Letter to Hunter on the Poetics of Sudden Gentle Beauty

by Jade Gaynor

I’ve got a new shard stuck in my lower hope and I think shining a small enough light through it will cast a refracted answer at the surface, but I’m in some stages of the decay of my sin, so please be patient. You see I’ve been listening to Sean Bonney like you taught me, and I’ve realized some things. His poetry somehow takes small but consistent doses of mild withdrawal from opiates, a warm buzzing building and burning under the skin until the only thing you know is that you’re dissatisfied, serotonin syndrome groaning an insufferable chorus of hallelujah’s shadow in you to say you’ve been saved from the delusions of a blissful life and, now, will recognize the acid rain from the upside down fountain in the city center. It picks away the protective parts of the plaque around the human heart before the rest, but the parts in need of protection will still need it as the rest dissolve.

I can’t tell if I want to write like him or use the feeling of his writing as the bedrock for the poetics of a better world where I never make another person feel that. Like, it’s such a powerful poetics but it’s legit liquified and concentrated police boot imprint, and maybe I want the force of a rubber-mat playground pushing against that. I feel the danger is that when you become what can defeat state violence in open opposition you seem necessarily made of harder stuff which will brush against the softer stuff of a living future too roughly, and so you will need softeners so that shit doesn’t stay compacted in you and survive into a future where it wouldn’t have been needed and thus makes for itself the context which will require it so it can live. I think I’m saying I want to write Docusate Sodium because, as WebMD warns us, some conditions can make constipation more likely.

I’m not saying it’s better to be counter-revolutionary —that’s the evil the constipation compacts itself against— but rather that fighters, of necessity, need support: medics, supplies, things that everybody needs like food and connection, and things only fighters need like the most concentrated kinds of safety and understanding. These roles are needed in poetry no less than any other field, but in the flavor of their field no less than bandages to guns. This is what I’m going to call the poetics of support, or of post-combat logistics, or of sudden gentle beauty, and they’re as necessary for the world as friendship or qualia. It might be a justification for what I see as being my greatest vocal powers but I do think it’s true. The fight needs Ross Gay and Mr. Rogers too.

Back to your immersion in the man though. Did you get yourself some kind of relief or ambient osmotic activated charcoal thing to leach that, or are you still grappling with the fucked up, or if another thing what? You’d already got those Bonney-esque footholds, I can only imagine how easily it centipeded itself in.

I won’t be at the reading tonight, but I hope you touch god or whatever. Saffron tells me “there will be more art,” and I believe them.