Talking Shock

What is the role of violence and shock in poetry today? Or, as English professor and critic Stephen Burt asked at the “In Extremis” poetry panel Oct. 1, “What does a poet gain or lose by having blood all over the page?”

This is perhaps one of the most polarizing questions for the vanguards of today’s literary scene. After all, it is framed in the context of an age replete with lurid images available at our fingertips. For many a highbrow critic, excessive sex and gore are undesirable in a lyrical work since these elements have the potential to reduce poetry to kitschy sensationalism. However, this was not the view of Johannes Göransson or Joyelle McSweeney ’97, the two eminent poets seated in the Woodberry Poetry Room with Burt.

Göransson, a poet and literary critic of Swedish origin, has also published numerous works in translation, a field he credits with introducing him to more controversial topics in poetry, such as violence in Korean action novels. Explaining how he sees the American literary environment, he noted, “We are a culture with many images flowing over us, but everything is labeled as ‘obscene.’” In his view, the term is not only hypocritical; it may also have a stultifying effect on our nation’s creative output. “Calling a poem ‘tasteless’ is a way to divorce it from the rest of its genre,” Göransson said. He deplores such a dismissal as closing too many doors for the American literary enthusiast.

For Joyelle McSweeney, award-winning poet and cofounder of Action Books, a press that publishes poetry as well as numerous works in translation, violence holds a rightful, even necessary place in poetry. “Obscene? My work is obscene,” she laughed, asserting that poems should provoke and unsettle the reader. Historically, it is without doubt that shock value has been prominent in any artist’s toolkit. Where would Whitman have been without his heavy use of sexual innuendoes that caused his contemporary John Greenleaf Whittier to allegedly throw “Leaves of Grass” into the fire?

According to McSweeney, poems should reflect one’s social or political reality rather than skating over uncomfortable topics. “My obligation as a poet is to address the violence going on around me and to bring it into visibility,” she said. However, she does not throw blood on the page for its own sake. “It’s not like, ‘If it doesn’t have enough violence, it isn’t cooked yet,’” she chuckled.

Shock value can also be conveyed in other ways besides the written word. “I like to make my live readings as charged as possible,” McSweeney said. “It is ethical to envision poetry as an alternate space [where one can also] conduct violence into audibility.” To demonstrate, McSweeney performed her current work-in-progress, Pistorius Rex, a libretto that presents the murder case of Oscar Pistorius as an allusion to “Œdipus Rex,” complete with a Greek chorus of frogs borrowed from Aristophanes. In this piece, McSweeney does not hesitate to pick apart and expose the most sensitive areas of the case, such as Pistorius’s disability and the ghastliness of the murdered girlfriend’s death: “but why would the dawn…love Pistorius / is it…because he runs—like a woman / or a cat—on blades.”

Such gruesome images were rendered all the more striking by McSweeney’s robotic, choppy pronunciation of each line as she took on the lines of the frog-chorus. She did not give the audience the benefit of a pause before each wave of toneless questions, rattling off one after the other in a mechanical barrage of sound. By audibly stripping the murder case of its pathos, McSweeney left her audience to face alone the full blow of the morbid imagery. This transfer of the emotional burden from performer to the spectators left many feeling like the frogs: helpless bystanders to a Greek tragedy whose fate they are not able to control.

For McSweeney and Göransson, this “staging of the sound” has become the hallmark of the modern extreme poem. Take spoken word poetry, whose fired-up performance poems are popular among the newest generation for what Göransson sees as their “visceral impact” on the audience. No matter how they communicate their power, however, McSweeney and Göransson agreed that poetic works are nothing different from the reality from which they emerge: they simply digest the controversial and vexing events that catch the gaze of any citizen. As McSweeney says, “It’s just that the volume has been turned up.”