Renee Good was shot and died. That’s a fact, and it’s a tragic one. But the story was framed at once as sacrilege. Not a woman. Not a citizen. Not a human being capable of bad judgment. A poet. Which is to say, someone presumed to exist beyond the limits of consequence.
Once the word poet entered the narrative, the scene changed instantly. Obstruction became bravery. Recklessness became righteousness. Reality itself was suspended. This is not how the world works, but it’s how myth works. And we’re living in a myth economy.
The word poet should’ve been used denotatively, to describe what Good literally did for a living or how she arranged language. Instead, it was used connotatively, as a form of moral insulation. Poet here didn’t mean “writer of verse.” It meant gentle soul, fragile spirit, harmless creature of metaphor. The label didn’t describe her actions; if anything, it erased them.
This matters because denotation asks what someone did. Connotation supplies a mood that excuses it. And when connotation wins, accountability dissolves. In the myth economy, poets float above ordinary error. They don’t escalate. They don’t misjudge risk. If something goes wrong, it must be because the universe misunderstood their tone. How could someone so devoted to language ever be guilty of a crime? The idea that a poet might behave like any other human, including a badly-behaved one, is considered crude.
History, inconveniently, ruins this feckless fantasy.
Poets have been many things. Saints, occasionally. Monsters, often. Drunks with typewriters. Sadists with sonnets. Parasites with publishing deals. Some beat their lovers. Some abandoned their families. Some praised tyrants with exquisite enjambment. Ezra Pound sang hymns to Mussolini. Pablo Neruda wrote odes to Stalin and raped a woman who cleaned his house. Lord Byron treated women like garbage and debts like hobbies. Rimbaud became an arms dealer. Verlaine, a fellow poet and his lover, settled an argument by shooting him twice with a revolver. Ted Hughes was, by all accounts, a sexual deviant. Allen Ginsberg defended NAMBLA, an organization devoted to the normalization of adult sexual access to children, Anne Sexton molested her own daughter. Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven while her children slept nearby, knowing they’d probably be the ones to discover what she’d done.
Poetry is a skill, not a sacrament.
We’ve reached a stage where responsibility can be neutralized by biography. Wrong action is outweighed by correct identity. The question is no longer what happened, but who was she. Once the answer includes the pre-approved list and the correct political affiliation, the case is closed. Inquiry becomes blasphemy.
Pet ownership is now treated as moral certification. If someone loved a dog, as Good reportedly did, they must have loved life. If they cared for an animal, they couldn’t have made a catastrophic decision. This is childish reasoning. Affection proves only that a person could be tender in one corner of life, not that they were incapable of irresponsibility in another.
Motherhood is granted the same mythic status. Again, to say a woman had children is to imply she couldn’t have chosen badly. But as Plath and other gifted women who failed catastrophically as mothers demonstrate, having children doesn’t place someone beyond consequence. It doesn’t convert peril into purity. It doesn’t turn miscalculation into martyrdom. It only enlarges the grief when things go wrong.
Death is terrifying and sometimes violent, but it doesn’t demand dishonesty. A fatal mistake can be both heartbreaking and real. To say, “this was self-endangerment” is not to say, “this was deserved.” Those are separate sentences. Only a culture drunk on emotion insists they cannot coexist. They can.
Good may have been a good person. I don’t doubt that. But in the moment that cost her life, she made a bad decision. She didn’t die because she was a poet, a pet-owner, or a mother. She died because she made a human choice in a situation where human choices carry irreversible cost. She wasn’t above consequence. She wasn’t outside cause and effect. She was human.