Perhaps, as a white man who was born and raised in St. Louis County, Seidel felt obliged to say, in the poem's most unpoetic line, "I wouldn't want to be a black man in St. Louis County." But so what? KKK members don't need Harvard educations to say the same. I guess I was hoping for a little more insight.
[Edited to say--In retrospect, this remark I made yesterday sounds a lot more snarky and anti-elitist than I'd intended. I don't expect poems to convey "messages" in a didactic way, and of course I was taking into account the possibility that such a line might be doing more than its face value suggests. Poems are supposed to let you arrive at your own answers, rather than spelling everything out--an opening out to meaning, rather than a narrowing down. But I was still hopeful that, after I'd invested a reasonable amount of time and energy to connect the dots presented by the poet, I might arrive at deeper insights from the poem than I've managed to.]
Ian, I liked Seidel's "Boys" poem--which, I suppose, is also about black men in St. Louis County--much better than this one. In "Boys" (as in Browning's "My Last Duchess"), the poet seems fully conscious of the limitations of his narrator's point of view. His carefully-chosen little details add up to an impression of privilege, self-congratulation, power-tripping, etc. In contrast, I'm not sure that the poet is aware that his Ferguson poem is stuck in a particular mid-20th-century point of view.
To me, the unsuccessfully unzipped fly, vulnerability, and reaching through the window bit represent the purported struggle for Darren Wilson's weapon, said to have taken place through the window of the police car--a claim which the physical evidence supports. Fly-equals-holster is a bit less obvious than the stereotypical gun-equals-phallus, but that strikes me to me as a plausible interpretation. The magical intervention of an assisting angel is one way of explaining why the physical evidence and the witness accounts of Michael Brown's non-threatening behavior don't always add up.
However, the easiest explanation for why the two don't always add up--and the one which Seidel's poem seems to endorse, if I'm reading it right--is that Michael Brown's transformation into a symbol makes the actual facts of what happened irrelevant to some parties. This tunnel vision be true in some cases, but I don't think it's representative of what the protestors are actually saying--if one takes the trouble to listen to more than a soundbite here and a soundbite there.
I can't tell if Seidel has failed to listen, or is mocking those who have failed to listen. It's hard not to think of simplistic, chant-like slogans in general, when the poem says:
Quote:
Skin color is the name.
Skin color is the game.
Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri.
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The invocation of Billie Holiday as proof that light-skinned blacks have also faced prejudice--and therefore what happened in Ferguson couldn't ONLY have been about skin color!--seems so banal that I'm inclined to conclude that Seidel is mocking the protestors. (Seriously, does anyone over five years old think that racial prejudice is only skin deep? Sheesh.)
Today's Ferguson protestors do chant slogans, but few, if any, of them are claiming that we would have a more just and peaceful society if people of all races could freely steal cigarillos from stores, and then brazenly walk down the middle of the street with them, and then defy a police officer's order to move to the sidewalk, and then perhaps grab for the police officer's weapon, etc., etc.
No. The protestors' message is that lapses of character and judgment are more often fatal for young black men than for young white men. THAT's why Michael Brown can still be regarded as a martyr, even though everyone recognizes that he wasn't a saint. (Or angel, any more than Billie Holiday was.)
Saying that the work of King is still unfinished is not the same as a hyperbolic transubstantiation of the body of Brown into the body of King. The body I see most clearly in this poem is that of the straw man Seidel has constructed for the purpose of knocking it down.
It also bothers me somewhat that, even though I am forty-six years old--can I even use the term "middle-aged" anymore, given how few ninety-two-year-olds I know?--I still seem too young to be Seidel's target audience for "Ferguson." He assumes that the reader will instantly recall the FBI's surveillance of, harassment of, and rumored involvement in the demises of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Hoffa, and others thought to be Communist sympathizers. Throw in Robert Kennedy and Billie Holiday, and the poem feels painfully, painfully dated. It's addressed over my head, to my parents' generation.
Which, unfortunately, makes me think of my dad's dementia when I encounter the poem's use of absurdities and repetition--not, perhaps, the connotations Seidel was going for. I think he probably meant to convey the differing accounts of what happened. For example, the hands of the waiter raised as the man in the flaming clothes (police uniform?) approaches him evokes the version of events in which Michael Brown's hands were raised to show that he was unarmed. (In contrast, the Robert Kennedy video, which Seidel's narrator claims to have seen himself, remains identical in both tellings. See what a reliable witness he is? We can totally trust him. Even if he is well over the proverbial age of thirty.)
Perhaps it's appropriate for the poem to feel stuck in the past, since Seidel suggests that society hasn't progressed very far since then. The mention of time delays in the poem evokes both the months-long delay while the grand jury examined witnesses and evidence, and the decades-long delay between Robert Kennedy's announcement to a largely black audience and this week's press conference to a largely black audience. But my overall impression is that Seidel is more stuck in the past than society is.
(Then again, I get stuck in my own ruts, as well, particularly where experimentalism is concerned, so I've a significant pot/kettle problem when I take issue with Seidel's.)
I do very much like Seidel's line "And brings God a glass of humble water," which hints that a police officer clothed in power and authority expects people of color to treat him as if he's godlike and must be placated at all costs, lest they incur his fiery wrath. When that line is immediately followed by the idea that, if a victim can change from a corpse to a cause, there's also hope for white-dominated police agencies [Edited to say: or other, vaguer, Powers That Be] to change from harassment and occasional brutality "to blessing and being blessed"...i.e., it's too much to expect them to stop thinking they're godlike, but maybe they could do so in a more benevolent manner?...wow. I don't share that sardonic attitude, but I find it very effective in the poem.
Thanks for the conversation, which I hope isn't over, and for introducing me to more of Seidel's work. He may never be my cup of tea, and I may be badly misreading him here, but I do find his approaches interesting. Many of my own narrators are not particularly sympathetic, sometimes quite intentionally, so I would be foolish not to pay attention to what he's doing and why, and how it goes over.
Linear Mode
