Major Jackson photo: © Erin Patrice O’Brien.

Does American poetry suffer from an abundance of artistic dignity and not enough street credibility? It’s possible. When I asked a friend, a terrific prose writer, why she seems to have a slight disdain for poetry, she replied, “It’s too elitist, like walking through a beautiful forest in which I know not where to look, much less know what I am searching for. If I don’t get it as a reader, then I feel like an idiot and somehow not worthy of the form.” In years past, I would have fretted and dismissed her remarks as garden-variety philistinism, but my friend is admirably sensitive, a brilliant scholar, Ivy educated, and not someone prone to make trivializing remarks without great consideration.

Nor is she alone. For the better part of my life, at dinner parties, at neighborhood gatherings, or on the sidelines of my children’s sporting events, I have had to confront the incredulity of ordinarily thoughtful, even erudite people who professed a similar antagonism toward poetry. An English department chair, a Renaissance scholar relishing a moment of candor, with tapenade and a flute of Dom Ruinart in hand, admitted to me that he is “terrified” of poetry. The roots of such fears and anxieties have been the subject of many essays, and as a result there are as many defenses as there are quarrels with poetry, the most recent being Ben Lerner’s humorous and insolently titled The Hatred of Poetry. Read More

On rereading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and confronting the trauma of sexual assault.

The morning after I was raped, nearly eight years ago, I got in my car and drove home. There, in my teenage bedroom, I took the pair of tights I’d been wearing the night before out of my bag, put them back on, and looked at myself in the mirror. The tights were torn across the crotch: not a ladder, but a gaping, deliberate tear that went across both thighs and between my legs. At the tops of my legs, on the skin exposed by the tear, were bruises. I took the tights off and threw them away, along with the underwear I had been wearing that night. I was due to start my first year of college in a week, and my mind was pushing down the memories of what had happened the night before. Even then, I was already rationalizing the tears and the bruises as something consensual, something I had either invited or agreed to.

The mind has ways of burying what has happened to the body, during and after trauma. If this has not happened to you, it can be difficult to comprehend. Dissociative amnesia is a survival mechanism which represses memories and experiences of trauma so deeply that the conscious mind has no access to it. Throughout my time at university, I dissociated myself from the memory of what had happened just before I moved away from home. I experienced anxiety and depression, developed disordered eating habits and addictive behavior. I had nightmares, dreams of a man standing over me, from which I would wake up screaming so loudly that I would wake my neighbors, but all of this I somehow managed to put down to exam stress, work stress—anything that would allow me to continue denying the fact that I had been raped.

It was not until a year after graduating, more than four years after the assault, that I first acknowledged what had happened to me. Whether it was emotional stability, maturity, or forcible reminders, my mind was ready to present me with those buried memories. And when they came, they came with force. I was suffering daily panic attacks, flashbacks, intense anxiety, and depression. I began treatment, medication courses, therapy, and the soul-destroying work of telling the people I loved most what I had spent all these years hiding. Of the various coping mechanisms I developed, functional and dysfunctional, the one I held on to, the one that gave me the most hope, was writing. It gave me the possibility of a future that wasn’t shaped by trauma, but that I might shape. When I first started showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress, it was November 2015. By the end of the year, I had written the short story—a rape, its consequences—on which my first novel would be based. Read More

On Linda Boström Knausgård’s novella Welcome to America and the end of childhood.

Still from Village of the Damned (1960)

Every night when I was a child, my mother asked me to set the table before dinner. I came to believe that if there was anything odd among the four place settings—a chipped plate, say, or a knife from a different pattern—the one I gave it to would die. My habit in the beginning was to give it to my brother; later, my mother, and later still my father. I can’t explain these decisions. Night after night, no one would die, but my belief in this power, my fear of this power, persisted. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I’d mostly outgrown the belief. I had talked myself out of other secret, compulsive behaviors, like counting things pointlessly, never stepping on a certain corner tile in the foyer. Still, when setting the table, I began to take the doomed object, the portent, for myself—superstitiously, just in case.

Ellen, the eleven-year-old narrator of Linda Boström Knausgård’s recently released novella Welcome to America, believes she has similar powers, but life has provided her with more evidence that they’re real: “My dad’s dead. Did I mention that? It’s my fault. I prayed out loud to God for him to die and he did.” In the aftermath, Ellen has stopped talking or even writing—communication is dangerous, any crossing of the barrier between inner life and outer world. “You should never ask for what you want,” Ellen says, or maybe thinks—the transmission of this confession somehow bypasses her silence.

It disturbs the order of things. The way you really want them. You want to be disappointed. You want to be hurt and have to struggle to get over it. You want the wrong presents on your birthday.

Ellen does not feel remorse about her father, whose moods were erratic and threatened violence; he made her mother and everyone unhappy: “I never felt guilty about wishing he was dead.” She reasons it was murder in self-defense and, further, she is not fully responsible, since she achieved the killing through prayer. God is her coconspirator: “It was me and God who’d killed my dad. We’d done it together, once and for all.” But she is afraid of her own power, “the power there was in me speaking.” She quickly realizes silence is another kind of power—the power of withholding what other people want (“It was so easy. Just stopping. From one moment to the next my life was changed”). It’s a power she must have the strength of will to maintain: “Sometimes I’m scared I’ll talk in my sleep. That someone will hear me and hold it against me at some future time.” Ellen has spent so much of her childhood in fear. In her silence, finally, she becomes frightening; a threat and not the threatened.

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