Floods and the Aesthetics of Destruction

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I have been struck by the photos of towns and farms in Iowa and Missouri submerged under the rising waters of the recent floods. I was also disturbed by how oddly compelling many of the photographs are--silos protruding from beautiful pools of green blue, seemingly mythical towns buoyed on the pristine surfaces of endless lakes, cultivated fields that seem to rise out these lakes and reach toward trees.

We are often paralyzed by the images of destruction; sometimes because the images shock us into consciousness (like the photos in this month's National Geographic of slaughtered mountain gorillas in the Congo) and other times because the composition of the images startles us with a new representation of what should be a familiar landscape, like the charred remains of a mountain after a fire.

Most of us watched with uncomfortable attention and interest at the recovery efforts of the recent earthquake in China, much the way we kept tuning in to see similar efforts after the typhoon in Thailand and Indonesia a few years ago. Awe-ful in the worst way, visual coverage of these events both humanizes and globalizes such tragedies. We watch and we worry and we wonder and we weep.

The artful images from the recent floods in the Midwest reminded me of two different Katrina-based art projects I encountered on a recent trip to New Orleans. The first is an installation that existed for one day only in a small, edgy gallery owned by Kirsha Kaechele, located in a predominantly African American neighborhood of the city. The brainchild of artist and architect Mike McKay and his wife, artist and architect Liz Swanson, the Cloudline project replicates through fishing weights and lines, the topography of the living room in McKay's childhood home that was destroyed by the Katrina levy breaches. Part of the artist statement reads as follows:

Made by a series of 3800 weighted filament lines suspending over 8,000 aggregated points, the project replicates a specific debris field documented within a living room of the artist's childhood home. The debris field contains the exact forms of household furniture, such as chairs, end tables, a sofa, and a piano, yet one’s reading of the objects remains abstract due to its construction. Instead, one is left only with a vague sense familiarity based on scale and proximities to the human body.

McKay suggests the exhibit looks at the relationship between chaos and stagnation, which it certainly does, but for me, it is also about the conversation between destruction and construction as well as this notion of aesthetics and disaster. Though it takes a while to load, you can view a short documentary of the project here. As you watch, you may ask yourself what sort of conversation tragedy and beauty might have with each other.

Across the street from where Cloudline appeared stand two small empty houses that now serve as exhibit spaces, both of which comment on what it means to "reside" in New Orleans post-Katrina.

Visitors walk through the houses to confront dirt floors, ducks hanging from ceilings, overturned appliances, broken fireplaces, and secret spookily lit indoor gardens.

In the case of Cloudline and these houses-cum-canvases, exterior becomes interior, and we are forced to reconsider easy distinctions between "nature" and "civilization," as well as facile notions of what is "artistic" and what is "created."

Such art may not fix the damages caused by floods, but it does reorient us to the process of meaning-making that both floats on the surface and simultaneously lies at the very depth of human lives.

Now that we have pop music, why do we still need poetry?

The Professor of Pop poses this question as a comment to last week's post on poetry and popular culture.

It's a good question; one that probably should be asked more often, but instead, poets, professors and publishers of poetry merely ask: why don't more people read poetry? Inquiring instead into poetry's necessity is an altogether different and more meaningful project.

Liking poetry to music is even more interesting, and it raises some important points about cultural associations we make with various genres. The poet Robert Bly once remarked that he was jealous of musicians because their work goes straight to the heart. Bly lamented how, in the United States, poetry seems to get log jammed in the brain, only rarely trickling down to the emotional register of the "heart" or "soul." Indeed, we all know the sensation of a really phenomenal song and how viscerally we react to it--even over the entire course of our lives.

For better or worse, our brains (and perhaps also our bodies) react differently to words than to music, and here is where I would say poetry differs from pop music and why we need both. Pop music is largely about sound and a little bit about language; poetry on the other hand is largely about language and also a lot about sound.

For example, I truly love Nirvana's music. Nevermind is a great album with exceedingly poetic turns of musicianship. However, there is really nothing about the lyrics that is linguistically transformative. Some of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is catchy, but most of the song is a string of cliches. Even worse is the Professor of Pop's bailiwick, Led Zeppelin, which also happens to be one of my favorite bands. That said, almost no band has worse lyrics. Either the words are pinched from old blues songs or pinched from earnest but freaky tales about gnomes, Mordor, and may queens. And, after films like This Is Spinal Tap, those kinds of over-the-top I-am-trying-very-hard-to-be-deep lyrics just come off as high camp. But, the guitar riffs on "Whole Lotta Love," the vocals on "Black Dog," and the entire side two of Led Zeppelin III are musical "genius"--the term traditionally used to describe writerly talent.

We need poetry because popular music can only do so much. Lyrics in songs with driving riffs or thumpy back beats are always going to be the chaser to the music's bigger drink. What's more, since we communicate with each other through language, we need something in that realm that turns the same words we use at the grocery store, with our children, on the phone with customer service, and in bed with our partners into something not ordinary, not commonplace, not quotidian. Popular music--as a whole--just doesn't (and can't) do that, but at its best, poetry does.

We need poems because they help put us in right relation with each other and the world. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger claims we need poetry because "the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy." Langston Hughes, the great African American poet once wrote that "poetry is the human soul entire, squeezed, drop by drop, like a lemon or a lime, into atomic words." That's pretty heady stuff, but thankfully, poetry is both a lot more and a lot less than that.

Still we need both music and poetry because we don't want holiness or Madonna all the time. Sometimes we want a funny poem by Billy Collins or Sherman Alexie or Russell Edson. Or, we want a funny song, like "Little Ghost" by the White Stripes or the Gourds cover of "Gin and Juice." Sometimes we want Radiohead, and sometimes we want Emily Dickinson.

Poetry can do a better job of not taking itself so seriously, and it should market its levity and its windows into the modern dilemmas of love, politics, language, culture, and existence.

But, there will always be room for both popular music and poetry if, for no other reason than, when you are on a date, you do not--and trust me on this--want to try make out to a recording of Ezra Pound reading the first poem from The Cantos . . .

Poetry & Popular Culture

IS POETRY TOO COMPLICATED for the average reader?

This question begins a recent post from the engaging West End Journal on the relationship between poetry and popular culture. For years now, I have been puzzled by poetry's poor readership in the United States, especially given our cultural context at this particular moment in history. Strapped for time, obsessed with self-help texts, and hungry for authentic sentiment, you would think that Americans would find in poetry a great deal of what is missing in their regular lives.

More and more, people want short, quick, blasts of emotion and engagement. Nothing is more that than the lyric poem, whose compression is, in my mind, designed for contemporary audiences. Intense and introspective, the lyric poem can also function as a kind of mini-self help text. Poets like Sharon Olds, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Sherman Alexie, and Charles Wright make the poem a site of emotional exploration, soul-searching, and lesson-learning that is actually readable. And, really, no genre does love and eroticism better than poetry. From Pablo Neruda to John Donne to Anne Sexton to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Octavio Paz to that guy, Bill Shakespeare, it's pretty easy to find something in these poets if you're Jonsing for some action.

"For a very long time," write the folks at West End, "poetry has been seen as a literary playground directed toward other players. Publishers recognize that poetry doesn’t sell very well, and so, they are apprehensive about publishing a great many books of poetry. The problem, though, is that while there may or may not be a market for poetry, no one really knows for sure. In short, no one is making an effort to shove it into mainstream media."

To be sure, they are correct. Mainstream publishers don't advertise poetry, and, unlike novelists, poets aren't really featured on programs like Fresh Air, The Charlie Rose Show, or Oprah. Hollywood isn't making a summer movie of the new Li-Young Lee collection, and there is no "Poetry Bestseller" list.

But, even if there were, I'm not sure Americans would know where to start with poems, what writers they might be drawn to or even what the experience of reading a poem is supposed to be like. Some think the American public isn't really wired for poetry and that they have never really been trained to enjoy it. But, I'm not convinced. So, The Weekly Rader is going to tackle this problem head on. It may make no difference, but we're going to start a monthly feature on contemporary books of poems that a smart, average American--someone like, say, Katie Couric--would like. We'll call it "Poems Katie Couric Would Like."

If you have recommendations on such collections of poems, post them here or send them via email to TWR--making America a nation of poetry readers, one reluctant person at a time . . .

Sex and the City: A Review

EVEN THOUGH THE BOROWITZ REPORT had me scared to death to see Sex and the City, I decided to brave the sexual orientation waters and wade into that space where, apparently, no straight man treadeth.

In truth, Sex and the City isn't right out of the gate, the ideal summer flick for a straight man; in fact, I know no straight men who have seen it. On the night we went, my wife and I estimated the number of (what we assume to be) straight guys in our nearly-full theater could be tallied on one hand. Granted, we live in San Francisco, so our data point could be suspect, but any movie that hangs its boa on what it calls the two L's: labels and love, has a pretty specific demographic in mind.

While some critics, like Anthony Lane, have panned the movie for this, I think it's great.

Traditionally, summer movies are all about the guys--action heroes, comic book heroes, adventure heroes. But, where are the fashion and romance heroes? For better or worse, I think Sex and the City has established a new bar for the women's summer movie--a fantasy flick that replaces explosions with orgasms, bullets with Blahniks, car crashes with kisses, shootouts with shopping.

Of course, there are moments when both the passion and fashion are over the top. The Fantastically Fabulous Four are always fierce in their couture, but so many of the clothes feel forced and unusually impractical (not to mention unaffordable). And, the gratuitous scenes of hot naked men, candlelit sex, postpartum bliss, and string-free relationship reconciliation feel strained at times, as though writer Michael Patrick King had to cross off all of the chic-flick to-dos. And, while it was great to see the wonderful Jennifer Hudson in the movie, her presence to me felt like a way to insinuate a black woman into ground zero of vanilla.

At its best, Sex and the City lets women be women and celebrates them in all of their bad decisions, break ups, anxieties, and devastations. The movie allows the women to be so not fabulous, which is refreshing. The film is at its best when the Super Friends are in Mexico on Carrie's not-honeymoon. Carrie is so depressed she can't get out of bed; Miranda gets busted for her unwieldy pubic hair; OCD Charlotte poops in her Juicy Couture; and Samantha gets absolutely no sex. There are moments, in other words, when friendship isn't quite enough. It's not the answer, not the palliative that is the show's (and the movie's) ethos.

It is those moments that ground the campiness so many straight women and gay men have grown to adore. The film is neither all fluff nor all gravitas, but it has strong enough elements of both to make us interested in the characters we already know and to remind us that this is fantasy.

It's women's summer soft-core--not XXX but a new genre of XX.

Reading Obama and Native America

ON THIS NIGHT WHEN political culture meets mediated visual culture, it is interesting to keep in mind what the image of change actually looks like. Myrtle Strong Enemy, the oldest living woman on the Crow Reservation in Montana, might be asking for a level and a culture of change that most in America can only pretend to understand. What might it mean for there to be a president who takes Indigenous issues seriously?

Equally moving is the 101-year old Strong Enemy's optimism. You are always young enough to want change.

You are also always young enough to know what change might look like.

Baseball Loves Poetry

One of America's best poets of the 20th Century, Marianne Moore, throws out the first pitch at Opening Day, Yankee Stadium, 1968.

Who says poets don't got game . . .

It's About Run: A Baseball Poem

THOUGH IT'S HARD TO acknowledge baseball while there is still so much good basketball out in the world, I thought it might be nice to augment the basketball poems with a fine baseball one. Written by May Swenson, the poem is as much about poetry as it is about baseball. The poems sounds mimic not simply the rhythmic sounds of baseball but also the rhythm of other poems. What's more, the poem's form (how it looks on the page or on this screen) is long and cylindrical, like a baseball bat or a foul pole.

Best of all, the poem, like baseball and poetry, is just fun.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It's about
the ball,
the bat,
and the mitt.
Ball hits
bat, or it
hits mitt.
Bat doesn't
hit ball, bat
meets it.
Ball bounces
off bat, flies
air, or thuds
ground (dud)
or it
fits mitt.
Bat waits
for ball
to mate.
Ball hates
to take bat's
bait. Ball
flirts, bat's
late, don't
keep the date.
Ball goes in
(thwack) to mitt,
and goes out
(thwack) back
to mitt.
Ball fits
mitt, but
not all
the time.
Sometimes
ball gets hit
(pow) when bat
meets it,
and sails
to a place
where mitt
has to quit
in disgrace.
That's about
the bases
loaded,
about 40,000
fans exploded.
It's about
the ball,
the bat,
the mitt,
the bases
and the fans.
It's done
on a diamond,
and for fun.
It's about
home, and it's
about run.

Thanks to the Writer's Almanac who sent the poem and who reminds us that yesterday, May 28, was May Swenson's birthday.

Why Men (but not those at The Weekly Rader) Cheat:

EVERY MAN WANTS TO sleep with as many different people as possible.

Or, so claims Phillip Weiss in his bold and bewildering essay "The Affairs of Men," that appeared in last week's New York Magazine. According to Weiss, men of all ages are driven by a desire for sexual variety; in fact, Weiss comes clean, so to speak, and confesses that he is a luster--so much of one it "jolted [his] marriage." The agonizing longing for different partners has been his cross to bear all these years, and now, at age 52, he's ready to be strung up on that cross.

His thesis is that men's overwhelming desire to sleep around is taboo to talk about and even more taboo to write about: "When I decided to write about it, the novelist Frederic Tuten offered a warning about the sanctity in which Americans hold monogamy in marriage. 'You can go against it in life, but don’t speak against it. It makes you a monster. Who speaks against it? And this creates a dichotomy, between what we live and what we profess.'"

That's great rhetoric, but maybe both Tuten and Weiss have different experiences of literary and cinematic history than I do, because when I think about it, most great literature, beginning with trifles like The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer's Odyssey have explored, even celebrated the man-dabble. More recently, many of the best (8 1/2, The Apartment, Crimes and Misdemeanors) and most popular (Fatal Attraction, 40 Days and 40 Nights, American Gigolo, Wedding Crashers) movies either chart or poke harmless fun at infidelity. Friends character Joey Tribiani is a walking monument to the charming and rarely-judged Lothario. In short, men's interest in sexual forays are not closeted. They are so well known, they are now parody.

Nor, does speaking against monogamy make one a monster. Take Wilt Chamberlain, for example, now famous for bedding more than 20,000 women. His need for "strange," (to quote both Weiss and Kris Kristofferson) actually boosted his reputation. So much so that most people under 35 probably know him more for his scoring in the bedroom than on the court.

By no means is TWR advocating infidelity, we are simply correcting Weiss's rhetorical assumption that to speak in favor of the sexual buffet (as Ben Franklin did) is new and transgressive.

More interesting than this claim is his assertion that women don't share the male interest in sex and that they really don't have a fascination for a diversity of sexual partners. Visual culture often gets things wrong. Popular culture overdoes just about everything. Most mainstream news isn't really news. And, most memoirs and confessions are in general, enhanced. But, even in these flawed genres, it is common to see women who want a diversity of experiences, a range of emotions, and a portfolio of sexual experimentation. Sex in the City, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, even The Golden Girls.

What Weiss pays too little attention to is the underlying emotional infrastructure that mediates and moderates fidelity, marriage, and what we might call the monogamous unit. Weiss says throughout that men in America are not allowed multiple partners. That's simply not so. Married men are, typically not allowed multiple partners. Most married men in America have taken an oath to do a number of things, one of which is essentially not to sleep with other people. And, chances are that topic of conversation has come up now and again after unwise party flirting or some other harmless offense, so even that oath wasn't taken before bridesmaids, preachers, and a bouquet, it was probably done via casual conversation in a bed after too much sangria.

For a number of reasons, both medical and emotional, most of us are not wired for a long-term, adult, emotionally committed relationship in which our partners get free passes to do other people. We are, however, wired for attraction, and we are wired for curiosity, and we are wired for fantasy. What is interesting to me is why Weiss makes the assumption that to want is to have.

There is something fundamentally American about Weiss' article--a crankiness, like that of a boy in Toys R Us--that he can't have what he wants. He feels cheated. Indeed, there is an undercurrent of ownership, of conquering, of possession that runs through his article, which makes me think that his desire for adultery may be less about men needing to sleep around than it is about him needing to consume.

On American Idol

A COUPLE OF PEOPLE have inquired as to why The Weekly Rader has shied away from reality TV, citing American Idol as an example of the intersection of media, pop culture, and the arts. True enough. Idol is like no other show on television--or better or worse--and it is an odd melange of commerce, criticism, and camp. I've not written about it in part because I don't keep up with it as religiously as one might if he, say, wanted to come off as an expert, but I have been following this year's competition, mostly because of David Cook.

Though David Archuleta seems like one of the sweetest closeted boys ever to come from Utah (and that's saying something), he really brought very little to his songs except his big voice. In general, his renderings of those songs were pleasing, but vanilla. He has no bite, no gravitas. On the other hand, Cook not only seems to know music and music history, he also clearly understands the art of arrangement. Every song he sang, he made his own. He, too, was a bit too earnest at times, but I liked how he tried to expand the range of what American Idol talent might be and perhaps even upgrade the musical palette of the loyal Idol viewer.

What I don't like about American Idol is how narrowly the show defines what "American popular music" is. Most of the singers are young, not particularly interesting, and almost entirely without edge. Nearly every performance, and the subsequent judges' comments, reward bombast over nuance, power over precision. What turns me off the show is the now ubiquitous closed-eyed, fist raised and clenched, I'm-so-overcome-with-the-power-of-my-voice trumpet blast of a singing. Who ever said such drama, such over-the-topness, is or should be American music? Belting out power chords may be American, but that doesn't make it good.

A critic at Entertainment Weekly recently said that one of the problems with Idol is what he calls its "forced spontaneity." That's less of an issue for me. What I object to is linking a powerful singing voice with being an idol.

TWR Gives the People What They Want: Basketball Poems

AS INTERESTING AS BASKETBALL and basketball players may be in the present, in retrospect, they can take on entirely new nuances. Below are two poems by established writers (Edward Hirsch and John Updike) each of which focuses less on basketball and more on basketball players. Hirsch's wonderful poem, written in energetic couplets, mimics the pace of a fast break. In fact, it's one single sentence pushed to the end.

Updike's now classic poem examines the gap between the glory of the basketball player and the reality of the ex-basketball player.

Both poems merge the excitement of the game's present-ness with the humanness of those who play the game.

Several readers liked the Sherman Alexie basketball poem I featured in a recent post. Follow this link to one of his best poems--and of the great basketball poems, "Defending Walt Whitman" that appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Now, to Hirsch and Updike . . .

FAST BREAK
Edward Hirsch

In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop,

and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach's drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfectly though the net.

EX-BASKETBALL PLAYER
John Updike

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

Is on the corner facing west, and there,

Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—

Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,

Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.

One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes

An E and O. And one is squat, without

A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,

Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,

As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,

But most of us remember anyway.

His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.

It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.

Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,

Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.

Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods

Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.