The Right To Annoyance

Permission to be pissed

In our workshop last night, we read the following poem by former Milwaukee poet laureate Matt Cook:

“The Woman Next Door”

The woman next door
Was in the process of getting evicted.
The landlord had shut her power off.
She had all this meat in her freezer, she said.
She was really worried about the meat in her freezer.
She wondered if I had a long extension cord
That we could run between our houses
To keep her freezer running
Until she moved into a new apartment.
I plugged an extension cord into a kitchen outlet
And ran the cord out my kitchen window 
And in through her kitchen window.
The cord was there like that for days and days
And I felt good about the whole thing.
It felt good to be keeping somebody else's meat cold.
And then one day she was gone.
Her car was gone, she was gone, everything.
And my extension cord was gone.
She stole my freaking extension cord –
Weirdo ungrateful extension cord thief.

Our writing prompt for the poem was to list 10 baffling things that have happened to you and then pick one to write a poem about.

One of our workshop regulars pointed out that Cook sets us up for a different kind of poem, a poem, possibly, where the speaker reflects on privilege and the forgivable losses he incurs for someone who might need an extension cord more than he. That expectation is most set when the speaker says, “And I felt good about the whole thing./It felt good to be keeping somebody else’s meat cold.” I have absolutely felt like a god damn neighborhood legend when I, say, move a branch out of the road, or pick up a single piece of litter. “Me? A hero? No, I am just a normal like you!”

So the speaker is feeling very good about themselves for, objectively, not a gigantic act of kindness. It’s a nice thing to do, surely, but it makes it more enjoyable for me the reader that his tiny hubris is met with a tiny subversion. And he doesn’t over-react to the theft but he also doesn’t see the need to signal what a thoughtful person he is for zooming out and taking in the whole situation. He allows himself a perfectly reasonable amount of annoyance.

(Here’s Cook reciting his poem “James Joyce” in The United States of Poetry. Maybe re-read the poem above in this voice and cadence and see how it feels!)

I don’t think it’s bad to have and write about morals and morality and communicate from a position of your values. But few people (I’m pretty sure) can live their lives lockstep with their values. We (I) get irritated and fuck up and have poor judgment. Sometimes our extension cords are stolen, sometimes we steal extension cords. Maybe it’s because my life right now is inundated with didactic children’s media gently guiding my and everyone’s kid to be an anti-racist eco-warrior, maybe it’s because I have been writing from the imaginary, more saintly version of myself too much, but I gotta say it’s extremely enjoyable to see a poem with an appropriate level of annoyance with no lesson. And truly, we can even have empathy for someone who would be in a place where they would steal an extension cord while still being totally flabbergasted at the theft of that good-faith extension cord, which was yours and doesn’t exactly grow on trees, ya know?

Or to put it another way, like people, some elephants are just jerks.