by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]
Russian Formalist theorist Victor Shklovsky argued in his 1917 Art as Technique that verse “makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new.” Central to the interpretive vision of Shklovsky and his compatriots was that poetic language, which is figurative and consciously literary language, in opposition to prose and the literal, must engage in some form of defamiliarization. That is to say that poetry transforms the prosaic into the profound, but in the process, it draws attention to itself as artifice, as language itself. Prose, intended to convey information, whether it’s factual or fictional, largely eschews being about itself, but in some sense the Russian Formalists claimed that all poetry is about poetry. Verse toggles between the abstract and the concrete, gesturing towards the strange function of poetry itself, making clear that what’s being communicated is somehow both more and less than what it seems.
Such defamiliarization need not only be transforming clouds and trees into things which are strange, for as dramatic an event as a presidential assassination is converted into uncanniness by the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong in his poem “Of Thee I Sing” in his 2016 collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Written in an ekphrastic idiom, the poem depicts one of the most totemistic moments of the twentieth-century, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza while traveling by motorcade while campaigning in 1963, so that Vuong makes this horrific and already deeply analyzed event into something even more ethereal, otherworldly, strange, even while in that poem the narrator, Jacqueline Kennedy, disturbingly “pretend[s] nothing is wrong” in the seconds after her husband has been shot in the head (whether because she won’t or can’t is left unsaid).
Common sense would dictate that the social, cultural, and political ruptures of an assassination are anything but normal; while the sheer violence of Kennedey’s assassination, as emblazoned into the collective consciousness of Americans through the wide-spread viewing of the infamous Zapruder Film, means that the murder is already an event that is defamiliarized. The opposite is actually the case, for regardless of the (thankfully) relative rareness of presidential assassinations, Kennedy’s death has been so parsed, examined, interpreted, and analyzed that “Of Thee I Sing” reminds us of the singularity of the event and of its broader metaphysical implications (which are not necessarily limited to the event itself).
Read in the context of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, as well as the broader poetic interests of Vuong which often focus on American military involvement in the nation of his birth, a lyrical intimation of JFK’s death makes innate sense. The 35th president has often been configured as either the executive who made the escalation of the United States’ war in southeast Asia inevitable or the martyred figure killed precisely because he was planning on ending the conflict, a difference of interpretation which depends on your affinity for him and your predilection for conspiratorial reasoning. That Vuong is darkly commenting, perhaps satirically, on the violence of his adopted nation which wrought such violence on the country where he was born is clear regardless of the particulars of Kennedy himself.
The title, with its reference to the schoolyard patriotic song “My Country Tis of Thee,” which is itself strongly associated with Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts (“Land of the Pilgrim’s Pride” as it says in the song), announces Vuong’s poem as a kind of cracked anthem. Throughout the poem, Jaqueline conflates her husband’s murder with the complexities of America, utterances meant not to be ambivalent, hypocritical, or even contradictory so much as genuine paradoxes. In the last six sentences of the poem, the narrator says “I love/this country. The twisted faces. /My country.” The adjective “twisted,” evoking either rage or horror, exists in tandem with her love of the nation, which should be interpreted unironically, though that sentiment need not be confused with that of the author.
Notably, the line is end-stopped at the second enjambment, there is no preposition connecting “faces” to “My country,” so that there is a structural association but not a grammatical one, a seeming inability to fully connect what has occurred to the “The twisted face/[of] My country,” a demonstration of Jaqueline’s feelings for America. As is matter-of-factly stated in lines 7 and 8, “I love my country./I pretend nothing is wrong,” for as she has said prior to this “They have a good citizen/in me,” the pronoun indicating the ways in which the first lady has been made a patriotic commodity for the citizenry, one now suffering in unimaginable ways, the connotations of “good” less a moral than an aesthetic judgement, the president’s wife the collective property of the very people who killed her husband. “I love my country,” she says, “but who am I kidding? I’m holding/your brains in, darling.”
What’s most arresting about “Of Thee I Sing” is the violence, for Vuong’s poem depicts how such violence is capable of turning a thinking person into raw material (the opposite process from poetry which endows dead words with multitudinous vitality). Across 34 radically enjambed lines, each separated by a caesura and arranged so that the poem itself almost appears as if a jagged zipper whose teeth face off akimbo, the narrator’s disjointed thoughts are made to unspool in the immediacy of the assassination. Part of what is conveyed is obvious shock (for both the narrator and the audience), such as with the earlier reference to her being made to hold her husband’s brains in, but the simultaneous incongruity, intimacy, and terror of the moment is made clear by the affectionate nickname following the comma.
Throughout the poem, there are several instances of vivid descriptions of the assassination itself that are made to defamiliarize the actual moment of a bullet shattering a skull. In the moments before the shooting, as the couple are “riding in the back of the black/limousine,” we’re told how the spectators along the parade route “have faith in your golden hair/& pressed blue suit,” the disjunct between the handsome young president and his fate to quickly be made clear, the juxtaposition of “golden hair” and “faith” transforming Kennedy into not just a president in a blue suit, but something almost Apollonian. Jacqueline doesn’t hear the bullet herself; everything has happened so quickly that she’s only aware that something is wrong which she sees in the audience a “man/& his blonde daughter diving/for cover,” though immediately before this she’s made clear that she “pretend[s] not to see” the pair, the disposition of either a survivor or a denialist, the same sentiment we see in the first lady’s attitudes towards America itself.
Though the moment of the bullet piercing Kennedy’s head is only depicted obliquely, a second that is as if an apophasis, a null, a void, the narrator repeatedly describes the aftereffects, but in a manner that is nonclinical. An autopsy report, or the Zapruder film, might offer a perspective which is “like a slaughterhouse,” but Jacqueline is first truly aware of what’s happened when she reports the heartbreaking observation that “you’re not saying/my name.” Describing the moment of wounding itself, she calls it “a brief/rainbow through a mist/of rust,” a self-consciously beautiful description of something awful.
The stigmata of November 22, 1963, is gestured towards within the poem, the narrator addressing her husband by saying “You’re all over/the seat now, deepening/my fuchsia dress” (though there is no pink pillbox hat in Vuong’s poem). What’s notable is how even here Jacqueline isn’t saying that Kennedy’s blood is all over her, but rather that “You’re” – as in his personhood itself – is what’s been spilled. There is a refusal in the poem to reduce a body to a corpse, so that the moment in which the first lady climbed only the trunk of the convertible to retrieve a section of her husband’s skull is explained as “I’m reaching across the trunk/for a shard of your memory,/the one where we kiss & the nation/glitters.” There is a rejection of the base anatomical, of the merely material, for the bit of bone from the body of this thing which used to be the president remains a “shard of your memory,” albeit now shorn from the greater whole. That this bit of expelled bone and flesh contains the memory where the couple does “kiss & the nation/glitters” expresses an intangible and crucial truth about the implications of the assassination in a manner that either the didactic or the sentimental wouldn’t have been able to. An evocation of a transformative moment wherein the spiritual reality of a nation is altered by the violent rearrangement of the simply material which nonetheless used to be a man.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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