Transgressions

“Transgress.” Because you have to have that edgy, sometimes-crime-is-right vibe going on. But of course, it’s college after all. They aren’t going to say “Uphold Current Social Norms.” Imagine how hosed college would be if things were generally ok. What would people at colleges do if they weren’t moved to transgress all the time? (Please, by the way, nobody tell them that the current social norms are them. They’ll get too boring.)

I can’t remember the last time I transgressed,  – wait, I can. I remember sitting in my first back-to-college class, a week or two in. We’d been split into small groups, and as I sat there with four kids in their late teens and early twenties, I had cause to say “Are you asking who cares about it? I do. I am one. I care a great deal about what happens to white males.” While caring about my future is a rather perfunctory and mundane thing to me, it’s what transgression is in 21st century America.

Clearly, at 41 years old, I still cannot help myself from showing gratitude through insult and cynicism. “Fragments” is the literary magazine at Seattle University, and they’ve selected one of my poems for publication. But you know this. I was able to  get hold of last year’s edition, with a bonus 2013 copy thrown in for free. The worries that I had about being the only submission, or in some other way seeing my elation diminished, are put to rest. It’s a good, heady collection of very high quality work. I am in good company, and in every way justified in feeling just tickled as hell to be a part of it. Though in honesty, if I was the only submission, I would still consider myself poet laureate of at least my home, and present my work as enthusiastically as ever.

Somebody commented on one of my Facebook posts “So you’re a poetry guy. Cool.” I find it odd, first, that he is just now seeing that. But I don’t usually put my poetry on FB, I put links to my poetry there. I know that people don’t look closely at everything. They don’t click through. And this is not a reactionary lamentation. We can’t look closely at everything. We choose, mostly unconsciously, what sorts of things to plaster onto our days.  To choose everything would crush us, then turn us inside out. Parenting, for instance, is often an involuntary capitulation brought on by too many things choosing you. And if you haven’t felt crushed and inside out after mad morning with kids, fights over toothbrushings and HURRY UP WE’RE LATE, feed the dog and no, the dishwasher still needs to be unloaded, and SERIOUSLY NO SOCKS, then you don’t have kids. It’s the closest to lost you’ll ever feel. Helpless. The parent knows it. The crime victim knows it. The soldier knows it. And it’s all because, as I said already, too many things have chosen you. We are limited, but discerning. The world is neither.

But yes, to end it quickly and get off to school, I am a poetry guy. I need to put it to good use. I am not a crusader, not a protester, not a fighter. But if anything needs a transgressor right now, it is poetry. Not as the boring “voice” against the world’s evils. That anyone is still writing about oppression or bad presidents is depressingly unhelpful. Poetry itself needs to be transgressed against. To have it dragged up from its self-obsession, pulled by its collar from the cave, subsumed, ultimately, by its own protests. And to start celebrating knowledge again. I promise to make it fun.