Deaths, Plural: On Pro Wrestling and Poetry
The speaker in Steven Kleinman’s poem “My mother’s many deaths” closes his eyes and becomes a professional wrestler. He says:
I was the British Bulldog. I was Rowdy
Roddy Piper. Death was Hulk Hogan.
Death was the Legion of Doom.
The impact these lines may have on a reader owes everything to the wrestlers’ names. Not that all readers would necessarily know who any of them are—with the exception of Hulk Hogan, probably. The point is that the names themselves are intimidating: Bulldog, Rowdy, Hulk, Doom. At least to a boy who has just lost his mother and who, in his grief, must imagine himself as tough and as mean as death.
The same effect could have been achieved with the names of professional boxers: Iron Mike Tyson, Tommy The Machine Gunn, Héctor Macho Camacho. Wrestling, in this sense, is incidental to the poem, yet wrestling is what makes the crisis at the poem’s center survivable.
Professional wrestling, both as performance form and as cultural event, it should be said, is unlike boxing in that it’s not a “legitimate” sport. And American culture, though it has embraced it from the fringes, does so mostly begrudgingly. This attitude is best demonstrated in Gregory Pardlo’s poem “Allegory,” which tells the story of pro wrestler Owen Hart’s death from a fall as he was being lowered from stadium rafters during a live pay-per-view event. Pardlo describes:
…E.M.T’s like evangelicals huddled to jolt
the hub of Hart’s radiating soul as fans prayed the stunt
might yet parade the emperor’s threads wrestlers call kayfabe.
Kayfabe, a dialect of pig Latin, lingo for the promise to drop
at the laying of hands. To take myth as history. Semblance
as creed. A grift so convincing one might easily believe
it could work without someone else pulling the strings.
The poem is not elegiac so much as it offers snide commentary on both the fallen wrestler and the once adoring, now grieving fans: You all should know better. Pro wrestling, at least in mainstream culture, is often approached as if there were little else to know about the form other than what—it is assumed—everybody already knows: two brutes enter a ring and act as if they are beating on each other for the enjoyment of hundreds, or thousands, of fellow brutes in the audience. It is a guilty pleasure, and people are expected to quickly outgrow or deny it.
Hatred of pro wrestling, one could argue, hinges not on the form’s opacity but on it being so superficial; so gross, so, well, boring. And yet, like poetry, wrestling too is a practice of excess, of the unjustifiable and the unnecessary: the costuming, the tanning, the crafting of a distinct style in service of a vision of what becomes necessary in order to get through the day or death.
Brian Oliu, in his wrestling-themed collection of short prose Body Drop, writes of Owen Hart’s death: “This is not an angle. This is about a straight drop from a height unthinkable: we will look at the ceiling and count the crossbeams—the metal catwalks, the rattle of metal.”
Oliu considers what the fans presumably will do now that Owen has died: we will count the crossbeams. To what end exactly? This, often, is the question non-wrestling fans ask of the form—to what end do performers bulk up and train and submit themselves to grueling and risky activities if there is nothing “real” at stake? It is the same sort of question non-poetry readers ask of poets: to what end do poets toil over word choice and sound and rhythm and form if there is ultimately a more straightforward way to express oneself?
But this, of course, is the wrong question to ask of either form: poetry or pro wrestling. The correct question is: what do we count if there are no crossbeams?
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In January of this year, professional wrestler Jay Briscoe died in a car crash. In a special tribute show, his real-life brother and tag team partner faced their real-life friend—and in-ring enemy—Jay Lethal. The latter was visibly crying before and after the match. During the contest, however, he acted as if he was hell-bent on ripping his dead friend’s younger brother’s head off.
This is what professional wrestling—more than other performance forms, or sports, I’ll argue—is most adept at: the embodiment and staging of the tension between what people are called to do to each other given the context, constraints, and expectations that frame and mediate their relationship (in this case, having to appear publicly as enemies) and what people ultimately are to each other (in this case, ever loving and now grieving friends). It is the same sort of underlying tension and suspension of opposing ideas that poetry makes possible, and which can make a poem great. Kleinman again:
I drank a Dixie cup of Jack Daniel’s and went out for a drive,
all the while my mother was dying of old age,
was hit by a car, drowned in the ocean.
…
That was the first year we didn’t visit
at Christmas. Can you imagine? She was so lonely.
W. Todd Kaneko’s Owen Hart poem, “Long live the king of hearts,” eulogizes the wrestler by marking his meaning in the relationship between the speaker and his father:
Because my father claims to have seen the Blue Blazer
fall that night on television, his head snapped
back like a man who has just lost everything.
Because he wanted something to talk about with me
those nights we sat together watching wrestling.
Because no one saw what happened that night except
the audience in Kansas City.
The father, as the poem attests, is a liar. But he also wants something—anything—to talk about with his son. The poem highlights the tension between the Good one would like to offer a beloved other (communion, connection) and the less-than-ideal ways one has of trying to offer it (claiming to have been or have done what you both know is impossible). This tension goes unresolved in the poem, in the same way that having two friends fake-fight on TV does not resolve the pain they feel from having lost a brother.
And still, there is no lonelier sight than a wrestler—all costumed up and tanned—in the middle of the ring with nobody to fake-fight.
Pro wrestlers, it should be noted, die many deaths. Some even get buried alive on live television. Then they come back, refreshed, and ready to make a run at the world title. Their names, yes, are often intimidating. But many are normal enough: Owen Hart, Jay Briscoe, Kevin Owens. In any case, the bodies they put to brutal use in the ring are the same bodies they must use for everything else outside of the ring.
This is the advantage that wrestling has over poetry: contrary to poets, wrestlers’ means of artistic representation are their very means of and for living. Poets must struggle to get the language right to convey to readers that the stakes are just as high; that there is something “real” at risk in or around the text. They must also figure out a way of making a living.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
The point is that somebody is always left behind to count the crossbeams.
At the end of their match, Mark Briscoe and Jay Lethal embraced in the middle of the ring. It was as if the pain they inflicted upon each other for twelve minutes had somehow brought them closer; made them care for each other more. This is the tension, the impossibility, that poetry can sustain. A son comes to know the depth of his father’s love for him when he knows him to be liar. A boy comes to understand that death is truly insurmountable once he understands its name is so regular sounding, it’s almost boring. We learn what to do after having lost someone by learning anything and everything we might do is pointless.