engaged the language/gesture/concept of apology. And so, I thought of Williams. Because it is one of those poems readers know by heart, even as they may not have sat with or thought seriously about the piece since first encountering it as required reading in school. “No Apologies,” in turn, appears in Giménez Smith’s collection Be Recorder, which I happened to be reading at the time that I was writing this essay.
I. What is Just to Say?
I am teaching my four-year-old to apologize because I want him to grow up to be a decent person and a well-meaning member of society. Though he is quick to say he’s sorry, he is often reticent to admit what he did wrong. But if you stare at him long enough, eventually the words begin to fall out of his mouth in lengthy intervals, which is exactly how I read William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Williams’ speaker seems reticent too. They do not want to fess up to their misdeed. They seem unwilling to ‘just come right out and say it.’ The poem, with its slim lines and drama-infused pauses, enacts a less-than-willing and presumably contrition-filled address. The opening line here is key. The poet’s decision to begin with “I have eaten” as opposed to “I ate” is significant. The former gives the poetic address an almost prayer-like formality, and gravity: One is tempted to read it as “I have sinned.” The latter is markedly more casual, and presumably more in tune with the quick note left on a kitchen counter that the poem is mimicking/mirroring. Thus, the modest, matter of fact tone of the title is immediately erased, and the poem opens itself to the possibility that the admission of guilt is more serious than initially hinted at. At least until the opening of the third stanza, where the speaker openly pleads for or demands forgiveness. But then the apology veers in an unexpected direction: It’s the plums’ fault!
The apology is revealed as a ruse. The guilt-laden expression ‘I have eaten’ is transformed into a guilty pleasure. They’re just plums, after all. And what are a few plums — eaten by a loving and loved other without permission? In effect, what the plums signal to — being so sweet and so cold — is the intimacy between the speaker and their addressee. The note is not one of regret but of loving play: they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold. The poem-note is not to say that I’m sorry. Rather, this is just one more way to say that I’m with you, that we’re together in this life. And that too is delicious. And sweet. And cold. Williams’ speaker is a flirt: they ate the plums just so they could leave the note.
Now, to read Williams’ faux apology poem as a lover’s discourse (Barthes dixit) does not necessarily mean that it does not offer significant insight on the apology as an address and as a social relation. In using the site and language of apology to emphasize the intimacy between the speaker and the addressee, the poem can be read as privileging the context and character of the relationship between two people over the need for one party to apologize to the other for a harm caused. Loving relationships, the poem suggests, can and perhaps even should withstand any number of slights or harms caused by either party. Apologies are unnecessary insofar as what really matters is the fact of the shared life together.
To further insist on, and expand on this point, I would note that Williams’ speaker does not say they’re sorry. Moreover, given the deliciousness of the plums, we have every reason to believe that they are very much not sorry. What they are is expecting to be forgiven. Because, after all, they’re just plums, yes. But also because the speaker and the addressee are in love. And so, the offended party must take it. For love’s sake. In this sense, “This is just to say” posits the apology as a sort of imposition: the addressee not only is missing their plums, they also must attend to their lover’s playful plea (or demand) to be forgiven. Furthermore, I would argue that the poem embraces — and celebrates — the vulnerability inherent to shared life. To make a life with another — both within and outside romantic relationships — includes and implies our willingness to be imposed upon, made uncomfortable, be hurt and/ or otherwise harmed by the other’s actions and be expected as well to somehow learn to live with it.
The ending of the poem, one could argue, in leaving readers with the speaker luxuriating over the other’s plums, emphasizes how lovingly unjust human relations are at their best. In this fashion the poem manages to be flirtatious and sensual and devious and selfish in an instance where the scene of address would call for an entirely different series of sentiments: guilt, worry, remorse. Thus, what is, likely, the most well-known apology poem in American letters is a strikingly — and wonderfully — unapologetic text.
II. If everybody is offended, then nobody is
The present cultural moment in the US does not seem receptive to the inevitability of discomfort as it pertains to living with one another and therefore of letting each other move on, or get on, with their lives. People keep ‘receipts’: evidence of others’ misbehavior in the event they might be useful to hold somebody to account, or evidence of one’s actions if somebody else tries to take one down. In either case, there is always someone looking to hold another to account and/or demand them to apologize publicly for both minor and major wrongs. For the most part this dynamic plays out across social media but can, and does, have consequences beyond Twitter and Facebook.
This is the context for Jason Olsen’s poem “If anyone was offended …”, published in the Fall 2021 edition of Rattle. A cento, it is composed, in its entirety, of lines lifted from public statements made by celebrities in response to public backlash to their perceived violent, hateful, insensitive, or otherwise inappropriate comments and/or behavior. Each line in the poem ends on a footnote where the author provides information regarding who said what and why. The alleged and/or confirmed bad acts range from racially insensitive tweets to romantic affairs to sexual harassment and assault. The poem opens as follows:
I want to start with saying I’m sorry.
I view this situation as one big lie
I repeated a lot of times.
I immediately knew in this situation that it was wrong.
The last few days have been wrenching.
As a kid, I didn’t understand the power of certain words
and how they can hurt.
I clearly had one drink too many.
I convinced myself that the normal
rules didn’t apply.
But if I did behave as he describes,
I owe him the sincerest apology.
These statements, in their original form, circulated widely across social media platforms, were reproduced in news articles and/or investigative reports. They are and will continue to be readily available to the curious and searching. As such, the poem — because this what art presumably does — is an attempt to immortalize, perhaps, the nerve of this people to have said what they said when they were accused of being — or proven to be — what they obviously are: harassers, rapists, racists, ultimately unsavory individuals who wield power and influence across the cultural marketplace. In my reading, Olsen’s poem highlights the hypocrisy of the celebrity apology.
Notice, first, the lack of specificity in the first four lines: sorry about? What situation? In the wrong regarding what exactly? While the poem becomes more specific — referencing certain places, people, and things by name — a level of indeterminacy is latent in the entire piece; a result of its compositional structure, whereby the author takes bits and pieces of text related to events that the poem will not properly go into. Second, consider how following the opening wholesale apologetic statements, the poet, in line five begins to stack the qualifications, justifications on top of the recognition of the (possible) harm done, to the point where once the “sincerest apology” — acknowledged as a debt — is promised, it has already been swallowed up by the context preceding it: the “wrenching” days, the childhood lessons that went unlearned, the inability to think clearly and act accordingly due to alcohol, the ability to exert power over others presented in the poem as a problem or a curse, and lastly the possibility that whatever is being said about might very well not be true. The apology, as an address, disappears in plain sight. In this sense, the poem mirrors how the most reprehensible injustices can be carried out even in the most public or publicized ways. Here, it could be argued, that Olsen is prodding readers’ sense of outrage at a fundamentally unjust social system. But I would argue that the poem burrows deeper than that; its implications are wide reaching.
[right — Jason Olsen] Olsen explains his motivations for writing this piece in the biographical note that accompanies the poem: “I apologize too much…Because of my own tendencies, I am fascinated by the ‘art’ of the celebrity apology. I composed this poem over several days in my kitchen, constantly reading the apologies aloud to my wife as I progressed. I hope she has forgiven me.” By ‘too much’ the author means that he apologizes for things there is no need to apologize for: “I apologize for things I have nothing to do with. I apologize to the dog when I step too close to his bed.” Conversely, most of the celebrities whose statement Olsen sources apologized for things that are important and that have everything to do with them. Some of the celebrities included in “If anyone was offended…” are: Harvey Weinstein (multiple sexual assaults), Paula Deen (racial discrimination), Mel Gibson (racist comments), Kevin Spacey (sexual assault of a minor), Louis CK (sexual misconduct), Hulk Hogan (racial slurs recorded without his consent), and Alec Baldwin (offensive comments toward 11-year-old daughter recorded without his consent). The poem continues:
At the time, I said to myself that what I did was OK
because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first.
I have reflected on and spoken to a variety of people
who were hurt by my impulsive recounting of a brutal rape.
I accepted a free trip to Israel in exchange for a few posts.
I do admire Anjelica Huston. I don’t think she’s a shithead.
The placement of the border post was a result
of misunderstanding, not a deliberate act.
One assumes, of course, that each offending celebrity had somebody — a well-trained and well-remunerated team of public relations professionals — write the apology for them. One assumes that the celebrity apology — contrary to say, an apology by a not-famous person — is neither directed at the party alleging the harm, nor is it addressing the harm itself. The celebrity apology is directed at the media and public who are following the story as it develops. But this isn’t totally accurate. The ‘problem’, if there is one, with the celebrity apology is not that it is an address to a mass public, but rather that it is presumed to be a technique — for which the hired professionals are aptly trained and handsomely paid — in crisis management. The celebrity apologizes—often in the least incriminating and least specific language possible — not to repair an apparent harm to another, but to prevent or reduce the harm that might be done unto them, as it pertains to their image, reputation, and career prospects. Hence, the discursive bent, as can be seen in the above quoted passage, of an admission of guilt enveloped in a subtle attempt to lessen the severity of the alleged bad acts: “never … without asking,”“impulsive recounting”, “misunderstanding … not deliberate.” In addressing the harm caused, the offender is still evading accountability. The statements, thus, read hollow. And Olsen, in assembling them, highlights this lack of sincere concern or regret:
It was unprofessional. I am genuinely sorry.
I did not intend to hurt or offend anyone
with my choice of words, but I clearly have.
Obviously, calling your child a pig or anything else
is improper and inappropriate,
and I apologize to my daughter for that.
I so respect all women and regret what happened.
In this set of lines, contrary to those quoted previously, the apology is given rather than promised. Moreover, the defensive claim of a lack of ill-intent is swallowed up by the expressed willingness to be held to account and accept judgement: “unprofessional,” “improper,” “inappropriate.” But notice the use of the adverb so. Rather than stressing the level of alleged respect for women, and corresponding regret for “what happened,” the use of ‘so’ undercuts the sincerity of the apology. The need to stress the respect felt reveals a profound disregard: instead of the emphasis being on the subject who is worthy of respect (“women”), the adverb ultimately serves to highlight the oh so respecting and respectful ‘I’. What is more, the fact that Olsen’s authorship is limited to pure assemblage; the fact that the poet is not altering these statements, but rather that this is in fact what an offending celebrity put out as their official statement only serves to increase readers’ antipathy towards these hideous men (Wallace dixit).
Hence, the title of Olsen’s piece. “If anyone was offended…” is a phrase often used in this sort of public statements and it is often and rightly read as a rhetorical strategy to shift the weight of the responsibility from the offender over to third parties. As if the celebrity were saying: I obviously had no intention of offending you, so, it is really your bad if you got offended, but, if it will make you feel better, I’m sorry. This would seem to be the ‘truth’ that Olsen’s piece reveals: that the offenders are not looking to make things right; are not willing to do anything to make it up to the people they hurt, rather they are looking to defend themselves by this superficial show of remorse. Consider the poem’s final sequence:
I acted like a person completely out of control
when I was arrested and said things I do not believe to be true.
I want to apologize specifically to everyone
in the Jewish community for the vitriolic
and harmful words that I said the night I was arrested
on a DUI charge.
Who anticipates being recorded?
Imagine the worst moment you have ever had being recorded
and broadcast to the world and it wasn’t meant to be public.
I’ll apologize when hell freezes over. They can fuck off.
While included here are comments made in three separate occasions and pertaining to three distinct events, they were all made by disgraced Hollywood actor Mel Gibson. It is a heavy-handed move by the author, as the turn from apology to blunt dismissal makes brutally evident the hypocrisy and manipulation of ‘celebrity apologies.’ Here, the logic of the poem would suggest, the disgraced celebrity speaks the truth about all celebrities who have been or will be accused of truly horrible and less than horrible things. Gibson, the poem suggests, finally gives it to us straight: if anyone was offended … they can fuck off!
I would argue that Mel Gibson is right. At least as it concerns his call on others’ sympathy and/or understanding at having one’s worst moment recorded and broadcast to the world. There is no possibility of a dignified life in community with others if a person cannot be released from their previous actions. The seemingly common-sense notion that people should have to carry the burden of previous wrongs without reprieve makes of personal accountability a sort of indefinite arrest, whereby a person once found to be at fault will not be able to overcome — or escape — the fact of their wrongdoing. Under this logic, each future instance of misbehavior not only constitutes a wrong but adds to a narrative of continued, inherent and/or inevitable wrongness. In this regard, Olsen’s poem is a site of policing and arrest, whereby the names attached to the bogus apologies and to the bad acts that led to them are made to appear only and always as their worst possible selves.
This is further complicated by the people and acts that the author brings to the poem for the sake of the poem’s composition. Olsen, one would imagine, lifted the quotes that would make for a better poem. But, as mentioned, he also references the relevant sources in the footnotes. And in the footnotes, one finds, yes, the names of those celebrities accused of the most heinous of acts. But, in their midst, are others; whose, perhaps, equally superficial, and self-serving apologies were made as result of markedly less serious, even benign offenses. In this way the moral landscape of the poem becomes muddled. There is no sense of proportion as it pertains to harm and redress. The gravity of the original damage done comes to matter very little, what remains is the sense of having been wronged somehow and needing to get some form — any form — of retribution. “If anyone was offended” thus heralds the primacy of the harm over everything else.
This is why the closing Mel Gibson sequence strikes me as crucial. It gives “If anyone was offended…” with a slight, yet certain, possibility of the better. Gibson, in his plea — or in his demand — to “imagine the worst moment you have ever had being recorded/ and broadcast to the world and it wasn’t meant to be public” warns of the dangers of people not being able to move on from their prior bad acts. Gibson, here, is not looking to connect with others through an expression of regret, but rather on the danger such a predicament would present to us all. His call is not to excuse what he did, nor to understand it. His call is to recognize that at some point we will all need to move on from whatever harm we may have caused. At some point, yes, we might find it necessary to tell everybody else to fuck off.
III. Better not to say
The speaker in Carmen Giménez Smith’s “No Apologies: A Poemfisto” — like Olsen and me — apologizes for every little thing. And she hates it:
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
Initially, I took the poem at face value, and attributed the speaker’s stated contempt for the apology on her personal compulsion to apologize. Saying ‘sorry’ makes her sorry, meaning pathetic, and she simply will not stand for it anymore. For me, the speaker was gesturing toward a willingness to live with the inevitability of harm and hurt. Shit will happen. But there is nothing to be gained from people feeling like they must apologize for all intended or unintended harm caused. Hence, her manifesto, which is outlined in the poem’s opening:
I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Notice how Giménez Smith performs apologetic subjectivity in language. There is a hesitancy implicit there, a sense of instilled and/or assumed smallness in her choice of wording, which seems ill-fitting for a manifesto: “I would love to make,” “I’d like to begin,” “I want to recommend.” Where is the boast? Where is the fearlessness of a radical proclamation? Where is the firm conviction that either one’s world must be remade, or one will burn it all down? Giménez Smith’s speaker downplays the event (“won’t upset the orbit tomorrow”) even as she claims it to be to be “revolutionary.” Then she goes on to list all the things she apologized for on the day.
Suffice it to say that, at first look, “No Apologies” is a letdown for a manifesto. One, as a reader, has trouble believing in a “revolutionary love” that announces itself in the hushed, timid tone of the person who apologizes behind you in line at the copy machine, or the ATM, or at the checkout counter. That is, until one realizes that for Giménez Smith, the compulsion to apologize is gendered. It is women who are expected to/ feel like they must apologize all the time. The poem does not come out and say it as such. Or rather it does, but the author has decided to do it subtly towards the very end of the piece. The poem concludes:
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.
Because the seed is to be planted in a woman’s mouth, the ‘you’ addressed in the poem can no longer be read as a general or universal addressee. It is not ‘you the reader’ or ‘you the people’. It is you woman-now-soon-to-be-comrade. It is women as a class. This big reveal turns the apparent modesty and hesitancy in the poem’s address on its head. The recommendation that will not upset the orbit tomorrow becomes a radical and radicalizing event: “This is our first step of world domination.”
Furthermore, the choice to gender the poem in this close to imperceptible way strikes me as a second, accompanying manifesto. A manifesto on how a poem brings about a moment of political inflection; on how a poem, even as a public address, establishes a sense of intimacy — or better — a sense of complicity with a certain type (or class) of reader, to the exclusion of all others. Notice how there is nothing to warn of this turn. It almost risks being missed, but if one were to miss it, then the poem really would lose almost all enunciative force as the revolutionary love referenced in the end would ring hollow; it would be too abstract. The decision to deemphasize the poem’s major point in what is presented as the outset as manifesto-like poetic text presumes some readers — the ones imagined or desired by the poem — will already know what the speaker is talking about. In this sense Giménez Smith posits an intriguing ethics of both poetic and political engagement: it is on ‘us’ to know who the speaker is speaking to and on what terms and for what purpose. The poem is to make no allowances for those not hip or attuned to it. As such, it is a poem of distinct, elective affinities, that have been decided beforehand. It draws a line, splitting the audience (society, humanity) in two: There are those who do not have to apologize for all these things, whose unapologetic lives are made possible precisely because women must go on apologizing for everything, to each other and to them. And there are those who will come to dominate the world.
I would argue that this is the sort of nuance and of socio-political insight that is absent from Olsen’s “If anyone was offended.” The world is not shaped by the celebrity/ non-celebrity distinction. While Olsen’s poem references individual people who wield power and influence because of their race and their gender, they are lumped in together with the frivolous acts of people of just happen to be famous. And while, yes, they too may very well be powerful, this is more a product of their wealth and fame, not a consequence of social ordering. The consequence of this is that the poem presents/represents a vision of the world — of US society at least — that may reflect what we see in our social media feeds, but that certainly finds no purchase in social life. To further stress this point, I would argue that Olsen’s use of footnotes, though meant to offer context for the terrible things celebrities said in response to the terrible things that they did, are ultimately just more text. The motion of the eye turning from the main text of the poem to the bottom of the page mimics the act of scrolling down one’s Twitter feed for the original post that explains the comments one sees retweeted virally. Moreover because, contrary to what poems often do, the Olsen piece — because it is composed of repurposed statements and quotes — does not give a rendering of what power or violence look like. There is no deeper meaning given to them here. They are simply referred to. In contrast, “No apologies,” though it does not explicitly explore the social conditions faced by women as a class at any length, it does present a distinct subjectivity, understood to be plural, and that is defined by the quotidian experience of being made to feel both small and always in the way somehow.
Using “No Apologies” as a lens for (self) reflection, Olsen’s (and my) compulsion to apologize is nothing more than a bad habit. It is of no greater social consequence or significance. It is something we simply do, but that following the logic of Giménez’s poem, we could easily go through life without doing because this is a privilege our gender affords to us. Similarly, “No Apologies” can also be read as a retort to the closing sequence in “If anyone was offended.” To Mel Gibson’s “Imagine having one’s worst moment broadcast,” Giménez Smith’s poem seems to say, imagine having every little thing that happens, every little thing that you do — from standing too close to somebody at the copy machine to putting your stuff down on the counter—seem to you as the worst thing you could do, are constantly doing, cannot help but do repeatedly. Imagine then feeling like you are always in the wrong and always having to make up for just being in the presence of others, minding your own business. These events might not make headline news, or go viral, but they do a socio-political subject make — one that is deprived of the social space to simply exist, without apology.
This is what makes the love announced in “No Apologies” revolutionary. The poem wants to see women free of the constructs and constraints of the apologetic subject. It wants to see them happy and free. Or, if not happy, then at the very least not having to feel sorry for everything, which is a form of freedom. In this, the author strikes a tone that has traces of Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” In her poem, the plums are not in the couple’s icebox, indicative of their life together. They are sitting, unpaid for, in the cooler of a supermarket and the speaker is plotting to break in. Only the poem does not say this. For Giménez Smith, it is better not to say exactly how this will be the first step to world domination. What the poem hints at though is the once a certain class of political subjects defined and constrained by their gender are finally free of the social and ethical binds that force them to continually find themselves at fault, the possibilities are, as they say, endless.
IV. Everything and everybody is forgivable
I should note that neither “This is Just to Say” nor “No Apologies” involves the sort of harm for which apologies figure as that socially required first step in a process of regret, redress, and possible redemption. This notwithstanding what is left unsaid in both texts would prove useful to a more sustained, critical consideration of instances of serious harm and necessary accountability. That love can and must bear (some form of) harm and hurt. That there must be a limit to what we can apologize for. That, at some point, the idea of individual people — or a class of people — beholden to the will and whim of another group is intolerable. That people at some point must be allowed to move on from the harm they caused even if they cannot make it right, even as they are not really looking to make it right. That people, also, then must develop a relationship to the offenses suffered at the hands of another that is not dependent on whether that other has acknowledged their guilt and offered some form of redress. These are not by any means judicial arguments. They are more like ideas and propositions found amongst the stuff poems are made of to see what, if any part of them sticks to the real. If, following Derrida, the only thing worth forgiving is the unforgivable, then the question of how we get over incidents of harm and hurt is not about if and how offenders can make amends, but of how the offended can come to terms with what the offender did to them. And more specifically with the fact that the offender will ostensibly continue to live with or around them. Autoethnographer Tony Adams writes:
“With forgiveness, a person does not forget an offense, but rather develops a new relationship to the offense: e.g., recognizing cultural constraints that contributed to the offense, acknowledging their complicity or participation in the offense, and/or believing that they/others acted as best they could given particular circumstances.”
Following Adams, a companion manifesto to “No Apologies” would declare that everything and everybody is forgivable. This is not to say that there should be an expectation — much less a social obligation — to forgive. But rather that forgiveness is not something we may or may not deserve depending on how we comport ourselves in Butler’s “scenes of address.” It means that the possibility to forgive is not a prize for the offended to grant or withhold from offenders pending their judgement on the sincerity of their apology. What Giménez’s poem so neatly reveals is that that the apology is a form of social control that serves to make one group of people subservient to another. Thus, to go around soliciting ‘sorries’ is to be complicit with this oppressive dynamic.
Instances of harm do not bind one person to another. If offender and offended are strangers, then a one-off, or otherwise temporary, encounter has taken place. If they are known and beloved others, then what binds them are the feelings and habits and sustained histories of love and care between them. In the first instance, the offense can provoke a whole host of reactions, but it does not a relationship make. In the second — like in the Williams’ piece — the love withstands it, or it doesn’t. People move on or they move out.
This is, I think, what I would most like to teach my child. I want him, of course, to be well-meaning. But, more importantly, I want him to be conscious of how personal habits for some can function as social constraints for others. I want him to be of the habit of coming up against those constraints precisely because his liberties, great or small, may very well be possible thanks to them. Most of all, I want him to be free. Happy too.
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Works Cited
Adams, Tony. “Critical Autoethnography, Education, and a Call for Forgiveness.” International Journal of Multicultural Education, vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 79-88.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Routledge, 2001.
Giménez-Smith, Carmen. Be Recorder. Graywolf Press, 2019.
Olsen, Jason. “If Anyone Was Offended …” Rattle, vol. 27, no. 3,2021, pp. 35-39.
Williams, William Carlos. “This is just to say.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56159/this-is-just-to-say.
Accessed November 1, 2022
[1]Some of the speakers in Olsen’s poem who — given their presence here — are ultimately made by the poet to apologize too much are: Reese Witherspoon (disorderly conduct during traffic stop), Tiger Woods (romantic affairs), Jackie Weaver (for telling somebody to ‘go fuck themselves’), Robert Pattison (for stating publicly that Batman is not a superhero), Lucy Hale (for saying that she was fat).
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