I was working as a planning and budget analyst for the State of Illinois when I received notification that I’d been accepted into the Washington State Artist in Residence program. This was the beginning of my work in K-12 schools helping young people write poetry. I also worked in a Senior Center where we started a poetry workshop with 10 senior citizens and 10 high school sophomores. I don’t know which group felt more nervous about the other. I watched them come to understand one another better, write more insightfully, and gain in both critical capacity and compassion.
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It was very moving and yet something nagged at me: I worried that poetry was trivial. No one much reads it. And what good does it do? William Carlos Williams said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
OK, but poetry feeds no hungry families. Poetry cures no disease. It ends no war. Williams was a doctor as well as a poet. Perhaps I should have been a lawyer. That’s what I thought. I was young. But I stuck with poetry and have written and published it now for 50 years. It’s too late for the law.
In the past few days, following the shooting by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, I’ve thought again about the place of poetry in a troubled society. Ms. Good, poet, mother, citizen is now dead. As a student at Old Dominion University, Ms. Good received the Associated Writing Program poetry prize. Her award was for “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” a poem about the struggle to understand the place where science and faith meet. The narrator has donated Bibles to thrift stores, both the Bibles “plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots” and those that don’t go by the name Bible, those with “the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils.”
In high school biology class, I too was asked to dissect fetal animals and I too struggled to find where the soul resides. In Ms. Good’s poem, it’s “maybe there in between my pancreas and large intestine.” She called it the “piddly brook of my soul.” As the poet does, I too asked if faith and science could exist together: “this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom.”
When I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I submitted a poem for the Associated Writing Program competition. This was at the end of the Vietnam War. We were scarred by President Nixon’s lies and torn apart by both violent and nonviolent protests. National Guard troops had shot and killed students at Kent State University, while the police had shot and killed students at Jackson State University. My poem tried to stay away from politics. I didn’t win the prize, but did receive an honorable mention. I was just happy to be done with the war.
Now here’s Renee Nicole Good, shot dead in her car by ICE agents going door to door trying to round up people who may or may not be undocumented residents of the U.S., who may or may not have committed a crime.
I’ve watched several videos taken by both ICE agents and bystanders. It’s clear Ms. Good was neither threatening nor attacking anyone. As she backs up, an ICE agent grabs the driver’s side door of the car, saying, “Get out of the fucking car.” Another agent steps around in front of the car from the passenger’s to the driver’s side. Moving forward, Ms. Good turns to the right, away from this second agent, who pulls his gun and fires one shot through the windshield. As the car continues to turn away from him, he fires two more shots through the driver’s side window. Ms. Good’s car then crashes into the back of a nearby parked car. A bystander runs toward the scene; ICE agents look around, offering no aid. Then the agent who shot Ms. Good walks to the crashed car and, after a few seconds, turns back, telling his colleagues to call 911. Another bystander, his hands raised above his head, speaks:
“Can I go check a pulse?”
“No. Back up. Now.”
“I’m a physician.”
“I don’t care.”
That’s the poem of the day. In poetry, irony is a widely used writer’s device. Only it’s usually not so brutal.
In the United States there are tens of thousands of law enforcement officers (police, sheriffs, highway patrol); none patrol our streets and highways and enforce our laws in full battle gear with automatic weapons. None wear masks and all wear some form of identification .
Why is it that this Ice force is able to operate unlike any other law enforcement agency in the country? Why do they also have blanket immunity for their actions?
What would Wyoming do if Ice showed up in one of our cities and started snatching our neighbors off the street simply because they are not white or speak with an accent? No warrant required.
Well done. From another Associated Writing Program award winner, UMass 1979.
Thank you for this reflection, Mr. Romtvedt (thank you for your poems, too!) and WyoFile.
Poetry may or may not be “political” or address current issues. Poetry resists authoritarianism because it is always “about” being human, not about being a tool, a pawn, a product, a producer, or a consumer. It is not interested in wealth or power, except for the power of the imagination and the voice. How is poetry relevant in dark times? Poetry–in its intuitions, passions, disinterested love for the world and the Real, its humor, its striving for clarity, and its intellectual agility–stands as a rebuke to fascists. The regime’s clowns, cranks, and cartoon villains want us focused on fear and conspiracy theories, and not on love for the world and for others.
Whatever creative work you respond to (you don’t have to love or read or write poems), you know how crucial artistic communication is to our freedom.
Poets are warriors with words and verse is never easy. It is a way to tease out that thread in the tapestry of life that no one else sees. Thank you
Renee Good’s tragic death never should have happened, and it can be argued that the events leading to her death began when Biden opened the border to the world. Couple that with Blue states and/or cities ‘sanctuary city’ laws and policies hampering federal law enforcement from enforcing existing immigration laws, and the powder magazine is stocked to the brim. The fuse was lit when Democrat politicians, Leftist organizations with an agenda, and most of the media demonized law enforcement and conservatives on a hourly basis. Instead of heeding the warning of ‘FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE!;’ Renee chose to follow her heart and not the rational part of her brain. Renee chose to do more than be an ‘observer,’ a ‘peaceful protester;’ she chose to be a foot soldier for a Leftist cause that doesn’t care about her or the people they claim to advocate for. Renee’s poor decisions led to her early death. I’ve seen the videos too, and whether she was deliberately trying to hit the officer or get away is moot as she willfully interfered (obstructed justice, a crime) with her actions hitting the officer with her car (e.g., deadly weapon).
Regarding Nixon and Vietnam; yes he lied; but it was nowhere near the whopper LBJ told about the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident to justify America’s entry on a large scale into the Vietnam war. LBJ’s lie led to 58,000+ dead Americans, and untold numbers of dead Vietnamese.
Thank you for re-humanizing Renee Good, a victim of institutional violence. When one of us is unsafe, we are all unsafe. When immigrants, the vast majority of whom are not criminals but instead are workers and good neighbors whose paperwork problems could be alleviated by investing in judges and clerical help, and the people who speak up on their behalf are de-humanized, demonized, treated as undeserving of human rights or respect, violence is excused, the rule of law withers away, and carnage ensues. When agents of the government are empowered by leadership beyond their statutory duties, it is an abuse of power. When one of us is killed for expressing her First Amendment rights, all our rights have been diminished.
I wish Trump was as concerned about protesters in the United States as he is about protesters in Iran.
Bravo! The hypocrisy is blinding many of us to what is happening before our unseeing eyes!
Nice work, David. This is beautiful.
Another stanza for your poem.
“Call 911”
Deny entry for 15 minutes
Force EMTs to carry victim to ambulance without a gurney
Isnt it puzzling how EVERY SINGLE ice operation is swarming with protestors and media. Even the agents are filming with their phones as they shoot people (R Good).
Does ICE call a protestor hotline to let them know exactly where and when they are going to grab someone?
Almost like this entire drama is desired/planned.
The protesters are people trying to help their neighbors. They are networking to alert the neighborhood and try to protect each other from agents who look like they are heading into battle in Iraq, with camouflage and heavy arms. ICE agents used to wear windbreakers as uniforms. Why the change?