A poem from KEY BRIDGE by KEN RUMBLE

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“8.october.2002” in Key Bridge by Ken Rumble

(Carolina Wren Press, Durham., 2007)

8.october.2002

#1 with a bullet

a constellation of chalkpoints

(don't put body-bags in the poem

--

Live free

--

broken geometry proofs broken ideas girding space broken angles
exponents
variables
length
width
angles

my city, my geometry, my broken (my flawed

cosine

now the gunman
one plus one equals
this geometry defining space that separates
space by definition
by focus:  coarse, fine

I don't know what to say here.

the tragedy we make
the tragedy we are

 *

This poem was written during the Washington DC Beltway Sniper’s killing spree. The first DC shooting took place 2 October. By the time this poem was written 10 people had been shot, 9 fatally. As the name “Beltway Sniper” implies, the shots were all fired from a distance, leaving the city and surrounding area locked down and terrified.

So this is a “poem including history”, epic and lyric at the same time And, since it was written in media res, it begins and leaves off where? Up in the air, so to speak. We can expect no beginning, no end.

This is about/a representation of/and attempt to come to grips with terror. It is important to recall that 9/11 took out a section of the Pentagon just a year before, and a week after that DA (among other places) began to under Amerithrax, as the FBI’s case file called the still-possibly-unsolved outburst of anthrax attacks.

I don’t imagine that, in 2002, stress levels were higher many places than in DC, expect in Afghanistan, which “the coalition of the willing” had invaded beginning October 2001.

With that background, we can begin to read this poem.

“#1 with a bullet”. I can find nothing specifically tying this to the Sniper. Perhaps this is a reference to the Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo tune of the same name, which was first released a decade before. Lyrics do tend to stay in one’s head. But they’re one thing in a song and another when reality is what they represent: The last time I caught a body it was recent / Gimme a HK, four banana clips, and I’ll take on a precinct / Yeah, the murder rate is on the rise, with niggaz like me / steady poppin niggaz are droppin like flies / To get em up when I hit em I hit em hard, there’ll be no get well card / Niggaz straight to the motherfuckin graveyard /  …

I don’t know how likely it is that the poet / narrator had this tune in mind. But back in the day Kool G Rumble was huge. And hugely influential on the East Coast scene. So it’s not ridiculously unlikely, either …

By the way, this line is repeated in the poem headed “14.january.2003”, in relation to Lee Boyd Malvo, the young man who was the Sniper’s accomplice (I don’t know what exactly to call him). So it is a refrain of sorts …

 I feel safe in assuming that “a constellation of chalkpoints” refers to the places where the bodies dropped, and to the “design” made by connecting positions. We’ve all seen the chalkmarks, of course, unless we don’t watch television.

“(don't put body-bags in the poem”. This strikes me as an attempt to NOT conflate the DC-area dead with the dead soldiers already coming back from Afghanistan. I think the poet / narrator is concerned that none of the dead come to be seen as symbols of “the dead in general.” But it’s an attempt that fails, of course, because 1) he does put “body-bags” in the poem, and 2) because how not conflate them? (It’s worth noting that Saddam Hussein is mentioned in “#1 With A Bullet”). Too much death, and what’s singular about each death diminishes in the imagination of the observer (tho not, certainly, in the experience of the families and friends of the dead individuals, who remain individuals for them).

“Live free” has its own section. I think this brief sentence points in two directions. First, how live free what a gun could be pointed in your direction at this very moment. Second I think it’s a reference to that ridiculous slogan “Live Free Or Die”, which has no truth value to it, tho a great deal of affect. The slogan is broken short here, as if the “Or Die” has become “And Die” instead.

The next section continues all the way to the end. It begins:

broken geometry proofs broken ideas girding space broken angles
exponents
variables
length
width
angles

my city, my geometry, my broken (my flawed

cosine

now the gunman
one plus one equals
this geometry defining space that separates
space by definition
by focus:  coarse, fine

This is barely coherent. But it does reflect the media and police and perhaps citizen fascination/obsession with attempting to determine exactly what is happening. A complex reality is being turned into a Euclidean abstraction, a series of equations. The city is now the equivalent of a certain geometry of terror, as is the Sniper. It is no wonder that the next line reads “I don't know what to say here.”

How could anyone?

But the author / narrator does find a few more words. They are completely ungeometrical, unless one is thinking in terms of Aristotelian tragedy, which clearly the author / narrator is not.

the tragedy we make
the tragedy we are

They could conclude any poem, really. But they are particularly appropriate here, given the lines above, where in spite of everything, there is mention of the body-bags. Given what has transpired in DC (and the world) since 9/11 (and even before, of course, going all the way back to, say, 30,000 BCE), no one gets off the hook.

*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you didn't do so already and have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other.  And an afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.