Meddling

Madeline started a Zoom-based writing club, and invited me to join. The arrangement was straightforward: we were to meet every other week having read two pieces in the time between. One of those pieces would be a published piece, identified by someone in the group as meriting our collective attention. The other piece, written by one of us. It was fun, if occasionally intimidating. I hadn't written for others to read without the prodding of a teacher or an application compelling me. Here, I wrote because I had decided--with Madeline's encouragement--that I would like to.

The group grew to include several of Madeline's and my own former high school classmates, Madeline's parents, some college friends, and eventually Madeline's boyfriend Geo. He introduced himself as a poet, and introduced himself as a poet, as a poet. He's a poet. I am no poet, and hardly a reader of poetry. Nonetheless in the spirit that led me to the group initially, I gamely approached the poetry that the group engaged from time to time. At the end of every session of response and feedback to poetry, Geo would find a way to alert the rest of us in the group to our shortcomings as readers. He would tell us we were looking for the wrong things in the poem, providing feedback not on the essence of the poetry, but the mere words. Geo was there to guide us to what matters, to the true, deep, essential feelings. What star-crossed circumstance! We had managed through sheer bum luck to assemble a group uniformly lacking the apparatus for receiving feelings from poetry.

Some months into participating in Madeline's writing group, I solicited my mom interest in our writing group. She is keen and coarse; she'll cut into the weaknesses in what she reads and in the same breath break to vulgar humor. Viz:

Me to ma: "Have you read Portnoy's Complaint?" Ma to me: "Penis, penis, penis, I hate my mother, penis penis penis. You mean that one?"

This is a good person to have in your writing club, so with Madeline's blessing I roped her in. It did not take her long to work up her own estimations of everyone in the writing group, and I wasn't about to miss the opportunity to benefit from her acerbity. Besides, I yearned for closeness with my family as medicine to pandemic isolation, even if that closeness came as petty sidebar commentary. Off camera, we kept up a steady exchange of textual snickers and eye-rolls.

Late in April, Geo's number was up; it was his turn to submit to the group.

Maybe the warming, sticky New Orleans weather had shortened my temper--or maybe any other polite and untrue substitute circumstance--or maybe I had grown frustrated in the honest way of folks who have had enough. As we each of us settled in to our sofas and desk chairs around the country, I made a silent, text-message vow to my mom:

"If this guy tells us how to read poetry again, I'm giving him both barrels."

In-keeping with the structure of our meetings, the poet (poet) kept his peace until the end of our workshopping session, when Madeline asked him if he had any further questions for the group about his piece. Geo thought for a moment, then asked if we had thought to read the poem instead from the perspective of...I have mislaid the rest in memory. My blood was began to churn in my ears, a roar of fight-or-flight chemicals overtook my senses. For this conflict-allergic younger brother self-styled "cerebral" Seattleite, this wasn't the overture to rebuke; it was an emotional eclipse, a confrontation with unknowable stakes. Internally, I was huffing. I checked if the escape hatch was operable:

"Geo, I just want to be sure I understand. Are you telling us how to read poetry?"

No no, he answered, just, maybe you should think about it this other way. I gave him both of the barrels.

"When you submitted your poem to the group, we took time to read it and collect our thoughts about it. I offered in good faith the best feedback I could. When you tell the group that all our feedback is misplaced because we are not reading poetry correctly, not capable of understanding your work the way that only you seem to, I find it very fucking insulting."

Then it was quiet. My phone buzzed: "Atta boy." Thanks, ma. Not long after, I ducked out.

I received an apology text message from Geo a couple days later. Strictly speaking, it was conditionally an apology, the kind with an 'if' right after the part that goes "I'm sorry". He let me know that I had mistaken a joke for something serious, I had misunderstood. He offered to talk. Searching myself, I didn't discover any desire to fix my understanding, so I deleted the message and put it out of my mind.

By January I had moved back to New York City and was enjoying falafel from Mamoun's Falafel in Washington Square Park. It was cold, so for the sake of my fingers I ate quickly. Madeline, on the opposite side of the concrete chess table, was eating in tiny increments, just as she always has. We blew through the family, school, and work updates, and arrived to the exciting moment in a reunion where you steer into the new episode. The excitement was palpably tempered, though. Tempered by the same lingering sogginess had impinged on our first reunion after I moved back, and the fistful of phone chats we'd had before that. Madeline finished her falafel and told me I have to make nice with Geo. She explained that spending time with me brings discomfort to her relationship as long as there is unresolved conflict. She told me I would need to apologize.

Where do forgiving and forgetting meet? I had bristled in a writing group at a turn of phrase. Though at the time I had blazed with a gladiator's ferocity, it's really no great shakes one way or the other. Anyway, I'm sure you get what I mean.