by Erik Anderson
The white male body is not marked, or so white men are raised to think.
When I was eighteen and a freshman in college, the poet Ron Padgett visited the writing class I was then taking in a surprisingly bright basement room. We had been studying Padgett’s New & Selected Poems, and during the Q&A I asked him to read aloud a sonnet from the book, fourteen lines that repeated the same thing: “Nothing in that drawer.” He laughed and then delivered each line with a slightly different intonation. He was making fun of me a little, but I appreciated the joke. I liked that I was in on it.
Padgett read another poem that day mocking the notion of a young writer “finding his voice.” The poem, “Voice,” concludes with the assertion, “I hope I never find mine. I / wish to remain a phony the rest of my life.” The punning punchline (phone comes from the Greek for sound or voice) seems to come at sincerity’s expense, suggesting that the speaker’s “phoniness” is more real than any candor the poet might offer. The irony is that Padgett’s voice was as affable and wry in person as on the page. His phoniness was genuine, though I didn’t understand this at the time. For years, through no fault of Padgett’s, I was more suspicious of voice, my own in particular, than I should have been—at a time, moreover, when that was probably self-defeating.
The deeper suspicion I gleaned from “Voice,” and from much else I read over the decade that followed, was of expression itself. I saw as dated and juvenile the notion that there could be anything uniquely inside or about a self that one might want or need to convey. I believed in art but not in communication. I valued life but distrusted the self, or selves, that experienced it. In the many hundreds of poems I wrote between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, pronouns were abstractions: I was certainly another, and another, and another, but it was never me. My poems were sophisticated—clever, refined, experimental, and specious—but they were indistinct and indistinguishable. They lacked precisely the qualities that my voice, whatever that is, might have given them.
Put another way, I never quite learned how to be a body in a poem, never learned how to speak on my own behalf. The language divided me from what was being said, and it bears lingering on the tragedy of that, which is more timely, and enduring, than it might first appear. Because I didn’t trust, let alone know how to use, words to depict bodily or interior experience, I didn’t trust that experience. I was so deeply suspicious of the message’s mechanisms, that I didn’t trust the message.
All of that changed on Labor Day weekend in 2007, when I was assaulted by a group of men near my apartment in central Denver. Struck with incredible force by a man the police believed must have been holding brass knuckles, my nose and right cheekbone were badly broken. Much else broke or broke open in me that night. I was raw and hurting and there was no glossing over what I felt. There was only feeling. Language’s task was to reveal that feeling to the friends who drove me to the hospital, to the triage nurse and emergency room doctors, to my wife on the phone, visiting family a thousand miles away. Words became a nifty tool. They built bridges, not walls, and they linked up with my emotional registers in a way they rarely had before. There was nothing phony about it.
In the weeks and months after, the signs of my assault (and the corrective surgery that followed) visible on my face, I continued to speak with the same urgency and necessity. I told the story to everyone who asked, and plenty did. I couldn’t yet explain why, I would say, but I was grateful to my assailants. I felt more open and connected to others than I ever had. It slowly dawned on me that the person I had been up until that point hadn’t been that great, and that the person I might now become was only possible because the previous self had shattered. The men who attacked me had done so out of malice, but I wondered what they would think if they knew they had done me a favor. Would they flinch at the word, as so many have?
After a dozen years I understand the dimensions of their gift more clearly. They liberated me from pretense, from the phoniness of my poems, but they also gave me my body in a profound and enduring way. Until then—and how strange a notion this is to me now—I didn’t really consider myself as having a body. The body was a biological fact, but one divorced from how I interacted with others, and it certainly had no connection with my intellectual and artistic life, none that I would have accepted or even acknowledged anyway.
I’m not unique in this misapprehension. Most white men, I would argue, especially straight ones, are by default abstracted from the body, and detached from the consequences of identity. The white male body is not marked, or so white men are raised to think. And because we’re trained to see ourselves as insusceptible in this regard, we come to believe we’re impervious in other ways as well. We take our safety as a given, and it is a hallmark of both our privilege and our ignorance. What my assailants gave to me was the knowledge, obvious in itself, that everything depends upon the body, but also that the body is more than the sum of its parts. An account of the mechanisms of my steps along the stretch of Denver sidewalk near the corner of 9th and Washington would, from one perspective, adequately describe the body walking into danger, but in insisting on that body as an individual, autonomous actor, such a description would conceal the equally important fact that the body is a social construction. And it was this construction, more than anything else, that my assailants attacked and to some extent demolished.
The body, I know now, participates in a field of feeling, but an inability to attach words to feelings limits one’s access to that field, which is almost continuous, almost, with language itself. Pain, Rebecca Solnit writes, defines and delimits the body—“what you cannot feel is not you”—but “you participate in the social body with those you empathize with, whose pain pains you.” In the years since my assault, my work as a writer and teacher has been about entering that field, participating in that social body, or trying to. Because I never learned how a body might do that in a poem—because, as Claudia Rankine writes, loss isn’t “something an ‘I’ discusses socially”—I turned, pro se, to prose.
The question of not writing poetry is now the question of my life. My first book, The Poetics of Trespass, was a lovesong and farewell to the poem. My second, Estranger, includes a brief postmortem on my unremarkable life as a poet. The title essay of my collection, Flutter Point, centers on a brief period in 2013 when I tried to salvage my old poems and immediately came down with shingles. The question has come up in every job interview I’ve had since 2007, and I’ve answered it in the other sort of interview as well. It gives people pause, the idea that one could change so completely, that a person’s primary mode of being in or understanding the world could shift almost overnight, that a person could say goodbye to a previous self without much remorse or regret. Mine is a conversion story, and whether it’s Paul on the road to Damascus or Gregor Samsa in his bed, whether the sinner becomes a saint or vice versa, we want to believe that change, even redemption, is possible.
Such change is rarely as easy, however, as waking up a new person. In a recent essay for Lit Hub, I argued against mistaking disclosure for liberation and advocated the hard work of telling one’s story rather than reducing it, as to a tweet. The truncated version of events I’ve offered here omits my years in therapy, my stubborn but intermittent depression, and much else that I’ve channeled into my work. Because to change is not to achieve new and different stabilities: it’s a process either the circumstances of one’s life, or the forces of one’s will, set in motion. Writing nonfiction has allowed me to chart and shape that process in a way that the multifarious strictures of poetry (and even experimental poetry sometimes offers its versions of a straightjacket) or the imagined worlds of novels never could. Nonfiction has allowed me to participate in what the writer Susan Griffin calls the “public cognitive scene”: not writing as a mode of expression or an exercise in aesthetics but as a way of collaboratively and collectively learning and understanding.
These days it takes a lot for me to crack open a book of poems, much less read the whole thing through. Because I know poetry is thriving, not dying, I know there are plenty of poets out there whose work I would admire. As for my own poems, the memory of those shingles—like a sword through the rib cage—is still fresh enough for me to avoid the stresses of making and breaking lines.
Some percolate through, nonetheless—Frank O’Hara’s, for instance, my first favorite. Written in 1956, when the poet was three-fourths of the way through his short forty-year life, “Why I Am Not a Painter” breezily contrasts the artist Mike Goldberg’s work with his own. Goldberg paints the word “Sardines” on a canvas before obfuscating it in the final version, which retains the word as its title. O’Hara recounts, in contrast, the composition of his poem “Oranges: 12 Pastorals,” written in 1949. One day, O’Hara says, he was thinking about the color orange and so wrote a line about it. Soon it was a “whole page of words, not lines.” “It is even in / prose,” he writes, “I am a real poet.” A single word may have been too much for Goldberg, who thought in line (of a different sort) and color, but for O’Hara, the real poet, a single word was a portal into so many others. Where the “Sardines” of Goldberg’s title hints at all that language cannot do, the “Oranges” of O’Hara’s—at least in his telling—point to all it can.
But me? Last week I was walking the High Line with my friend, braving its crowds, rather, and marveling at the scale and speed of the area’s development. The rail line had been a ruin, but the city couldn’t allow it to remain so. There is something in the human psyche that refuses defeat and decay and debris, my friend said, and there’s something both optimistic and maybe a little foolhardy in that. Because there are also times when the wreckage of some previous life becomes plain, when what we’ve papered over becomes visible once more. I am interested in that moment, I told him, interested in holding open the aperture, in residing with what pains us. Boarding my train back to Lancaster soon after, I thought there should be so much more, not of ruins but of our conversation, of how terrible life is but also how generous.
Days have gone by. I sit down to write to my friend, to thank him for his good company. Pretty soon I’ve written pages, not of thanks precisely, but about losing or finding one’s voice, which is nothing like a copy of The Village Voice, a once-physical thing one might have misplaced or recovered; the voice is nothing outside of or detachable from one’s body but coterminous, and coextensive, with it. When I’ve finished I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing my face. My right cheek sags a little, as the surgeon said it would, and my nose tacks a little to the left. The scar leading through and above my eyebrow is faint enough people rarely mention it. Whatever one calls these marks, they are not, for me, the stuff of poetry, but much as O’Hara saw in oranges what Goldberg couldn’t see in sardines, for some other body they could be.
Having finished my thank you note, which is now a whole essay, I sit back down at the table and—I am a real writer—open a new email, type in my friend’s address. I attach. I hit send.
Erik Anderson is the author of four books of nonfiction, most recently Bird, published in 2020 as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. He teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, where from 2014-2019 he directed the annual Emerging Writers Festival.