Tangled Rope

It’s the end of a long week, and the beginning of the end of a long semester. But I’m committed to packing in a couple reviews of poems from this year’s Best American Poetry anthology before the week is over. I’ve been finding few of the poems easy, fewer poems really difficult, which leaves most of the poems somewhere in the middle. Over half-way through the anthology (with some skipping around) I’ve found just a dozen that I’ve liked enough to read more than twice, and only a 3 or 4 that I might want to keep.

One of those is Michael Johnson’s poem “How to Be Eaten by a Lion”. Even before I read the poem I thought I knew it by title (it’s possible I’ve read it before, thought I don’t recall ever picking up a copy of The Mid-American Review). As you’ll see hereit’s difficult for me to say exactly what it means beyond the surface, but the poem stuck. I may have been entrapped solely by the clear, rich imagery; or by the interweaving of a darkly humorous didacticism of its voyeuristic narrator (“Try not to scream”, he quietly suggests, “for it devalues you.”). Or it may be the significance I sense but can not quite see, like a large object in a dark room.

The imagery really stands on its own; everything described is made sharp, not too dense, fresh, but never completely alien or overly verbose–much like the crystal clear flashbulb-type memories we might store as cortisol shocks our body into recognizing, remembering the details of a stressful event.

As delightful as the imagery and the music of Johnson’s language is, I’ve spent more time on the meaning of the poem.The poem is framed by the hypothetical, if but proceeds through the events step-by-step, by a calm, certain narrator who’s helpful instructions may mean the difference between dying ignobly at the paws of a wild beast, and … dying memorably at the paws of a wild beast. The black humor of the narration moves from precise, even wondrous description toward points ridiculous. For example,

It may seem soft, barely a blow,
more like a falling, an exquisite giving
of yourself to the ground

Yet the narrator’s sincerity gives some veracity to the meaning, and indeed I felt I remembered being thus assaulted by a lion, so my mind was willing to suspend its disbelief, and even connect real, if generalized, memories with Johnson’s strong descriptions. When was I last felled by a lion, or something lion-like? I find myself asking.

Not too long ago, if we extrapolate the lion to represent nature, or fate, or death, or even the daily challengers that sometimes lurk and sometimes pounce. So though the hypothetical nature may be the poets way of saying, of course we know this is not happening, especially to sheltered Americans like us. But it’s the narrator’s aloof, seriousness instruction that prompts me to ask, what if it were? What could we learn? To this end the poem makes two primary impressions: 1. dying in the mouth of nature is elegant, even noble; 2. death/defeat is inevitable, so pay attention to the good stuff while you can.

It could be something more, or something less. It could be a critique of objectivity, illustrated through the passionless voyeur narrator. It could be merely a concern with callousness toward violence, ignorance of real violence, and even the visual representation of violence. And there’s certainly room for a strong feminist critique of this work.

I’d like to think there is something more than this. By pushing the reader into the role of the victim, the poem lets us forget that we humans are also great hunters, devourers of flesh, and destroyers of life; that is our role in nature. It reminds us also that we have beasts within, beasts which may destroy. The lion has no choice, and is not to be questioned, let alone thwarted; the narrator makes this clear enough. But what do we do with our primal nature? How do we direct our killer instincts, our blind hungers, our conquering desires? Do we ignore them, pretend they do not exist? Are we as helpless as both the victim and the observer in this poem seem to be, do we keep counsel on how to die nobly, but not how to fight?