On May 8th 1996, Cassidy Stumler performed her poetry for the last time. It was on a pre-fabulated stage that she give her last reading of her final book, The Effigy, which directly addressed her feelings after a terrible car accident with a drunk driver left her deformed and disabled. She was no longer able to walk and it took considerable effort for her to speak. But after several years of rehab she managed to eek out a passingly articulate voice.
She had arranged the stage so that all of the onlookers could look down on her while she occupied the center of the room. She would situate herself on a rotating platform so the entire audience could see her face which had been badly burned when her Tesla exploded in flame during the accident. Unable to walk and in a wheelchair, Stumler looked crumpled like a dying ant. Her lips did not move as she recited her poems and neither did she. From the audience's perspective, the poem could have been delivered by a corpse.
Members audience said that the effect of her disfigured face with the Artaud-like arrangement of the stage, and the profoundly disturbing text of The Effigy itself was so unnerving that some people started shaking and had to leave, others fainted, and within a month of the performance, three of the onlookers had taken their own life.
One of those onlookers was a 16-year-old girl who was attending the event for school extra credit and she was interested in poetry. Herself an aspiring writer, her parents reported her personality had changed significantly after listening to Stumler’s performance. "She never looked or sounded happy again," they told the press.
Her parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Stumler who recovered millions from her own lawsuit against Tesla. Stumler would never respond publicly to any accusation. But she pulled the publication of The Effigy after she learned of the girl’s death. Her parents would see the lawsuit against Stumler dismissed for failure to state an actionable theory of liability against the poet. Most of those who do discuss Stumler's work are interested in whether or not its possible for a reading of poetry to provoke that kind of response, but Stumler poured all of her rage and sorrow over the car accident into those poems. It was deeply moving for the audience, but in a profoundly destructive way. Some had accused Stumler of "distilling her language to the point of lethality." And creating a "perfect storm" that triggered at-risk people to make the ultimate choice.
Today, a mere 200 copies of The Effigy remain in circulation. However, copies of the book remain available on some sites that celebrate the work of Cassidy Stumler or are drawn the macabre event surrounding the performance of her work. Stumler herself retired from public life and now runs a cat rescue in Buffalo, NY. The following is the titular poem from The Effigy.
“The Effigy” by Cassidy Stumler
miscalculation_ -- Jesus himself yielded to expand
destined to Power
grateful for his opponents
three days of pain is bliss
happiness is evil
robbing God of his left hand
The world is a cage
able to write its own ending
used to purging itself
of vermin
the Lord was a fantasy of men
scarcely understandable to anyone
But needful in a child's way
The way adults knead children into shapes
That mimic their dreams
This is a cold place
but it leads to flames
enveloping like an old witch
with perfect tits
sewing discord with a smile
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I used single-choice word generation from the latest version of N=G=R=A=M=S. The bias was Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzche.
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