Amelia Gray

In a brilliantly provocative essay for the New Republic, Ruth Franklin describes a poetry reading she went to recently where poet Amelia Gray “took the stage and announced with a demure smile that she was going to read some ‘threats.’

As Franklin relates,

Some were humorous: “I will gather your oldest friends at my home and we will have a conversation. You will hear us talking but when you come into the room we will stop talking.” Some left the menace to the imagination: “Try to kiss me. See what happens to your lips.” Some were vividly violent. “Your face is sealed with glue I have boiled in a vat.” … “Trust me when I say this: I exist to ruin you.” She read each cheerfully off a tiny slip of paper, which she would then toss onto the stage behind her.

The atmosphere was instantly charged. What was this – prose, poetry, neither, both? At first there were some quiet chuckles, then open laughter at the end of each outrageous expression of anger. “My truth is a sucking chest wound. The field doctor will apply a makeshift occlusive patch crafted from cellophane, aluminum foil, and duct tape. You are far from home.” The laughter was both shocked and relieved. There was something electrifying in the spectacle of this sweet-looking woman blithely reading off her visions of brilliant mayhem ….

It was enough to make Franklin consider “how unusual it is for poets, and women poets in particular, to express anger. To the extent that such things can be generalized about, there is a distinct style of contemporary American poetry that tends not to range dramatically in mood. For the most part it is serious, elegiac, wistful, perhaps with a sideline of dark humor. It coolly offers images and observations; it does not judge or rabble-rouse or incite revolution.”

That’s point one. But in point two, Franklin takes the consideration someplace even more interesting — into the heart — or, as she might say, the guts — of our democracy, where it belongs:

But the other reason the audience responded so favorably to Amelia Gray, I think, had to do with the contrast between her appearance and her words ….

What if Amelia Gray were to disguise her beauty with dumpy clothes, a wig, big glasses? Or if she delivered her menacing lines “I could quite literally devour you” in a tone that sounded like she meant them? What does true, sincere, gut-wrenching anger even look like anymore – can it be marshaled without the accompanying doses of irony to soften its edges? In an age that worships even-temperedness and deflection, a little righteous fury seems like it could be a necessary correction. I’d like President Obama to stand up before a room of BP executives and proclaim, “You are the acid in my guts. You are the pile of sand behind the curtain of my memory. You are the fish on the hook of my ugly heart. You are the tie around your own neck.” If he could do it without smiling afterward, that would be truly subversive.