Somebody Wrote A Creepy Poem Involving New Yorker Writer Jia Tolentino, And We Have Just One Question: Why
On Wednesday, a poem was quietly published in 3:AM Magazine to little fanfare, because, as it goes with countless literary journals that haven't much overlapped with mainstream media, no one was really paying attention. (Forgive me, and know that I say this as a writer and reader of these kinds of journals and magazines.) It wasn't until people caught wind of the tweet the magazine had made linking to the poem, with the simple caption: "Jia Tolentino," that it began to provoke response. (Update 8/7: 3:AM Magazine's tweet has since been deleted.)
Jia Tolentino, in case you aren't familiar, is an essayist and writer for The New Yorker (among other outlets) with a book of essays out called "Trick Mirror." Her intelligent and accessible analysis of pop culture, literature, cultural reckonings, her own youth and growth, internet curiosities and other subjects has earned her a wide audience — most notably among millennial readers, to whom older publications like The New Yorker don't ordinarily cater. Whether you like her writing or not, her body of work rightfully holds solid footing in the media landscape.
But back to the poem from writer Nicholas Rombes, who, per his bio in 3:AM Magazine, is a novelist and professor at the University of Detroit Mercy. You can read the poem here, but as a quick recap: it consists of seven uneven stanzas that seem to express a certain melancholy and brokenness on the part of the speaker, who has spent "twenty-seven days in nickel-freezing / northern Michigan" and who says: "Jia, I've deleted all my by / gones and ghosted each and every / version of myself: a kingdom I don't / believe in anymore." He also asks Ms. Tolentino to "take, conditionally, her hand, the soft pink palm / of it" and use it to give "a gentle push / against [his] Wonder Bread face." At the end of the poem, he says that he wants "to come back / new / into this eely wet / slippery world / with you." There is also mention of elk herds and beer. Okay!
Needless to say, the poem caught Twitter's attention, in the bad (but good, if you enjoy a little schadenfreude on a Friday afternoon) way. Here is just a smattering of responses and reactions:
In the headline of this piece, I refrain from saying this poem is "about" Jia Tolentino, because here's the thing: is it, really? The poem's author evokes her name in its title and several times throughout the poem, and expresses a longing for her as some kind of remedy to the fact that he does not believe in the "kingdom" of himself anymore. He wants to be reborn, he claims, with Jia Tolentino. But outside of the poem's title and its inclusion of her name, the poem itself doesn't seem to be about Jia Tolentino at all. That the poem has garnered attention only by dint of including Tolentino's name suggests that no matter how much pretty language it uses and, uh, artful line breaks it makes, the poem has not succeeded in communicating anything meaningful.
In short, the poem says much less about Jia Tolentino than it says about Nicholas Rombes, which is: a novelist was in so desperate need of attention that he decided to write a poem of murky longing and parasocial lust/love/??? about a writer who he doesn't know, who doesn't know him, and who seems not to want anything to do with him. Below, from Jia Tolentino's instagram, is her only comment on the matter so far:
In a way, none of this is new: not the trope of writing odes to a woman-as-symbol whom the writer hopes will save him from his existential despair; not the evocation of real people or celebrities' names to make a work of writing pull cultural interest; not the phenomenon of a writer creating a parasocial bond with a woman who did not consent to the relationship the man dreamed up.
Also, sorry to Nicholas Rombes, but none of these northern Michigan references add up to much more than some bleak scenery. Mr. Rombes, hear this: please leave Jia Tolentino and any other women you don't know out of your weird lonely midwestern fantasies, and most importantly, leave them out of your poems.
