Everyday People

In the haze of daily tasks, it’s easy to convince myself that the quotidian lives apart from the remarkable; history, it sometimes seems, is something that takes place elsewhere. So when I first read Ana Božičević’s “Everyday People,” the opening line—“Everyday people do remarkable things”—rhymed with a familiar pep talk, hollowed by its elision of power: You, too, can make your life matter! But if the poem traverses the familiar, its routes defamiliarize my relationship to what I take for granted. Estranging me from the material of my ordinary living (everyday people are ones who “enter small metal pods / And glide through / The Atmosphere”), “Everyday People” restores mystery to what has sedimented into common sense—opening a space for questioning the matter of the daily from which, after all, eras are made. Where the idea of the ordinary dulls my awareness that I might join with others to forge a meaningful alternative to what is, Božičević’s poem enlivens me to a wideness of possibility. By the poem’s final gesture, I want to relinquish the very page I’m writing on, but it’s too late. I’m already here—bearing the violence that brought us to this point, jostling against the otherwise, which is in us, too.

– Claire Schwartz