The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

She was the kind of poet whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon. He thought her poems craven and beautiful and utterly dishonest.

Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.

All the Shakespearean misunderstanding and misspeaking, everything doubling in its extremity and consequences until it ruptured into something truly cathartic. Except that there was no catharsis. Just people hardening into the caricatures of their roles.