19 pages • 38 minutes read
Jon LoomisDeer Hit
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: 21st Century Personal Narrative Poetry
For a period of time in the late twentieth century, the second person point of view poem gambit dominated workshops as poets fled from the egocentric confessional mode but still needed a way to deliver personal narratives. In many turn-of-the-20th Century poems, second person narratives essentially function as first person narratives.
In his 2006 essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland discusses the fashion for dissociative, experimental poetry at the beginning of the 21st century as a retreat from complicated reality and the embarrassment of the personal. Second person narratives achieve some of that desired remove while still maintaining some affiliation with the real.
In “Deer Hit,” the bad decisions, poor judgment, and reckless behavior all land on the reader, the “you.” Loomis draws the reader to a place where no control can be had, carried along in a narrative bound to cause destruction. The actions portrayed as ours reflect choices we think we’d never make, but ultimately the story does not belong to us. Loomis wants us to know what it would feel like, however, if it did.
Artistic Context: Contemporary Thriller Movies and Narrative Tension
“Deer Hit” reads with cinematic sensory detail, and Jon Loomis draws on tropes from thriller, horror, and gangster dramas to heighten the anticipatory anxiety in the poem. Menace exists in all directions, and violence threatens in waves. Each wrong-turn decision the driver makes—from the actual wrong turn in to a deer and on through the entire poem—affects the reader the same way watching a doomed victim in a genre film does. The second person narration raises the tension by making the entire poem a kind of point-of-view camera shot, walking the reader through a series of disasters he participates in causing without affording the possibility of any control.
From the dramatic, haunting vision of the car headlights pointed upward through the trees from the ditch in Line 13 through the “terrible bleat” of the deer repeating “again and again” (Line 18), all senses outline a tableau of things gone wrong. This disorder periodically turns to confrontations: a backseat deer attack resulting in further injury for the driver (Lines 31-32) and a fraught, alcohol-tinted negotiation between the driver and his angry father through the poem’s second section. These opposing forces, the father and son, align under a greater threat, ending the deer and “dumping the body” (Line 50) afterwards, “like a gangster” (Line 51). The line secures the secondary meaning of “hit” in the poem’s title, and in doing so, endows these events’ seemingly accidental nature with the force of purpose, if not deliberation. By the last line, the reader knows the architect of destruction’s identity.
The poem’s two-part structure itself works like a performance with an intermission, each section predicated on the heightening violence of its narrative, the potential for the destruction around the driver to land more squarely upon him. This atmosphere prepares the reader for a different kind of blow in the final line, revealing that this memory all along served to create a context for the driver’s adult despair. The plot follows the turn in horror found in late 20th century movies and genre novels, in which the threat no longer comes from an external threat, like Cold War-era swamp creature and alien movies. Reflecting the internal anxiety building in American culture, the “call is coming from inside the house” model of terror overtakes the poem, replacing a Romantic notion of nature’s power to overwhelm with a greater threat: basic human callousness and cruelty.
