Poet's Corner: Meditations in an Emergency" by Cameron Awkward-Rich

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

“Meditations in an Emergency” from Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). 

At night, blue & red lights blurred by water

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it or consider purchasing or borrowing Cameron Awkward-Rich’s book. For an interesting juxtaposition, consider reading Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” from 1954, which comes from his book of the same name.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet, essayist, and professor who explores an “artists’ ability to reimagine the politics of social worlds.” Awkward-Rich’s two poetry collections include: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). Cameron is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and writes critical/scholarly essays such as his book, The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022), which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in 2SLGBTQIA+ literature and cultural studies. Please read more about his life and work here!

I’ve long loved this poem, and couldn’t think of a better time to share it—or perhaps reshare it—with you. 

Let’s take a deeper look…

Firstly, the form is what we might call a prose poem—a block of text, which in this case, serves the content of the poem perfectly. It reads like a journal entry or a meditation that a reader can return to. One of my favourite craft choices in the poem is the juxtaposition of heartbreak with several things that, on the surface, might feel conflicting, such as waking and heartbreak or rain as thrilling and then heartbreaking. What a world we live in, where waking up in the morning breaks a heart. But there’s much more to heartbreak in “Meditations in an Emergency” than its ostensible meaning…

Gradually, what’s heartbreaking gathers like bunching cloth, growing more overwhelming. In suit, we’re asked to consider the necessity of heartbreak—to create cracks in space for all who break our hearts. The shift away from heartbreak’s frequent association with romantic relationships is powerful here. The people who break Awkward-Rich’s heart in the poem—and subsequently, ours—are not romantic partners. They’re people with whom we’re in a relationship in ways we don’t readily recognize, whether due to privilege, ignorance, or a blend of the two. And perhaps this is one role of the poet: to not only point out the emergencies people are experiencing, but bring forth the other, maybe more sinister emergency: that many don’t or choose not to witness their role in others’ emergencies.    

There are also striking images in the poem, such as “men in Monday suits” and running like fingers through the world’s hair. Hair, as an image, makes me think of care: detangling, combing, brushing, conditioning, tending, styling, braiding, tying up in elastics away from harm—all words applied to the unfolding of our lives. Hair is a beautiful metaphor for a world without borders, where wind blows it freely. In your world of hair—personally, communally, and globally—how do you care for it? How do you field both rage and softness?

“Children all of them” pauses me, every time: the vulnerability of being born is one we share, but it’s not one we all carry with us into adulthood. This is a breathtaking way of writing about the emergency of privilege and systemic violence. Again, rage and tenderness coexist. 

This poem also invokes curiosity about the word ‘dream’: the dream in which Cameron loves the world shares space with “the institution of dreaming.” How do these, together, help us see them as different? What is the institution of dreaming? What we dream about and hope to dream into being, I might argue, must be deinstitutionalized. Maybe the emergency is dreaming inside an institution where the manufactured dreams that come true maintain the status quo. 

Finally, the last two lines of  “Meditations in an Emergency” read something like, “I promise what I’m saying is true.” But what of the last line? Placing a hand on your heart to reassure yourself of its beating, perhaps to shield it, despite everything threatening to break it? Do we have heart attacks or is the heart attacked? How do we protect such a necessarily naive and resilient muscle, ungoverned by the thinking mind?