A Fiction About a Petition as a Poem, and Poets and Prizes and Pensées
December 17, 2016 1:42 PM   Subscribe

Pardon Edward Snowden is not about Edward Snowden. A short story by Joseph O’Neill, in this week's New Yorker

From the story:
Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.

He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? Write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.

Mark wrote:
How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.
Then:
Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of . . . bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.
He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:
It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.
posted by Stanczyk (9 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Pardon Edward Snowden is not about Edward Snowden

You really blew a golden opportunity here to find out who really reads the article before commenting.

Watch thing. Liver.
posted by rokusan at 1:47 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Don't worry, we'll still get plenty of people who read the piece and didn't understand it. I'll certainly put my name down on the list.

I mean, I liked it. The characters were good and clear, I developed feelings for them, I like the poem at the end, I felt that it was tackling an interesting topic. I don't want my ten minutes back.

But by the same measure, it's a New Yorker story. I know by default that I've missed all the points, and there'll be a mountain of subtlety and insinuation that went flying miles over my head.

So in defiance of what I'm guessing is at least part of the message, I shall post, in ignorance, rather than remain silent.
posted by YAMWAK at 2:06 PM on December 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


How can anyone in this day and age call for the pardoning of that traitorous scoundrel Edward Snowden!?!? I refuse to pledge allegiance to the Silent States of America!

Signed,

Julius "Ding" Ansich III
posted by chavenet at 2:18 PM on December 17, 2016


I might have signed the poetition, but the word crawled into my ear and began to lay its eggs so quickly...I was distracted, and remain so.
posted by mule98J at 3:37 PM on December 17, 2016


It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.

We can all agree that your statement is paradoxical -- but is it paradoxical enough to be true?
Like humans learning to speak, juvenile birds learn to sing by mimicking vocalizations of adults of the same species during development. Juvenile birds preferentially learn the song of their own species, even in noisy environments with a variety of different birdsongs. But how they can recognize their species' song has, until now, remained a mystery. In a collaborative study, neuroscientists and a physicist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have uncovered an innate mechanism for species identification based on the silent gaps between birdsong syllables.
Silence as a "barcode."
posted by jamjam at 3:54 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Shoot. A'hm a gonna go blow sumphin up, clear ma head.
posted by bert2368 at 4:42 PM on December 17, 2016


Sorry, but I'm not going to read a New Yorker article complaining that popular poetry is too accessible unless there are some cartoons.
posted by Phssthpok at 5:51 PM on December 17, 2016


Stanczyk, thanks for the link. I feel like I have been (then retreated) some distance down the path that Mark took, where you feel hemmed in by all the great inspiring work that's come before you, but you also massively distrust ambition and public notice to the extent that anyone who gets a bit of attention earns your automatic suspicion.

How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.

It is unpleasant to spend time in Mark's head, but I'd like to read enough of his prose to find out what he thinks the proper vocation and activity of a writer is.
posted by brainwane at 5:37 AM on December 18, 2016


This story reminded me of the part of dating where the person leans across the table and tells you "I have always loved language".
posted by thelonius at 5:48 AM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


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