Contributor’s Marginalia: Ruth Williams on “The Petty Politics of the Thing” by Kathryn Nuernberger

I used to have a postcard hanging over my desk of a photograph from Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait series. In it, Sherman is dressed in an ill-fitting, black 80s-style skirt suit. At her sides, her fists are clenched so tight you can see the pink hue of blood pooling underneath the skin. Atop her head is a messy blond wig; tussled and a little crooked, it obscures all but one eye on Sherman’s face. That one eye radiates, a wet-looking red that meets the camera’s gaze with a shocking intensity. Though the postcard says this is “Untitled (#122),” I’ve always thought of it as “Female Anger.”

I thought of this picture when I read Kate Nuernberger’s poem “The Petty Politics of the Thing.” It struck me immediately as arresting in the same way as Sherman’s photo; you don’t often see a poem whose subject is the intense rage that springs forth, wild and unexpected, from the banalities of office politics. Nor do you often read a poem in which a female speaker explores violent anger so directly. Even the speaker of the poem is surprised “by the teeth and meat-breath / of myself.” Like Sherman’s photo, Nuernberger’s poem asks us to look at a reaction we might initially dismiss as unprofessional or unladylike, insisting that there’s something meaningful to be had in meeting the speaker’s angry, red eye.

The poem’s crucial juxtaposition is of the animal, angry self with the adult, polite or professional self. The first line of the poem finds the speaker surprised at her intense, animalistic response precisely because “We’re adults in an office.” You’re to cultivate “collegiality” and other “feats of such-like professionalism” in the office. Certainly, in the context of academia (which I gather is where this office is located due to the mention of a “department”), you should cultivate a certain remove. Academics, who live, after all, the life of the mind, value the intellectual “I,” not the red, angry wet-looking eye. Feeling anger, especially because of something petty, is a sign that you are too weak, too sensitive. “Thank goodness this is just a job,” you say, even if you don’t believe it. And yet, though the speaker has, like the rest of us, gone to school where she’s learned “We are not animals,” her wildness housebroken by “the fluorescent lights and [the] geometry of so much / empty furniture in a room,” there’s a voice that “whispers” in the “back of her mind.” It’s the sound of her animal self, the “cat-rabbit.”

Nuernberger introduces the “cat-rabbit” early on as a story that can stand in for the who-what-when-where-why-and-how of the fight that inspired the poem because the fight that sparked her predatory response “was not the kind of fight / a poem can understand.” Poems frequently serve as vehicles for transcendence or beauty, a way of rising above the daily grind, not a place for hashing out petty disagreements. And yet, given the poem’s very existence, the speaker clearly believes there’s something in this pettiness that demands a closer look. So, if the poem can’t understand the fight, then the speaker will speak to it in its own language, constructing her metaphor by “tell[ing] instead / about the cat who drug the newborn rabbit / from the nest under my porch.”

It’s interesting that what Nuernberger chooses to emphasize in this predator/prey relationship is the life-and-death nature of the struggle. Having witnessed the fight between cat and rabbit, the speaker explains, “I’ll tell you / that a bunny losing her throat screams like a panther / from within the fluff of herself.” When the bunny is attacked by the cat, it screams for its life; yet, in an office we keep quiet in a fight. The speaker isn’t certain why: “I do not know if it is / the cat in us or the rabbit that keeps so silent.” Notice this line suggests that those in the office, despite their commitment to collegiality and adultness, haven’t lost their animal selves, even if they don’t admit it. Going against this denial, the speaker admits, “Sometimes in the course of a day / I hear the cat-rabbit in the back of my mind whisper ‘I will fuck you up.'”

Instead of apologizing for this rage, the speaker declares, “Oh, I love her. I love her / for how real she is.” I love her too. How refreshing it is to read a poem that acknowledges and respects female anger! (Because the speaker uses “her” to personify this cat-rabbit, I assume that the speaker is a woman herself.) So often, women are encouraged to be nice, to keep their discomforts bottled up, to generally go along to get along. While we are all socialized to forget we are animals, women are, perhaps, encouraged even more so to never let on to the “meat-breath” inside them. After all, to do so is to be potentially dismissed as a raging bitch. Thus, to me, it feels liberating—in both a visceral and feminist way—to read the line “I will fuck you up” as a validation of female anger.

But, before you wonder if I read this poem as a license to let my anger flow freely in a kind of antisocial boil, I want to point out the curious nature of the cat-rabbit metaphor as a check against this interpretation. Why a “cat-rabbit”? Why not just a cat or just a rabbit? By blending the cat and rabbit into one, Nuernberger suggests that anger flows not just from the predatory lust for blood and power embodied by the cat, but also from the fight-for-your-life instincts of the rabbit. This isn’t a celebration of anger for anger’s sake; it’s an honest examination of the emotions that lead us to anger, which include fear and vulnerability. Furthermore, the desire to “fuck you up” is not something the speaker acts on; for her, “it’s enough just to know” the voice and its attendant anger exists. It reminds her of what is real beneath the surface of our adult remove and academic intellectualizing. This is why the cat-rabbit is able to “see through / even the most tangled bramble of rhetoric.” She knows what’s really at stake.

In the final part of the poem, the speaker passes along to the reader what her inner cat-rabbit has taught her. What we take as our daily life is full of symbols, things that stand in for other things. Even if we think it’s banal, “[t]he office is a symbol.” Having recognized the animal instincts within herself, the speaker can now read the space for its deeper meanings, revealing:

Your clothes may or may not be
a chain of severed heads around your neck.
Your diplomatic tone is the sharpened tip
of an obsidian stone. Don’t feel mean,
I have one too.

So often in offices, especially in the office-departments of academia, people pride themselves on arguing from principle, from a sense of what is objectively proper, good, right. Methodology and disciplinary standards, truth and science, tradition and authority are their rallying cries. But, this poem suggests that the “principle” of these arguments shadow what is, at heart, about power and ego, blood and fear, “the very meaning of our lives.”

Nuernberger’s poem suggests there’s a power in recognizing the cat-rabbit in all of us. We need not let our anger out unchecked, but we need to know that the cat-rabbit is there, rumbling “her stalking purr of so-close now” every time we deny she exists. The poem ends in a kind of suspended moment, the speaker recognizing her own cat-rabbit “waiting / for someone to let me sink my teeth into it.” Here, I take “it” to be the real ego battle beyond the symbolic surface, the actual substance that exists beyond the “tangled bramble of rhetoric.” In showing us her angry red eye, the speaker of this poem asserts she has power over those who choose to couch their predatory rage in “diplomatic tones.” She can honestly acknowledge what’s going on behind the “petty politics.” And, I would argue, it’s only in this recognition of the actual stakes that the real work of the fight and its resolution can begin.

So, while one may try to dismiss all this talk of anger and animals and academia as so much “melodrama” and insist that “not so much / is at stake in this silly bureaucracy / we idle our days through,” like the speaker of this poem, I know that these dismissals are just a way of denying the raging, hungry, predatory, vulnerable, scared, fight-for-your-life cat-rabbit in you.