william doreski on "the mess the assassination left"
“The Mess the Assassination Left” is the afterglow of a dream, but also the aftermath of years of battling developers to try to save what little remains of New England’s forest habitat. Trotsky’s assassination, like the destruction of the landscape, represents reaction and authoritarianism. The local thugs who believe that any plot of land not covered with hideous vinyl-sided houses is wasted are equally authoritarian in their desire to master the landscape. Why I happened to link forest depletion and Trotsky through the act of writing this poem puzzles me, but I believe in the principle of multi-vocalization—that is, poems should call upon more than one voice, or tone, or register of diction. History has to speak through the present, somehow, to express itself. Poetry has to refer beyond its original impulse, its emotional core, and become intertextual. Even the briefest poems, as Emily Dickinson has shown us.
From Wallace Stevens I learned the advantages of incarcerating complex utterances in simple forms. When I write a poem I try to stick to a plain rhythmic scheme. I’m not good with free verse, and my handwriting is large and clumsy, so I cling to shorter lines, often with three or four accented syllables per line, a kind of reprise of ballad meter. Sometimes after typing up drafts I rearrange the lines to conceal their accentual origin and make them look like free verse; but more often, and in this case of this poem, I retain the discipline of brief accentual lines and stanza breaks that help bring the poem into both visual and aural focus.
Since poetry fictionalizes whatever it touches, I can’t worry about identifying the woman in either my dream or in this poem. She doesn’t exist, although her dream persona may bear some relation to someone I’ve known. I don’t much care. Nor do I care whether or not Hoover had anything to do with the plot against Trotsky. Could the FBI have teamed up with the KGB in the 1930s? It seems far-fetched; but authoritarian types tend to understand and sympathize with each other, and who were more authoritarian than J. Edgar and Papa Joe? I imagined a woman in a little cottage beset by developers but who embodied, in her past and her widowhood, something of consequence from the past century. And it occurred to me that if Trotsky were to reappear on the scene the CIA would probably take care of him before he could utter a single word in public. So even as the old America collapses into economic, environmental, and social ruin (a house made of sticks), that murderous impulse thrives.
From Wallace Stevens I learned the advantages of incarcerating complex utterances in simple forms. When I write a poem I try to stick to a plain rhythmic scheme. I’m not good with free verse, and my handwriting is large and clumsy, so I cling to shorter lines, often with three or four accented syllables per line, a kind of reprise of ballad meter. Sometimes after typing up drafts I rearrange the lines to conceal their accentual origin and make them look like free verse; but more often, and in this case of this poem, I retain the discipline of brief accentual lines and stanza breaks that help bring the poem into both visual and aural focus.
Since poetry fictionalizes whatever it touches, I can’t worry about identifying the woman in either my dream or in this poem. She doesn’t exist, although her dream persona may bear some relation to someone I’ve known. I don’t much care. Nor do I care whether or not Hoover had anything to do with the plot against Trotsky. Could the FBI have teamed up with the KGB in the 1930s? It seems far-fetched; but authoritarian types tend to understand and sympathize with each other, and who were more authoritarian than J. Edgar and Papa Joe? I imagined a woman in a little cottage beset by developers but who embodied, in her past and her widowhood, something of consequence from the past century. And it occurred to me that if Trotsky were to reappear on the scene the CIA would probably take care of him before he could utter a single word in public. So even as the old America collapses into economic, environmental, and social ruin (a house made of sticks), that murderous impulse thrives.
