Headpiece Filled With Straw

Television

For the Boy in Bayou Blue Who Spoke in Tongues

By Jack Bedell

When he was twelve, he made the national news
to his parents’ delight and filled the pews
of the Living World with gaggles of girls and
tourists eager to hear the sermon he’d planned
for A Current Affair. His long, curly hair
and sparkly eyes glowed when he’d share
his witness with the congregation. He’d shout
and swoon and lash his tongue while rows fell out
rolling in ecstasy around his raised
pulpit. It pleased the deacons when the crazed,
fainting crowds filled their baskets with money,
but no one wondered when his eyes rolled a funny
white back into his head if he were reading from
cards inside his skull, or if the Spirit would come
and improvise the whole show for him
while his mouth spewed syllables like phlegm.

from At the Bone House (Texas Review Press) © 1998 by Jack B. Bedell.

Yo Jack! If you should find this, I just have to say I seem to remember a version of this poem from back in the day, and I loved it back then too! I just had to run with it!

Chris

Link: storySouth / Poetry by Jack Bedell.

The Change

By Tony Hoagland

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
        and the new president proves that he's a dummy.

but remember the tennis match we watched that year?

Right before our eyes
some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite -

We were just walking past the lounge
      and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
         I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
                           so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln's throat,
like she wasn't asking anyone's permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
                  you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
                           and touch it on its flank,

and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
                 had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed -

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed

 

From What Narcissism Means to Me © Graywolf Press.

Link: The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media.

TUESDAY, 11 JANUARY, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

money & yellow

Link: formerlyROSIE: money & yellow.

Rosie, I sure hope it's ok to reproduce this poem here in my venerable collection. I was just struck by it, and it's something I want to hold on to. File this under Things That Need To Be Said. And for what it's worth, Rosie, I used to watch you as the emcee of some comedy club show on cable back in the late 80s. You're still all right.

Chris

money and yellow

By Rosie O'Donnell

i know why michael moore screams
because he must

michael moore & marshall mathers
both won oscars
because the art they made
was pure yellow
real and true

those in the audience
hollywood elite
voted for these two men
outcasts misfits
for to deny the yellow
would be artictic suicide

no one knows where yellow comes from
how to make it is big business
but not a science
there is no sure fire way to create it
it arrives like magic
uncontrollable
real true and brutally honest

joni mitchell is my yellow
bruce springsteen –
cyndi lauper
i have been soaking in them lately

yellow with my kids
yellow with parker always
the boy who first handed me my own piece
in human form – himself
a blaze of bright yellow –
warming my formerly frozen core
parker

life is meant to be tough
full of obstacles that slow us down
forcing us to stay look and see

to climb is the reason we were born
into flesh form –
from the cloudy spirit world
to conquer the hills we have yet to
without an incline
our journey would be just a dull walk

fame stole my yellow

broadway shows
the never fail yellow station
"fill her up - high test"
as the orchestra tuned up
yellow –
glorious life altering –
soul fuel
pulsing yellow yes
always on broadway

in year three
it went missing
from my opening nights –
the attention on me
ruined it somehow
something was different
i was not alone in the velvet seat
a small part of the whole
i became part of the show–
people watched me watching
threw off the balance
it changed everything

the joy
walking in nyc - gone
finding the perfect cotton gap pull over
on the sale rack - none there
the beach – ruined
all of it’s there places had failed me
my yellow was officially missing

truth
your truth
what is it
and how much can you compromise
before it goes

i told the truth on my show –
year one and year two
enough to allow the yellow
it was there –
the show was a hit
yellow sells

my dreams of barbra and tommy
i believed in their yellow –
guaranteed goosebumps
i felt it in them
still do

here i was an unlikey winner
a fat irish gal from ny –
invited into the palace ball
real life cinderella
the public responded
yellow yellow everywhere

i was canonized the queen of nice
a misnomer 4 sure
you can develop a taste for worship.
soon as you do –
the yellow fades

yellow comes from living –
constantly working
makes creating impossible
what could i share with others –
when my truths
were becoming more and more unreal
i fell in love with kel
big yellow –
a life changing level of love

ok i reasoned with myself
i won't tell - but i won't hide
kel came places with me
the press knew - it was printed
but i never commented
it was ok for me
for a while

but the yellow we had together –
lost something by never being let out
truth - my truth
i had to go
return to myself
with maybe enough time
to detox my family
to get us all back to the yellow

last year i got a check
for 42 million dollars
i never see my money ever
i live with my atm card
600 bucks at a time

so this check arrives
at the money guys on a tuesday –
on thursday my agent asks how it felt –
to get a 42 million dollar check
i told her i didn't know i had
this upset her
she measures in money

i ask kel –
who does the money stuff –
thank god –
if i did get a 42 million dollar check
she said - without missing a beat
" yes but after taxes and commissions ...."

ok now there is something wrong here
many things in fact
first off - no one person
should ever get a check
for 42 million dollars –
it's absurd - obscene
and if that person
is not even aware that it arrived
some kind of altered reality happening

42 fucking million dollars
with taxes and commissions
only 24 million –
not too bad for a thursday
whose life is this?

so michael moore wins –
and up he goes in his sears polyester suit
in a size no one in hollywood
would ever allow themselves to be
he looked surprised - mikey did
the kid from the chess club
invited to the homecoming dance
wow
and then he did it
he opened his mouth
and actually said the words
he spoke the revolution
he told his truth
and they –
the ones who are not nearly as brave as he –
those clad in million dollar jewels
and almost believable lies
boo-ed him

fame forces you to be afraid –
to be removed from who you are –
alone in your dark private screening room
feeling michael moores yellow –
but too scared to admit in public
that it lives there

why did i leave my show –
it took my yellow
i wanted it back
without it i can’t live –
the gray kills me

"you cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, i will now continue my life as it was before this thing, success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation"  tennesee williams

Remembering Reagan?

(tip 'O the pen to William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org for "Planet Reagan")

Buffalo Bill's/defunct

By e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Wanna get wonky?

Hee hee. This article in the UK Independent has no place on a poetry site, so of course I must excerpt it here, and link to the book on my book list, just to scare the bejesus out of all of you folks who find even the smallest suggestion of Language Poetry abhorrent (hey, I'm one of those...).

I'd like to think I predicted postmodernists would get themselves into this predicament the next time they (re)discovered fascists, and then I went and sort of became a pointy-headed type myself (not really), which means, in true postmodern fashion, this article below gives me a big laugh on at least 3 different levels.

Terry Eagleton: Culture and society

The man who 'sexed up' literary theory believes that postmodernism is dead. Christina Patterson talks to Terry Eagleton about love, sex, God - and the global crisis

27 September 2003

"You won't believe what happened last night!" Terry Eagleton announces, with a twinkly smile that is clearly something of a trademark. He had, it turns out, been walking along the Strand, after seeing Michael Frayn's new play, Democracy, when he was stopped by a young man with a Yorkshire accent. "Where's that David Blunkett?" the youth demanded. Eagleton suggested politely that he try the Home Office."No, no," insisted the youth, "the one in the glass cage."

It is a strangely surreal scenario, but somehow not surprising: the former Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford being asked for directions to the weirdest show in town, the sort of narcissistic, navel-gazing enterprise, in fact, that has been one of the triggers for his new book. After Theory (Allen Lane, £18.99) is an explosive follow-up to Literary Theory, the book that changed the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates. At a time (the early 1980s) when students of English literature were either battling with Beowulf or ploughing through swathes of opaque prose by literary theorists announcing the Death of the Author and the pre-eminence of the Text, Eagleton took the literary theoretical bull by the horns and, well, deconstructed it. With him as their down-to-earth and witty guide, thousands of students suddenly saw the postmodernist light. If all was not clear exactly, at least they knew why.

There was no such thing as clarity, only the "seething multiplicity of the text", hitherto obscured by one's hidden, and simplistic, assumptions. The advantage of this view, as he helpfully points out in the chapter on post-structuralism, "is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else's beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself".

More than 20 years on, After Theory is not, of course, an attempt to redress the balance (a woolly liberal concept that Eagleton would hate) but a response to a crisis. The jacket bears the silhouette of a plane, a motif that could imply the book is yet another knee-jerk response to September 11 and the rise of fundamentalism. That is part of it, Eagleton admits, but the general issue is very much wider. Students today, he asserts, are engaging neither with history nor with post-structuralism. "What is sexy instead is sex," he announces, in the first chapter, on "The Politics of Amnesia": "Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, they prefer to focus their energy on "the history of pubic hair" or the evolution of "Friends," a trend that Eagleton regards as "politically catastrophic".

Considering I did my dissertation on the online mostly lesbian fans of "Xena: Warrior Princess," and wrote the argument in native hypertext in a form impossible to reproduce in print (on purpose) (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation), I sure do know where I fall in the above picture Eagleton is painting. And that makes me laugh even more, because I do believe I was making an original argument involving VERY big ideas (which were centered on power and politics) on many different levels that most certainly did deliberately loop around recursively (see, I'm not PoMo enough to disbelieve that there is any such thing as an original idea. Hell, I used to get in trouble in grad school for putting too many original ideas in my stuff, overstepping, not paying enough homage to previous scholarship).

We are sitting in a minuscule office on the eighth floor at Penguin, surrounded by leaning piles of Penguin Classics. We'd been promised panoramic views over the Thames but the posh meeting rooms on the 10th floor have all, today, been colonised by Pearson. Our conversation in this cramped corner is, in more ways than one, a consequence of the Triumph of Capitalism. The entire building, with its vast, open-plan vistas and rabbit warren of tiny, glass-walled offices and spaces for meetings and parties, is a symbol of contemporary cultural production. Here culture is acquired, processed, marketed and launched, with sauvignon and canapés, before hitting the media and then the shops in its final incarnation as cash-producing commodity.

We have to of course get in our obigatory pseudo-critique of capitalism, as if being a postmodernist exempts one from being painted as an utter hypocrite with 3 homes and a 30-year career as an elitist Oxford don. But more on that below.

Eagleton looks back, he says, with "proper nostalgia" to a time when "there was a sense that culture was somewhere you could make a political difference". He even, astonishingly, expresses a long-standing regret at having turned down a job at the Open University. He went instead to Oxford, where he stayed for 30 years and which he left "without the slightest twinge or sense of nostalgia". Oxford gave him "a lot of freedom", but he never came to terms with its innate conservatism and unfriendliness. "When I came to Oxford some of the rather hostile vibes that I felt I was getting I thought were because I was a Marxist," Eagleton confides with a wry smile, "but were probably because I was from Cambridge."

If he really WAS a Marxist, he would have taken the position at Open University, or been like Paulo Freire in Brazil, teaching dialogically among the rural poor. It oughta be against the LAW to take a job at Oxford or Cambridge, or maybe even the Open University and still call yourself a Marxist. That's the problem with PoMo heads. They have embraced irony so fully they can't even muster up proper shame at their own hypocrisy.

It is certainly true that Eagleton has been "ill-served by his acolytes", those jargon-spouting, willfully obfuscating and, sadly, often not too bright purveyors of the kinds of arguments that prefer to loop endlessly rather than take the risk of any kind of original thought. Whoever bears the responsibility for this cultural mire - and only a conspiracy theorist could lay the blame entirely at Eagleton's DM-shod feet - there is, he believes, an urgent need for fresh, and more profound, thinking about the world we are in. "History now is such," he explains, "with the political drive from the right, that thinking small isn't really an option any more ... There are different ways of thinking big, or deep."

After Theory outlines just some of them. With his characteristic lucidity and wit, it charts the gains and losses of cultural theory and its refusal, or inability, to engage with the Big Issues: not just political, but moral and metaphysical, too. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary cultural theorists, Eagleton is not afraid to talk about love and death, or to reinstate the body as on object of frailty as well as a source of Californian myths of eternal youth.

Methinks he should be afraid. Or rather, I'm wondering, if one's theories are thin as water, if one doesn't become far more fearless than those who strive for greater substance. I'd wonder that, surely, if that wasn't what my professors used to say about me when I was off bird-walking across disciplines and theories in a single bound, being original and thinking big, and as a result, not paying enough homage to the entrenched canons of Great Ideas that had gone before me. Once again, I resemble the thing I'm criticizing. I must be having a postmodern moment too. Oh! The irony!

(all exclamation marks are provided exclusively courtesy of various Romantic Poets, and not postmodernists. Byron and Shelley always had a few to spare, so next week I'll have to post some of those in here just for equal time, to make up for the borrowing)

Chris