06X: Poetry is the Cut that Heals

Megan Fernandes's poem "Amsterdam," memes as figures of speech, and how we really need to stop scrolling as a substitute for feeling.

It has occurred to me more than once, lately, as I scroll Twitter or compose a text, that the moment for the mass popularization of poetry is upon us.

Think about the proliferation of visual memes, for example: how they are nothing if not ultra-versatile figures of speech, capable of encapsulating layers of complex meaning in a moment.

What else was the original meme of Bernie in his mittens at the Biden inauguration, but a deft visual couplet, shaped and edited to mean a modern version of Hamlet’s “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.”

And think about how multi-layered our lives are now, and how poetic that is. We live in ordinary space, and we now also lead digital lives via video conference for work, school, family and friends, multiplayer video games, watch-parties, and through conversations on social media.

And what are most texts but word play and line breaks?

The double and triple meanings of poetry, once esoteric, are now endemic.

Let’s test this theory on a poem by one of my current favorite poets, Megan Fernandes. Here’s the first stanza of her poem, “Amsterdam.”

Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true—
like when I see a blond man bob for red apples
in the street selling records side by side with a black cat
wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says
he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism
depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief
is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering
that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that,
he seems sad today. How do you stay alive.
When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told
me not to go because it had a gift shop and that
made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve
in public, how to make public space for loss
unless you can make money off of it but really
there is something else to his anger, the child
abandoned, the residue of a young girl’s life turned
into a petting zoo—this he cannot take.

To start, you can see how the image of the man, the apples, and the sleeping cat has a quick, portable, meme-like effect. She’s saying “to start, let’s picture the obvious thing.”

Then, notice how Fernandes unspools the narrative of “Josh”’s concern about the monetization of suffering in a way that reflects the way we now relay complex information: the last eight enjambed lines rush through the details like the meme of the girl yelling Very Necessary Facts into the bewildered frat guy’s ear. It’s reflective of how our media diet hurries us through any story that is longer than a tweet, requiring an apology for taking the time.

The next stanza then has another quick turn in tone, just like our conversations do—we jump from one thing to the next, skimming and liking. Here, Fernandes tells us her who, what and where just as surely as we tag and geo-tag our posts.

I have become like my mother where I don’t
need sleep in a new city anymore, immune to
time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit
and almonds and a good loaf
of bread and today, some fresh juice, skipping museums
though I want to go back to see Anne Frank’s
house this time, because this time,
I am a woman and last time, I was a girl
and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl
and when you are a woman, all you see is history
careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.

The stanzas ends with more enjambment that makes word play of sentence syntax and the repetition of “girl.” Here again, Fernandes is getting the hard part out fast and with the ironic, arched eyebrow of skipped punctuation. In a world in which almost everything is monetized for content, God forbid we be earnest and especially don’t be earnest if it’s about being afraid.

Then, comes the Instagrammable image in the first half of the next stanza:

In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate
with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal
has been painted at its compression. In it, I pour
some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit
on the white couch overlooking the new
neon green blooms gathering on a branch
outside the large window . . .

This reminds me of how, recently back from the Netherlands, I talked a bit too much about how good European coffee and public transportation are, and my son told me that I “low-key” sounded like I had just come back from school year abroad.

Like so many of our travel photos, there’s just no way they can be digested unironically.

Sure enough, just as my kid’s world-weary, millennial sarcasm follows an Instagram quality moment, the stanza turns.

                    . . .      directly facing an apartment
of a bookish couple, the kind who forget
they have bodies and think they are better
than those who are bodily which is most everyone else
in the world but the girl in the couple is lying
and misses the small animal inside her
crying for her breakfast.
What she needs is food, not Yeats.
What she needs is your fingers.
The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass
and cacti of all heights like reptilian skyscrapers.

So, this is where my analogy seems to breaks down, because it’s suddenly very clear that we are not reading a comment thread. The recurring motif of the abandoned child—the at-risk girl and the sudden appearance of cacti as “reptilian skyscrapers—” are introducing discordance, as surely as the Old Masters did with their overripe fruit and drooping blooms. This is a poem now, not a social media moment. There is fragility and mortality to think about; we are going to need a minute.

Except that we are now as accustomed to discordance as we are duality. Our weather app tells us that there are thousands of lightning strikes across the river, but in our own garden, the sun is already shining through the clouds. Our feeds tell us that we are at each others throats, but Joe, our neighbor who has a the flag with the blue stripe running through the middle, has brought our trash cans in again.

Like the narrator of this poem, we all think in what the poets call multiple temporalities almost without noticing, traveling from the physic reality of our immediate, local world, to the ideas about our lives that exist in our minds, to the memories we have of other places, and back again.

Our poet, in this particular case, suddenly travels back in time and space to find herself in New York City at a restaurant in Harlem.

I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam.
Sometimes I go there to hide.
I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady
named Fay. Fay is older with light eyes and her whole
family works this place and her grandson
is behind the bar and he’s just seventeen and a soccer
player and this week got into Dartmouth and I ask
her if she thinks he’ll be happy, being a black
kid at Dartmouth, but Fey is Queen Fey
and knows better than to answer questions
about race at dinner time especially in front
of all these nice people.

For someone like me, this poem is now extremely local. There is the idea of Dartmouth—the one in the poem that signifies an elite East Coast college and its attendant issues—and my own, IRL Dartmouth which is very near where I live. It is the Dartmouth that has a monster-sized new building that is somehow both a very large parking garage and a center for computational science and the stately bell tower of Baker Library, which tends to look lovely at sunset. It’s a twinning of a reference, created by a geospatial and digital convergence.

We are used to these, now, too.

It happens every time we see the face of a lover, or our child, or a friend, or an ex in a group photo posted by a venue or a school or a friend group. The imagery of our lives have multiple meanings that are both remote and very, very near.

(We are almost finished now, so stay with me. Keep scrolling.)

It’s time for the thing that every good poem does, which is take us back to all of the ideas that it floated at the beginning and reveal the pattern of connection, which is maybe the most fundamental job of a poem. Welcome, all of you recreational internet conspiracists, the poet says, hold my beer.

Fernandes, true to form, takes us back to the Anne Frank house and that chilly morning in April:

In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April
grows the dandelions in the gutter and when
you get to 263 to see Anne Frank’s house (only
from the outside) the building is not as tall
as you remember and you wonder what the ceilings
were like for a young girl and you imagine
her face, I imagine her face and think
maybe something bad happened to Josh
when he was a kid and you see her
face in the window, her face lit up in story,
her face in love and in fear, and you are in Amsterdam
when the American president bombs Syria.
You say American president as if you are not
an American and as if he is not your president.
You promised that he would not make his way
into any poem, but here he is bombing
Syria and here is he is in your poem
and here is her face spreading all over
Europe and here is your face, Anne,
spreading all over Europe and
here is your face, your face, your face.

So, here is where the scalpel comes out. This is not a meme, and we are not going to be able to just scroll and go home. That is not what poetry is for. It is not here to stultify your mind with a cascade of endorphin-producing visuals and pseudo-facts and ads and then send you into another night of insomniac tossing and turning.

No. The poem is here to make a clean cut that heals.

It is here to free us from our understandable but magical belief that if we touch grass or put a flag as our avatar or eat more protein or clear our inbox we will defeat suffering and death. The poem is here to make you understand that we are dealing with violence that is real—that the doom we are scrolling is not a viral video, out of context, nor the abstract violence of a museum exhibit. It is the violence that is happening right now, “in the poem” and “spreading all over Europe”—the tens of thousands of children in Syria whose lives are as important as Anne Frank whose loss will never be told.

It’s a wound that heals, because it is the truth and not the scrim of the truth. And we are helped with facing this truth because the poet has first grounded us in the things that we know, like the simple beauty of “olive oil and a little bit of salt” or our childhood wounds, or the way we look into the windows of other people and envy their lives. We are grounded in what we know, which makes it possible to pause and actually feel something.

This is what a poem like “Amsterdam” does. It takes us by hand and lets us face the truths and not just perform them. It helps us remember that we are not merely tourists in our lives, consuming ourselves as images and memes.

It reminds us that we are not and never will be influencers nor are we merely vessels to be influenced, but rather we are people, with baggage and visions, who are trying to make sense of the swiftly turning world. Which we are all managing to do, one way or another, by dint of holding on to our empathy.

It is enough. It has to be.

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