Monica McClure's “Tender Data”

On an excerpt from "Tender Data"

When I first started thinking of what to write about this poem, attempting to formulate cogent thoughts—usually while jogging in the June heat—that would theorize and illuminate this poem of memory clots and digressions and non-sequiturs that, as the title poem of the book, promises to hold the major themes together, I became really stressed out. Like really stressed. Only jogging temporarily relieved my anxiety. One day, I thought of the opening sentence of this piece, which, like a warm chandelier lighting a marble foyer, would invite you up the spiral stairs to explore sumptuously furnished rooms. As I write this now, I can't for the life of me recall that sentence. Instead, I remember the dreams I started having, again. The old dreams about dead friends returned, having never really been dead, but rather missing, or away some place where they were subject to the same forces of gravity and biological decay as me. I touch their gently aged faces. My dreams fixate on the physicality of dead lovers long after I've trained my conscious mind to resist: the density of curls in my fingers, the look in the eyes when my earring dropped on a forehead, the bow of the upper lip, and so on.

When I wrote this poem, which in early drafts was about 60% copy and pasted one-sided social media missives, I was reading The Parapornographic Manifesto by Carl-Michael Edenborg (Action Books, Salvo Series #1). Among many other things, he discusses the relationship between undressing / nakedness / carnal knowledge and reality (oh, sacred reality), positing that our culture's obsession with secrets and ravenous appetite for access to secrets (pornography being only one interesting manifestation of this) is a symptom of secular purposelessness. We want to believe, especially when the beloved's body is gone, in something solid and real and stable that made their life, and by that virtue, our lives meaningful. That, to me, is a very religious concept. I grew up a devoutly religious young person, and when it came time to disavow a particular type of Christianity, I did so with my body, violating its sacredness. The poem, I hope, calls into question the sanctity of the body, and then folds back on itself, reasserting the holiness of it. I'm still religious, I guess. In the beginning of this poem, the narrator—"I" and sometimes me!—is interrogating her position towards death and the body through experiences, some calculated, in that involuntary way that a grieving person will scheme to get better, like a wound scabbing over, and some random, including a visit to the Panerai Memorial Museum in Lithuania, where Nazis murdered thousands of people, a relationship with a bereaved man, the first Body Worlds exhibit in Chicago, an imaginary journey to a deadly war zone via my own nude photos, bequeathed to a reporter, and perhaps some shades of others.

As you may have noticed, the poem begins with a fist opening inside someone. This image was simultaneously painful and comforting. To have pain blooming inside you is maybe better than being empty. The appropriated material included in the poem ranged in content from those omnipresent anonymous "Hi beautiful, how are you?" lines to "Send a photo of yourself to be published in my lit journal, and you might as well send some poems while you're at it." These messages streamed into various inboxes while I was writing the poem, prompting me to consider how the language of inquiry as a mode of seduction and possession enacted by people (well, men) because your picture is publicly consumable is a great example of the parapornographic. Sometimes I struggle to feel like something other than a receptacle. Is it different for other people, I don't know. This poem explores how to enter rhetorically into what I can no longer enter (or be entered by) physically.