Poems as string figures
Failing at death, failing at poetry, the wisdom that comes from failure vs. the recognition that comes from ascendancy
“ … giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before …” — Donna Haraway, Staying With Trouble
“Do not speak to god without a light.” — The Pythagorean Symbols, quoted by Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy
I entered grad school by way of the psych ward and a poetry obsession. After trying to shlep it as a journalist in the first several years of the 2010s—rising from the investigative crime reporter at a small daily in Alabama to a journalist on the “public safety” night desk at The Charlotte Observer—somewhere along the way, I had subconsciously decided I didn’t want to ride a career on the backs of other people’s deaths to The Washington Post or The New York Times. These papers were the career pinnacles in my brain as a high-school writer and a college J-school student, and even in the age of shrinking newsrooms and corporate buyouts, I watched other young, obsessively working, obsessively worked reporters make these successful careers leaps, albeit on smaller salaries and shittier healthcare benefits than what had undergirded the similar professional arcs of our editors and newsroom “higher-ups.”
It made me wonder what was wrong with me, three years into what promised to be A Good Career and already finding myriad little ways to sabotage my role as “star reporter,” drinking, drugs, eating disorder drama, an ill-conceived affair with an older editor. Other reporters on the crime beat didn’t seem to have an internal war constantly waging in their brains or in their lives about the bodies we saw, the ethics of writing about them (however complex, however nuanced) in ways that sold papers. For me, even 3,000 word 1A stories couldn’t wipe away the stench of my own careerist closeness to and complicity in Black and marginalized death. The cops were always there to point fingers at, sure, but so was I, and my own racist family, and the intricacies of a South where private and public reckoning were never apart from each other, however much the newspaper business declared objectivity as the line between each. Writing poetry became one of the healthier ways I coped with this entanglement.