Graham Foust, "The Only Poem"

Read These and Thank Me Later

• Mia Sato, "Bad influence" – so there's Amazon, a monopoly with frightening control over markets, the Internet itself (Amazon Web Services), entertainment, etc. And Amazon wants to sell cheap but shiny goods to people who want to belong to a certain class. A class owning homes which look exactly like one Kim Kardashian would live in. This article is about two women who shop online for a living, who are Amazon "influencers," constantly making content to hawk products to their audience. One has sued the other for copyright violations and it would be near impossible to tell one influencer's work from the other if it weren't for the fact that one's tattoo has more flowers in the same style than the one who just has one flower.
  
  You'll read this article and wonder exactly what dystopia we've created. 1984 and The Origins of Totalitarianism will be set aside. What we're seeing is people becoming the same commercial for the same brand willingly, shaping their whole lives around a hitherto unimaginable level of conformity. Also: both of these women make plenty of money.
• If you can access it, Elad Nehorai's "The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost" is well worth your time. Just one quote from Nehorai, I think, will cement this as a must-read: "BLM was in many ways the last moment of true hope in America for many progressives and liberals. It was truly participatory and grassroots, it addressed the core existential issues Americans faced, and it shifted discourse in a way that was unprecedented. Which meant that when it lost its prominence, the hope around these subjects also faded."
• "I Liked New York as a Tourist. I Fell in Love with It as a Tour Guide" – this was a really sweet read about how all the little details we accumulate about a place can be so powerful for ourselves and others. You'll want to read it so you can find out why pigeons are so ubiquitous in NYC.

Graham Foust, "The Only Poem"

I'm staring at Foust's last lines of "The Only Poem:" Even in danger, / you're a writer, liar.

I might have been confused about those lines before. Danger? Me? Like the Ralph Wiggum Simpsons meme?

I'm not as confused about them anymore. I'm not thinking so much about being an academic in a country where education is under attack. More just the uncertainty of everything. Who knows whether I'll be healthy enough each day, whether I can depend on the routine of work, whether I'll have the support I need, whether the car will operate, whether family and friends will also make it. So many things need to go right in order for life to happen. Writing, by contrast, has a peculiar certainty. We can debate what the words mean, but the words do find the paper and form something.

The Only Poem
Graham Foust

This is not a machine.
It does not kill fascists.
You're pretending to see the light.

Winter. Some river,
its claws of water stalled.
You walk across, crossing this, it.

You trust ice, the thermometer,
and riotous loss. Even in danger,
you're a writer, liar.

So what is Foust saying in "The Only Poem?" Why do I have to confront being a "writer, liar" who doesn't understand the danger he's in? The poem has a strange construction worth looking closely at. Two of Foust's stanzas give us an image of walking across a frozen river in winter. "You trust ice, the thermometer, / and riotous loss." This co-exists with an opening about another topic entirely: "This is not a machine. / It does not kill fascists." How do we navigate the combination of political danger and the risks of a walk in winter?

The declaration "This is not a machine. / It does not kill fascists" comes from earned, complicated wisdom. I'm used to the best things I say falling on closed ears. You try to get the right words out there and hope they make an impact at the time they are needed. It's an uneven, contradictory process that rarely works. Lots of people in the history of thought, people with names like Machiavelli and Thucydides, strongly imply that only force or deeds move people. Fascists were killed en masse by an alliance of capitalist and communist powers.

At the same time, words do work. They just don't do exactly what we want when we want. Foust follows "This is not a machine. / It does not kill fascists" with "You're pretending to see the light." He seems to be saying that he has to pull his trust in words away. It's too unreliable. I want to push back at this juncture, three lines into the poem. I want to tell him that he actually can't pull that trust away. He can qualify it, but words are ultimately what we have. We know what deeds are because of words; what we struggle to articulate can cease to be real or meaningful. You're giving me a look, but think about the good things you failed to tell yourself about and how they almost disappeared. In like manner, there are bad things which could have occupied us but were allowed to dissolve.

Foust then switches the scene on us. From an ideal of words stopping fascism, a world where words are simply efficacious, to a reality within a winter landscape:

Winter. Some river,
its claws of water stalled.
You walk across, crossing this, it.

A river, with "claws of water stalled." "You walk across, crossing this, it." This is real. You can walk across water, no matter how vicious it is otherwise, if it is frozen. Is this what words mean to do? Freeze time and create the reality we need? If so, is the truth that matters from walking out in the cold?

Foust doesn't let himself so neatly divide the ideal and the real. "You trust ice, the thermometer, / and riotous loss." This looks like science but is not. It is a feeling, a report of what one could feel, and a cynicism about gains. This, too, is a lie, if one believed one's words couldn't stop fascism. The lie does not reside in a failure to cause anything, but rather in one's expectations and consistency. Confronting oneself as a liar, then, is understanding that making truth–writing the words that count–isn't a wish as much as a process. You can walk across that ice, you can rely on it, because of your actual test of the ground.