In “Pardon Edward Snowden,” your story in this week’s issue, the poet Mark McCain is invited to sign a “poetition” requesting that President Obama pardon Edward Snowden. The poetition is a bad poem. What’s the worst petition that you’ve been personally asked to sign?
You’re implying that I’m regularly asked to sign a petition. I’m not. I certainly don’t recall getting asked to sign one that was crappily written. That said, the petition definitely belongs to a perilous genre. The open letter, the proclamation, the démarche: not many writers would be comfortable producing one of these, for all sorts of reasons. But sometimes you have to toss a penny into the fountain.
The Snowden case is one example of artists and writers attempting to intervene in specific politics; perhaps the anti-Trump campaign is another. Do these appeals ever work? If they don’t, what do you think the artists and writers get out of them?
I’ve signed a nonfictional petition pleading for Snowden’s pardon, so I must think that it could be useful. I believe more than ever that he should be pardoned, by the way. The Putin-Trump axis will give Russia carte blanche to commit war crimes in Syria, and in return Putin will deliver up Snowden to Trump—who will try to humiliate, harm, and maybe even execute “his” prisoner. Dispositively, in my view, the chances of a fair trial or a fair sentence are now close to zero. My suspicion is that Obama will grant a pardon. Not to do so would be just gutless and wrong.
Mark gets into a discussion with his friend Jarvis, a short-story writer, about the relative difficulty of various forms of writing. Each advocates for the severity of his form; Mark has also taken to writing what he calls “pensées,” which he finds a relief from writing poetry. In your mind, what are the particular difficulties of each of these forms?
All of these forms are hard, but poetry has to be the hardest. The hardest technically, the hardest spiritually. I say this as a writer who started off by writing poems and quit because I found it too tough. It’s such an extreme, cold, high-up, no-ropes, precipices-everywhere kind of word-sport. Which is what makes the good stuff so important, especially in dark and untruthful times.
Toward the end of the story, Mark decides not to sign the poetition, even though it will now be printed in the Times. He sees this action as a form of resistance—but what exactly is he resisting?
Good question.
