on “Poems Not Written”
“Forgive me, for I have been nurturing
my well-worn grudges against beauty”
— Hanif Abdurraqib
The guy who abused me had a beautiful voice. When I write about him, that’s what I write about — its honeyed filaments, its transformation of air into event, how it unfurled like a ladder you could climb towards light or darkness. About the abuse, its duration (two years of Saturday nights), the slim chasm between my spot on the floor and his on the bed, what happened when I was made to cross it, I’ve written no poems. Or, nothing that I’ve continued working on until it became a poem. Why not? Those nights stacked on top of each other like leaky old batteries have eaten a hole in my life I have to keep pulling the rest of my life through, so why wouldn’t I write about it more directly?
There are several reasons, some of which I understand better than others. Some are personal, and some are formal, if not ontological. One reason that fits in both these camps is the difficulty of defining what even a hole is in the first place: is it a presence? Is it an absence? Can it be talked about it without describing what surrounds it and gives it shape?
You can see why I reach for his voice first. It had a quiddity, an unmistakable thing-ness to it, however ephemeral. And, a beautiful thing he knew was beautiful, it was everywhere. It sticks out still. Like a boot in the mud of my mind, I can’t shake the tread out. It used to be I had to say, after concerts and musicals and sports practice and aimless car rides along the tidal marshes of southeast Virginia, that I was wowed by it, no matter what. Otherwise, I’d have to weather his sulky rancor, bright as a holiday orange and studded with threats like cloves. But I can say it now. It’s taken time, but it’s true, not to mention easier. I’ve been schooled to write beauty. Praise it, strive for it, run alongside it like a kid running alongside a train carrying his favorite athlete or soldier off to the next vaunted skirmish, waving wildly, for a moment as fast as it is. So that’s another reason.
And why not admit the shame of it, even twenty years on. Wrapped in the various garments of US individualism and toxic masculinity and Catholic stoicism (we met through church) as I have been, to admit this baldly feels like taking off my skin. Not to mention, too, how memory has curled at the edges so it’s hard to suss out timeline, what happened when and how and other specifics. If those two years were a building, it’s like I’ve been living in one room that is actually all of the rooms shoved inside of each other; the general shape of it comes through but all the rest is blurred and frantic looking.
Another, stronger reason (one it feels like some days I hide behind, and on other days I stalwartly uphold) is that a poem is not a recapitulation of trauma. (Just ask Kenneth Goldsmith.) A poet’s job if we can call it a job is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments so someone else might know the sequence of gestures and spasms and their relations to one another so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical. After all, a poem is, if we believe Randall Jarrell, a lightning strike, though I like to think of it less as a sudden flash of luck and inspiration and more as a fleeting yet searing connection between two or more disparate planes.
The biggest thing is, though, who cares about the king, lolling on his sumptuous throne — it’s the advisors, heirs, and generals who drive the intrigue, plotting and wangling behind velvet curtains that faintly reek of meat and smoke. We don’t look straight at the sun because yes it can blind us but isn’t the way it warps everything around it, plotting odd space trash and planetoids on eventual elliptical collision courses much more interesting than the changeless churning inside it? What about the suspense of the near-miss it engineers accidentally, happening over and over and over again?
It doesn’t need narrating, what the sun does, how the crash sounded, what it felt like as the blade or bullet parted various paper-thin membranes and introduced air and light into places that had lived until then bathed in darkness. Because we know these things, on a primal level. Wince at the thought of them and their various intensities. It isn’t the trauma that deserves elaboration—it’s what it radiates out of and into, the fabrics that make it visible and which it disrupts, because without those what would it be?
Not much more than what it already is — banal, basal, a series of smacks, superficial layers coming into contact with other superficial layers that jiggle or thicken or yield. There is a mechanical aspect to them that is boring in its reality and horrifying in its simplicity. How, the traumatized mind wonders, could this, of all things, be what plagues me? Or, how could I allow this to occur, continue, and stay here? By freezing the frame and focusing on it, we highlight and thereby valorize, however inadvertently, its terrible simplicity at the expense of everything else. (Zeno, eat your heart out.)
But these things are not simple. The act may be, but the preamble isn’t, and the response certainly is not. The spray of safety glass in the gutter refracting stochastically the red lights of the ambulance says more about the collision than the collision does. If we’re going to freeze the frame, let it be on the weird harmonies it creates by accident — the faces of passers-by a stereoscope of dawning surprise; the streetlight dented and leaning at the same angle as a roof behind it; the fireflies flaring like bokeh in the adjacent empty lot.
This is not to avoid, though, or to John-Stuart-Mill our way out of, this, with the pretty and surprising ends justifying the means, but as a reminder that beauty isn’t free of mess — it is the result thereof. Yes, John Keats, I know I know, it’s all I need to know, but what else can I know except that one of the most beautiful voices I’ve heard — still hear— was the one that bent me against my own axis. Beauty isn’t stainless. It isn’t innocent. It erases and overwrites. It has been a weapon in the long march of whiteness across the hemispheres and through the potter’s fields of history, sweeping up the shattered teeth and gnawed cadavers whiteness has built its faltering empire on.
But it also happens. “The aesthetic [experience] isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption,” Peter Schjeldahl writes in his essay on dying. Without a limber sense of possibility, an ability to recognize the “accidental aspect” of things, the surprising syzygy of random elements into a composition, we will “respond to art only sluggishly” which is another way of saying we will respond to the surprises of life only sluggishly.
I’m not here to get into the lifesaving possibilities of deep aesthetic experiences, the benefits of Stendhal syndrome, how literature trains your empathy muscles into an Olympic fitness, though there is value there. I’m here because beauty has been the sugar dissolving in our spoon- and shovelfuls of lambs’ blood and other quackery modernity has been serving us. A fact that sits smug and spidery at the intersection of capitalism and white heteropatriarchy is that if you are good enough at something, it will swallow the rest of your life, however bitter or grody or squalid or reprehensible it may be. Make someone money, or make someone feel like they just made money — which we’ve been sold is the feeling of beauty: the taste of having time in front of you to do anything at all — and you are free. From consequence if not expectation. Creeps galore have ridden this simple algorithm high enough into the firmament of public consciousness to be effectively beyond the reach of their victims and critics. Like waving your arms at an eight-foot ceiling, trying to dislodge a fresco.
The most enduring, difficult-to-arrive-at reason, though, for me not writing poems about the abuse, is me. I’m still learning what I need to unlearn and where. “Aesthetics,” says W.G. Sebald, “is not a value free area.” But looking at the naked truth of some things can be too much to bear. I have tried, but those drafts that tried to describe the actual abuse were like drawing schematics — angular and flat. One of the ways culture works is by populating the many rooms in your head with people you think you may one day talk to, and when I wrote these poems I was writing to them, to convince them that what had happened to me was what I felt it was. Turns out they were all dour men in black robes and convoluted wigs who kept pointing to the spaces between letters and saying you may be able to fit your feelings there but we still see a gap. You never said no, did you? You have no one to corroborate this because you didn’t tell anyone while it was happening? These weren’t poems — they were exhibits, gestures flash-frozen as they were lifted out of the darkness they were born in. The larger problem here wasn’t necessarily the poems, though — it was the audience I thought they were being written for. Turns out that I am full of people so ready to blame the victim it doesn’t matter if the victim is the one who created them.
I am still evicting these people from my head. It is a long process, and one that went on adjacent to the desire to write poems that presented the abuse so that it was not flat or boring, and so stark and undeniable that even the gnarled magistrates in my head would have to sigh and weep. In me rose up (like a tide? A swamp monster in festoons of duckweed?) the desire to aestheticize, and to find not only something pretty but some enduring meaning in the cruelty and selfishness. (Beauty being truth and truth being beauty.) This is where the poem stops and propaganda begins. There is a reason that Neruda wrote, in “Explico Algunas Cosas,” that the blood of children runs through the streets “simplemente, como sangre de niños.” Pain and suffering are pain and suffering and if someone tells you otherwise it’s because they will benefit somehow from more of it. And it’s true that I can get something out of presenting my own trauma as something pretty and meaningful when it is not — a false sense of mastery over it, the illusion that I’ve healed and found strength in it, but even more so that the possibility of discovering beauty and meaning in random and unnecessary suffering is possible. Who doesn’t want to buy this? That at the end of their pain there was, if not a door, a reason. If I can sell you that, what else might you buy from me?
I’m not here to tell anyone that, least of all myself. The poems I haven’t written are the ones that try to do that. The ones I have written are the ones that say this has happened. The happening itself is meaningless, in the same way a neutrino flaring against water atoms and betraying their presence is meaningless — it happens because two things came into random contact. But someone was there to see the flare. And from that infinitesimal cone of blue light in an arctic lake they might learn a little bit more about the elusive nature of distant things and that, despite that immense distance, they are connected.