NaPoWriMo Day 8: What's Happening?

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Semantics At Four P.M.” by Reginald Shepher …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

You know how, when someone asks “how are you” or “what’s going on,” people often tend to give a stock answer? “I’m great!” “All is good!” “No complaints!”

Imagine someone just asked you “what’s happening?” Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. Don’t give the polite answer. Give the direct, controversial, shamelessly honest answer.

Poem: “Semantics At Four P.M.” by Reginald Shepherd

He smiles, says What's happening?
and I say somewhere
someone's setting electrodes to someone's testicles
who's been immersed two hours in ice water

up to his shoulders, he can't remember
what day it used to be. Somewhere someone
is being disemboweled with a
serrated blade, fish-knife

to slit open two fresh trout
he had for dinner last
week, Wednesday celebration
sizzling in its battered aluminum pan

over an open campfire
in a clearing, gleaming
pan and fish and fire and the water
that put out the fire, and

he looks down at his intestines, small
and large uncoiling, spoiling
by the unpaved road, surprised
the slick should glisten so, even

at noon, this close
to the equator, is it still summer
there, I never can remember
seasons. Several things are

happening, someone is being kicked repeatedly
in the ribs by three cops (he's black, blue
by now too, purple boot
marks, bruise treads), someone else

keeps falling against the wet cement floor
of his holding cell, he can't stop
falling, somebody
stop him, then he does, stopped watch, old

-fashioned, with a broken
spring coil mechanism, and someone
could find it facedown on the sidewalk, hold it
up to the light, say I can fix this,

but doesn't. Somewhere four teenaged boys
are playing hackeysack by a stream bed
on the verge of story, one
has an erection he wants

to go down, and someone thinks about
dinner, someone says Sure looks like rain.

This is a dark poem, for sure, but also violently memorable. Shepherd doesn’t flinch from the real answer—the answer that says, without compromise or euphemism, what’s actually happening.

Pay attention to the lens of this poem. It’s interesting that the speaker looks outward, perhaps in an attempt to look inward: he examines, for example, people being attacked for their race or sexuality, something that doesn’t happen to the speaker in this poem, but could. (Shepherd was a gay black man who died, tragically, of cancer at age 45).

There’s also a lot of irony here: the man gutted by his own fish knife; the hypothetical watchmaker who won’t fix time. And then, of course, there’s the irony of the title. Shepherd is being tongue-in-cheek by responding to “What’s happening” in this self-referential semantic way. He is, quite literally, stating what is happening, an answer no one really wanted to that question. Moreover, his answer is sandwiched between two bits of small talk: the question What’s happening, and the boring observation Sure looks like rain.

At times, I feel at odds with this poem’s worldview. Not that it’s incorrect—these things happen, are happening, will continue to happen. Moreover, it’s good that, from time to time, we are reminded of the violence embedded in society, swept beneath the world’s rug. Perhaps I just prefer it when poems can juxtapose beauty with pain, meaning with meaninglessness. But sometimes, as in this poem, the poet can’t. The discomfort this yields is stark and visceral, but not altogether bad.

Lastly, I’ll point out the voice of the poem, which I love for its conversational nature. “I never remember / seasons” has a weirdly vulnerable quality to it, and I feel the speaker’s full mind present in this piece. I also find some of the poem’s slips into other conversations interesting, like the line “somebody / stop him, then he does,”—the speaker breaks out of the story, briefly, to comment on it, a deus ex machina that does stop the anecdote’s pain, but not, perhaps, the painful march of time.

Prompt

What’s happening? Write a poem after Reginald Shepherd’s. You don’t need to espouse nearly as dark a worldview, but don’t shy away from your honest pain. Even if that pain might seem intense or embarrassing, poetry can hold it.