Poetry Braver Than Anyone 

by J.H.

Jenny Garcia’s father, a direct descendant of the notorious Mexican bandit Joaquín Garcia, abandoned her and her mother two days before her tenth birthday. No one knows when or why Garcia began writing poetry, but public records indicate she attended Los Angeles City College and graduated in two years with an associate’s degree in the Earth Sciences. She was fascinated by plants and soil and the various types of rocks (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, etc.). Her former schoolmates say she rarely spoke in class unless called upon and besides a young man named Rafael (who would later run drugs and be killed along the Texas-Mexican border), she had few friends or acquaintances and did not belong to any clubs or organizations. Her professors don’t remember her.

Was Garcia an admirer of Charles Bukowski, who also attended L.A. City College, albeit briefly? Unclear. Her poems reveal no trace of his influence, which, of course, could itself be a sign of influence. Or not.

Things we know about her: she rubbed her hands with lavender hand sanitizer before sitting at her computer to type. Also: she was uncommonly pretty, and yet shy, and spoke so softly she could barely be heard in conversation and therefore often had to repeat herself, which annoyed both herself and others. And finally: she seemed to own very few clothes and in pictures is often seen wearing the same outfit: black tank top, blue jeans, combat boots, oversized sunglasses, and sometimes a red flower in her dark hair.

Garcia was raised by her mother in a small walkup apartment in Lincoln Heights, on Altura Street, near the public library. They had a dog (a pitbull named Alfie) and two cats they found in a dumpster on a rainy Autumn evening. The mother, intensely suspicious of Garcia’s scribbles, had throughout her childhood tried to instill in her an admiration for simplicity and practicality and told her time and time again not to make life any harder than it needed to be. Find a good man, she’d say, and love him and have his children and love them too.  

One day, a day like any other, Garcia found the courage to inform her mother that she was going to do something special with her life, become a poet maybe, and her mother had a fit and pulled at her hair (her own, not Garcia’s) and screamed that poetry was dangerous, an errand for fools and beggars, and that she would be much better off as a waitress or perhaps, if she got lucky, a secretary. But of course Garcia didn’t listen.

At the age of twenty, Jenny Garcia, completely unknown and unpublished, sent a poem to Harper’s Magazine. The poem, written in free verse, chronicles a fantail goldfish’s conflicted feelings toward the relationship between himself and his owner, a ten-year-old girl. On the one fin, the goldfish understands that his owner is responsible for his very existence—she feeds him every day, cleans his bowl, and provides him with toys to swim under and around. So he’s appreciative. But on the other fin, the goldfish explains, he’s alone all day and even when the girl is at home she mostly ignores him.  Worst of all, he’s imprisoned in a small orb-like bowl like some kind of criminal. The poem, which Harper’s wisely picked up, was a big success and won Garcia the Emily Dickinson Award ($250), the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse ($5,000) and the Shelley Memorial Award, among others. Garcia gave interviews and accepted the money (which she gave to her mother) and the awards, except for the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, which she declined over the telephone, explaining politely but firmly (and with perhaps a touch of annoyance) that the foundation had misunderstood her poem, which was not meant to be humorous at all.

It’s unclear whether the goldfish poem was her first ever submission, to Harper’s or any other journal, but what is clear is that Garcia, instead of riding the wave of her newfound recognition, simply disappeared. If she continued to write poetry, she never shared it with anyone, least of all the public, though there is a poem from this period (allegedly) that is sometimes attributed to her, titled Pittsburgh’s Only Poet, Pittsburgh being perhaps a metaphor as there is no indication she ever visited the city nor knew anyone there. The poem:

Boot, step, slosh.

Puddle, reflection, diesel truck.

Stray voices, smoke-scratchy and cackling.

Hooded sweatshirts and blue jeans.

A middle-aged office worker, a pot-belly.

A white college girl in Uggs: “I was, like, literally dead.”

Except she wasn’t dead.

Possibility, shivering in the cold, alive.

Forlorn Fifth Avenue delis with ten tables and one customer.

An over-the-shoulder glance, toward the door.

Street grate steam solidarity.

Everyone is at work, but not I (Pittsburgh’s only poet). 

For five years after her breakthrough onto the poetry scene and subsequent retreat, Garcia remained in Los Angeles with her mother. Her mother, who worked at the bus station ticket counter and had trouble paying the electric and water bills, found her a job at a nearby food court. They rode the bus into work together and afterward Garcia would prepare dinner, usually rice, beans, and chicken seasoned with adobo, while her mother played solitaire on her computer. Garcia wrote a poem about the sounds (“Ding! Ding! Boing!”) of the computer game.

Just when it seemed the literary establishment had forgotten her, Garcia received an email from the National Poetry Society of France (NPSF) inviting her to Paris to speak at an international convention at the Sorbonne. The topic was no less than the current state of poetry in the 21st century.  

Three well-known American poets would be joining her. Silas Hughes, son of wealthy Philadelphia businessman Peter Hughes, who’d made his millions in the lawn gnome manufacturing industry.  In college, Silas had been a fraternity brother (Sigma Alpha Epsilon) and an unabashed philistine, but at some point in his mid-twenties, after discovering the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe (while on vacation in Ibiza), he decided to begin anew and reinvented himself as an intellectual and a prose poet. His poems have been translated into fourteen languages. 

Douglas Patterson would also be attending the convention. A high school English teacher from St. Paul, Minnesota, Patterson had made his name writing long, free-verse poems disparaging people of color and Jews and homosexuals as well as haikus and lyrics detailing his emotional responses to abortion, the death penalty, contraception, illegal immigration, and universal healthcare. In his thirties he was the editor of Book and Musket, the most prominent right-wing poetry quarterly in the Midwest and Tucker Carlson once referred to him as “the most vital intellectual voice in America today” and a “fearless poet-warrior.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, in a 2016 campaign speech, credited him for “steadfastly advancing conservative values in the traditionally liberal stronghold of the arts.” Patterson, a self-identified member of the Alt-Right, wore his long black hair in a ponytail and his cool green eyes rarely blinked, which people found impressive and somewhat unsettling.

The fourth American panelist and the least distinguished, apart from Garcia, was Carmen Smith (originally Carmen Fuentes) of Miami, daughter of Cuban exiles who fled the revolutionary regime after the father, the CFO of Café Bustelo, found himself on Castro’s blacklist. The incident naturally turned Mr. Fuentes into a lifelong conservative and vehement supporter of the American Dream, so it was perhaps not a surprise to Carmen when, on her twenty-third birthday, her father legally disowned her, without a word, after a friend showed him one of her Trotskyist, anti-Catholic rants in The New Yorker. And yet, in spite of this betrayal, Carmen’s mother still wired her money on the sly every month and these generous infusions, along with her income as housekeeper for a family in Coral Gables, allowed Carmen to live modestly and continue writing. As her literary reputation grew, she was invited as a guest lecturer in creative writing at Florida International University. But during her first semester, a Me Too scandal involving two sophomore students put an end to any academic aspirations she might have had. Several years after the scandal, the young men admitted they had fabricated the story.

These were the four Americans invited to speak at the Paris Poetry Convention in July of 2017. Their flights were already paid for, as was their lodging at the Biermans-Lapôtre Residence, one of the many international dormitories of the Cité Universitaire, a campus of residences maintained for the use of visiting students, artists, and academics. Past visitors include such notable figures as Julio Cortázar (who stayed in the British residence), the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the Canadian Residence) and Jean-Paul Sartre, who for some reason was housed in the American building.

The French had scheduled an honorary dinner their first night in Paris and at this dinner the Americans would meet the other panelists (all European) speaking at the convention. Unlike the Americans, who were almost entirely unknown outside their respective circles, the European poets were firmly established in the international literary community.

Their number included Arnaud Simon, a black, homosexual Parisian in his mid-forties who pretended to be Jewish, and in fact he was, though only .8% percent. Simon claimed that he despised the German nation, the German people, and even the German language, but for some reason he decided to live in Berlin for almost a decade. One day while sitting in the park, he saw a little boy and girl playing tag and, hearing their laugher as they teased one another in German, Simon began to cry, because he realized he hated those children and he didn’t want to hate them anymore. He cried silently at first and then louder and louder until his cries turned into demented wails which soon drew a crowd of concerned citizens. Simon stood up and turned to the boy and girl, who were of course staring at him as well, and smiled at them, whereupon he went straight back to his apartment and began writing a collection of poems he would later title After the Swastika, a thin volume he would complete in a three-week torrent of inspiration. The book was published that same year to great critical acclaim in France (and indeed all of Europe, especially, for some reason, Slovakia) and won him many admirers, patrons, and prizes, including the prestigious Hugo Prize and several government grants.

Also on the panel was Elsa Hanssen, daughter of Swedish psychologist Isak Hanssen and celebrated British feminist Christine Murray. Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge (and briefly at Trinity College, Dublin) Elsa quickly became one of Europe’s leading lights and won the Hamsun Prize in 2015 and 2016. She wore dark red lipstick and all black attire and spoke in a deep and confident voice. Her sex tape with two Parisian bankers in their late sixties went viral after a data leak, which greatly increased her book sales. Some weeks she chooses to be identified as she/her/hers and other weeks they/them/theirs.

Lucia Benedetti of Milan was an eighty five year old poet who’d won and lost literary fame several times over the course of her long life. She wrote ballads, odes, and epics, mostly about women of the Middle Ages who rubbed shoulders with counts and kings and shared beds with daring knights and ruthless crusaders. She also wrote fictional love letters between historical Christian figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalene and Saint John the Baptist, and the Madonna and Jesus’s disciple, Peter.  

And most notorious of the Europeans, if not most talented, was Guillermo Valdez of Madrid. Poet, lover, bullfighter, and amateur race car driver, he enjoyed a pitcher of Sangria every day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Young women, usually aspiring poets themselves, would visit him and, it is said, perform oral sex in return for feedback on their work.

The dinner was held at the fashionable Méchants et Grossiers restaurant in Montparnasse. The Europeans were seated on one side of the long table and the Americans on the other. After exchanging the briefest remarks and expected pleasantries, they commenced to speak only with their compatriots. Hughes flirted unsuccessfully with Garcia, who soon turned her back to him and began conversing with Smith about the plight of the Uighurs in China.

The Europeans, perhaps unsurprisingly, looked down on the Americans, considered them hacks and amateurs, and wondered throughout the entire appetizer of oysters, escargot, and white wine (Sancerre) why exactly they (the Americans) had even been invited to speak at the convention in the first place. Though they wouldn’t have admitted this, to one another or anyone else, the Europeans considered it an honor to have been invited, an honor now sullied by the Americans’ presence.

The Americans, for their part, saw the Europeans as sellouts and charlatans, mercenaries who skipped from university to university, teaching poetry (as if poetry could be taught, as if poetry could be learned!) and hosting summer writing retreats for wealthy students on little-known Greek islands.  The Americans ate the oysters and drank the wine, but did not touch the escargot.

On the other side of the table Simon held forth on anti-Semitism in eastern Europe and the genius of Israeli poet Yahuda Amichai while the others pretended to listen, except for Benedetti, who stared past him toward the wall and appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open. Valdez was whispering in Elsa Hanssen’s ear about the vintage convertible he planned on driving down to Monte Carlo after the convention.  

The trouble began shortly after the main course of beef bourguignon arrived. By this time, according to the waitstaff, the eight poets had finished off almost ten bottles of wine. The conversation on the European side of the table had turned to poetry and Simon and Valdez were now debating whether a poet should keep the common man in mind and whether it is the duty of poetry to be understood or the duty of the populace to understand, and, subsequently, whether politics could be divorced from poetry, and, if it could, what effect this would have on society, and, conversely, society on poetry.  Someone soon put forth an even more enticing question: whether or not poetry and politics were in fact separate disciplines and not just two different sides of the same coin or reflections in a mirror.  And then, seemingly without reason, Simon leaned across the table and snapped his fingers in Patterson’s face and accused him of being a Nazi, a label Patterson resented, apparently, because he immediately retorted that he was in fact a nationalist, not a Nazi. Simon replied that there wasn’t much difference, if any, and then Patterson began to laugh and said: “Ahh yes, you must be the faggot Jew” and then Simon threw his fork down and stood up from his seat and Patterson rose to his feet as well.

Garcia, who had been mostly silent throughout the evening, stood up and told them all in an uncharacteristically loud and firm voice to shut up and stop being jackasses.

By this time everyone in the restaurant was staring at the table. The waiters stood nervously nearby, unsure what to do.  

It was probably Simon who started it, though no one knows for sure. A chunk of beef shot across the table from somewhere and hit Patterson directly in the eye and before anyone could stop him Hughes had come to his aid and launched a carrot at Simon and then a crust of bread at Valdez, just for good measure. One would think it rather difficult to have a food fight with an entrée like beef bourguignon but that’s exactly what the poets did. Pearl onions, carrots, beef chunks, and mushrooms flew across the table back and forth in rapid fire until the Americans and Europeans were escorted from the restaurant by the manager and two security guards.

The next day, Jenny Garcia walked the city with Carmen Smith, ostensibly to avoid Hughes and Valdez, who had both blatantly propositioned her the night before. They wandered more or less aimlessly along the banks of the Seine, shunning the literary haunts on the boulevard Saint Germain such as the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots because the food and drink were too expensive. Instead they bought a fresh baguette and cold meats and cheeses and ate below on the banks of the Seine amongst the Parisian youth, who were smoking and laughing and drinking wine.

Afterwards, the pair took the metro to the Gare du Nord and tried to score hash from the Africans who stood in the alleyways selling fake purses. Garcia found the train station to be one of Paris’s prettiest sights, far more beautiful than the Eiffel Tower or the Notre-Dame, or so she wrote in a postcard to her mother. They also visited the grave of Jim Morrison in the Père Lachaise Cemetery and Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Hot and tired, Garcia and Smith sat down at the first cheap cafe they came across and ordered beer. At the table next to them a young British man was sitting with his legs crossed effeminately and explaining to a pretty French girl that, at that moment, he was the number four best amateur golfer in the world, and though the girl didn’t quite appear to completely understand she smiled and nodded. That is the last time—by Carmen Smith at a café whose name she doesn’t remember—that Jenny Garcia was seen.

The day before the convention there was to be a poetry slam, an informal competition between Garcia and Guillermo Valdez to be judged by the visiting students living in the dorms and a few professors. No one knows for sure who initiated the slam or why, but most assume it was Valdez and because Garcia had insulted his work (calling it “overblown misogynistic twaddle”), though perhaps the true reason is that she had declined his sexual advances. They were to meet on the lawn on Friday at noon, the day before the convention. The poetry slam naturally caused quite a bit of excitement as word spread across the Cité U and when the clock struck twelve there were almost fifty people—students, visiting artists, professors, entire families—standing around in a circle chatting to one another in eager anticipation. The American poets stood in conference with the European poets in the middle of the circle. It was a hot and humid day. Valdez soon appeared, wearing a white linen shirt halfway unbuttoned to expose his tanned chest and tight black jeans and boots. His face was clean-shaven and his hair was wet and slicked back as if he’d just showered.  

Garcia, however, was nowhere to be seen. The poets and onlookers waited for her for the better part of an hour until it became clear she wasn’t coming. Then the crowd slowly broke up and the disappointed onlookers drifted back towards wherever they had come from. Valdez finally left, smirking broadly, the Europeans trailing after him triumphantly as if an important point had been made. The Americans, humiliated, waited a while longer on the lawn before also returning to their rooms to nap or read or shower or browse the internet.

It was the day of the convention and Garcia was still missing. The Americans knocked on her door, called her phone, and when they didn’t get an answer they assumed she was too embarrassed to show herself and left without her.

The convention itself is hardly worth mentioning. The Europeans fielded questions first and were well prepared—so well, in fact, that their calmly delivered lines appeared memorized, and perhaps they had been. They deftly handled questions on topics such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Romanticism, and even Dadaism, and took turns handing the questions off to one another for comments or a well-articulated soundbite here and there. They drew parallels between Francisco Franco and Steve Bannon, the Brigate Rosse and Antifa, the Huns and the Islamic State, Cancel Culture and Orwell’s Thought Police. The crowd listened politely throughout, clapping when appropriate. 

And then the host turned his questions to the Americans, who looked bored and hungover, and asked them to comment on their influences and the future of poetry in the 21st century and beyond. The Americans were silent and the silence stretched for almost ten awkward seconds until Hughes leaned in to his microphone and delivered a halting and irrelevant commentary on Poe and Hunter Thompson (who, as far as anyone knows, did not write poetry) and then for some reason began talking about Transcendentalism in New England and other such obscurities until he lost his train of thought halfway through and his voice trailed off and the host had to step in and put the question to Patterson, who began lambasting French poets past and present, apropos of nothing, and then went on to claim that socially and artistically Europe was stuck in the past with its head up its own ass, and, really, why wasn’t there air conditioning anywhere? The crowd laughed, but Patterson wasn’t joking. It’s not funny, he said, it’s not a joke, whoever gets off their lazy ass and introduces air conditioning to France is going to make millions. 

Carmen Smith, when asked about the role of poetry and love in the dating app age, made a comment about Oscar Wilde and a quote attributed to him: “when one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” Smith said it was in fact the other way around—you begin by deceiving the other person into thinking you’re someone you’re not, someone better—and then the romance ends while you’re deceiving yourself, trying to convince yourself that you’re happy and not missing out on something better. She also briefly discussed the decline of organized religion in the United States and how the void is being filled by identity politics. Instead of art and poetry, she added needlessly. 

A few more questions were put to the Americans and then to the Europeans and then the host turned toward the crowd and asked them for a round of applause.

The Americans didn’t discover until several weeks later that they’d been invited to the convention as satire, which might explain why such figures as Philip Levine, Nick Flynn, and Mary Karr hadn’t received invitations.

Jenny Garcia, meanwhile, was still missing. A young Parisian detective named Christophe Moreau, who disliked poetry, poets, and art in general, was brought in to investigate. First he interviewed the Europeans, Valdez in particular, but found them irritable and unhelpful and, after failing to gain any leads in several weeks, was taken off the case.  

Towards the end of the month the police received a call from a caretaker at the Parc Mountsouris across from the building where the Americans had stayed. An unidentified woman had been found at the bottom of one of the industrial garbage bins at the edge of the park. Detective Moreau took a look at the body and decided that it was in fact the corpse of the American poet Jenny Garcia, her mangled torso pierced by twenty-seven stab wounds across the abdomen, chest, and back. Her throat was cut ear to ear.

Le Monde picked up the story and the next day a blurb appeared on page three about a slain American poet. The internet caught wind of the killing and Garcia briefly trended on Twitter. The American poetry community was appalled, offended, and mildly curious about what had happened, though not for very long, and soon the name Jenny Garcia and her goldfish poem were completely forgotten.

It turned out, though, that the slain woman in the park was actually a Bolivian au pair. Garcia never corrected Le Monde, apparently preferring the anonymity of death, and was again living in Los Angeles with her mother (though she would stay there for only two months).

For five years, Garcia refused to publish her work, until the winter of 2024.  She was living in Vietnam, where she had recently established a literary journal with the help of her husband, the Vietnamese linguist and translator John Phan. The first publication featured two of her poems, neither of which garnered any kind of attention. The journal soon floundered and a year later Garcia and Phan divorced. She now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona and works for the Century 21 real estate agency.