Punitive Poetics I
I am going to admit it, I thought this poem had to be deliberately this bad to be this bad. You know, like, how bricks don’t generally glitter.
Wait, UNLESS she is talking about those glass bricks they use in South Philly Italian restaurants the mobsters sup inside of! (See what I did there?) Also, what a word: “sup.”
Sup Skinny Joey, Joe Soprano, Jolie-Pitt clan and the clans comprising their
undisclosed miscegenation compound
”Sup paps and pervs and perps and papajohns paired
in dormrooms with Olde English
at first in irony then necessity then Ramen:
The knowledge economy is bearing no knows!
That’s when i cling to my revolver:
tomorrow never knows.
So far, so boring.
Each day we go about our business,
Unless we are unemployed.
walking past each other,
Not Dick Cheney—he’s in a wheelchair.
catching each others’ eyes or not,
I’d like to catch the eye of someone hot.
about to speak or speaking.
RIP, silent majority.
All about us is noise.
I thought the American ideal was peace, quiet, and good order.
All about us is noise and bramble,
Bramble indicates a pretty plant that has thorns. Ouch.
thorn and din,
Ouch again. Earplugs please.
each one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Incest? Dirty. Better: I always thought America was a process of forgetting ancestry. Or at least sublimation.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
This part—with nods to women, soldiers, and the working class—seems a denial that most goods in America are disposable.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
Primitive music, classical music, street music, folk music, a cappella groups.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
They won’t necessarily have to sit in the back. We get it. Also, check off nod to stay-at-home moms.
A farmer considers the changing sky;
Summary of the first page of The Corrections, except the character is a railroad employee.
A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
The meritocracy of number 2 pencils and bubble filling. Well, I ain’t about to complain about that.
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
You’d think that with several weeks to write this poem for her biggest public appearance ever, the poet might conjure a couple of better adjectives for the part of the poem about “words” than “spiny” and “smooth.” Anyway, false dichotomy.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
At last a nod to the master class that built this country by paving through forests and dosing blankets with small pox.
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
First clause: 9/11? Second clause: Iraq?
Say it plain, that many have died for this day.
Cue cliché: everybody’s dead except us.
Sing the names of the dead
Pander to the following.
who brought us here,
On slave ships?
who laid the train tracks,
Indentured Chinese?
raised the bridges,
Generic working class, unless you remember the Joe Mitchell piece about the Indians who worked on the Brooklyn Bridge.
picked the cotton and the lettuce,
Black people, generic farmers. Remember that scene in East of Eden when they tried to refirgerate lettuce?
built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Construction workers, many of whom these days are illegal immigrants. Cool. But man that terminal preposition; even “work within” would have been better.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign;
Nod to small business owners.
The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
The pandering to family values is less egregious than the gerund construction, which return
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Ironic nod to intolerant Xians.
Others by first do no harm,
Weird nonparallel nod to doctors;
or take no more than you need.
Sounds a bit Marxist, weirdly out of touch with a time of headlines about pyramid schemes or does she mean to exclude capitalists from her praise.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national.
What if? Outright counterfactual.
Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
I.e. our new president will project American power by projecting a positive image of America rather than by preemptively invading foreign countries.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
“Sharp sparkle” a phrase indicative of this poet’s decision to begin just any old sentence and nary a good one.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.
Brink, brim, cusp—praise song for the thesaurus.
