Dropping Leaflets Poem Analysis

For the first time first time first time in history ordinary busi-security bioterror to defend enemies with the no-ness of life.

If I’m going to be honest, I had a difficult time inspecting Jenna Osman’s “Dropping Leaflets” with the use of my own logic. It didn’t make much sense, but then I knew from the beginning of it all that it wasn’t supposed to make sense. In the audio recording, Osman talks about how the poem came to be, or at least the idea behind what the poem really is, which is already poetic in and of itself:

“In the spirit of Marianne Moore, who often incorporated what she was reading into her poems, I’m going to read a piece made of words I found when I read transcripts of press conferences given by Bush, Ridge, Rumsfeld, and Cheney in the last few days. I read the transcripts, printed them out, I tore them up, and then I stood on a chair, and then I bombed my office floor with them as if they were leaflets and the leaflets told me what to do. So this piece is called ‘Dropping Leaflets.’”

In

It may be because of how random it is, or perhaps it is the way it is for a completely different reason. Whatever it is, I don’t think I’ll ever know or understand just by thinking about it. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t and couldn’t understand what this part of the poem and the rest of it mean, let alone be able to explain it in simple statements and words. I’ve written it over and over again, and I’ve listened to myself say it again and again but nothing came of it when I forcibly looked for answers. The answers came to me, and words I haven’t encountered before like “bioterror” and “no-ness” scraped and dug into the surface of my brain more than they should have. And all of this should give you an idea about what makes this set striking and different all on its own. Its words are alive and breathing. It seems friendly, almost. But it’s also the kind of poem that eats itself to