High Horse

I came across i have a gun (2024, Rejection Letters) through an episode of Sean Thor Conroe’s 1storypod. I watched the conversation on Youtube last February, in which he and author Graham Irvin casually discussed Philly, literature and writing. I had just – belatedly – finished Conroe’s Fuccboi (2022, Little Brown) and was looking for something with a similar set of teeth, potent enough to inflict the same literary wounds – the kind one licks in the privacy of their own home. The novel indeed had me contemplating the absurdity of my interactions with the world as it is bound to birth ambivalent experiences with seemingly boundless fertility. 

I was intrigued as I witnessed, in Conroe’s office, Graham Irvin’s very particular mix of quiet demeanor and self-assuredness that is singular within the alt lit scene. But more importantly, I wondered what kind of statement a book entitled “I have a gun” could possibly make. Later, as more and more passages from the poem were suggested to me on Instagram – my one source for alt poetry – I started to observe how sincerely Irvin interacted with his own text, severed though it was by the aesthetic demands for brevity of the social network. Going through excerpt after excerpt, I was stunned by the way this long poem was unlike anything I’d read before, blending the conversational with the poetic in an unexpectedly tender manner. 

For anyone in the world, no matter what country they’re from, the sentence “I have a gun” is a notable statement. Said out loud, it has the power to make anyone’s skin crawl and break into a cold sweat as their head swivels round. As the title of a book, it sounds like a farce, a joke, a laughable show of bravado. As the subject of a long poem, it questions the justification of the latter’s very existence – do audiences really want to read about someone who makes such a claim? The first page of the poem astutely answers this interrogation, thanks to Irvin’s unique brand of ruthless levity:

a gun is a conversation 

a gun is an argument

I always win

a conversation

is an argument

when you have a gun 

everybody listen up

I have a gun

By opening the book with this statement and an epigraph attributed to Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the late UCLA psychiatrist who studied extreme behaviors and violent crimes, Graham Irvin sets the tone for his poem: nothing but pure energy will hail from it, and it might not all be benevolent. 

Blending free verse and prose, Irvin sets out to explore the limits of the written word in an American context where the specter of gun violence is lurking, in an almost feverish, often ironic hybrid form of plea and diatribe. It took me three days to finish the book, compelled as I was to make the experience last. 

Right after my first reading, I ordered Liver Mush (2022), Irvin’s first collection published at Back Patio Press that, in so many ways, sets the tone and lays the groundwork for i have a gun. Borrowing its title from a traditional dish of the Southern United States, Liver Mush is a conversation with America about itself. The delicacy acts as a pretext for Irvin to talk about family, friendship, community, God, and the way those things conflate the universal and the personal. What starts out as something that could be mistaken as an Oulipian exercise in style turns into an often funny, sometimes poignant, always spot-on reflection on memory and heritage that avoids the pitfalls of preciosity and gratuitous convolutions:

but make no mistake it would never be real

I would never approach a passing human
  intimacy

I was trapped in the broken mech that was my
  body

eternally watching a system fail

we only had 30 minutes

I talked about exercise

how much coffee I drank 

I told the doctor

“wednesday I cried 4 hours straight

“most days I can’t get out of bed

“the effort to care physically hurts”

I didn’t mention liver mush

it felt like too cruel of a joke

(“There Was Limited Time”)

In the collection, the phrase “liver mush” is repeated countless times, becoming a symbol separated from history, to paraphrase Irvin. It is the mediator that makes the transformation of the colloquial and the quotidian into art possible – an endeavor that has been part of the great American artistic tradition for a very long time. 

In i have a gun, Irvin takes a page from his own playbook and writes monomaniacally once again, this time about firearms and their symbolic power that, ultimately, is a power over language that the poetic voice envies, imitates and, ultimately, if only for just a moment, appropriates and supersedes. 

By discarding poem and section titles, Irvin puts the metaphorical gun in his reader’s not so metaphorical hand, challenging them to go through the book at muzzle velocity. Indeed, the piece often feels like a provocation, a dare – to read on, despite the presence of landmines and proverbial guns on every page: 

and look even though

this poem mentions the murder 

of cops and serial killers 

and whoever else

you wanted me to kill

when I gave you permission

to imagine it

and even though

this poem called

people bitches

and even though

you’re partly complicit 

temporarily and mentally

in the taking of lives 

that were lost

the part of the poem 

I’m least comfortable with

is the pedophile

a lot of people could say 

that poems shouldn’t have guns

but I think poems

should have more guns

if only to get rid of 

the pedophiles

Throughout the piece – or pieces, depending on one’s readiness or need to pause their reading – Irvin rolls out various poetic strategies to explore the way guns have invaded the public and private sphere in the United States. He taunts, mocks and mistreats his reader, granting and withdrawing knowledge and agency, to better cajole them on the next page. He quotes Barthes and Deleuze, then feigns ignorance to give them an illusion of power – the latter being systematically taken away from them:

a gun is a metaphor

in the same way

saying, I’m going to kill you

is a metaphor

people interpret it differently

if I’m holding a gun

That underlying sense of threat is an integral part of reading the poem: 

all great art

examines death or sex

with art about death

the gun’s pointing at you

with art about sex

the gun’s pointing

at everything else

As Irvin multiplies the addresses to the reader in his very specific brand of off-hand comedy and transforms his rapidly fired lines into longer uninterrupted verse, the poem delves into something heavier, darker, more immediate. Sliding from the hypothetical into the historical, Irvin reminds the reader that there is an actual gun, somewhere, because guns have been around for a long time and have been causing unspeakable damage. This harrowingly culminates in the penultimate section of the book in the form of a 15-page list of the number of victims of the mass shootings that have taken place in 2022. Here, the savagery of those deaths is rendered by a clinically accurate enumeration – or so Irvin says – that goes so far as to align the dates in a seemingly infinite oblique pattern on the page, only broken by the mention of the last victim. The closing statement of the section is almost an adjuration whose urgency can only be followed by a break, a silence:

I looked it up. I wrote it down. I thought about it nonstop for two years. I wrote some poems. I thought about those constant deaths while writing poems. 

Now you’re reading it. 

Here it is. 

In i have a gun, Irvin explores the (in)adequacy of form and content and questions the potency of the word – the quality of the word, the number of words, and the absence of words. He wonders about those who use them carelessly and those who use them sparingly. About what guns would be without words, and what words could do if only they had the same power as guns. He challenges the reader to wonder about their own words, and their relationship to others’. He discusses the weight of the written word within the economy of a more and more standardized society. He questions the intent of the autofiction edgelords and the relationship of literature to manipulation, be it linguistic, emotional or otherwise. 

Even more strikingly, after getting the expected comments on manhood and male genitalia out of the way in a most spectacular manner, Irvin offers up a reflection on contemporary American myths and representations in the face of the country’s very own contradictions. Like Liver Mush, i have a gun is about family, friendship, community, history and heritage. But it is first and foremost – like Fuccboi, for that matter – a book about vulnerability. About the inability to cope with the demands of reality – and especially the way those are exerted on young American men. 

The great talent of Graham Irvin is to make this very specific experience accessible and an object of empathy. Indeed, the female European reader that I am has been force-fed highly stereotypical representations of the American male experience by postmodern literature and a generally hypermediated contact with the United States. My understanding of their very own challenges has largely been curtailed and determined by my significant exposure to those images. However, the specificities of the autofictional mode, as it is practiced by Graham Irvin (and Sean Thor Conroe) gives readers like me access to something I had only vaguely intuited – a form of tenderness that stems from narratives that don’t shy away from the mortifications and humiliations of the American male experience, and which turn out to be the foundation not only of violence, but also of infinite strength and character.

Maud Bougerol is a researcher in contemporary experimental American literature. She reads, writes and teaches in Paris, France. More of her writing can be found at dancingonthepalimpsest.substack.com. Stay tuned for more reviews from Maud coming soon!