Last weekend, when I started writing this — which was before the White House plague had me believing in God again, which is also why you should never wait to press “SEND” on such things — it was about Trump flags. I had driven through the Adirondack forest, Trump flag after Trump flag after Trump flag blurring like middle fingers past me, revolted not only by its politics (KEEP AMERICA GREAT) but by the experience of having to see it over and over. Each flag called to mind others: hoisted at Iwo Jima (why? I’ve forgotten, I won’t look it up), the one I insisted on sticking on my parents’ car after 9/11, the one sunk into the moon, the one “o’er ramparts we” —we?—“watched.” I sped past, forgoing bucolic pleasure to instead engage once more in a useless confrontation with settler colonialism, xenophobic militarism, and white supremacy. For of course every Trump flag is in dialogue not with a Biden sign but with an image of BLM protestor the flag-waver must have seen on Fox News in the last few months.
Poets, I think, unlike writers who so painstakingly must create or represent a world, are often best in moments where the distance between what you see and what you can’t collapses. Poetry is unusually able to exist in this world, to encompass the truth of the irregular Substack letter and the president in the hospital, without having to tell us why and how they do so. Why the Trump flag means is, actually and literally, a poetic question, because it speaks to us in signs that elicit — and never quite articulate — what it is they signal toward (the Minneapolis uprising, the moon). What the flag knows about Minneapolis, or the moon, depends on who reads the flag — who hears the register of its speaking. In “Anecdote of the Jar,” Wallace Stevens points us to that presence, without—of course—ever describing anyone:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
What makes this wilderness “surround” the hill (instead of, we infer, merely exist, as non-human existence does)? Does the jar create that relation, or does the poem subject that world to its order?
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
The made thing, the human artifact (jars, flags, fascism, poetry) orders — or perhaps subjugates — the rest of the chaos of being. The jar leaves wilderness un-wilded, inert. It civilizes, it colonizes. It gives the human language purchase. Something to describe, something to know.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
With its dominion, the poem finally rhymes. The endless potential of language submits momentarily to the regimen of rhythm, and then breaks it again. But having been harmonious, for a moment, this last rupture is as unnatural as the placement of the jar. It doesn’t fit, yet by language it rules over the land which cannot speak its name.
What I’m saying is my ability to exist as the antagonist at which the Trump flag flies forces me to concede to being made legible by it. This is why the flags made me so mad, I think. They felt almost too exactly for me. They awaited my witness, my lib-ness, my Klean Kanteen and my Honda CR-V. They interpellated me as they would know me, as “hater” or “loser,” compelled me into a relation with them and with myself I would not have assumed except in this exact confrontation. That I had no choice but to assume, to incorporate into my body (via sensations of rage, despair), in a process that became a way of perceiving the universe I now understood I existed within.
But that was last week. This week, with Trump in the hospital, my own fevered typing having cooled off a bit, I’m thinking about the ways language is itself a virus, replicating and replicating, the word Trump implanting in me a need to analyze something, anything, I can understand (a poem) in the face of what I cannot (history). Coronavirus is laden with metaphor, the most salient of which, of course, that there is no cure. And though I was always going to end this third and much belated dispatch with sections from the Louise Glück poem, “Witchgrass,” I think writing today, Monday 10/5, I want to position it at least as a curative approach, a way of speaking that leads away from the endless iterations of language into an actual otherness:
If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything—
…
I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.