History & Memory: A Look At “After Watching the Challenger Documentary on Netflix”
There are memories I recall that we collectively refer to as history: watching footage of 9/11 from my apartment in Minneapolis or seeing news of the Berlin Wall as a child. There are other memories, just as powerfully present, that shape who I am with no public discourse (comforting my daughter when her fish died, learning my son had his first kiss). These personal histories are deeply felt yet remain unknown. What Clint Margrave manages to do in his poem “After Watching the Challenger Documentary on Netflix” is brilliantly blend the space between collective and personal histories. He creates a poem that functions as history, memory, and private narrative, all at once.
The title, simple and direct, leads us in. And it’s not just the title that is simple and direct but the poetic voice as well, which only works if the author has a certain kind of intellectual and emotional confidence in the work. To Margrave’s credit, it works extremely well here. (I sometimes find excessive, ornamental complexity and lyricism in a poem to be the equivalent of a bathroom deodorizer; you know the writer is spraying it everywhere to cover up the smell of bullshit, but I digress…)
Margrave brings us back to “The falling debris,” The schoolteacher,” and the “sky blue walls” of his sixth-grade class. We are given a classmate who “kept launching / and exploding” a toy shuttle, playground “jokes,” and a time capsule which eventually gets thrown out.
Retelling a collective memory is a balancing act. To capture what many experienced without cliche, without speaking over people from a soapbox, is a difficult task. I can write about Margrave’s pacing, his restraint, and even about his ability to make common adjectives (little, sky blue) seem like million dollar words by their placement, but the key aspect is the parallels, the pairings (some implied) presented throughout: the disaster and the documentary about the disaster, the toy shuttle and the Challenger, the sky blue walls and the sky itself. The school teachers. The mother and son. History, memory. Margrave takes a snapshot and transforms it into a profound poem.
Some traumas, some memories replay over and over. Sometimes we are the boy launching and relaunching our toy shuttle to the same awful ending because we can’t fully process any other way. Witnessing changes us. “I’m a little more aware of dying now,” the note in the capsule reads (one which he “hid,” in a drawer, a telling detail). In the end, the mother throws out the capsule “not knowing / what she’d found, / or what” the speaker lost.
I can’t exactly say with absolute certainty what was lost (innocence, a sense of immortality?) but I believe it’s something we all lose eventually. Isn’t it a comfort to know a capsule of a poem like the one Margrave wrote can give us something back?
