Dear President Obama

Dear Mr. President:

You are a great man.  You need to remember who you are and what makes your fires burn.  When you walk into Congress next, remember why you took this job.  Remember what you are capable of. Most importantly, remember that half the country is depending on you to uphold and enforce the ideas and ideals that got you elected.  Put on your mental boxing gloves, your samurai verbal skills, and your divine resolve.  Do not let the Insane and Inane Spell, which has taken over almost half of this country's logic and reasoning, like some terrifying Greek tragedy, deter or sway your resolve one bit.  There are dark forces at work now.  Hate is in the Devil's court, and he has more dancing to his tune than at any time in history.  You are the leader of light.  Rise and become your destiny.  I am counting on you.

Your faithful servant,
D.T. 

Michael Robbins in Poetry, December 2010

So, my husband gave me a copy of Poetry for Christmas, and it immediately provided dividends of thought and conversation.

In particular, Michael Robbins' poem "Confessional Poem" is inspiring. At first, it pissed me off, but then I reread it, again and again, and I was a little less ticked. Reading his interview provided further illumination. I'll end up quoting the whole thing if I'm not careful, but these are the highlights you will need to go down the mental road I went down:


Confessional Poem

You had a woodchuck and an opium ball.
The one ate through the furniture,
the other sat in its cage depressing me.
Now the woodchuck sheds its skin.
I have a cow behind the dollar bin.

You shouldn't drink diarrhea
unless you bring enough for everybody.
Turn it into a teaching moment.
Asian-American Students for Christ
have the room until 2:30.

Rume says no donkey is a virgin,
no, nor any beast that bites the grass.
Maybe it sounds better in Persian.
An unseen force propels the carts
across Whole Foods parking lot.

The woodchuck hasn't been born yet
I'd rather keep than you as a pet.
You'll sleep on wood shavings, I'll comb your pelt.
That animal loved you, his captor,
whom he hated. I know just how he felt.


So, this poem pissed me off for several reasons. At first, I thought it was waay too personal for anyone other than the N and the S to understand. Then, I suspected that I was being petulant, so I read it again. I was startled to see another poet write about the Whole Foods culture; I thought I was the only poet interested in the subculture of health food stores, grocery stores...and the women who stalk them....

Then, as I began to read his interview, he started talking my language. Here are the highlights, as I understand them:

M. R. Responded to a question by musing on the existence of confessional poetry as a genre. Said Plath, Lowell, Berryman and Rich demand to be read with care, because they are some of the most self-aware poets of the twentieth century.

When asked about the woodchuck, he spoke of people whom he has hated:

"Now we get to it. Except for, say, Dick Cheney, I wouldn't want to name any of those whom I have hated: their name is legion. But they all nibble at my poems -in many ways, I'm writing for them. I think hate can be a healthy emotion in literary contexts--the brash exhilarating hatred if Nietzsche or Céline or Geoffrey Hill...they must be good haters if they are to be good lovers--is true of poets too...Speaking more generally, I write from a deep hatred of liberalism, its pieties of individual choice and self-correcting markets. Fredric Jameson writes that we must

persuade ourselves---that we are inside the culture of the culture of the market and that the inner dynamic of the culture of consumption is an infernal machine from which one does not escape by the taking of thought (or moralizing positions), an infinite propagation and replication of "desire" that feeds on itself and has no outside and no fulfillment.

The liberal, on the other hand, believes that the system

is not really total in that sense, that we can ameliorate it, reorganize it, and regulate it in such a way that it becomes tolerable and we thereby have the "best of both worlds.

I know perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who insist it is sheer fantasy to imagine that there will ever be any alternative to the capitalist order. My poems try, in their modest way, to expose the ridiculous logic of this way of thinking (some more than others, obviously), even as they recognize its seductions, its inescapable."

What I took from this is that, (we) think the system is okay because we can change it to work for us, but the system is busted.  We need to scrape the whole system.  Self-correcting markets don't take into account social and environmental issues.  The negative effect is, while it may take into account supply and demand, it only looks at the former after the damage has been done.

But what made me go back and read this poem - and the part that really pissed me off underneath it all, was the freakin' rhymes - they sing.  They make the whole poem chug (along with the shock- moments).  The way Robbins rhymes speaks to me because it teases formal schemes, but it doesn't crush you, with the full weight of its craft, until the last stanza, where it makes its point with visceral anger. 


His next poem in the article:

We Have the Technology

By the sparklet of certain ciliates cesium
   practices its cricket song.

Am I supposed to be impressed?  My smoothie
   comes with GPS.


Take a left at that crustacean.  You--- yes, you,
    with the crisis Isis eyes.

By Odin's beard, this is snowier than usual.  We can
     always burn the first folio.

Go bug the dandelion.  You'll have
   the elephant of surprise




So, besides all the common themes Mr. Robbins and I write about, I got to talking with my husband, and we discussed the poems and Robbins interview.  This prompted this interpretation, which we agree with: You can't buy a book on the Dalai Lama and call yourself a Buddhist; you can't drive a Prius and call yourself an environmentalist.  It takes deeper action that that.

Our system doesn't work.  But, our people want to pretend it works so they give themselves fake badges to prove it works: buying organic, a Prius...

Tired, more later