The Envoy

Donna Massini is a Hunter College MFA alum. Massini works at Hunter College as an English professor and teaches creative writing and poetry classes at Hunter’s MFA program. 

To write is to feel, to transcribe and project one’s deepest feelings and emotions onto the blank pages of a book. These are the things that one may consider when witnessing the incredible writing success of Hunter College alumni who, at one point, walked the same hallways and escalators as we do now. 

I picked up Donna Massini’s 4:30 Movie, a 2018 collection of calm yet eruptive poems published by W.W. Norton & Company. Massini’s poems are described as “intimate and wild, provocative and tender” that explore “personal loss, global violence and the consolations of art.” 

Massini’s collection of poems explores the concepts of grief, loss and life as it reflects her very own experience with her sister’s passing and how she coped with that bereavement. As the title and the book’s cover suggest, the movie or movie theater serves as a foundational space for the following poems to reside in and venture out from. The theatre is a place of life itself, where people come and go, where emotions are trapped and let out and where people come to lose themselves or get lost in “the burden of being watcher and screen,” through the very first poem titled “The Lights Go Down at the Angelika”, referring to the Angelika Film Center, a chain theatre with a couple of locations in Manhattan. 

In the poem titled “Tracking Shot: Subway Lines,” the speaker describes a tracking movement of the subway, both physically through the people but also mentally through the mundane and the everyday and rather what we as a society have deemed “normal”.

The opening lines in the poem say, “Are you depressed? Have a disability? / Need a divorce? / Are you haunted?,” which in the setting of a subway cart allude to the various infomercials plastered around. One may read these lines through a commercialized voice, the standard, high pitched mechanical voice we all know too well. 

These lines echoed the ways in which television advertisements do their voice-overs in an attempt at a theatrical motif. One that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. We can relate to this from the perspective of a New Yorker, whether it’s through our public transportation system or a more portable device like our smartphones, we nevertheless know that as individuals and as a collective society, we are perpetually in contact with ad consumerism, whether we like it or not. 

The commercialized or even the digital presence is one that we see and certainly feel on a subconscious or conscious level. It is the twenty-first century’s “theme song” as we have come to understand it: more advertisements equate to more money and well… money takes the prize for corporations to profit off of. 

Let’s take the commuting subway example; while we stand tirelessly on our feet or if we manage to score a seat on the subway, the moment that we look up, we see advertisements plastered all around, tempting us to indulge in consumerism. We live in this age, causing us to defamiliarize ourselves and lose touch with the world around us. We must buy, buy, buy and such acts push, push, push us away from living as we are constantly pressured to be in search of our “next thing,” our next purchase or next move.

Throughout this poem, the speaker uses the subway as a physical presence to pinpoint a place and a concrete object while highlighting the subway line as an open concept. A space where everything seems to be out in the open, people facing each other whilst going about their days, reading the advertisements around them or catching glimpses of other individuals. A mirror that connects everyone in an inexplicably uncanny way, whilst also reminding all of us that we are leading different lives with different perspectives; all in unity yet all living in a state of sonder.

Throughout the collection of poems, Massini organizes and effectively takes objects and places that are familiar to us in some shape or form, or rather seem normative and transforms them into obscure, thought-provoking images that feel as if they’re trying to communicate something more, something beyond the ordinary threshold. Poems that provoke the reader to reevaluate life, gain, loss and the role in which words act as a translator of such complex feelings.