A Different Take On The Topic

First, 100th post!

Second, Sorry I'm late.

Third, here's my post.

Within the blanket of the broad topic for this week, "words," and the subtopic censorship, I think that an interesting news story has arisen. The Virginia Tech shootings, of course, are on the news all the time, and everybody is scrambling to find an angle to take on them. It's probably too early to tell what the angle that will be repeated ad nauseum for months will be (like during Columbine it was playing violent video games or listening to Marilyn Manson), but one aspect of this attack that people are talking about that I worry might be the angle is the dude's creative writing.

Apparently, Cho was a creative writing student (he had at least taken some classes if that wasn't his major). Many classmates are coming forth and describing how dark and disturbing his writing was, and how as a result they should have seen this attack coming. Two of his plays have even been posted online, with many news organizations pointing to how twisted and dark they are. Famous poet Nikki Giovanni (I think the term "famous poet" might be a bit of an oxymoron) has said she had to speak to him in her class about his writing (and also his behavior, but that doesn't fit with my argument) and how it was disturbing the class.

Well, as somebody who a) is a creative writing graduate student, and b) wishes to teach creative writing for a career, this angle that the news is taking is bothersome. What if schools were to suddenly start deeming it necessary that all students who hand in disturbing or dark writing be reported to school counselors? Over the past semester in poetry workshop I handed in 7 poems. In 6 of those poems, there were deaths. In 3 of those, it was murder. Last semester, I handed in a poem called "Execution" to class in which a serial killer is the speaker, and he graphically disembowels a young couple and then wishes for death and hurt for all their families. In Frank Bidart's last book, Star Dust, a National Book Award finalist, there is a poem in which the speaker kills a woman with a hatchet, then stabs her through her gut and reaches up through her to pull out her heart. Frank Bidart and I aren't about to go on shooting rampages. (Well, I'm not. I don't know Frank Bidart personally, so who knows?)

In poetry, we are told (by Frederico Garcia Lorca and our teachers) that all good poems are written with an air of duende. That is, that the threat of death hovers just behind the poem, influencing the words and the way they form on the page. Even a great love poem must be written through duende, because we are transient beings who will one day die, and the love must be informed by that temporary nature.

I think that judging what people are going to do by how dark and disturbing their writing is is ludicrous. But people want to think that they can somehow be prescient about this sort of senseless act, and that's why they so desperately try to find the "cause." Additionally, if we learn something through this and are able to stop another person from suddenly cracking, then those 32 people who were killed would have died for something, rather than just senselessly. So I understand the psychological need to find something to pin this terrible act on. I just worry about how the censorship of dark ideas might influence the poetry classes I'm going to take or teach in the future. Will students start self censoring themselves so they don't get labeled as potential killers? Will the trust that must exist between a poetry teacher and student be destroyed when teachers must start turning in their students poetry to administrators for analysis?

Well, that's the end of my real argument. But I just wanted to add that Cho's two plays that have found their way online are not as deeply disturbing as all the news sites are making them out to be. To me, they just seem stupid, like the guy obviously wrote them in a half an hour just so he could pass the class. When I taught fiction workshop I was handed much more violent stories, and I never thought twice about whether or not the student was going to kill people. So we're just trying to say that the signs were there, rather than the reality of the matter, which is nobody can tell when somebody is going to snap.

This is off the topic, but...

I thought you all may be interested because of our previous gun control conversations.
This article from the Washington Post talks about international reactions to the Virginia Tech shootings and heavy questions about America's gun problems.

Jane, I read somewhere that South Korean officials offered public condolences to the Virgina Tech families. Can you offer any more insight into the international reactions? I think the writers of the Post article just looked at other news web sites to find out what they were covering.

Jane's UPDATE: One of the best blogs about Korea, The Marmot's Hole, has an excellent post on the subject, which continues to be updated as new information becomes available. Click here to read. (He summarizes a lot of Korean news sites, which is great for those of us - like me - whose Korean skills are embarrassingly limited.) One of the things he has mentioned is that the Korean President and Foreign Minister have offered their condolences to the American people. Definitely read the post; it's quite informative. There is an incredibly long post on this topic up at another great blog about Korea, Scribblings of the Metropolitician, entitled The Politics of Pride and Shame, which I recommend, assuming that you can force yourself to wade through the entire piece.