Graham Irvin I HAVE A GUN review by Kirsti MacKenzie
There’s a poem in I HAVE A GUN which goes, simply: “if you asked a gun / what it felt like to kill / the gun would say / pow pow pow / pow pow / pow.”
Imagining how a gun would communicate is Irvin’s wink at the reader, one of many. Guns don’t talk. They’re used by people to short-circuit communication via coerce and control. When someone asserts “I have a gun” to end conversation, Irvin stubbornly keeps talking. I HAVE A GUN engages an uneasy audience about projections, metaphors, and cliches about guns and their place in collective consciousness—and unease is the goal.
Over the course of eight sections, Irvin largely explores the gun as concept, as metaphor: gun as justice, gun as threat, gun as profit, gun as power, gun as bonding, gun as sidekick, gun as self-esteem, gun as literary device, gun as Biblical device, gun as PhD, gun as joke. It’s not a passive exercise; at each turn Irvin insists that this is a conversation in which we are active participants. He’s able to develop these metaphors because we’re so familiar with them. We’ve cultivated them together. We are complicit.
Complicity is key in I HAVE A GUN. Irvin’s narrator sits us down at a party, hands us a beer, and unloads his every thought on guns. Least we imagine that he’s some kind of sicko, that it’s his obsession alone, he’s quick to remind us that if guns are a problem—in thought, in conversation, in reality—we are collectively responsible. For the phallic jokes, for the revenge fantasies, for the casual apathy: “How can I get them to understand and even agree? Believe that they too have a gun somewhere they’d like to wield at times?”
“I know when I make jokes about guns or wanting a gun or having a gun, people aren’t sure how to respond. They shut down. They get nervous,” the text says. This is, of course, the point. Irvin’s exercise repeats gun jokes, gun metaphors, and gun realities to the point of disruption. To re-sensitize us, to make us viscerally uncomfortable with a horror we’ve grown accustomed to. Even the title is designed to discomfit: What does it say about me if I pick up this book? What does it say about me if I laugh at the joke? What does it say about me if I too have a gun?
Irvin’s brilliant trick is using the metaphorical gun to play with distance, to hold us hostage to a conversation we’re avoiding. Violence, or the possibility of it, is confined to the page in I HAVE A GUN, but that doesn’t mark us safe. After laughing at dick jokes, scoffing at war profiteers, and sympathizing with vigilante justice, sections seven and eight grapple with the inclusion of fact in a largely rhetorical project. It’s time to face gun violence: guns as reality rather than fiction.
“This doesn’t work if the gun never becomes a real threat, right?” we’re asked. Irvin’s party conversation ends with a list of mass shootings interspersed with commentary to make sure we’re paying attention. Because we do need to pay attention, and urgently. Irvin’s rhetorical gun transmutes from metaphorical joke into hard fact upon firing; if we tune out, dissociate, or normalize it, the horror persists.
In the midst of the mass shooting list, Irvin mentions the number of mass shooting deaths on World Poetry Day. “It’s a shame,” he says, “an entire world of poets writing poetry, reading poetry, conceptualizing poetics at the global scale, didn’t end violence for good.” There’s a lurking, self-reflexive cynicism here. Despite compelling the conversation with his metaphorical gun, Irvin recognizes that the exercise may be futile. If conversation is all his poetry amounts to, then there’s no real action to stop gun violence. The problem loops back on itself: “I want to simplify all interactions to, “Fuck that”, or “Hey man, nice gun.”
How do we end the conversation and finally take action? Do you believe now that you too have a gun somewhere you’d like to wield at times?
There are no good guys and bad guys here, no neat dichotomies, no tidy moral resolutions. Complicity is key. We all have a gun, and we’re all sick of the conversation. But more than that, we’re sick of violence. Irvin’s last page reminds us we’re in a stand off: “Shooting one gun / with another gun / a perfect poem.” This only works if we decide, once and for all, to put the gun down. To agree to connect, to stop holding each other hostage.
Who goes first?
Graham Irvin’s I HAVE A GUN is published March 5 with Rejection Letters Press.
Get your copy now.
Review by @KeersteeMack
Punk Noir Press 