Joseph O’Neill - Good Trouble

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Joseph O’Neill 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here .

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008283995

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008284015

Version: 2019-04-01

To Gill Coleridge and to David McCormick

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Pardon Edward Snowden

The Trusted Traveler

The World of Cheese

The Referees

Promises, Promises

The Death of Billy Joel

Ponchos

The Poltroon Husband

Goose

The Mustache in 2010

The Sinking of the Houston

About the Author

Also by Joseph O’Neill

About the Publisher

The poet Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a “poetition” requesting President Barack H. Obama to pardon Edward Snowden. The request took the form of a poem written by Merrill Jensen, a writer 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 “USA”; and “USA” “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, 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? Because, 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 regretted it. (Strange, just how draining an 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 had to be endured, the peacocks huffed and squawked to the fore, 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 move 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 could not bring himself 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 very table where they now sat. At that meeting, Mark revealed 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