In a recent essay, Adam Shatz notes the plethora of explanations for the current condition of the U.S.: post-9/11 politics of fear, populist rage, and so on. But, says Shatz, none of the explanations “captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis,” because the crisis “is not merely political but spiritual.” In his recent poetry collection, Sad City, Craig Kite does not add to the plethora of explanations for the crisis, but does convey something of its dimensionality: the book does not attempt, or purport, to explain the crisis; it does report on one person’s experience of life during the crisis. It does not attempt to identify the causes of what is happening to the polis, but to describe the experience of what is happening to the spirit. It does not theorize America’s crisis from above the fray; it reports on America’s crisis from within. Sad City, that is to say, is less in a What’s the Matter with Kansas? mode than in a Nickel and Dimed mode, not analyzing how we got here and who’s to blame but narrating what it’s like to be here and who’s paying the price.
“Quitting” typifies the mode of the poems. Its first-person speaker has heard all the stock terminology, “creative problem solving” and “the precariat” and such, but he has also heard how tinny those words and phrases sound. His work experience has the character of a cartoon. His training in “manager bootcamp,” consisting as it does in “learn[ing] to multiply zero,” moves him not up a hierarchy of needs but down into the infantilized and infantilizing world of animation: “Silly rabbit, mutiny is dead / and creative problem solving / is for the top percent.” The only viable response is a cartoonish one. Even to quit his job, to leave the cartoon world, the speaker has to become a cartoon figure himself: he
drew a tunnel by the water cooler,
did the mashed potato
and a curtsy,
exited through the wall.
The cartoon world, though, spins on an axis of harsh reality. At the exact center of the poem (seven lines before it, seven lines after), the “fixéd foot,” the “still point in the turning world,” is this stark couplet: “I went behind a bakery today / and ate cake out of a dumpster.”
The title poem deploys the familiar, always-illuminating trope of alien perspective, as effective in poetry as it is in sci-fi (as exemplified by the “Martian school” provoked by Craig Raine’s “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”), and as effective in exploring collective experience as in exploring individual experience (as witness Yves Citton’s “the surface of the Earth seen from Saturn” thought experiment in The Ecology of Attention). In Kite’s poem,
Aliens gaze
down on a human metropolis
and cannot understand
what they see.
It appears to them
as a cancerous mass
on a formerly immaculate
body.
Sad City appears to the aliens as a cancerous mass because so much of what they observe is cancerous. For example, they watch Daniel Pantaleo murder Eric Garner:
The city is a series of smokestacks
built by smoldering bodies
where cigarettes can cost
you up to $18 a pack.
It can cost you an extrajudicial
killing to sell an imaginary loosie.
The city throws up its hands
and still gets shot for no reason.
It still gets stopped
and frisked for no reason.
As in “Quitting,” so in “Sad City” the protagonist’s exit is not from an unreal world into the real world but from one unreal world into another.
An alienated man
dreams of aliens
and a world
where he is safe.
The fact that Sad City is not theorizing America’s crisis, or theorizing anything (it’s poetry!), does not keep it from resonating with existing theory. It would be hard, for example, for a reader not to think of Sara Ahmed’s argument that “happiness is used to justify oppression” while reading Kite’s poem “Fuck, We’re All Gonna Die,” with its characterization of happiness:
I spend an inordinate amount of energy
on not getting hit by cars.
My happiness revolves around
the shiny things I notice
in between not getting hit by cars.
Dante may have awakened in a dark wood in the middle of his life. Craig Kite awoke in “A Subterranean Hellscape” that looks a lot like the New York City subway (and a little like the one into which Alice Notley’s Alette descends). And Kite awoke as “a useless / plastic grocery bag,” one of the “billion” he has “under my kitchen sink.”
Sad City is not a pretty place, but here we all are. Craig Kite R Us.