You Haven't Seen Enough

I never thought that a discussion about poetry could upset me on a personal level, but apparently I was wrong:

We were workshopping a girl's poem in class. It was about remembering her grandmother six years after her death, picking imagery from a birthday party her grandmother had thrown for her and the grandmother's funeral, and it was written in an understated, yet subtly sincere way that was rather close to my own heart.

Anyway, this kid made some comment about how she was putting "a cushion between her poem and her emotions"--saying that there wasn't enough raw anguish apropos to the death of a loved one coming through the poem, and not enough of the knee-jerk "betrayal" feeling (which he seemed to pick up on, though I didn't see it as being part of the original poem's intent at all, if it was even possible to infer such a sentiment from the poem), and those things detracted from the psychological impact. I did not agree with this, and responded that, especially given the six-year gap between the death and the perspective from which the poem was written, it might make more sense to deliver the emotions in a fuzzy, nostalgic way.

So far all in good fun, if momentarily absurd, but a girl suddenly burst in saying she couldn't believe I would suggest something like that, that the removal took away something human about grieving. She said that it was, quote, "anti-poetry." As though I was somehow inhuman for suggesting that one could write about grief in a mellowed-out tone of voice.

I had a lot of things to say to that. Things along the lines of my own father died not even six years ago, and two more of my family members have died since then, you can't tell me what's human about grieving and what's not because you don't have any fucking perspective, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

I wanted to say that sometimes--all of the time for me--writing poetry was like throwing knives at the circus: you have to cut it as close as you humanly can, but you can never throw the knife directly at your target, because if you actually hit it, you were fucked.

I wanted to say that if talking about emotions, real ones, were so easy a thing, we wouldn't have to resort to literature, confronting emotions like Perseus did Medusa--through reflections and projections, because to face the thing face-on would snuff out the life in us all.

I wanted to ask if they could even understood what that meant, and if not, what were they even talking about?

All these things rushed to my head like a dammed-up river, and I couldn't even think until a minute later, when I realized the professor was talking to me, and actually agreeing with them. Bloody hell. All I could do after that class ended was wander into the Hut, collapse on a couch, crank Kid A and pass out. I didn't get much sleep last night.

And people wonder why I never talk about my "emotions," as they were.