I don’t get it. Is it just about never letting people forget their crimes? Or…? Maybe I should just ignore this sub instead of asking stupid questions… I’ve never been good with poetry.
OP here. Not to get all EngLit teacher, but pretty much any instinctual reaction to art is valid. Perhaps the author wants you to feel slightly confused - as thats a common function of art (see crosswords/puzzles, murder mysteries, stories that start in medias res, magic eyes, postmodern novels, cut up art, or really any art that isn’t entirely linear and explained, which can include naturalistic drama if an antagonists’ motivations aren’t revealed until later)
Perhaps they want you to consider what it means to be a criminal, to observe and interact with a criminal, what it means to serve one’s punishment and the aftermath, what it means to be an ex-criminal, how we imagine our responses to crime (it seems like there’s a bunch of reactions in the poem: rehabilitation, activities in society, removing someone from a cycle, violence, verbal abuse…)
It could also be a reflection on how we use humor to cope — the speaker in the poem knows he’s (friends? accompanying? the officer assigned to?) with a murderer and yet jokes about it - a pretty human thing and an interesting concept for a poem
It also speaks to me of dystopic fiction or experiments in rehabilitation / psychotherapy in the past/present, and the media’s and society’s reaction to such.
Plus, I find it quite amusing even without deeper thought.
Well count me confused. Mainly by the second to last line, the ham implies they are both murderers?
No, I don’t think so. “Would you like a sandwich? … The murderer eats his sandwich” implies the narrator gives him a sandwich. Cheese and ham is a common sandwich.
Nah ham is the flesh of someone else
I’m in the same boat, lol. I saved this post so I could see if people started discussing it, so I could understand. I will say it is intriguing though!
Oh thank god I thought I was gonna be the only one 😂 Maybe the author is the murderer and it’s about him trying to live with it, but never being able to forget? Seems flimsy, even to me.
OP posted their thoughts on it, fyi!
Found some analysis on it:
https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4840
“In my own correspondence with Kennard he suggested that the poem’s message is that “there’s more than one way to murder someone, and the narrator, in his vaudevillian, repetitive cruelty, is the real murderer.”1 So we are meant to see the moral shortcomings of both of the central characters, and the piece appears to make a case for moral relativism: the speaker’s moral pronouncements are comically undermined and the poem seems consistent with postmodernism’s refusal to construct a moral hierarchy.”
Also, this isn’t the full poem. There’s more, and it is really funny (and a bit bleak).
Okay this was very helpful, as was the rest of the poem, in understanding it. I mean, I think I need to read the full analysis while someone with a beret and very small sunglasses plays a bongo out of time in the background, every breath a lungful of stale cigarettes and spilt red wine, to really understand it… but it helps. Thank you! 😊
edit: I think my favourite is
‘I hope you’re not a murderer, too,’ I say. ‘One murderer in my life is quite enough for me.’
‘Actually,’ she says, quietly, ‘I think we’re all murderers.’ I brake for a red light. ‘That’s lucky,’ I say. ‘I imagine it would be difficult going out with a murderer
If you weren’t a moral relativist.’
That is very funny… though I can’t quite describe why. Absurdism, I guess.