Contributor’s Marginalia: Esther Lin responding to Jared Harél’s poem “Ode to Barbed Wire”

At first one believes one knows where this poem is headed: it will wrench your heart, it will do it with chiseled descriptions of torment, the heartlessness of perpetrators, the cold. It opens: “To clarity of purpose. To hell / with subtlety.” To hell with incrementalism, one might add. It begins in an ars poetica. The ever self-aware sonnet form performs its intent as it declares it. What a sublimely terse promise to make the reader.

We swerve to New York, to the barbed wire and the little nests they hold outside of Rikers and a Con Edison building. To the barbed wire tattooed on “juiced muscles.” Then we swing upward into the constellations: “so distant and fiery / they’re downright uninviting.” It is with the image of star field—perhaps hovering over the Atlantic, parting New York from Europe—joined to the Jewish star that we finally arrive at the ghetto or camp. Here the barbed wire has lost its teeth, it is called merely a “coil.” We burst onto the piercing ending, “like a child missing home.”

Shockingly the coil is figured as the child, gripping its captive the way this child would grip his memory of home. Instead of being praised, ode-like, the object bursts with its own longing and intent. It’s a peculiar gesture enacted on an icon of imprisonment; Harél has repurposed it as a lesson in empathy.

So—why an ode? It’s no grand statement to say we live in divided times, that America places little premium on empathy. The barbed wire “grows meaner come dusk / like certain trees,” reads Harél’s first quatrain. The arch reference of “certain trees” calls to mind Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These,” her commentary: “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own ways of making people disappear.” Recall her ending:

[ . . . ] because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Rich’s poem is a condemnation of the pastoralist uninterested in daily affairs, the complacent general public; Harél’s ode inverts her gesture. Times have changed since Rich’s day; the general public’s latest expression of complacency is outrage and condemnation. Our social media teems with it, the politicians rattle their sabres, their outrage earns our eyerolls. (If the American public has any talent, it’s our keen nose for disingenuity.) Harél’s poem gently, gently plucks up the reader from image to image of barbed wire for another challenge: to dare ourselves to embrace and be embraced by those who have been persuaded to wound us.