Conjecture
Returning from the gym I stop to check my messages, come across a rejection notice for three poems. I’d submitted the set to a journal geared toward social justice. No. More accurately, a conversation being had in verse, in response to world events and the changing landscape.
I don’t mention this to talk about my disappointment. Rejections, often because a piece is not right for a magazine or doesn’t touch the right nerve with the editor, are part of the game. I actually appreciated the candid response by the editor, who wrote (paraphrasing) the reader, a few years from now, might not understand the events that these poems refer to. While I don’t share the same idea on what events and descriptions are memorable or even understandable, the sentence was one of the best in telling me specifically what the journal aims for. It is that question, what events, what responses and what descriptions will stand the test of time and give insight to a person looking back. I did not know much about mustard gas attacks when I first read Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est.’ Extracting the full effect of the poem required from me the supplemental reading I was willing to bring to the table. However, the poem can be read and appreciated without the scavenger hunt process of determining whether this or that is a reference and to what. I’m staring at a silent television screen. Our president is speaking to the United Nations. I know I’ll find the text and read it later. In real time, political speeches feel like being bombarded with agenda masquerading as fact – too fast to refute and almost arm twisted into submission. For the moment, this is the event that captures our attention and most have determined how they will react before a word has been spoken. But while the event creates the anxiety, we’ve learned for more than a decade that the news is in how people like us respond in living rooms, in diners and other public spaces, or in the workplace talk. Reactions, whether educated or erroneous or prejudiced or thoughtful, affect what happens next. Afternoon comes and I’m standing in a public kitchen. A man, respected in the community, leans on the door frame having listened to pundits pour over the speech. He starts with small talk while I’m chopping vegetables, focused more on blade and fingertips than events. He says, ‘This is what happens when you’re more concerned about political correctness.” (He never explains whether the you is me or some broader group.) “How so?” I ask. Then think about it. Then say, “Back up. First define political correctness.” We argue (but in a low tone) for a while. Which isn’t the point. Point is this. The event that triggered the discussion has happened. We are not near the end of thinking about what it means. , or how to bridge people rather than becoming more entrenched. The event is happening in New York City, 1700 miles away, roughly. I can’t write the witness poem. I could write a political, a didactic piece, and probably a bad one. But there is a news we tend to ignore in our 24 hour news cycle of fact spewing – which is the reaction to it, locally, maybe in our own homes. The reaction becomes news because it is the story of how each person will view the world afterward – a small chance of changing, a greater chance of having that view hardened. What happens next, perhaps an image of political refugees from war torn Myanmar, already has meaning attached. It is in tens of millions of living rooms like this where the tension rises. Somewhere it reaches a crescendo. In which living room does the next Dylan Roof sit glued to the screen, or the next activist for positive change? Writing about these fault lines provides a glimpse of the movement beneath the surface, the impending collision that makes these words relevant at some unknown place down the road.
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May 2019
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