Audio: Joseph O’Neill reads.

The poet Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a “poetition” requesting that President Barack H. Obama pardon Edward Snowden. The request took the form of a poem written by Merrill Jensen, whom Mark knew to be twenty-eight years old, a full nine years his junior. The poem-petition rhymed “Snowden” with “pardon.” And “pardon” with “Rose Garden.” And “Rose Garden” with “nation.” And “nation” with “Eden.” It rhymed—or, as Mark preferred to put it, it echoed—“Putin” and “boot in” and “Clinton” and “no disputing.” “Russia” echoed “U.S.A.”; and “U.S.A.” “Thoreau”; and “Thoreau” “hero.”

Mark forwarded the e-mail to the poet E. W. West. He wrote:

Am I crazy to find this enraging? Within seconds Liz wrote back:

No.

They arranged to have coffee that afternoon.

In preparation for the meeting, Mark tried to organize his thoughts. His first point, of course, was that the very idea of poem as petition was misconceived. A poem was first and last a Ding an sich. It definitely wasn’t a message that boiled down to a single political-humanitarian demand. It made no sense for an agreeing multitude, or mob, to undersign a poem: you could no more agree with a poem than with a tree, not even if you’d written it. Of course, the signers of the poetition would argue that they were associating themselves with the text’s petitionary substance and not with its formal properties; and that in any case poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes its scabbard. But, accepting all that, Mark mentally counterclaimed, why not just have a petition in the form of a petition? Why drag the poem into the muck? Well, the undersigned might reply, a versified petition was likely to attract more attention and be more consequential than the alternative. To which Mark would answer, The good of poetry resides not in the—

He began to feel a familiar dialectical dizziness. He set off to meet his friend, even though it meant that he would get there twenty minutes early.

Liz was waiting for him when he arrived.

They hugged. The moment they took their seats, Liz said, “Well, are you going to sign it?”

Mark said, “I don’t know. Are you?”

Liz said, “Not my problem. Nobody’s asked me to.”

Mark paused. This was a complexity he ought to have foreseen. With extravagant bitterness, he said, “Oh, they’ll rope you in.”

Liz mused, “I did a reading with Merrill in January.”

Mark had attended the event, as Liz well knew. “I felt bad for him,” he told her. “You really showed him up. Without meaning to, of course.” He went on, “Look, I do think this thing is chaotic. They’re basically shooting out e-mails at random. And I don’t think Merrill is a vengeful, petty guy. Far from it. I think his heart’s in the right place. Ish. But you know what? I could be wrong. He’s obviously interested in a certain kind of success.” Mark stopped there and was glad he had, even though he loathed Merrill Jensen. Whenever he bad-mouthed a colleague, however justifiably, he invariably regretted it. (Strange, just what a draining effort of tact was required to get through the day without bad-mouthing another poet.) In this instance, he felt, he hadn’t thrown Merrill Jensen under the bus. He’d dissed him only in order to express solidarity with Liz, and only to that extent.

Liz doubted that Merrill had overlooked her because she’d shown him up at their reading; in all probability, Merrill’s recollection was that he’d shown her up. No, she had been overlooked because she was a woman. Whenever a stand needed to be taken and the attention of the public needed to be endured, the peacocks huffed and squawked to the fore en masse, idiotically iridescent.

She decided to say, “We need people like Merrill. Somebody’s got to be interested in being prominent. Otherwise we’d all disappear.”

Mark said, “I expect Dylan has been contacted.”

Liz laughed. The singer’s Nobel Prize in Literature had bothered her, yes. Literature was in the first place reading matter, after all, and Dylan’s lyrics were mostly unreadable—and not even listenable to without the music. Even his supposedly best stuff would be torn apart if presented to the poetry practicum she taught every Tuesday, not only on account of its wordy, clichéd, hyperactive figuration but, more fundamentally, because of the soothsaying persona that the singer so readily deployed, a trope that worked fine in a pop song but on paper came off as a shtick. All that said, Liz had not taken the news as a personal hit. Mark, though, in common with many men of the pen she knew, had been knocked flat. For two days he had not been able to leave his apartment or even to post on Facebook. Only after this period of grieving had he managed to discuss the matter with Liz, at the same table where they now sat. At that meeting, Mark had reported that the night before he’d found himself thinking back to the seventeen-year-old who, wandering the public library of Forsyth, Missouri, inexplicably leafed through a tattered Norton Anthology and for the first time came truly face to face with a poem’s mysterious verb-visage. He still remembered the one that did it for him—Roethke’s “The Waking,” funnily enough. So take the lively air, / And, lovely, learn by going where to go, he recited to Liz. And that was the moment he’d set off on a delightful clueless journey in language, and for years he never once felt lonely or even singular, because at all times he felt this breeze, he said to Liz, on which the poems he would read and write might be accepted and held firmly aloft, and the air of the culture seemed filled with such breezes and such poems. Yes, Liz said, I know exactly what you mean. Frank O’Hara did it for me, she said. Which one? Mark asked. She said, “Animals,” to which Mark replied, We didn’t need speedometers / we could manage cocktails out of ice and water, and Liz wanted to hug her friend. Anyhow, Mark continued, the damn thing is, it’s so hard to keep believing. And there’s so much you need to believe in. Does that make sense to you? It does, Liz said. Mark said, You become aware that what you’re doing is almost nothing. That it’s just a few atoms away from nothing. And now, with this scandal, I feel that what we do is in fact nothing. I feel like it’s officially nothing. Liz saw that Mark had other things he planned to say but was too emotional to speak. Liz, they’re calling him a poet, he finally got out. You know? They’re not calling him a novelist. They’re not calling him a songwriter. They’re saying he’s a poet, Liz. I know, sweetie, Liz had said.