It Came From Twitter: an Elegy for the Poetry World
I had intended to abstain from the genre of complaining about the cesspool of hot takes that is Twitter; I am already too terminally online. But I got suckered in this time by a kerfuffle over an either heartwarming or white-supremacist sonnet by John Okrent.
Takes on the poem range from the pictured “so beautiful” to “This poem sucks.” There were a variety of complaints, which, if you have no respect for your own time, you can find dominating the replies to the quoted tweet, but these were primarily political rather than aesthetic objections. I will get to these briefly towards the end, but first I wanted to take the poem on its own terms.
“May 5, 2020” is not quite an elegy but hits a note of soft grief. Grief is itself a vexed emotion. We do not know how to grieve, having never figured it out. Grieve too little and we are cold, uncaring. Grieve too deeply or too long and we are ridiculous. We must stop grieving, we know, throw off our black cowls, and yet the loss we are grieving is never restored. No one rises from the dead. Grief often feels inexpressible, and yet calls out to be shared.
An elegy must somehow navigate this morass of expectations. To see how this can be done, let us take a typical elegy from late 19th century American poet James Russell Lowell, also a sonnet.
Jeffries Wyman (Died September 4, 1874.)
The wisest man could ask no more of Fate
Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
Safe from the Many, honoured by the Few;
To count as naught in World, or Church, or State,
But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious Nature ever new;
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clue,
And learn by each discovery how to wait.
He widened knowledge and escaped the praise;
He wisely taught, because more wise to learn;
He toiled for science, not to draw men's gaze,
But for her lore of self-denial stern.
That such a man could spring from our decay
Fans the soul's nobler faith until it burn.
Such an elegy has the qualities of a good funeral speech. It is dignified, well-structured. It evinces admiration for the subject, but plays down the speaker’s personal connection in favor of a more objective survey of the departed’s finer qualities. The elegizer seeks, perhaps presumes to speak on behalf not just of himself. Whatever deep feelings the speaker has, they manifestly have a hold on themselves. As with many elegies, it concludes with an attempt at divining some deeper meaning, but it is not overreaching: even formally it dispenses with the pat couplet to draw out the rhyme scheme of the final stanza.
The speaker of “May 5, 2020” is in no danger of pulling a Leland Palmer but neither are they in any position to emulate James Lowell. He simply does not have anything much to say about the departed and so the speech comes off as if speaking at the funeral of a stranger. Juan, we are sure, had many fine qualities, too many to list.
Such a speech would be embarrassing, cringe as the kids would have it. Hence the “What right have I to write this poem[?]” Even worse than being cringe, though, is having too strong of an aversion to cringe, such that one fails to recognize what is earnest if awkward and out of place. One of the under-eulogized losses of the pandemic was the acquaintanceship: sometimes, as here, for reason of death, but more commonly by enforced estrangement. It was almost better to be reunited with a near-stranger than a close friend. Juan thus serves as a metonym for all of these smaller losses.
This may or may not make things better. It explains the relatability of the poem (that most shallow and fleeting of aesthetic virtues) but it also intensifies the cringe. If it is gauche to monologue at a loose acquaintance’s funeral, how much more so to look, by extension, to thereby speak at an indefinite host of funerals. One would be committing not only the pecadillo of making the event too much about you, but inflicting the further insult of making it too little about them.
Of course, it is only by assuming that this poem is nonfiction that we can convert this misgiving with its speaker into a complaint against its author. It is of course possible that John Okrent had in mind a real maintenance man in his hospital, perhaps even likely, but by no means a given. The author, it seems, is the one person we can bring back to life.
And it is yet another leap from finding the poem to be in bad taste to finding it offensive. Here, as I understand it, is supposed to be the problem. John Okrent is white, well-off, professional. Juan is decidedly neither. These facts, as well as the fact that Juan died from the coronavirus and John did not, presumably have something to do with background racial and economic inequities. Of course, John Okrent is not, by any indication, especially responsible for or insensitive to these inequities. But it is rather thought that by virtue of inhabiting the luckier side of things there is something unjust in Okrent using Juan in this way.
I have expressed a certain squeamishness towards this, so I feel I have some sense of where such claims are coming from. I retreat, however, from ascribing anything especially nefarious. More strongly, I cannot see that responding to those who find something beautiful in the poem with such shaky righteousness accomplishes anything. Grief borders not just sadness but anger and fear, and so perhaps there is something not merely aggrieve but grieving in readings of the poem that would, say, represent Juan as being Okrent’s servant.
And of course there are more worthy subjects for elegy, but we might spare a thought for poetry. The coronavirus has of course been the source for a deluge of situational poems, a couple of which have flared up briefly into public consciousness. But these have done more to remind one of poetry’s moribund state. Poetry, as it is, has a miniscule upper crust, institutionally ensconsed or mildly popular, and lower ranks of semi-professionals and amateurs who contribute to and run smaller magazines. Poetry is especially prone, as many institutions have proved prone, to takeover by enthusiasm for social justice: given the leftist slant of its creators and its more-or-less complete immunity from popular demand. These are not what killed poetry, but they have left a somewhat less dignified funeral.