On Election Week and Loudness

It’s Wednesday, November 4^th, the day after the 2020 election. I’m on a walk with my wife as we trade off pushing our daughter in the stroller. There’s a park with a lake near our house in Southern Minnesota that we take laps around. It looks to be the final week of warm fall weather before the forecasted cold and snow that will remain for months. It’s mostly quiet around the neighborhood today, as the next few days will be. Or, maybe I’m imagining all the quiet, wanting to find myself in it, a space to meditate, since so much of my day has been checking social media and election results. I am not writing much poetry this week, but I am thinking a lot about poems.

On the way home, I notice all the campaign signs have been pulled from front lawns. All except the Biden/Harris or Trump signs. I live in a college town surrounded by farmland. On any given block, the signs compete. Large Trump signs. Many small Biden/Harris signs. Recently, a friend told me he walked outside one morning to find two giant canvas tarps with Trump’s name hand-painted on them, hanging from the second floor windows of his neighbor’s house. We chuckled a bit, called the gesture “loud.”

So much of the media today feels loud, but “loud” doesn’t mean “true.”

~

It’s early morning Friday, the third day after the election, and Biden now has a narrow lead in Georgia. Later in the day, he’ll pull ahead in Pennsylvania. My ten-week-old daughter is down the hall and wakes hungry. She grunts and sends small cries from a bassinet in the bedroom. When I look out the window where I’ve made an office, the sun has just started to blue the sky and silhouette the leafless trees. This week, I can’t seem to concentrate on any one thing for long enough before checking results. At my desk, on either side of me, books I’ve pulled from the shelf, and have turned to during this long week: Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead; Jacqueline Balderrama’s Now In Color; Joy Priest’s Horsepower; and Lucia Berlin’s selected stories, A Manual For Cleaning Women. A train from the other side of town blares its horn and the sound gets caught between there and the hill near where I live. I wonder if a winner will be called today.

This election week has made me think of the quietness of a poem. Or maybe what I mean is that a poem is strong enough to not only exist but persevere with little to eat or drink. Poems as self-sustaining, self-sufficient. I know they will outlast me.

~

There’s a memory I trace my poet-self roots back to, usually as a joke, but it does say something about the way I move through the world.

In 1999, preceding the internet and social media as we know it, there was the Party Line. When you called—usually from your cordless house phone—there were a number of chatrooms you could join where conversation was already going, always happening, and you jumped in, in medias res. At thirteen-years-old, my homies would often call for one of two reasons. The first was to flirt with women, hoping to get their phone numbers. When that didn’t work (it hardly ever did), or if the guys outnumbered women, my homies would instinctively start talking shit. They’d laugh and cuss out strangers. One friend would yell monkey noises into the chatroom. Whenever they passed me the phone, though, I’d just listen to everyone else talking. I wanted to observe arguments and conversations. I wanted to sketch the room in my mind. Eventually, the phone was pulled away from me and they’d start up again, howling and cursing.

I rarely know what to say in the moment. I take my time. Sometimes I wish I were the person who can respond on the spot. It’s possible I became a poet because a poem has never asked me to. A poem can be, itself, urgent, but poetry has never demanded I respond urgently.

(Everything this week feels urgent.)         

~

Saturday mid-morning, on another walk toward and with the solitude I seek, my sister texts me a photo from her living room TV: Joe Biden’s name and face with the words “president-elect.” I start to reply You sure? Who called it? but I call her instead.

I spend the rest of the day watching Instagram clips of friends dancing, photos taken from street corners where gas stations became backdrop for spontaneous parties. I watch YouTube breaking news clips of celebrations across the country, overseas. Joy grounded in relief. One large exhale. On my end, in my small, rural, college town, I sport a maroon Phillies hat for Pennsylvania, which took Biden to 270 electoral votes on Saturday. It’s a slight thing, my thing.

~

Sunday. I said before that “loud” doesn’t mean “true,” but my wife and daughter are asleep, and as I linger with them, I listen to the steady sounds of my daughter’s breathing. Isn’t there a kind of loudness in this? Or if not loudness, an immense something else that takes up space in me?

I walk to the park. It’s early enough that the sun seems to hit the hillside directly: all its bare trees after weeks of fall; every pale leaf the wind has combed across the ground. This morning, I’m thinking about Richard Siken’s poem “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” specifically these lines: “Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write / things down. / I walk through your dreams and invent the future…” From this angle, at this hour, sunlight sepias everything, as in a photo, as if what I see has already happened. And that’s how it feels. I’ve spent so much time waiting to hear the news I wasn’t sure was going to arrive this week, but now that it has come it already feels past. I don’t find this moment signifies a turning point for my writing or this country or my life. Add it instead to an accumulation of moments, echoes in a conversation.

When I get back home, my wife and child will be awake and downstairs. My wife will be eating a bowl of cereal while her coffee brews. My daughter on the foam playmat where, in a few minutes, we’ll give her “tummy time” and wait for her to push herself up. We’ll cheer as she lifts her eyes up to find us and whatever else is next.