Something Different

Hater Report & a classic poem

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Hello friends,

Welcome to Office Hours. I’m your host, the professor of ethical hating, José Olivarez. Today I want to try something different.

Usually I start by telling a story and trying to connect it to a poem. This is how I approach poetry and reading. Literature is beautiful, but I don’t care about it in isolation. Poetry and all literature is relational. When I read a poem like “After You Toss Around The Ashes” by Ada Limón, it moves me. It connects me to my understanding of grief. It reminds me of my own mortality. It says something that I’m normally too busy or too stupid to say or think about: “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”

Anyway, I don’t have a story today. None that I want to tell at the moment. What I do have is a heart full of rage. A motherufkcing full deck of hate. So that’s what I’m sharing. Feel free to skip this post if you’re looking for beauty. I won’t blame you.

Here is today’s Hater’s Report:

The Hater’s Report is a musing on an assortment of things that I don’t like beginning with number one.

1. Trümp’s bill passing and the ceding of language to losers and idiots.

   1. Look. I understand that the man calls the bill he just passed “the big beautiful bill.” Who cares? Just because he calls it that doesn’t mean we have to accept it as fact. And yet, I was listening to New York Public Radio yesterday and the host kept talking about “the big beautiful bill” and asking his guests about how it would impact New York and The United States. I hate it. We have to stop accepting the language and terms that Republicans use. Same thing with “Alligator Alcatraz.” That nickname is an insult. These motherfuckers are laughing at us when we mouth along to their stupid language.

2. Drake released a new song. I hate it.

   1. It brings me joy to see losers suffer. The song belongs on the Hater’s Report, but Drake losing is on the Joy Report next to baggy clothes being back in style.

This concludes today’s Hater’s Report. Thank you for indulging me. Here is a poem I love by June Jordan:

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
June Jordan - 1936-2002

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

And as a bonus, here is a writing prompt to encourage your rage.

PROMPT:

What is the form your anger lives in? What type of plant would it be? What body of water is it? What is it’s favorite song? What does it look like laughing? What does it look like dancing? What happens to you if you lose your anger? What must you become?

Write a poem in which you become your anger. Give it shape. Give it transformations. Become a menace to your enemies.

See you next week.