Traumadification

How to turn the worst things that ever happened to you into tens of dollars!

Content warning: this whole thing is about trauma.

Look, I ain’t no therapist, and smarter people than me have written extensively on the subject, but I want to talk about the commodification of trauma in art.

Now, of course, commodification is not strictly about getting cash money for your pain and suffering. There are lots of forms of capital — from social to political to spiritual, etc… Even though they can be monetized, things like social media likes and follower counts have worth in their own right. As does writing the dopest poems.

“My pain is better than anyone else's”

Coming up in the slam poetry world, it was immediately obvious that some of the highest scoring poems were the ones about some of the worst things that can happen to somebody. In poet and playwright Edward Thomas Herrera’s performance poem “My Pain Keeps Me Regular” he says:

My pain is better than anyone else's
my pain is more serious than anyone else's
my pain is more important than anyone else's

Compared to my pain
everyone else's pain is petty
everyone else's pain is meaningless
everyone else's pain is a day at the beach a walk in the park a
fucking piece of fucking cake
it's my pain
my pain
my pain
my pain

Which I imagine is what poetry slams have sounded like to a lot of people, as poet after poet shares their (assumedly) real trauma and then it is scored by judges and, to the cynical implied author of Herrera’s piece, the best pain wins. In the slam, for some, scores and winning were¹ the currency du jour. Sometimes you could actually win real currency in cash slams. Did this affect the writing?

I saw a woman perform a piece about her sister dying of cancer that had the refrain “A breast is not a weapon” and by the time she was done with the poem, she was clearly shaken, not just performatively. Then the emcee announced her scores and they were not very high. The woman yelled “WHAT?” through tears as her friend held her. I would be indignant too if I had been told my sister’s death wasn’t worth much. But that’s not what those particular judges meant to impart, I think. They just didn’t like her poem ABOUT the horrible thing. Other judges may have given her higher scores elsewhere—possibly because they DID want her to have SOME kind of compensation for her pain. The least you can do for someone hurting is give them a 9.5.

Also many years ago there was a show in Chicago at the Green Mill where some page poets were doing a bus tour and Marc Smith (founder of the poetry slam) thought it’d be fun to have them compete against some of us local performance poets.² Predictably, the page poets were not impressed with our writing; we were not impressed with their performances. But afterward, I asked one of the page poets, Matthew Zapruder, what he thought about the slam and the conversation went something like:

MZ: I didn’t like it. I don’t like judging poems like that.
Me: But I saw you snapping³ and groaning at some of the slam poets’ lines.
MZ: Well then I didn’t like what the slam did to me.

which, I think, meant he didn’t like having the competitive person in him brought out and encouraged.

But the world of page poetry is rife with competition, albeit less theatrical. Depending which circles you run in, you might be competing for:

• publication in magazines or journals (against a thousand other poets)

• jobs (like tenure-track gigs at universities in towns the poets don’t really want to be living in)

• publication for your books

• sales of your books

• sex with hot poetry fans

• social status among and above other poets

• critical acclaim

• the most interesting glasses in the room

All of these economies are hard to ignore. Being cool with whom you want to be cool is a capitalism from which escape is almost impossible. Does this affect the writing?

So, even when you are doing your best to create in a vacuum free of all the currencies that pay for your daily life, they’re always swirling around you, guiding your hands like Patrick Swayze helping you make pottery. Does that mean writing directly or indirectly about your trauma is always going to be cashing in on it somehow?

Sorta! But sometimes what we try to exchange with our audience is connection, healing, growth, beauty, justice, perspective, a challenge, community. You know, good stuff. Personism.

For me, and I will say it elsewhere because I like saying shit like this, good art makes me feel alive. Even when it’s about the most tragic things, if it is done in a way that invites me in, it lifts me. I felt great after hearing a radio play of the tragedy Oedipus Rex, felt transmogrifyingly sad after reading Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, have seen Butoh dance performances that are as captivating as they are unsettling.

In the workshop we do on Zoom every other Thursday, people have shared deeply personal things in their writing that I am so grateful for. I doubt they are creating those poems to win our gratitude or to appear cool. For some, I think they are working through these horribles, giving them shape and structure in words, and inviting others into that sense-making. These pieces awaken our empathy and gently elicit our comparable horribles. A gift of those poems, then, is that they can help us give shape and structure to our own pain.

I have written about my traumas. Most of the time, no one sees those writings. Sometimes I share them with a small group of people in a workshop or a poetry reading. I, personally, wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to compete with those poems. In one instance, I performed a piece a few times and asked the audience not to talk to me about it afterwards so I wouldn’t feel like I had used my trauma in order to get anything from the audience. That was probably just an illusion I created for myself, delicate flower that I am. I’d be fine with people reading them since I am elsewhere, worrying about something unrelated.

But I am grateful for the people who do the work of sculpting their pain for their audiences, even if those audiences are huge (and profitable). We never really know their motivations for doing so, maybe they don’t know them either. Art that I like most GIVES me something. It is a gift. This is why, again, to me, no matter how beautiful, an advertisement is not art. It is designed to TAKE. Taking from me reminds me that I am mortal; giving to me makes me feel nice and still alive.

This is some messy stuff. There is a chance your pain could become a gift to someone else, a lift, a comfort. But will you be okay if you offer the gift and no one takes it? Will you be okay if you offer the gift and everyone takes it? Will you be okay if your trauma gift gets mixed reviews? Art can be therapeutic for the artist, but is it your only therapy? Is art as therapy a good enough reason to make it and share it with the world?

I think it’s good to check in with yourself about this. Emily Dickinson was writing some great shit but she seemed to check in with herself and came to the conclusion that the most comfortable she was sharing her many gifts was to wait until she was dead—when you can’t even get a free coffee for your efforts. We can’t all be as hardcore anti-capital(s)ist as Em though.

1. Are? Do people still do this at poetry slams? Are there still poetry slams?

2. I have no problem calling poems “page poems” and “performance poems.” This is probably going to be its own post, but I’ll just say that if you are writing for an audience, that audience will direct the kind of writing you make. If you’re writing a poem with POETRY Magazine in mind, your work will look different than if you were writing for Jacobin or Better Homes and Gardens. Just as it would look different if you were planning on performing a poem at a church or a bar. Each venue, textual or physical, shapes the writing in big and small ways. Shakespeare wrote performance poems called plays.

3. Snapping and groaning at the Green Mill slam is a power granted to the audience from Marc if they don’t like the poem. Usually it comes out if the poet seems pretentious or clueless about the audience’s experience (basically if they’re not being entertaining enough). So if you’re writing for that audience, you have in the back of your mind “I hope to God they don’t snap at this.”