On the Columbine High School Massacre
It too happened in 1999. The year before I got to know nostalgia. My mom would offer serious perspectives during car rides to school, and I would stare into the miserable a.m. sun, overheated by the conjoining of the light and her words. Just like an incidental song that awakens you to the moment. Eric and Dylan we can give them this knew what it was like to be a teenager, the inaugural discovery of the sublime in mere coincidence. And I bet for them as I can say for me meaning invoked an erection for the anticipation of it all making sense and the explosion, the expulsion, of their uncertainties when at last it does. You can bet that someone once told Dylan he had sensitive eyes, and maybe Eric's father said cheer up son and maybe his mother said don't be so vacant.
Have you been spending your nights wrestling with Gertrude Stein? I love the lack of punctuation, the absentee commas and such. How the sentences just fall off your face as you say them and it's confusing at first. I was pretty confused with the sentence: "Eric and Dylan we can give them this knew what it was like to be a teenager, the inaugural discovery of the sublime in mere coincidence." The first part of the sentence contains clauses that would otherwise be blocked off by commas, but here they are not--the Stein effect in action. But then there IS a comma before the clause "the inaugural discovery of the sublime in mere coincidence." I don't know what this means. I like what it makes me feel, but everything else feels more tactile. And I feel like this is just the tip of an emotion that I would really want to put my hands on as I read this--like how i can put my hands on the car, the mother, the year 1999, the sensitive eyes, etc. Everything you write is a petting zoo except that one line, and I like to touch everything that I read because I don't understand it otherwise, but that's just me. Maybe I'm stupid.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of writing about Columbine from the perspective of, well, us. The people who didn't really know what was going on at the time. Or maybe I'm reading my own experiences into this poem. Major news stories always confuse me for reasons I can't exactly pin down. I guess the sensationalism of them just seems unreal and kind of baroque, not something that can be grasped. But yes, this is rehashing something that can actually handle being rehashed. I think that as major news stories go, this one was a good choice.
ReplyDeleteI like how the poem relates itself to the Columbine tragedy. It helps to give the reader a sense of place about what is going on. It serves as a frame, if you will.
ReplyDelete"the inaugural discovery of the sublime in mere coincidence" --Wow. If this is a description of aging, as I think is, it's one of the more satisfying things I've read in a while--outside class included. You know how aging kind of sneaks up on you? You add the numbers so slowly--one follows the other, but they all add up. The "discovery," I think, is time: something you discover wrapped up in itself in little pieces.
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