Doomscroll

 

How do you feel about poets writing about some form of oppression they have had? Do you think it is good for the world? These questions came my way recently from a fellow poet. If anything is a subject for poetry, then the simplest answer is yes, you can write about oppression. Oppression is cause for suffering. Suffering itself is personal experience, experience that is a fact of individual being. Sharing the experience through words is one way towards understanding, towards empathy, towards not living alone with the suffering. At least up to this point, writing about oppression is both a good and even a necessity. You should write about oppression, is a more convinced, imperative way of answering the question. In fact, oppression is a root cause of poetic activity, bound up with our responses to our conditions. More to the point is how we write about it, so that it’s both personal and common. Some of the most humorous, light poetry imaginable can prove to be founded in suffering and oppression, it is a regular feature of comedy. Making fun of the object of your unhappiness is a tactical release, often something that comes naturally. Trickier is naming the oppression and expressing the displeasure, the outrage at length in doomscroll. This is my word for the wrongs that turn into rants, the well-worded exposés that transform into pages of unending rage. The risk here is losing the message and the emotion in stretches of doomscrolling, where only those who enjoy spending hours reading bad news will find something to their liking. The singing contortionist Iggy Pop exclaimed that someone has to suffer for their art and it may as well be the listener. This perverse twist on the Romantic notion of personal suffering needs to be kept in mind when you venture out on the theme of your oppression. Do you wish the listener to understand and empathise with your declarations? Or make them endure the oppression vicariously, thus adding to the sum total of unhappiness? This is the last thought on the minds of doomscrollers, as they plough their furrow from here to the horizon. The risk of sounding self-indulgent escalates. My fellow poet adds that these personal stories are sacred so they wonder how I felt about that. In reply I would say that confessional poetry can focus deliberately on the ‘I’ for good or ill and that you will be drawing attention to yourself and not just the oppression. Is this necessary? Our own experience is, as you say, sacred. For this reason, how directly you tell these stories, or how indirectly or obliquely, is a measure of the value you place on this sacredness. After all, poetry might be about how we think and feel, but in our written and spoken relationship with the other the central concern is how we make them think and feel, through words alone.