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Down in a library basement off of Toronto’s Bloor street, kids let their ink bleed over pages, spill their hearts on stages, and call it poetry. I felt right at home.
I started writing at thirteen when I got diagnosed with cancer and had to reconcile an existential crisis while hooked up to a cruel concoction of chemo and other drugs. Dazed as I may have been, I quickly found my way to poetry slams, sharing my sappy, rudimentary scribbles with other young poets. As simple as the poems were, they were the only way I knew how to express the profound strain of living in life/death limbo. The slams were a place we felt we could be ourselves, tell the tragic tales we usually hid from the world, and were applauded for it. We came to share our poetry, but bonded over pain instead. And for a while, this ritualistic sharing of our deepest darkest trauma felt good because writing our affliction into art implied that our pain meant something.
It took me a long time to realize how harmful this twisted version of healing was. Truth is, it didn’t heal at all. I’d see poets crying through words about wounds that had yet to scab over, and others rehearsing pain, opening old scars for the stage. Either way, we willingly wallowed in the hurt when we didn’t have to. Perhaps this is an inevitability as artists if we have to be in touch with our emotions all the time. But art and pain aren’t synonymous, and perhaps instead, we should demand of ourselves a more productive rendition. Perhaps all us trauma-bonding writers should adopt a literature and art culture that allow us to reconcile with and try to move on from our past, instead of forever live in it.
We need constructive art not just for our own sanity as artists, but for our audience’s because no matter how much they cheer for it, this detailing of trauma can be detrimental to them as well. Poems that dress up suicidal thoughts in flowery language only make suicide seem more appealing for those already struggling with it. In the same vein, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, in April 2017, suicide rates among US youth spiked 28.9% due to Netflix’s release of hit show 13 Reasons Why. Maybe it’s because the show gave people a guide on how to do it, or maybe it’s because a boy falls in love with Hannah Baker, but only after she dies.
Rarely is this harm intended by the artist, but the hurt happens anyway. For example, whether we attribute blame to cult classic director David Fincher for glorifying violence, or to the audience for their misinterpretation, Fight Club was meant to be a critique of toxic masculinity, but some were inspired by the violence instead. What’s difficult here is even if we recognize how our art affects us as artists, it can be hard to know how it will affect our audiences. If we cannot control how our work is interpreted, how much responsibility should we take on for its effect? Should we even take on any responsibility to make our art productive, or is honesty sometimes an antithetical and superior objective? It’s so easy to deny blame, ignore our influence, and go back to describing the graphic gore in painful detail. It’s so easy because audiences beg for it.
At every poetry slam I’ve ever been to, the more shocking the poem, the higher the score, and the most disturbing stories received standing ovations. The basement bars fill with a bunch of sadistic tote bag-carrying hipsters chanting for blood. And if the other poets are anything like me, they crave the validation even if they’re a little ashamed to. They perform the poems they’re best known for, even if it means reliving harrowing moments. Because validation is the fun part, but it comes at a cost. I wrote a poem about sexual assault a few months ago and a mentor reminded me readers would want the explicit specifics of my experience. But I kept the metaphors to guard me, to keep the trauma-ridden poem from being traumatizing. Maybe sometimes, we should resist giving readers what they want.
We humans have fiendish tastes. Our art and entertainment industry supply our steady cultural demand for vivid and vicious media. From gladiatorial combat to WBA championships, we have always had a proclivity for the horrific. Maybe we’re drawn to the high-stakes excitement, or the graphicness is the only way to make us feel compassion, or it's our penned in animalistic instincts that kick in. Whatever the reason, we should reflect at a cultural level on why we have such an inclination towards violent entertainment.
We writers should perhaps try to let our painful creations die with our pain instead of continuing to perform and market them. We should strive to write in a way that makes people feel less alone, instead of in a way that pushes readers towards violence and aggression. We should learn to deny readers’ demands if they come at the cost of our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. For all our callous and cynical tendencies, maybe it’s time we grow up and write responsibly.
Still, sometimes I can’t help myself. Sometimes, I crawl back to my bloodied notebook and write poems that romanticize trauma when I can’t bear the idea that all this hurt amounts to nothing. Maybe art can just be how we cope with all the tragic banalities we see around us. Maybe sometimes, we have to write our pain into poetry to make it poetic enough to live with, to make the world beautiful enough to live in.
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