Post-Election-Day Survival Kit

I’ve often struggled with writing list-poems. There’s an inherent challenge involved that I’ve never quite mastered: balancing the implied equality of items in a list with the need for progression in the argument of a poem.

Given this week’s theme from The Daily Post, I thought I’d dust off an old list-poem of mine. I had recently read Ander Monson’s collection Vacationland, and was particularly taken with his “list sonnets”: lists of items that told relationship stories. I decided to attempt a variation on that theme, the story of someone’s reaction to unfavorable election results (the 2014 midterms were fast approaching).

Post-Election-Day Survival Kit

maps, color-coded for inconvenience
wastebasket filled with bumper stickers, pins
Wi-Fi connection for the airing of grievances
half-empty Folgers and full-empty gin
shredded copies of the Washington Post
television off, blues records on
fresh gin and coffee, bacon and toast
for-sale sign to plant in the lawn
draft-dodger anthems from the Vietnam War
passport, suitcase, accent tapes, keys
GPS set to find to Lake Erie’s shore
plaster to puncture, stress-ball to squeeze
head on a pillow, ice on the brow
calendar turned to four years from now

Looking at it now, I’m a bit frustrated with its indecisive sense of rhythm — not even meter, just anything mellifluous — and the progression in the third quatrain seems off. But some of these lines still make me smile (“airing of grievances,” “full-empty gin”), so it’s not a total waste.

Perhaps come November, I’ll be inspired to write a sequel (though God, I hope not). Until then, I think I’m happy laying this one to rest.

via Discover Challenge: The Poetry of List-Making

Henri Cole and the Sentimental Interruption

Natural disasters, death, isolation: how many poems take these topics as their subjects? Poets from all over draw inspiration, however weary, from such grave events, yet these are difficult subjects to address well. The temptation is always present to slip into sentimentality or detached philosophy, which would do great disservice to these grave subject matters. What could trivialize heartbreak more than a Hallmark card?

At the same time, we expect poets to find deeper meanings within the events they relate; rarely are we satisfied with the written equivalents of still lifes. This is especially true when it comes to subjects worthy of elegies. Without the solace that poetry can provide us, we’d be left staring at despair — perhaps an emotionally powerful experience, but hardly a useful one. And so the tension poets face: how is one to avoid cloying sentiment on the one hand and callous objectivity on the other?

The poems in Henri Cole’s latest collection, Nothing to Declare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) — which often describe scenes of devastation, physical and emotional — resolve this tension in a curious way: they temporarily indulge in sentimentality, only to change course abruptly and return to the facts at hand. Like a release valve, the sentimental interruptions relieve some of the pressure that these scenes entail, but not to the extent that their powers are completely emptied.

To demonstrate how this “release valve” technique works, let’s take a close look at two of Cole’s poems: “City Horse” (originally published in The Threepenny Review, text available here) and “Dandelions” (originally published in The Paris Review, audio available here). In both poems, the speaker momentarily departs from a gut-wrenching situation, only for the situation itself to drag the speaker back into the moment. Once that final transition is complete, the speaker (and so the reader) gains a fuller of understanding of the tragedy they face, one for which the earlier sentimentality would not be sufficient.

As a single sentence spanning fourteen lines, “City Horse” captures a moment of continuous agony: a boy seeing a dead horse in the aftermath of a storm. The opening line leaves little doubt as to the direction of the poem; it’s a journey to “the end of the road from concept to corpse” (line 1). What was once a living, moving beast has been tossed by wind and waves, dumped alongside piles of inanimate debris (“uprooted trees, crumpled cars, and collapsed houses” [3]). Although she is positioned “as if trying to raise herself still,” she is irretrievably dead (4). The only question is how to confront that fact.

At first, the speaker appears absorbed with the physical facts of the horse’s death: broken legs, face in the mud. Of particular interest is the horse’s appearance: “the color around her eyes, nose, and mane (the dapples of roan, / a mix of red and white hairs) now powdery gray” (7-8). The declension narrative is clearest here. This beautiful horse, because of the capricious weather, has been reduced to a monochromatic object. One might expect, then, to read of further and further decay.

Instead, the speaker interrupts the description with a set of apostrophes: “O, wondrous horse; O, delicate horse–dead, dead–” (9). The register is so elevated, the repetitions so sudden, that it sounds out of character for the speaker. Whereas the first eight lines were earthy and plainspoken, line 9 is more consciously poetic, if not bathetic — can readers feel this sort of emotion for a horse they hardly know?

But “O, wondrous horse” is not indicative of the poem’s progress; it’s a sudden pulling back, an unsustainable retreat. Just after the speaker’s interruption ends, we hear the boy who sees the horse with his vernacular speech: “‘She was more smarter than me, / she just wait'” (10-11). The two voices in succession shake the reader back and forth, from lofty sentiment back to the raw details. And once the poem returns to those details, the import of the interruption becomes more apparent.

The closing image sees the boy attempting to comfort the dead horse, “stroking the majestic rowing legs, / stiff now” (12-13). It’s a heartfelt gesture, but a futile one, much like the horse’s attempt to escape its fate. She simply “could not outrun / the heavy, black, frothing water” (13-14). But then, neither could the speaker “outrun” the tragedy of the horses death by invoking some sentimental muse — he must return to the situation, the heavy, black, frothing situation.

“Dandelions” follows a similar path as “City Horse”: the speaker is confronted with an uncomfortable situation, attempts to escape via a sentimental interruption, but gets drawn back to the reality of the scene. What makes “Dandelions” a little unusual is that the scene itself has no reality — it’s a dream, as the first stanza explains:

In the dream,
a priest said
it was time
to be entirely
adult. (1-5)

The set-up suggests a confrontation between the speaker and the priest, but in fact the priest is addressing the speaker’s mother, who is “bedridden / because of diabetes” (6-7). The priest seems convinced that the speaker’s mother has little time left, repeatedly asking about her beliefs. His insistence frightens the speaker, who retreats into his own head (or further within his own head, as the case may be).

Specifically, he starts to think of the title flowers, of their simple beauty, which appears to provide him some comfort in the midst of the confrontation:

those silver gray
stems and lemony
blossoms
that transform
any landscape (36-40)

That landscape, of course, is the speaker’s mental state. For the moment, his mother’s health and the priest’s insistence have faded into the background, subsumed by the soft colors of the dandelion imagery. If “City Horse” drifts into the language of sentimentality, “Dandelions” indulges in its visuals.

But, as with the sentimental interruption in “City Horse,” the speaker’s self-distraction cannot be sustained here. He’s brought back to the dream-proper when his mother’s ailment intervenes: “and then I heard / Mother lifting her stumps, / where the hands had been” (41-43). It’s an unnerving image in any context, but when contrasted with the dandelions, it’s a downright shock.

“Dandelions,” however, arrives at a different attitude than “City Horse.” The mother’s closing declaration (“‘I believe / in these living hands'” [44-45]) might provide the speaker with some consolation at the end of the dream. His mother is aware her hands have been amputated, but she does not try to ignore than fact. Instead, she finds a kind of strength within her condition, hence why she loudly lifts her stumps. She has embraced her situation and come out stronger for it. Perhaps the speaker, once he awakes, can learn from her example.

Cole returns to the structure used in “City Horse” and “Dandelions” throughout Nothing to Declare, and it proves surprisingly durable. It never loses its punch, seeing that moment where a sentimental interruption collapses and the speaker confronts reality again. It reenacts a thought process which all of us indulge in at various points in our lives, then shows the limits of that very process. Whether solace or mere devastation await at the end, Cole’s poems show us those difficult facts that our minds attempt to cloud.

Nothing to Declare is available through Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s website and through Amazon.com.

(Disclosure: I received Cole’s collection as part of a Goodreads giveaway sponsored by the publisher. Neither the author, nor the publisher, nor Goodreads had any input regarding this post.)

Broadcasting Sports Injuries

The first few days of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio have been marred by serious, gruesome-looking injuries. On Saturday, August 6, French gymnast Samir Aït Saïd broke his leg while attempting a vault during the men’s qualification round. The following day, Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten crashed head-first into a curb during the women’s road race, resulting in several spinal fractures.

I watched both of these injuries happen live: Aït Saïd’s over an Internet stream, van Vleuten’s on the local NBC affiliate. After the initial shock and revulsion had passed, a question began to bite at me: what is the appropriate way to cover such injuries when they occur on a live broadcast? Given the inherent risk of physical injury in sports, and the inherent uncertainties of broadcasting events live, this is a question of some significance.

Broadcasters appear to face two conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, we expect that a sports broadcast will present an accurate (and often total) account of the event; on the other hand, we expect that broadcasters will maintain “good taste” — that they will not exploit the misery of participants or spectators (beyond, one might clarify, the misery that comes with defeat).

In most instances, these two imperatives do not come into conflict. Even in violent sports such as American football and ice hockey, the injuries players suffer do not generally inspire shock and revulsion. Concern and pity, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. Thus, during most games, media outlets can broadcast the events in their entirety, injuries included, without ethical worries.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, a player with sustain a gruesome injury, either as a tragic part of normal play (e.g., Joe Thiesmann’s compound-fractured leg on Monday Night Football) or as a result of a violent infraction of the rules (e.g., Steve Moore’s broken neck at the hands of Todd Bertuzzi). Such injuries inspire immediate revulsion, disrupting the constructed narrative of the sporting event and, oftentimes, the event itself. In these scenarios, the imperatives of accuracy and good taste do come into conflict. How, then, should this conflict be resolved?

The Aït Saïd and van Vleuten incidents offer two different possible solutions. In the case of Aït Saïd, the broadcast strategy was to avoid showing the aftermath of the failed vault, once the extent of the fracture became clear. The camera quickly cut away from the scene, and they did not show replays of the failed vault. When the broadcast did return to the scene, it was always in the context of Aït Saïd receiving medical attention, framed in a manner which concealed the severity of his injury.

In the case of van Vleuten, the broadcast team was more willing to dwell on the fateful crash. This was in spite of the fact that the site of the crash, unlike the site of Aït’s Saïd’s, did not have a dedicated camera, indicating a degree of choice on the part of the broadcast. Not only did the broadcast show replays of the collision, but the commentators continued to discuss van Vleuten’s injury for the remainder of race. relaying information regarding her condition.

So which is preferable: drawing coverage away from the injury, or making the injury a feature of the sporting narrative? They are markedly different, but I will say that in their respective moments both approaches felt reasonable.

One must remember that the two injuries happened in different contexts. Aït Saïd’s broken leg did not impact the outcome or proceedings of the qualification round. He was a relatively marginal figure in the competition (though he would have qualified for the rings final), and there were five other apparatuses the broadcast team needed to cover. Even if the broadcast wanted to dwell on his injuries, there might have been too much going on to do so.

Contrast this with the road race: van Vleuten was nearing the final stretch, leading by a significant margin. Her crash completely altered the medal situation, giving four other cyclists behind her a chance at gold. Further, in covering the progress of the race, the broadcast team had to film the other cyclists passing the scene of the crash. Had van Vleuten’s injury happened earlier in the race, they’d have little cause to dwell on it.

This pragmatic variance does allow us to keep both the accuracy imperative and the good taste imperative. There might be a case for dropping one of the imperatives instead. Pain is pain, regardless of context, and adjusting the guidelines based on the competitive conditions of a game may well trivialize that pain. Yet a consistent response might well do the same, treating such human misery in a dispassionate manner.

In the messy world of live broadcast, perhaps pragmatism is the best that can be done.

What Next?: Claressa Shields and Life Post-Triumph

Last night, PBS’s Independent Lens aired a 2015 documentary about Claressa Shields, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist in middleweight women’s boxing. Entitled T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold (dir. Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari), the film has its share of problems. The process of Shields’s qualification for the Olympics is not explained very well, and the film for some reason completely skips over the semifinal bout of the Olympic tournament. On top of that, the filmmakers set up a number of potential story threads in the first act, such as Claressa’s relationship with her sister, that are never fully developed by the end.

Indeed, had the film ended with Shields’s victory in London, I would have thought it a disappointment, a work with lots of promise but with little accomplishment. But the film has another twenty-five to run, and in those final scenes it finds its most compelling story: what does an athlete do after success?

Normally in a sports movie, if this question comes up at all, it gets answered with some expository text before the credits roll. This holds whether the film represents the end of an athlete’s career or just the beginning: when victory is itself the denoument, who could possibly be interested in the days and weeks after? Whatever happens, it will surely be lit with the afterglow of a championship.

But in T-Rex, the post-Olympics period is filled with uncertainty and frustration. For starters, Shields faces a difficult career decision: does she continue to compete as an amateur and defend her gold medal at the 2016 Olympics, or does she become a professional boxer and try to make a living for her family? As it happens, she chooses the former route, but that only becomes clear to audience in the closing expository text. Shields has plenty of reasons to consider the alternative path.

To further complicate matters, her relationship with her coach, Jason Crutchfield, becomes strained when she begins (openly) dating her sparring partner, which goes against Crutchfield’s principle of not mixing the personal and the professional (never mind that Shields lives with Crutchfield as a quasi-family member for the majority of the film). Considering how central his voice is in Shields’s life, seeing the two at loggerheads has an added sting beyond mere conflict.

The wrinkle that I find most interesting, however, is Shields and Crutchfield’s efforts to obtain endorsement deals following her gold medal triumph. Shields’s family has plenty of financial worries, struggling to pay for basic utilities, so she needs an income stream to subsidize her unpaid amateur boxing. One might assume that being among the first ever women’s boxing gold medalists would get the sponsors lining up to sign her, but such is not the case.

According to USA Boxing officials featured in the film, Shields faces far greater difficulty in getting sponsorship deals than someone like Gabby Douglas, 2012 gold medalist in women’s gymnastics. For starters, gymnastics gets covered during primetime on a major network, whereas boxing is shown midday on a cable channel. People, and by extension potential sponsors, are far more likely to have seen Douglas perform than they are Shields.

Yet there is also the problem of American cultural attitudes. Douglas, with her cheerful presentation and her achievement in a sport associated with traditional femininity, is an easy sell to corporations. Shields, on the other hand, has a more brash personality; in a clip from The Colbert Report shown during a montage, she says she got into boxing because she likes punching people. It’s at least partly in jest, but it’s that sort of thing, the boxing officials say, that can make sponsors wary of signing athletes.

As a black woman, Shields detects racial and gendered assumptions behind that reluctance, and while the filmmakers do not explore that particular line of thought in great depth, it’s hard not to reach the same conclusions. Given how much Shields has accomplished and how little she has to show for it financially, there must be something unfair in the system of American athletics.

Honestly, I would have loved to see a cut of this movie that stretched the post-Olympic period over two acts, giving more time to explore an athlete’s life once the dream has been realized. As is, T-Rex is a fine documentary that doesn’t reach its full potential until the final bell has rung.

Currently, T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold is available for streaming at its Independent Lens episode page (link). The 2016 Olympic women’s middleweight boxing tournament begins August 14.

Ownership in Dryden’s “Astræa Redux”

First published in 1660 to commemorate the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, John Dryden’s poem Astræa Redux lavishes Charles II with no shortage of praise. He is likened to David and Jove, described as a paragon of virtue, and cast as the favorite son of divine will. All these traits are wonderfully elevated and beautifully rendered, yet Dryden’s poem keeps returning to a word which seems rather mundane for a panegyric: “own.” Time and again, the poem discusses what Charles II or some other figures own. More than any particular actions, Astræa Redux chooses to emphasize the state of possessing something. As a dry fact of statesmanship, this seems like a rather odd topic for a time so jubilant and high-minded.

Right away, an obvious rhetorical rationale presents itself: by repeatedly invoking Charles II’s ownership of England, the poem implicitly argues that his claim to rule the country is legitimate. This would not be an uncontroversial position; after all, hadn’t the people (or at least their ostensible representatives) supported the end of the monarchy during the English Civil War? In this view, one might view Astræa Redux as a well-timed piece of Restoration propaganda, drumming up public support for what was by then a fait accompli.

There may be some truth to this position; however, I’d like to argue for a slightly different reading. The insistent use of the word “own,” rather than merely reiterating Charles II’s claim to rule, serves to highlight the virtues of his prospective reign. In the past, less noble figures laid ownership claims, and the country suffered as a result. But now that the Restoration has placed him in the role of possessor, Charles II can begin his virtuous rule of England (and, as we shall see later, possibly other lands as well).

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Gould on Abandoning Offensive Terminology

At the moment I’m reading through Stephen Jay Gould’s second anthology of natural history essays, The Panda’s Thumb (W. W. Norton & Co., 1980). As with Gould’s first such collection, Ever Since Darwin (W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), the essays in The Panda’s Thumb not only describe evolutionary theory and paleontology in ways accessible to laymen, but also delve into the historical context of the discoveries that drive these fields.

When reading Gould, I always appreciate his willingness to go beyond the biographies of scientists and the oft-told anecdotes involving their work. Indeed, Gould takes a particular interest in the underlying cultural assumptions that inform the scientific process. The Panda’s Thumb contains a whole set of essays (subtitled “Science and Politics of Human Differences”) which concern the ways in which scientists have historically used the trappings of their discipline to reinforce the racial and gender-based prejudices of their cultures.

I’d like to discuss one these essays briefly: “Dr. Down’s Syndrome” (pp. 160-168 in The Panda’s Thumb). Although the first few paragraphs describe the process which leads to trisomy 21, better known as Down syndrome, and the effects of the condition, Gould devotes most of his energies to discussing the names given the condition. “We have all seen children with Down’s syndrome,” he writes, “and I feel certain that I have not been alone in wondering why the condition was ever designated Mongolian idiocy” (p. 161, emphasis original).

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All Aboard: How “Stagecoach” Establishes Conflict

Viewed on a scene-by-scene basis, Dudley Nichols’s screenplay to John Ford’s seminal Western Stagecoach (1939) might seem a bit unfocused. The film, which follows a stagecoach racing across the territories out west, has an episodic quality to it. Each stage along the journey from Tonto to Lordsburg presents some set of obstacles: the unexpected absence of military personnel at Dry Fork, a passenger’s childbirth at Apache Wells, an Apache attack at Lee’s Ferry, etc. Really, it is one thing after another. If a student showed me this story as an outline, I’d be tempted to suggest that they “pick a direction and stick with it.”

Yet, when viewed as a whole, Stagecoach feels remarkably tight for what amounts to a road-trip movie. Each turn in the narrative comes across as the natural extension of some previous event, as though the new developments were not just chronologically but also causally linked. So how do Nichols and Ford make the journey’s episodes into a coherent story? Simple: they spend time establishing why each person has boarded the stagecoach.

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