A Metaphor About Being Terrified: i have a gun by Graham Irvin – Manuel Marrero
October 7, 2024
I needed a break from the great long form writers of our time so I picked up a trendy book of contemporary poetry. I’m not convinced there’s a reason for words to be arranged in such a fanciful way but I digress. i have a gun is every bit as tendentious as it never commits to being, using levity and irony and a charming desultory tone as plausible deniability vis-à-vis emotional weight to neutralize itself. In doing so, it actually fails to meet the gravity of its theme/motif by repeatedly breaking the reader’s immersion. A gun is a charged symbol, and Graham is hilarious and acutely perceptive in about the thirty percent of the book that’s strongest. The violence in the world can feel like we’re always being attacked, and the pain is felt when he doesn’t overthink it, when he allows it to be both beautiful and terrible. When he gets didactic and explainy, it becomes an anti-2A agitprop pamphlet, or a curio, a fun coffee table book you maybe flip through if you’re bored, but not a meaningful book. Words like “activist” and “fascist” tease you at first. You’re asked to imagine hypothetical moral purity test scenarios with an insouciance to sidestep straight-up hectoring and grating male feminist vibes. I’m not even trying to be mean, but I hate politics in my literature and I’d be remiss not to call it out, left or right. The speaker in Irvin’s collection/epic poem for some reason needs you to know he’s a leftist. His sympathies are with the downtrodden and he needs you to know, as if compulsively covering for something, like the fully implicating dimensionality of the right to bear arms. American partisan politics are shallow, divisive and uninteresting at this level. But you can tune it out, maybe. Sometimes it’s an egregious feature given how few words can end up on a single page, an interjection like sand in your eyes. I suspect this is a side-effect of completing an MFA program.
I don’t want to spend much time on this except that it feels cloying, and leaves no stone unturned to align himself with, let’s say charitably, earnest proponents of Émilie Carrière’s “sensitive reason.” Irvin needs you to know, throughout the course of the book, that he is by no means against guns. He’s fascinated. He also needs you to know that it is cruel and sexist to use the word “bitch,” that words and pacifism are effective deterrents against the threat of violence, crestfallen when a girl leaves him for feeling unsafe because he acted unmasculinely, that life does not begin at conception, that white supremacy is a problem in most Americans, that he disagrees with Camille Paglia, that he knows Ted Kaczynski was a traditionalist bigot who was also right about a few things, that the Confederate flag is racist, that Woody Allen is indefensible, that elites suck, that there is nuance in situations where failure to comply with Nazi Germany might have gotten you killed, and most tellingly, that it’s all made up; there’s dick jokes and he calls someone a bitch by the end, there’s plenty of toxic masculinity and unsavory locker room stuff he reckons with, it’s unhinged and has moments of intellectual curiosity and honesty that illuminate, like the best section in here near the middle where the titular quote comes from, and its run at the Bible, and his poignant connection to his grandpa’s erotica, and it’s not that serious and it doesn’t matter what he thinks, that you’re thinking about it is as important as him thinking about it, etc. It chafes at the idea of being taken seriously enough to be committal. It is what it is, and many people get a lot of joy from this kind of humor. If it sounds like it’s for you you’ll like it. For me it’s violence on the psyche. Fatiguing mental gymnastics. It’s more Dave Eggers than Frank Stanford. More humorless ideological solipsist than crass romantic. “A gun is the same as reading Deleuze & Guattari I don’t understand it.” Fair. Graham Irvin is an incredibly talented poet and I wish he’d get out of his way with the signaling and pandering. It’s spiritually wishy-washy. It’s a hat on a hat. Just saying.