Memoria poetry (5.31.22)

What happened in Uvalde?  Sadly, only those teachers, kids, and police know; and what happened inside that school room only a teacher and the kids in that class at that hour know.  The rest is for speculation.

Which brings me to my topic: poetry in memory of, or in acknowledgement of.  There is all kind of it, isn't there?  Think of The Iliad as a memorial to the great Greek-Trojan war.  Think of Sigfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooks writing about trench warfare in 1917.  Think of Whitman before that writing about a Union Army hospital camp and three dead soldiers under tarps.  Or more recently, Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet," about his experience serving in the first US-Iraq War.  These poems aren't exactly "in memory of," but more about the horrors and heroics of war.  But they might still be classified as a type of what I have in mind.  

Another type, more closely aligned with what I've been thinking about, you read in some of W.H. Auden's poetry in 1939 and 1940, as the German Army rolled through Western Europe.  You know, his "low, dishonest decade" and his "New Year Letter (1940)."  

Obviously, where I'm going here is poetry written in memory of a catastrophe or a "tragedy" or an otherwise horrific event that all of a nation or even the world experience together.  Like what happened in Uvalde and before that in Buffalo and before that  . . . and so on and so forth.

(I should sit down soon and write a poem about angry boys with powerful guns and title it "And So On And So Forth."  But the point of this piece is why.  Why would I do that?)

Like clockwork, like Inevitability itself, my own writing cohort has produced several poems now in reaction to the events in Uvalde.  Not so much on the events in Buffalo or any of the other deadly forays around the U.S. in the past five months.  But that's another story, maybe.

Like clockwork, it seems, Amanda Gorman produces a poem in reaction to the event in Uvalde.  It gets front page, above-the-fold placement in the New York Times on May 28.

Why do we do this?  What is this that we do?  For whom do we write these poems?  What are we, readers, to do with these poems?

I really don't know.  But lately they all strike me about as deeply as my Congressman's thoughts and prayers.

So, what happened in that school room and in that grocery market and in that church and in that nail salon (and so on and so forth) that any of us could possibly think we might address through a poem dashed off the day after?  We. Were. Not. There.  So shut up already.

Some "events" demand that: just shut up.  Give your horror which is my horror too time to simmer, to work its way out of your sub- and into your conscious mind.  No songs, no prayers, no poems.

Though of course, I have to write a full-on blog entry just to make that point.