I’ve been thinking a lot about how the ways violence is presented in the culture I take in has changed during my lifetime. I haven’t fully worked this out yet—this post is part of that effort—so apologies for any overstatements or generalizations I make in the process. I suspect some of what I write about will be tinged with nostalgia aka bullshit or at least the perceptions of an early 1980’s pre-teen, but it’s the path I’m taking to get to the poem I want to talk about eventually.
When I was a kid watching tv and movies in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world I lived in was violent but it somehow felt less immediately dangerous than it does now. Some of that is clearly because as an adult with a family, I’m way more attuned to potential danger than I was as a clueless 10 year old. But also it’s because the violence I encountered everyday mostly came from people I knew well, my parents, my classmates and teachers, the parents of my friends and other adults in my church. My parents were a combination of “spare the rod spoil the child” and “it takes a village” in the sense that if my sister or I misbehaved when under someone else’s care, the adults in charge had permission to smack us and then we’d get it again once we got home. This was not an uncommon parenting strategy at the time.
My parents were not physically abusive by the standards of the day. They felt spankings were necessary but they never sought to humiliate us publicly. We’d be taken to the bathroom or out to the car and then brought back when we’d finished crying. I don’t recall ever getting more than a little pay attention smack in the head where strangers could see it, but I saw parents hand out a lot worse to their kids in grocery store aisles and on sidewalks with no objection from other adults. Not long after I became a parent for the first time, I decided that wasn’t going to be in my toolbox.
Violence was also ever-present in school. The teachers often had paddles in their classrooms and if they didn’t, the principal had one in his office. More common were the fistfights, in the hallways or playgrounds or at the bus stop. I was never in a serious one, and the last one came when I was in junior high. I wasn’t a good fighter and did a lot to avoid confrontations, but I was competent enough—and physically large enough—to not be the easy target, even with my glasses and inhaler and unusual religious beliefs. I never wanted to fight but I was always prepared to if it came to that.
When I think about the tv shows I watched in the 80’s, fist fights played at least as large a part in the plots as car chases and guns and kissing did. Cops punched bad guys and got punched back. Private detectives punched bad guys and got punched back. And kids in school were taught to deal with bullies by standing up to them, even punching them, with the message that the bully would run away crying if confronted with a sock to the nose. Results varied on that one.
Fighting was also prevalent in professional sports, even the ones that weren’t contact sports. Bench-clearing brawls were common in baseball and basketball, football brawls were expected, and if you’ve ever heard the phrase “I went to the fights last night and a hockey game broke out,” well, I don’t need to say anything more about that.
And this is on top of the games themselves being more violent than they are today. Basketball fouls were harder and called less often, pitchers threw heaters at batters’ heads and batters charged the mound at a sprint so as to keep the catcher from getting in the way and holding them back. The announcers mostly found ways to justify the fighting, attributing it to competitiveness, to desire to win.
Then there were boxers, the men who punched each other in a ring, for money, with rules defining what was and what was not fair. Professional wrestling falls into this category as well, and I’m going to write about that at some point, but not now because it’s a different kind of entertainment.
It was a different media landscape back then, fewer outlets so attention was split in fewer directions, but even so boxing was way bigger then than MMA is now. It’s not close, really. Not for every weight class. The heavyweights and welterweights got the most attention, the former because they were giants and the latter because they had a stunning combination of power and speed. Big enough so that you could imagine feeling their punches through the TV screen, fast enough so you couldn’t imagine dodging them. I’ve pulled up some videos of Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler on YouTube recently and they’re still stunning.
What I didn’t feel I had to worry about was gun violence, and especially not the kind that gets the most attention these days. Gun control laws were still on the books and kinda sorta worked. And to be fair, living in the New Orleans suburbs I was pretty insulated from the drug war gun violence that was happening across the lake. Not everyone was that lucky. But my teachers never had to plan for what to do if someone wearing body armor showed up in the building with a semi-automatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a plan of attack. Those kinds of weapons were mostly in movies starring Arnold and Sly, Carl Weathers and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. They were cartoonish in the damage they caused, unrealistic even to a person who didn’t know anything about guns like me.
Even the characters who worked in more traditional kinds of violence were over the top. Indiana Jones not only continued to punch Nazis with great vigor after being shot in the arm, he kept himself from dragging the ground beneath a transport truck. Axel Foley gets shot in his right arm and then, after escaping from the man who shot him, shoots the bad guy with his off hand.
But the area of culture most abstracted from the violence it portrayed was in science fiction. It’s easier to separate phasers and blasters and disruptors and whatever they called their guns in Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers from the kind of damage that bullets do. Should Princess Leia be hurt worse than she is in the beginning of Star Wars? How stunned is someone when Scotty shoots them on an away mission? How many people were killed on the Death Star when Luke blows it up?
I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies these days and much of what I do is dictated by my almost 11-year-old daughters. We watched Star Wars with them earlier this year on family movie night and they commented more than once on how violent it was, and it was funny to me because when I was their age and saw it (well after the original release—my parents didn’t let me see PG movies until I was 11), the violence seemed comparable to what I’d seen on TV already, just with a different kind of gun.
I know there are still incredibly violent movies and TV shows out there, so maybe what’s happened is that the media landscape has become so diffused, so fractured that unlike when I was a kid watching what was available on three channels before the days of the VCR, my kids can watch a whole bunch of things that don’t make them uncomfortable, or that don’t desensitize them to violence and sex.
And it’s also likely that I’ve changed in what I want to consume as well. That’s especially true in sports. It’s one thing to get emotionally engaged with fictional violence. I can remind myself that it’s not real, that these are actors being paid to pretend. But I can’t do that with athletes, because it is real.
I was never more than a casual boxing fan, so it wasn’t even like I walked away from the sport. Other things just filled in the space I’d once had for it, especially once the pay-per-view era began. Football though? When the evidence for CTE started coming out, I reduced my engagement. I stopped watching games and only kept up with the Saints, who I’ve been fans of since I was 7 years old. I’ll watch highlights once in a while, but when I do and I see a big hit, my brain and my adrenal gland fight it out for control, because there’s the thrill of contact and the knowledge that the people on that screen may have shortened their lives a little bit, just to entertain me and millions of other people.
The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.
I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.
I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.
As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.
The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.
I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.” In multiple religious traditions, St. Michael is an archangel, a warrior in the battle between good and evil, but this is St. Michael of the mat. He’s the patron saint of earthier things, “of teeth glistening as they made their arc / to the laps of women sitting ringside.” That’s one of those images that falls into the sweet spot between glorious and gross, teeth wet with saliva and probably sweat and blood flying out of a mouth but in this arc that carries them beyond the bounds of the ring. The power it must take to hit a man so hard that his teeth not only come loose, but they fly, is awe-inspiring and terrifying.
And then here’s the first move toward the intimate.
You don’t like to see a man get knocked out
cold? Then you’ve never lived in Hartford
or any town of boarded windows. Have you
ever gotten hit or thrown against a wall?
There’s a sweetness to it, that moment when
your God would forgive you anything. One
punch free as yesterday’s papers. Marvelous
the way his body moved on the TV
screen.
Calvocoressi draws a connection between both being a witness to and recipient of physical violence and want, lack of resources, of opportunity perhaps. Put bluntly, the chances you’ll be personally touched by violence are higher in “any town of boarded windows” than they will be in less blighted areas.
But the speaker here won’t accept that as solely negative. It’s that feeling of having nothing left to lose, so you embrace what’s available, even if it’s pain. And to be thrown against a wall suggests that this is not a fight they have a chance of winning. They’re outmatched, not as big, not as strong, and yet that’s freeing, because if you’re going to stay in it even in those conditions, you’re going to get something out of the experience.
Take us home, Gaby.
And me? I moved around the room,
bobbed and weaved. I learned to hold my breath
so I could fight with my head held under water.
Before, the potential for violence was still a bit abstracted. There’s the possibility of being thrown against a wall, a maybe it’ll happen, but also maybe not. Maybe you can experience this vicariously.
But not now. This speaker has received some violence, and hasn’t been able to fully respond. There’s a threat they’re responding to using perhaps the only teacher they have access to, this guardian angel on the TV. They need to be ready to fight, so they practice, they train, they prepare for the worst.
And what happens next? Was there a fight? Did they escape without having to put that training to use? We can’t know. That’s not in the universe of this poem. We only know they made it long enough to tell us about this dance, this music.
Thanks as always for reading this far. I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything related to this. I know violence is often hard to talk about. It is for me at least. But if you’re willing, I am. Even if not, thanks for your time here.
Once again, you've posted something really interesting and thoughtful. Thanks, Brian.
You’ve given Merlot to think about. Thanks, Brian.