W: Imogen Wade

The Time I Was Mugged In New York City

Today’s poem won the National Poetry Competition in 2023. I have very mixed feelings about poetry competitions. I think the thing I enjoy about poetry, at its core, is the way that its value can’t really be measured monetarily. At its best, a poem is a conversation between minds across time and space, which I see as the kind of freedom that the capitalist systems and restrictions we all live under can’t really touch. I’m aware that I can say this from a position where I’ve chosen a career in teaching so I don’t have to hitch my writing to a livelihood, but I guess I’m just trying to explain my personal engagement with poetry.

I’m not so naïve as to think that poetry is immune from capitalism, but it seems odd to me when poetry overlaps with commerce and we all agree that a couple of times a year a poem is worth £10,000. That idea seems fundamentally wrong to me, but obviously because poetry competitions are largely judged by poets, that’s not to say that good and valuable poetry doesn’t come out of the process. This week’s poem is an example of that, for me. I have also had my feelings further mixed because in 2022 I got quite close in the National Poetry Competition myself, and was awarded a prize, the consequences of which were really valuable to me. So boyyy, I dunno. This is a good poem, anyway, and I’m glad it won a baffling amount of money.

The second element of all this is that after this poem won, there was an article in The Spectator called “The Poetry Society Has Betrayed Poetry” by Angela Patmore, which claimed this poem wasn’t a poem at all and that we should all care about standards. It was cynical horseshit produced by dickheads for dickheads, which is also true of everything else that appears in The Spectator.

You can read the poem here: The Poetry Society

The Time I Was Mugged In New York City

I told people that the travel sickness pills
made me stupid. I entered JFK with a red
suitcase and no one to greet me. A man
came up to me, dressed in black. 

There’s definitely been a choice not to inhabit a traditionally ‘poetic’ register, here isn’t there? The tone is very low-key, the structure is very prosy and the line breaks seem to be deliberately awkward in that they don’t seem to signal units of meaning, or units of rhythm, or land on ‘strong’ words semantically, as line breaks traditionally do. Perhaps that’s the problem that more traditionally-minded readers had, but to say it’s not poetry? Come on, now.

I like how all of these slightly odd things about the poem seem to contribute to the creation of a poetic voice that feels deliberately flat, almost dissociative. There *are* rhythms here, but they come from those first three repetitive, similarly-structured declarative sentences. They’re all three the same, aren’t they – subject, verb, object, adjective/adverbial phrase. Subject does something, object, small clarifying detail.

I like the tension that’s created immediately between the title, which suggests that the poem will be anecdotal, and the first line, which takes us to what she did *after* the mugging, which was to make excuses and blame herself, and it’s only after this that the anecdote begins, in that very simple language with the contrast between his black suit and her red suitcase. So the whole poem is framed by the speaker’s own attitude towards herself, which is that the mugging the title promises is the fault of the travel sickness pills, which made her stupid, which indirectly makes it her own fault. This is troubling, as I think it’s our instinct as the reader to dismiss this analysis as victim-blaming (albeit a fairly common reaction in victims of crime), but if this is the case then what’s also happening is that the speaker is being presented to us as a kind of unreliable narrator.

                                                     I found
myself in a car park by an expensive van
and he was holding my luggage. Get In, he
said. There wasn’t a single thought in my
head. 

I also like how time and place is being managed in the poem, which I think is perhaps lost in my cutting up of it here. This section here begins within line 4, and Wade moves us from the airport arrivals lounge straight to the car-park. Not only that, now he’s holding her luggage. It’s happened in a flash, across a single sentence. This is another way in which, for me, the matter-of-fact, quotidian tone is actually artful rather than artless. There’s something dreamlike in that disconnectedness, and something which continues to present the speaker as completely passive and helpless as the crime unfolds. “There wasn’t a single thought in my head” chimes nicely with “Get In, he said”, and echoes nicely with the opening line about being stupid. Even that small touch of the capital letters of Get In makes the telling of the anecdote feel less real, somehow, and give his words a gravitas that contrasts with the speaker’s passiveness.

              I found myself inside his van; he
locked the doors immediately after; made
me switch my phone off as we went under
the bridge. We spoke about Niagara Falls.

And again – a dreamlike cut in the narrative, signalled by that passive “I found myself” – now she’s locked in the van. In terms of what’s being delivered by the title, we’re now in the middle of the crime, but it’s interesting that the overt violence perhaps suggested by the word “mugged” isn’t happening. There is something violent here, I’d argue, in his “made me” switch my phone of, and the “immediately” of the locking of the doors, but it’s there as an unspoken threat rather than an imminent prospect. Does this make it scarier, maybe? It reminds me of a Kim Moore poem, whose collection “All The Men I Ever Married” I’ve mentioned before – there’s one in that collection too about a taxi driver who is also aware of this unspoken power dynamic and all too happy to exploit it.

I also remember showing this poem to some of my students after it won the National Poetry Competition. Because I teach English Lit, my class was mostly girls, and there was definitely a disconnect between my own reading and theirs – when I said that I found this part of the poem strangely passive and lacking in threat, they strongly disagreed and felt it was extremely sinister and disturbing, in the sense that the man’s power is immediately understood and doesn’t even have to be explicitly flexed. I think they were right. The Niagara Falls reference is a clever one too, isn’t it – obviously it’s part of the strange dissociative experience, where she’s talking to her abductor about a really common tourist destination, as though he’s her taxi driver, but of course also you do also have that image of the crashing and falling water, which suggests both her own lack of control and the potential for his violence.

He chose the narrowest roads in the city,
a needle making a joke out of Manhattan.

This line jumps out at me. “A needle making a joke out of Manhattan”. I really like how this line is the first moment in the poem where Wade diverges from the flat, descriptive, prosy tone to give us a really odd standout metaphor. What does it mean? I think it’s another one of those that I’m drawn to because it’s multivalent but also quite slippery – I’m not sure. What’s being conveyed is the driver choosing narrow roads specifically, perhaps to avoid traffic? But it’s also an indicator of his experience and familiarity with the city, contrasted with her own tourist status, and it’s perhaps also continuing the idea that she’s chillingly alone with him, away from the busy parts of the city and therefore in more danger.

So he (or the van) is a needle because he’s sharp and dangerous, and able to thread the through the fabric of Manhattan with precision. But what’s the joke? Is it an observation that this driver is so proficient he makes a joke out of the idea that Manhattan is a crowded and busy space full of traffic jams? Maybe, but that feels too banal – is the joke about her outsider’s expectations of Manhattan, too? New York’s poshest, richest most iconic tourist district: Sex and the City, Friends, etc – and the joke is that her first experience of it is being the victim of this embarrassing crime? Because of the tone and framing from earlier, we might also feel that the joke is on the speaker?

When he pulled up outside Grand Central
station, he said—don’t get out, there are
bad people around. He made me unzip
my suitcase, books and bras spilling over
the seat, and give him all my money. Then
he helped me out of the van like I was a
princess; he held my bags like a vassal and
kissed my cheek. 

So this takes us to the end of the anecdote, and again Wade has fast-forwarded to the final significant moment in that dreamlike way. Again, the violence suggested by the title is completely absent, but there’s definitely a more insidious violation going on, illustrated by the ‘books and bras’ that spill from her suitcase – her private things being exposed by him, because he can? I mentioned earlier that the line breaks appeared artless but that ‘unzip’ is surely a deliberate one, with the disturbing spectre of sexual assault being evoked and then clarified.

The “bad people around” line is almost funny in its irony, but also not funny in that it illustrates the power of psychological threat that we’ve seen has been the driver of this crime. Not only has he done this to her, he’s gaslighted her into the narrative that this was normal, and he is her protector.

I do like the way Wade goes even further with this idea, and again we step out of the more prosy and declarative approach into a more metaphorical realm, with her being figured as a princess being escorted out of a chariot, and him as her vassal. Again we have a flipping of the power dynamic – she has spent the journey completely passive and powerless, but now the crime is over he can engineer the pretence that she was in control, now that it doesn’t matter. The kiss on the cheek is creepy as hell too – again, entirely a power move.

                             Get In, I hear whenever
a man pushes me too far; Get In to my big
black car. Sometimes in my dreams, I am
sitting beside him on the leather; I don’t
need to be ordered and together, we drive
with melodious speed over the East River.

This last part is where I’m especially baffled at anyone who doesn’t think what’s happening here is poetry. The anecdote is over so these last six lines could go anywhere, and they do tie the poem up into a conclusion. But that conclusion is so ambivalent! It’s definitely working on the feminist, didactic level – the “big black car” is acknowledged as the obvious metaphor that it is, of patriarchy, of a world that has shaped both of them into these roles, and the “man” is made into a synecdoche for all the men who treat women this way, pulling the levers of a system of oppression so smoothly that outright violence or spoken threats are not always even deployed. So ok – this is an overtly political poem with clearly didactic moment, and I wonder if this is also why traditionalist organs like The Spectator didn’t approve. Fine, but if that’s your problem then get ready to clutch your pearls when you find out about Blake or Shelley too, then.

But also – what’s happening in the final few lines? The poem has been dreamlike throughout, but now we have the speaker processing what has happened. Let’s unpick it – so the speaker now dreams about what has happened. It’s not a revenge dream where she defeats him, and it’s not a dream that erases the experience. In fact the only thing that’s different is that she seems to have *a little bit* more agency – she sits ‘beside’ him which suggests an element of choice and equalness missing from the previous description.

So what’s going on here? I think the line “I don’t need to be ordered and together, we drive” is slippery, isn’t it? Does it mean “I don’t need to be ordered (to do this by him) and together we drive”, or does it mean “I don’t need to be ordered and together (and so) we drive”. The first suggests that she’s had the power to choose to do this, and the second suggests maybe that she’s let go of the fears and inhibitions that made her so passive before. In both cases, she’s turned it into a normal tourist experience, and that “melodious” speed, together with the sonically melodious “leather, together, River” rhyme, make it almost pleasant.

What we take from that is more complicated, I think? Is the fact that this happens in her dreams an indication that this is what she *wants* or is it a continued indication that she can’t control her reactions to the event? If the doubt around the narrator’s ability to evaluate her own actions was established in the very first line, are we supposed to accept this positive spin on the experience, or see it as more unhelpful dissociation? More than this – if Wade has explicitly turned the man and the incident into a metaphor for patriarchy and wider power dynamics between men and women in other situations, is there a simply a dreamlike wish here for the things that women fear about men to just be removed so that all relationships can be enjoyed melodiously? One of the things I love about a poem is when it sits with uncertainty and shows us a mind working through difficult ideas without giving us easy conclusions.

You can re-read the poem here: The Poetry Society

Wade’s debut collection drops next year – you can pre-order here: Girl, Swooning a book by Imogen Wade - Bookshop.org UK