Chinese mace, 18th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Public domain)
I first encountered Stephanie Burt when I was doing my MFA in poetry and she visited to read from her work; some years later, I got to publish her at the Boston Globe Ideas section. Currently, Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard University, where she is known for, among other things, teaching a hugely popular course on Taylor Swift. (“If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem,” she told the New York Times.) Her books of poetry and criticism include, most recently, “Taylor’s Version: The Musical and Poetic Genius of Taylor Swift”; “Super Gay Poems: LGBTQ+ Poetry After Stonewall”; and “We Are Mermaids: Poems.” I’ll let her introduce her own poem, below.
About “The Nancy Mace”
By Stephanie Burt
Things I can tell you: Practical anger and political humor often seem worlds apart; I like it when they come together. I also like it when left and center-left types can work together, recognizing that we need both an outside game and an inside game to defeat team tyranny and retrain or render harmless the dragons of oppression. Politics isn't sports, and isn't Dungeons and Dragons (or any of the less well-known indie tabletop role playing games that I frankly prefer). But those three things are alike in certain limited ways, and we can benefit from those analogies.
The poem comes from the inherent pun in the name of South Carolina U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, who takes wild swings that hurt people, especially trans people; from her outspoken opposition to trans people existing in public in any way; and from the contretemps around her successful attempt to ban trans women, including Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, from using the ladies' rooms at the U.S. Capitol.
Stephanie Burt (Jessica Bennett)
McBride herself has tried to act as a model of center-left decorum, compromise-making and bridge-building, raising predictable ire among my friends and allies who work, and write, on behalf of trans people (and who are not elected officials). My own temperament, as a granddaughter of the New Deal and a child of Washington, D.C., lies with the inside game ("politics is about the improvement of people's lives," as Paul Wellstone said, and makes strange bedfellows, as Wellstone did not say). I’ve even written an elegy for Walter Mondale, which you can read if you like. Of course, the inside game never works unless there's an outraged, uncompromising, committed outside game. I too feel outrage at the way the current administration has been trying to make me disappear, and to kill my friends. (That's not an overstatement: denying trans teenagers gender-appropriate care, in particular, really will leave some of them dead.)
“The Nancy Mace” reflects that outrage. All the facts in the poem are true, as far as I know: the prohibitions against sharp weapons for clerics (who therefore had to fight with maces, clubs, and such) applied only in the first and second editions of Dungeons and Dragons, not in the third and subsequent. Younger readers may not know that “nancy" (or “nancy boy”) is obsolescent, derogatory slang for a gay or effeminate man.
“The Nancy Mace” also adapts a form called monorhyme, where all the lines end with the same rhyme, and a variant (practiced by Paul Muldoon) where all the lines end with the same word, autorhyme: the effect is to hammer on some mood or image that you just can't get out of your mind. Here it's a consonant, rather than a rhyme—the letter p and the sound it makes—repeated throughout the poem. When people keep wanting to insult you or hurt you or drive you away because you're trans, it's hard to ignore their persistence (another p). It's also, not coincidentally, hard to think about anything else for long when you really have to pee. And when you really like Dungeons and Dragons (I do), it's hard to think about the modern world and its depredations when you'd rather be taming (or fighting, though it's more fun to tame them) a young green dragon. As my friend Elliot Mancuso once said, tabletop role playing games rule in part because they give players the sense of agency, the sense that we can affect the rest of the world, that sometimes seems lacking in our real public lives.
Even if we represent the entire state of Delaware in Congress. I wonder if Sarah McBride plays Dungeons and Dragons. If she ever reads the poem (and she's almost certainly got far better things to do), I hope she'll let me know.
The Nancy Mace
We’re all just people trying to pee in peace.—Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE)
The gayest of secret weapons, unable to pierce
leather or even skin, the nancy mace commonly comes into play
when somebody wants to bash back. Keen to part,
like a river, prosecutions
from persecutions, the colonial-era patricians
who wrote the U.S. Constitution prohibited
bills of attainder, meant to punish
one person, since law—when not a wooden prop
for personal gain—is a blunt instrument, prevented
from cruelty by firmly or supposedly impartial
propositions, plus
a jury of our peers. A blessed paladin
in old school Dungeons and Dragons can parry
and slash to her heart’s content, though the gods who empower
her also proscribed
their clerics, a.k.a. priests,
from bladed weapons, providing,
instead, for their pummeling pleasure,
the club, or bludgeon, or mace. The Palmetto
State portrays, on its night-sky-blue, Prussian-
blue flag, that same salt-tolerant palm
whose thick, straight trunk might put
you in mind of masts, like the ones on the tall ships that ploughed
the Atlantic and then the Pacific
to the Moluccas, or Molukus, the only place
where nutmeg, the source of mace—the pink
or brown outer skin that protects
the nutmeg—grows. Once mace cost more, per
ounce, than diamonds. A whole copse, properly
harvested and powdered,
might produce
a year's net profit
in a barrel. Propellant
shortages during the 2010s placed
strain on the U.S. production
of mace, the kind you carry in a purse
against a physical
attack, although it can proffer
no help against police: for that you deploy political
power, which grows from the barrel of something, perhaps
a gun. It's purportedly unfair to pun
on someone’s name. Pressure
makes diamonds, but takes forever, while public
opinion can pivot
on the proverbial dime. The Sergeant-at-Arms represents,
in Congress, the so-called people's
chamber, or lower house, by a silver and ebony pole,
a ready-to-fly bald eagle perched
atop its faintly penile
tip. This heavily harmless pretense
of a weapon, called the Mace of the Republic,
weighs thirteen pounds,
while the unpolished, perilous, portentous
nancy mace weighs nothing, since it exists in the pent-
up imaginations of people like me, who prefer
telling stories with polyhedral
dice over passing
unnoticed, or playing
half-dead, or picking up whatever pronouns
we're thrown (as in Throw her a bone; as in, I've got a bone to pick
with her), or being told it’s a privilege
not to be asked for our papers or passports, or becoming a platform
for people who hate us, or people who pretend,
for profit, to hate us. Passed
from hand to hand for a show of force, pushed
into plain view before a royal purple
curtain, or used to punch
through a plate-armored phalanx
in melee combat, the nancy mace projects
consistent confidence, though it lacks a point.
Held and swung to the right, it resembles a lowercase b,
writ backwards; otherwise it's more like a p,
as in, we all just want to pee
in peace.
In short
Donald Trump’s ongoing quest to transform everything around him now extends to color: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being resurfaced a lurid blue, in a no-bid deal extended to a company he has both confirmed and denied having used for the pools on one of his properties. The company, which specializes in waterproofing, has reportedly never held a federal contract before, and it is unclear whether they have ever worked on a pool; regardless, “Painting is not going to solve [the] problem” of faulty plumbing, an expert told the New York Times. Non-customers are bombing the company with bad online reviews, and the editor-in-chief of Pool Magazine is very concerned about the implications: “For contractors watching this unfold, the message is unsettling.” Meanwhile, the pigment is flooding out of the usually candy-colored packaging of Japanese snack company Calbee, the Associated Press reports, as Trump’s Iran war “disrupts the supply of an ingredient used in colored ink.”
Lauren Markham has a terrific essay in The Believer about being the daughter of the man who prosecuted longtime presidential hopeful and quasi-political-cult-leader Lyndon LaRouche, and her realization that LaRouche, in many ways, anticipated Trump. “It now troubled me that, however seriously my father had taken LaRouche as a con artist, he had never described the man as a serious political threat,” she writes.
A new report on American education from Stanford and Harvard Universities finds the nation’s kids still caught in a slide in learning that started around 2013, but finds some bright spots, too. For one, a mandate for a phonics-based “science of reading” strategy in certain states and Washington, D.C. is actually working. In D.C., as a local teacher recently wrote in The 51st, 86 percent of kindergarteners now finish the year reading at grade level, up from 72 percent just four years ago. I can also attest that the phonics approach throws off a lot of very cute artifacts along the way.
Portrait of a fansee ladee, by a local kindergartener learning phonetic spelling. (Clara Katz)
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