an experiment
Wednesday 29 October 2008 | 14 cookies in the jar
I’m curious to see whether you all would find the following poem difficult to position—or at any rate, as difficult as it apparently was for the Duende in yesterday’s workshop, since he seemed to misread its political emphases completely; or maybe I misread his completely correct reading; or maybe my poem has taken on cyborgian life and become Bob Barr to spite me; or maybe it’s entirely too much spittle-flecked ranting for most readers; or maybe it does not make ANY SENSE AT ALL; or maybe you already can’t make yourself care.
Well, so here—here’s something I never do, which is unveil works in progress; besides which, this is an atypical scrap of versifying from me, since it’s oddly straightforward, rhetorical, and not about, you know, romantic anguish and/or dismembered body parts used as metaphors for various aspects of lunacy.
“All poetry is experimental poetry,” said one Mr. Wallace Stevens.
Seriously? Or as serious as it’s possible for me to be, constitutionally? I’d really really love it if you’d weigh in, whoever you are, out there, reading this. I promise not to cry. Well, maybe just a little; but in the crook of my arm, quietly.
(Though drian biamond is officially recused from this little laboratory, since he already ripped said poem a (deservedly, je suis sûr) brand new one yestiddy. ;o)
TO OUR FRAMING POLYMATH
Dear Sir: Something terrible has happened:
an unforeseen thing: in his wildest disadvantages,
even Publius could not have feared it. Please
bear with me, Sir, a kind of granddaughter, ill-
educated by your standards, trying to explain.
(I did once visit your home—they herd us through
as grammar-school children now—and I admired
your inky cool wine caves; the simultaneous
quill-writing device, the fragile desk,
the bedroom where you worked the day you
died; your double-entry records of a favorite
quadroon; the pointlessness of an emptied
plantation, its yellow noontime fields.)
But the disaster at hand: or disasters: given
your terror of the executive, would you believe
federal agencies? To control the proliferating
spread of what would stagger even your
inventive belief (your copying machine, your
two languages, one at each hand): public
airwaves, televangelism, agribusiness,
trafficking, multiple felonies across state
lines (don’t ask about states’ rights)? So if
Arthur returns at the hour of Britain’s need,
would you mind if we descendents put in a request
for your attention; if you could, to intercede
like Mary to the throne of God; because, Sir,
elite’s been dirtied and race quit meaning human;
because citizen got replaced with consumer; because
we’re being distracted with fetuses while
flimsy currency (your “ghost of specie”)
soars and bombs, dull olive exchange
fluttering around the heads of those who
dive down along with it; because the salesmen
we call architects no longer read; because fruited
plain and farm turned factory, then went
up in pixels, and that we now make anything
at all is only by deregulated accident.
And your silver standard went the way of slaves.
And, Sir, that is not bad. As when I waited
in a tortillería in Guerrero Negro while
a soft-skinned woman put down her dough,
turned to the till, and pulled on plastic
gloves to count out change. Because you
were not the last to know that money’s
filthy; while bread, like labor and like your
new-birthed freedom, is always clean.
14 cookies in the jar
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Ther was once a saturday night live skit where the founding fathers were brought forward in time to some the countries political and economic woes. At the press conference where they were to lay out thier strategy, the reporters began by asking about thier links to slavery and, well, never stopped.
Your reference to the Authur legend reminds me of elliotts use of the fisher king, those yours seems to serve as a model for redemption while his was symbolic of a humanity robbed of its potency and bound by the meaninglessness of urban existence. But, Elliott’s Fisher King also stands in for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. Did you mean to do something similar talking about the purity of Bread?
The speaker of “What the Thunder Said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish, while your soft skinned woman pulls off her gloves, and like the widow in the temple counts out her last pennies in exchange for bread.
Am I reading too much here?
Why don’t you unveil works in progress?
(I feel like I can see my pmz better when I put ‘em up.)
Am I too familiar to give a fair reading?
The invocation of T.J. seems entirely appropriate, possibly excepting the human race bit (he did write of two races, creature/slaveholder of his time that he was). But I still love that, especially love everything from “So if Arthur returns…” to “dive down along with it” and the cataloguing of linguistic exchanges that have shortchanged us? And I feel funny picking out that as my favorite part because I like the whole too.
I don’t get Bob Barr — when I try to hold T.J. up against a libertarian measuring stick it is jarringly anachronistic. I’m trying to locate this politically, and mostly what I get is that we’ve exchanged the value of the fruit of our labor and an inherited love of learning for empty currency. Maybe the federal agencies and terror of the executive take it a little more libertarian?
Anyway, as they say, thank you for sharing.
@oleoptene: No, not at all! Besides, I totally owe you for citizen —> consumer….
I know, I thought better of that human —> race thing too (which I also owe to you, come to think of it—these both integrated so seamlessly into my brain that I forgot where they came from); maybe I even could’ve pulled it off if I hadn’t yielded to the temptation of a Sally Hemings reference. I was so enamored with the substitutions, though, that I just HAD to work that one in there; and now I guess I will just HAVE to work it back out again.
That whole shortchanged-exchange part of the poem was generally deemed to be, by the workshop, the weakest—most rhetorical, most like a very familiar diatribe, most like Pound at his most fulminating. Which makes me think that a) I need to work in just a line or two from the voice’s perspective again—”Forgive me, Sir; I get very worked up about all this” would be a bad example—because people liked those parts better; and b) clearly I need to get out more, because to me the observation that current political process distracts/divides us with unresolvable rhetorical issues like abortion? isn’t so familiar; or isn’t on the public table the way I happen to think it should be. But I have been living in a poetical cave (cf. body parts above) and have only developed my own apparently highly derivative opinions starting in about April of this year.
(That reads all arch and sarcastic but I’m just trying, pathetically, to be funny.)
Oh and FINALLY: I think I *did* misunderstand the Duende about his saying the poem embraced/espoused “central American values—not Central American, but central!” It occurs to me this morning that he simply meant basic/core/essential etc.—NOT centrist; when drian biamond said that under his breath, he was only joking. But by this point I had lost my sense of humor completely and I was just all indignant that anyone would read the ending as anything but balls-out Marxism.
Funny how most of the time I’m able to be all Mature and Neutral in workshop, not personalize the feedback, etc.—and then suddenly I act like an insulted five-year old and start packin’ up my Barbies. I’m sure I was literally pouting by the end of class on Tuesday. Maybe because this poem’s ostentative subject matter is so freakish for me? So I feel more vulnerable about showing it around, even though it’s not a personal subject at all?
No one indicated that they knew who Publius was; maybe they assumed, some random Roman statesman. I was wishing wistfully the other day that the Political Compass people would do a chart for the framers—it’d be cool to see in what quadrant federalism would fall. But how do you plot mercantile, as opposed to capitalist, economics? Where do you put the fact that the true separation of church and state would have made their heads explode? How do you account for the fact that when Jefferson wrote about banks, he didn’t mean, like, Wells Fargo or WaMu?
@miss bovary: Because I have a history of exposing tender newborns to the wrong people and having them be forever stunted. Also because everything in the last year has had the CRAP workshopped out of it, and I kinda felt like, enough already, you know? And finally: the Librarian.
@patrick: Can’t be possible to read too much! But possible and even likely for the well-educated reader to discover things the poet, in her daffy reveries, never intended. ;o) So I wasn’t thinking about the Bible (in this poem); but truly bread is a powerful symbol for many things in English, from medieval British literature forward.
No T.J. as fisher king either? Wow. I guess I’ve just had T.S rolling around in my brain so much lately that I am starting to see it everywhere.
I blame you, of course. After rereading a bunch of Ezra Pound (which I picked up after reading your blog) I naturally shifted to T.S.
I think I am going to go get some Rumi to help balance me out again.
It *IS* a little ranty and spittle-flecked, but I mean, “Wow, Daddy, you could never have imagined this when you wrote the rules” is pretty straightforward. And I’m a little bit of a bumbling dullard, so it took some tracking down and fitting the cues in the poem together and about 10 minutes of clouded thought before I went, mm, yes, Jefferson. So basically I am not sure that I have anything worthwhile to add?
Except that I think you are stinging and strong in the end, by way of the woman who put on gloves to count money–and most expository and affected, in retrospect, when you recall touring Jefferson’s plantation between parentheses early in the poem.
Oh, and “and then suddenly I act like an insulted five-year old and start packin’ up my Barbies.” AND THEN I NEVER STOPPED LAUGHING.
oh and also “because fruited / plain and farm turned factory, then went /up in pixels” = SWOOOOOOOON
Fun with line breaks! I reasoned the only way I could POSSIBLY get away with “fruited plain” would be if I broke it up, ironizing it, if that’s a word, which it isn’t, only now it is.
Expository, affected, all true, sigh.
“Wow, Daddy” = HAHAHAHAHA! Daddy-O!
Someday I’m gonna write a poem titled, “AND THEN I NEVER STOPPED LAUGHING.”
Keep ‘em coming, peeps! Don’t make me call on you. <— [poor classroom management technique]
I love this poem so much, it tore out one of my molars.
MB, you think ranty and spittle-flecked? Good God, you should see some of my high rhetoric these days. Of the toothless, querulous old-man-shaking-his-fist-at-the-sky variety.
Brujo, that is my FAVORITE variety.
So, you’ve gone and workshopped a workshop poem behind the workshop’s back? Well, the workshop will not stand for this. The workshop is not some hussy you can come to for a “good time” then leave in the morning without so much as a note. It reminds one of the Tarquinius’ betrayal of Publius.
And bee tee dubs:
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/091906/polymath.gif