THE PARANOID STYLE IN POETRY

If there is a paranoid style in poetry like the one in politics so widely seen in today’s raging conspiracy theories and cited by Richard Hofstadter in a famous essay, it—or a satirical version of it—is on full display in Phillip Lopate’s hilarious poem, “We Who Are Your Closest Friends.”

From the poem’s first two lines, which double as its title, its ominously omniscient tone is priceless. Impersonal as the writer of this “paranoid epistle” (Lopate’s term for his poem) may sound, he or she is ever so sympathetic to the intended recipient—representing, after all, her closest friends. It is the gentle embrace of a hand on your shoulder that grows tighter and tighter.   

we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture

Its lowercase, stripped-down lines give the impression of being beeped from outer space into the poor recipient’s brain, the product of a conscience wracked with insomnia. It taps into and confirms a person’s earliest social fear: Everyone is talking about me behind my back and, worse, plotting against me. It’s as if the poem proves the substance of the paranoia. “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you,” Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22.

We all are indeed after you, the poem says in the voice of an impersonal public statement, a voice like the editorial “we,” but malevolent. And resistance is futile, since the target of the message is a mere individual helpless against the designs of a sinister, godlike group. In its last line, the epistle echoes a Maoist demand for self-criticism “for the good of the collective.”

The poem is so funny because of the extremes to which it goes and the banality to which it sinks. Yes, the voice of the poem says, all you suspect is true, your best friends are your worst enemies, and they are meeting regularly 

to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture

Threatening as the poem’s tone is, both the crimes and punishment it cites are mild and mundane. The addressee’s sins are not unusual: she is someone who continually makes “unreasonable/demands for affection” and has a “disastrous personality.” Surely she is not an enemy of the state. Accordingly, the group, more a consciousness-raising klatch than the Politburo, merely pledges to “disappoint you/as long as you need us[.]”

The poem strikes me as a masterpiece of a genre in English-language poetry consisting only of itself. In its hints of paranoid terror, true, it can claim a precedent in Poe’s perennially frightening short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” In its humorous rendering of one’s worst possible fears, it is also vaguely reminiscent of “The Metamorphosis,” though Lopate is no Kafka. Yet I am hard pressed to find its likeness in poetry. Perhaps our times are too terrifying to make light of our darkest fears. But I think not. Rather, poems like “We Who Are Your Closest Friends” may be among our closest friends in terms of making sense of those fears.