Excerpts are from the poem “A Future History” by Suzi L. Garcia (Poetry, March 2020).
A muster of peacocks show off their tails, but instead of feathers, knives.
This line introduces me to “muster,” a collective noun applied to peacocks. It treats “muster” as plural: “a muster… show off their tails.” Going the American way by treating the collective as singular leads to “A muster of peacocks shows off its tails.” It has by-the-book rigor, but is slightly odd, suggesting a singular creature called a “muster of peacocks” (like “master of ceremonies”) that has multiple tails.
An enemy feints indifference and keeps their distance, places me on a fool’s throne. They underestimate me —
This line takes number fluidity further. A possible collective noun, “enemy,” is treated as singular (“feints,” “keeps,” “places”) and plural (“their”) in the same breath, then morphs full-on plural in the next sentence: “They underestimate.”
Number fluidity embraces gender fluidity under the covers here. Applying a consistent protocol to the collective noun could have two possible outcomes:
(1) “An enemy feints indifference and keeps (his/her/its) distance, places me on a fool’s throne. (He/She/It) underestimates me…”
(2) “An enemy feint indifference and keep their distance, place me on a fool’s throne. They underestimate me…”
The poem speaks by ear, not by book, and neither outcome is what it chose because stark clarity is not what it wants. The speaker wants to skirt the genderizing of his or her enemy, and fudging grammatical number is the expedient. Gender elision is the mother of number fluidity.
That leaves “feints” trying to be transitive in “feints indifference.” In my view this bit of rogue usage squanders license for questionable gain.
When noun “feint” moonlights as a verb it’s intransitive, meaning you don’t feint something (such as “indifference”), only somehow (such as “cunningly”). The case for going fluid here eludes me, and I long for “feigns indifference.” Even in a quarterback feint, the decoy move is “faked,” not “feinted.” And sonically, where poetry has much of its being, “feints” and “feigns” are almost joined at the hip.
c) 2020 JMN
Handshake
This photo captures a moment when a ritual handshake marked a pause in our Civil War.
The Virginia Monument… marks the departure point of Pickett’s Charge, an ill-fated assault launched 157 years ago on July 3 on the final afternoon of that three-day battle. The monument, which depicts a mounted Robert E. Lee on a pedestal surrounded by seven Confederate soldiers, was started in 1913 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the battle… On the afternoon of that July 3,… old Northern and Southern soldiers gathered at a low stone wall called the “Bloody Angle,” where Pickett lost 3,000 men. The soldiers shook hands across the wall…
Ackerman, author of this piece, is a veteran of combat service in Iraq. His conclusion seems to me to imply a useful distinction between history and hagiography.
A Confederate monument removal process that respects graveyards and battlefields and acknowledges them as monuments to the dead to be visited by the living, is the quickest way to eradicate painful Confederate symbolism from our public spaces and reconcile the country.
(Elliot Ackerman, “The Confederate Monuments We Shouldn’t Tear Down,” NYTimes, 6-7-20)
(c) 2020 JMN