The Poetry of Ignorance

Why do we willingly watch bad art? What pleasure possibly obtained from viewing William Hung’s savage evisceration of what little musicality remained in Ricky Martin’s opus major? Not once, but dozens and hundreds of viewings as the fabled excrescence was replayed across the land, revisited in American Idol retrospectives, and finally brought to life repeatedly by Mr. Hung himself on stage and in person. Certainly his interest in the matter is understood; pecuniary motives drive us all, and the sheer rationality of a man taking money for simply allowing others to laugh at his folly has an overweaning appeal, though few would be so bold as to apply for the same remunerative abuse. But us! From whence comes our pleasure? Truly, the shameful fascination for Hung and his ilk gives proof – if any were needed! – to Baudelaire’s contention that laughter is satanic, that humor derives from a malevolent and dark recess of the human spirit. Our comic pleasure is always at the expense of another, and if that victim cannot even see the costs, our laughter is only redoubled.

But, alas, most bad art provokes only boredom and resignation. Most bad music is merely run-of-the-mill. Even the worst of painting, literature, and drama has little claim on our spirit, and not even a claim on our derision. The dollar bins at used music shops, the “free” books outside used bookstores, the monstrous waves of material produced because … well, I can offer no reason, but crap is produced at a prodigious rate, nonetheless. A wiser person might make the connection between our consumer culture and the need for continual overproduction, or perhaps might show the fallacy of individualism and of inculcating a belief that each should “follow his dream”, or – better still – might find an existential lesson in our tortured pleadings to the muses who have abandoned us to the third millennium, left us to our own devices and who can blame them? I, of course, am a product of this selfsame spiritless culture, and so I can proffer only the banal observation that a lot of “art” is crap.

Some of that excrement, however, compels our attention. And the scatological term underscores both the heavy burden of this waste and our secret shame over its fetischistic attraction. Our passion for irony – if you can excuse the oxymoron – permits us to excuse our love for “Cult movies”, or the Village People, or Jeff Koons, or any of these myriad objects found in our fractionized cultural space, objects of our desire for, shall we call it, the “beautiful bad”. But such objects are rare, for it requires a truly special delusion to be Ed Wood, or Jeff Koons, or Pedro Carolino. Carolino, if you cannot place the name, was the author of the putative Portuguese-English phrase book known in reprint as English As She Is Spoke, in which the complete inability of Carolino to understand English creates a comic nonsense of disconcerting verve and beauty. An example of the resultant mishmash follows, in which the author describes the flaws of previous phrase books that his own will correct:

The Works which we were conferring for this labour, fond use us for nothing; but those that were publishing to Portugal, or out, they were almost all composed for some foreign, or for some national little acquainted in the spirit of both languages. It was resulting from that carelessness to rest these Works fill of imperfections, and anomalies of style; in spite of the infinite typographical faults which some times, invert the sense of the periods. It increase not to contain any of those Works the figured pronunciation of the english words, nor the prosodical accent in the Portuguese; indispensible object whom wish to speak the english and Portuguese languages correctly.

Has ever such sincere ineptitude been expressed more forcefully?

Mark Twain helped bring the world’s attention – or that part of its attention concerned with such trifles – to this book, contributing a preface to a reprint of the outlandish language guide. Mr. Clemens had a particular fondness for such charming failures; his praise for the leaden verses of Julia Moore helped make her first book of poetry a best-seller, in spite of the verses therein. Here is a sample of the poetry of the Sweet Singer of Michigan, in which she ponders one of her fellows:

“Lord Byron” was an Englishman
     A poet I believe,
His first works in old England
     Was poorly received.

Perhaps it was “Lord Byron’s” fault
     And perhaps it was not.
His life was full of misfortunes,
     Ah, strange was his lot.

Strange indeed.

Execrable though this may be, it is also almost impossible to imitate, unlike the mass of the merely bad that threatens to drown us in banality. Mark Twain tried his hand at crafting his own crappy verse in his “Invocation” to the platypus in Following the Equator, with results above the banal but below the stunned chuckle that the spectacularly bad can compel. Perhaps Norman Spinrad may be said to have succeeded with The Iron Dream, his splendid pastiche of a 1930’s racist science fiction novel as written by a bitter Adolf Hitler – but then Hitler’s talent for the truly bad lay in fields other than art, as anyone who has slogged through Mein Kampf can attest. But by and large, this brilliant incapacity is forbidden to the talented, a misshapen bizzaro-world Muse only available to the truly talentless who yet possess a passionate devotion to their art.

Which brings us to Mattie Jaxx.

I discovered Ms. Jaxx and her poetry (if “discovered” is the right term) in the New York Times Book Review, of all places, where my weakness for discerning the crass commercial motives everpresent around us had been subdued and lulled into a complacent assumption that therein I would find Literature or, failing that, at least Books. My attention – Let me back up a moment. I ignore advertisements. In newspapers, on television, on Web sites – on radio they are quite difficult to ignore, so I do not listen to radio. I accept some permeation of advertising into my daily life, of course, much like background radiation that, given a sufficiently strong ozone layer, usually isn’t a danger, but which can be quite harmful if one’s psyche is not protected from the ceaseless barrage of lies and inanity. So I view the ads in the pages of the paper as frames around the story I want to read, and the advertisers creep into my subconscious peripheral vision, and we both are happy and delude ourselves that we’re putting one over on the other. But on this particular Sunday I noticed an advertisement in the Book Review. Or, I should more properly say, I noticed a fraction of an advertisement, for within that full page spread promoting the works of thirteen authors of the Xlibris press was the cover of Mattie Jaxx’s book Obamaism is Socialism.

My attention was drawn to this particular work out of the fifteen present in the ad by three things. The first was the horrible layout of the cover, upon which the author’s name was broken by the author’s photo. The author’s name! The single most important part of the cover. As we all begin to appear for ourselves per se in every field of life from pumping gas to being in charge of our healthcare, we might reflect on the old adage about the type of client a person has who chooses to be his own lawyer. Is it not enough that Mattie Jaxx pretends to be a poet, without also forcing the poor woman to be a layout artist as well? Such demands could test stronger wits; in the case of Ms. Jaxx, the test was too much. Something had to break, and that thing turned out to be her (assumed?) name. I will not dwell on the photo itself; I find it difficult to do so. Best as well just to skip over the obligatory U.S. flag motif behind that photo on the cover, as well, and move onto the second thing that reeled me in: the title. Obamaism is Socialism. How trippingly it rolls of the tongue! The clarity of the argument can hardly be doubted. The triple “is” and double “ism” overpower any cavil. I have a soft spot for crank literature of all kinds – I don’t even have to go out and buy new books proclaiming Qaddafi’s evil; I have works from the 80s confidently proclaiming him the Antichrist. But neither the abysmal DIY (“Damage It Yourself”, in this case) cover nor the delightfully strident title would have made a lasting impression upon my jaded tastes. Perhaps the two combined might engender the amount of interest sufficient to tweet, post, update, etc. a link to the cover image – assuming I could find it easily – along with a snarky comment along the lines of “get a load of this!” or some other savagery. But then I read the book blurb

Learn why Obamaism is Socialism as author Mattie Jaxx boldly shares her thoughts and sentiments over politics, the government, and the nation through verse and vignettes. These insightful works capture not only her sentiments, but that of others in America.

I have reason to believe that it is Ms. Jaxx herself who addresses us in this blurb, as we shall see. Certainly it is an impressive display of poor English; but the two grammatical mistakes in two sentences did not command my attention, nor did the repetition of the tiresome word “sentiments”. No, it was the conjuration amidst the maelstrom of malevolent mediocrity performed by that magical word “verse”. Not merely wacko – but wacko poetry. How could I resist? I could not; so I sought the treasure.

The book is available on Xlibris.com – as was stated in the advertisement – as well as Amazon.com. The latter site allowed excerpts of the book to be viewed. Google Books also permits a preview. If ever a book existed for which sales would increase by not permitting people to peruse its contents, Obamaism is Socialism is that book. I had sought gems and found a gold mine, but had no interest in spending a double sawbuck upon the trade paper copy of Ms. Jaxx’s book of “thoughts and sentiments”. Even had I a Kindle, I am disinclined to spend a sawbuck upon the eBook version of her “verse and vignettes”. My review, let it be said explicitly, is based on only a partial survey of this particular poetic terrain; I am no brave explorer to go deeply into these wilds, only a discriminating tourist who feels that a surface survey, in this case, is a surfeit. All my remarks are based on those pages available online for preview on either Amazon or Google Books – the two sites offered different views of this work at different times. Again, the ability to read before purchase is a godsend for a potential customer, though not so for the author, who has spent a pretty penny to promulgate her “insightful works” across this land, as we shall see.

Obamaism is Socialism appears to be about seventy pages of poetry, with the remainder being given over to quotes from “interviews” made by Ms. Jaxx with “a multitude of American Citizens”. The examples available in the previews are quite banal, and do not concern us here, but I provide a sample for those of you who may not have ready access to an extensive collection of crank writing. The following quotation (quotes and all) is one of dozens of similar unsourced passages in the section about abortion, and could provide an irritating grit for a better writer to craft a pearl of discourse on the nature of urban legend and its place in modern politics:

“My neighbor’s granddaughter was pregnant. She went to the high school counselor. The counselor drove her to an abortion clinic. The abortion was performed, and the girl ended up hemorrhaged to death. Her parents didn’t even know, that their daughter was pregnant. The schools are becoming so Communistic, to sneak all rights away from parents!”

Besides abortion, the topics of her “interviews” include “Obama’s Socialist Health Care”, Muslims, illegal immigrants, “Real Racism”, same-sex marriage, the Tea Party, and the economy. As Ms. Jaxx says so eloquently, “This is a mixture of hot political stew!”

However thin and watery this stew may have appeared, her poetry had the rich flavor of untoward beauty. I mentioned earlier good reasons for believing the author wrote the book blurb, and first is the fact that Ms. Jaxx does not know the English language. The plural/singular confusion of “not only her sentiments, but that of others” (my italics) in the blurb is mirrored in such a line as “The evils of Socialism is trying to score!” from her poem “Wake up!”, or perhaps from the verses

Even sacrifice will bring forth the blessings,
Even heaven sent angels sings.

from the first poem of the book, “Socialism”. In addition to the possible subject-verb disagreement between “angels” and “sings”, the lines also have the benefit of making no sense – no sense at all. Perhaps you think that more context is needed; very well. Here are the final three couplets of this poem:

Wake up America, for the conflict of “justice”,
Throw out Tyrants, again, everything will be nice.
Even sacrifice will bring forth the blessings,
Even heaven sent angels sings.
Hail to America’s Constitution,
To the tyrants: Beware of the Revolution!

It is almost too easy to find examples where an understanding of English has been divorced from the meaning of the poetry. Take, for instance, this couplet from the poem “People”:

People, rise and lift up America’s standard,
And don’t allow Socialism to retard.

Or these lines (it’s hard to say if the first two are meant to be a couplet; as with the previous example these lines invite us to guess whether or not a rhyme is intended and, if so, which) from Ms. Jaxx’s poem “Conservative America”:

Let her have her great wisdom.

We know enemies hate her beauty-dome.
Let her remain humble and pure,
Let her feet be strengthen to endure.

The most basic spell-checker hardly allows one to even type such lines, and her book has so successfully eschewed editing that it abetted the escape of the following (from “Wake up!”):

Slumbering in sin and idolitry,
Always an excuse for every adultry.

This is the last of all dispensantions,
Use time wisely in this generation.

For many, such a complete misapprehension of the English language would preclude a vocation of poetry; not so for Ms. Jaxx! Her passion and convictions far outweigh any inability she may have to act upon the stirrings within her. She is on a mission – sort of like the Blues Brothers, but without the talent – and she states her mission quite forcefully:

“BARACK OBAMA IS EXPOSING HAZARDOUSNESS
TO AMERICA’S FUTURITY. VOTE OUT THEIR
CARNIVOROUS DESTRUCTION AT THE VOTEING
POLES!”

Again – and again and again and again; the temptation is not lost on me – it would be too easy to take this work to task for its inadequacies, or to take Ms. Jaxx at her word that she is “a Common Sense, Ronald Reagan, The New Republican Party Conservative!” and use that as a brush to tar the denizens of the Right, but such would miss the more important point, and would just join the long inane conversation whereby the politics of This are contrasted with the politics of That by picking one extreme example and saying “Isn’t That terrible?!? Vote This!” etc., etc., ad infinitum.

The appeal of Mattie Jaxx and her unique stylings upon the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare derives not in spite of her inability, I say, but indeed just because of her incapacity. For in spite of all evidence to the contrary, she feels compelled to sacrifice to the Euterpean Muse her most poignant stirrings of emotion – not only the rage and heartbreak she feels at her beloved country falling into the clutches of Obama’s satanic Socialism, but also the delightful joys of the everyday world. Far from renouncing poetry as did Rimbaud with much less reason, she pours out her libations of verse and creates a singular beauty – a beauty, I shall add again, unsusceptible to such silly contraries as “reason” or “taste”. Her almost heartbreaking sincerity propels her verse past the Scylla of grammar and the Charybdis of reason into some barely glimpsed beyond that poets with much better word sense rarely approach. Had she been possessed of the merest inklings of her inability to write, Ms. Jaxx would have hesitated and never implored us, in her poem “Gratitude”, to

Give thanks that you have shelter
And a bed,
Give thanks because you know Fred
And Ted.
Be glad we’re not an ice cube in a frying pan,
Be glad that we’re all just human!

The reader wishes to know more of Fred and Ted, disclaiming their acquaintance but desiring the same. Who are they? Few clues are at hand. We assume they are the same who are joined by two other assonantal fellows in this couplet from “Wake Up!”:

Arise from your bed,
Ted, Jed, Fred, and Ned,

but if further evidence is available to the reader as to the identities of these mysterious personages, it did not present itself in the previews made available to me.

The book is available in three convenient formats: $9.99 gets you the Kindle eBook, with the convenience of instant gratification and instant regret; $19.99 pays for the trade paperback version, making a convenient paperweight; and $29.99 obtains the hardback copy of Ms. Jaxx’s poetry and observations, conveniently exchanging your money for this worthy biodegradable tome. Xlibris is what once-upon-a-time was called a “vanity press”, but now that narcissism has been banished from the upcoming DSM, and the preacher Koheleth’s imprecations no longer echo in the omphalic future, the term “self-publisher” is as good as any other. Self-publishing may be profitable, but does not appear to be so for an author. The lowest cost package that promulgates your work in all three of the versions mentioned above (eBook, PB, and HB) is the “Professional Package”, which costs $1,099. The royalties paid to the author are set at 25% of the cover price, which means that for a book containing 254 pages – as is the case for Obamaism is Socialism – Ms. Jaxx might see $5.00 for each trade paper copy or $7.50 for each hardback sold. (The mysteries of eBooks and eBook pricing are further complicated by the fact that Xlibris allows many variants of pricing and author discounts etc.) Making some quick ‘back-of-the-envelope’ calculations, let’s assume that the book pays for itself — that is, the total author royalties equal the outlay for the publishing of this work — this would mean that 147 copies of the hardback were sold (or 220 of the paperback). If such a miracle were to occur, the author could sell the ten paperback copies and one hardback copy that came as part of the “Professional Package” at full cover and actually net $230! And I shouldn’t give such short shrift to the Package – it also includes postcards, business cards, bookmarks, posters. And let’s not forget the “Worldwide distribution” (e.g., Amazon.com).

But the siren song of self-publishing is not yet complete. Our theoretical author with a couple of hundred bucks in his virtual pockets has listened to Xlibris tell him that “Publication is a right, not a privilege.” He knows, from reading the company’s publishing information, that “Publication is no longer just for the selected few.” And what better way to ‘stick it’ to those stuck up Old School writers than by going right into their sacred temples and turning the tables on them? Well, our author can do that (figuratively speaking) by adding just a bit to his previous investment and taking out an ad in the New York Times Book Review – just as our own favorite author has apparently done. As Xlibris itself notes, “The New York Times brand has always been associated with credibility, trustworthiness and prestige.” Of course, you and I may think, that could change…. The cost for this “limited advertising opportunity”? A mere $5,499 – that is, five times the cost of the “Professional Package” already paid for. Again, I do not want to give short shrift to the full splendor of this marketing package; it also includes press releases being sent to 100 newspapers (to be ignored most likely) and “Social Media Marketing”, the latter meaning that you can find Mattie Jaxx and her work on Facebook and Goodreads, etc. She also has a Web site, to which we’ll return momentarily. And thus Ms. Jaxx and her vision made their way into my own consciousness, through the credible, trustworthy, and prestigious pages of the New York Times. Another bit of math: With fifteen slots for books in their full-page advertisement, Xlibris will pull in $82,485 from those authors wishing to take their work to the next level. The advertising rates for a full page in the Book Review work out to be $35,735 for a “Small Press” (you can look this up yourself; the New York Times has quite an extensive listing of all the potential rates you might want for any ad you may want to take out; your First Amendment rights in action). Thus Xlibris can clear $46,750 on this Sunday ad – assuming they haven’t worked out a lower rate (quite possible) and that their own production costs are not too high in producing the actual ad content (also likely). If they were only able to get enough authors interested each week to continually fill up those slots in the Book Review, they’d make $2.4 million in profit from this advertisement over the course of one year. Perhaps that is likely, perhaps it is not. (N.B. I have just checked this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, and an advertisement from Xlibris is not among their offerings.)

Besides the fact that the author provided almost $7,000 to Xlibris to publish and promote her book (see the note on the author’s Web site below if “almost $7,000” seems poor math on my part), little may be seen of the biography of this wunderalter in her poetry itself. Exegesis is always a difficult art, often providing more illumination of the exegete than the author of the work in question. There are few clues in Obamaism is Socialism beyond the politics which might broadly belong to any number of persons in these United States today – few of whom, it hardly needs be said, would dare to write poetry of any stripe, though most (I might add) could perform the task more creditably than this writer Jaxx. The name “Jaxx” is doubtful, as it is a well-known fact that “Exxon” was chosen as the new brand for the hapless Enco label, after discovering that “Enco” meant ‘car trouble’ in Japanese, primarily because a double “x” is a rarity in almost all languages of the world. A search for the name in Google Books brings up – besides the expected volume we study here – a snippet from a romance novel entitled Dark Guardian wherein the heroine, named Jaxx, is comforting a Matthew Jr. by crooning “Don’t cry, Mattie” (‘crooning’ is the author’s term, not mine), so perhaps we have a clue to the reading habits of our author. Perhaps not.

Searching for clues within the poetic works proffered, a tinge of the Mormon faith may be espied. Besides the association of the Jews with “Ephraim’s mold” and a few offhand references to this time being the Last Dispensation, a slightly chilling reference to the now disowned doctrine of Blood Atonement may be seen in her first jeremiad, “Socialism”:

These tyrants in power will “have to atone” for the blood we lost,
They will pay for our shedding of blood at a cost.
They are assasins of greed and fame,
Socialism is the “worst” name!

According to her Facebook page, she resides in Lakewood, California. But besides these meagre cues, there is little solid to hang a picture of this creator upon.

The many pages of “interviews” collected by the author show someone who has made field study of ignorance and bigotry and bile, but our author remains credulous. Otherwise, she could have answered the “interviewee” who asked, “My curious question for you is: Is Obama a member of the Skull and Bones / Illuminati Group?” The answer, of course, is no: Obama did not attend Yale, Skull and Bones is a secret society for Yale students and alumni, ergo Obama is not a member. Quod erat demonstrandum. But enough of such trifles. Seeking more information about this exceptional author – the exception in this case being the fact of writing at all – I further scoured the Internet like a good 21st-century human, and found little besides the many links to Ms. Jaxx’s work on all the various channels of commerce that make up the Web space in which we live. So I was surprised to find out that she actually has a Web Page, linked to from the abovementioned Facebook page, with the inspiring domain name www.obabmaissocialism.com. This site – while apparently not treated to the sort of Search Engine Optimization which would bring it back in a search (I could not even get it returned with the query “obamaissocialism.com”) – contains an Author Bio! My hunt for the source of these treasures was finally to be rewarded!

Allow me to interrupt myself at this point. I have to confess that the eerie fascination which this awful poet exerted upon me was in no small part a reaction to my recent reading of Rimbaud’s banal last decade of letters to his family and others. As I have written before, the complete separation of the author of those letters from the poetic firebrand who seduced Paul Verlaine away from his wife was a sad shock. Though many theories have been pronounced (by Rimbaud scholars, who must pronounce something, after all) as to the reasons why Rimbaud turned his back on poetry, if in fact he did renounce something rather than simply move on, the terrible fact of those tiresome missives and their depressed prosody left an unfillable ache within my spirit, contemplating my own shallow dreams of creativity in the shadow of Rimbaud’s refusal to worry about it. Becalmed as I was, the appearance of Mattie Jaxx within the pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review tore through these grey and spectral moods was like a bracing tornado of sewage, the stench overpowering a bourgeois bleakness with at least the promise of some life after the lifesickness left by Rimbaud’s pallid correspondence. Instead of questioning how one of the brightest lights of 19th-century literature could have walked away at the peak of his powers, I found myself facing a more deeply moving question, a question which has more resonance perhaps for the vast majority of us who shall never be the brightest lights of anything: How does the dimmest bulb refuse to stop shining? How does a person, far from hiding his light under a bushel, go to the opposite extreme and take out ads within the New York Times to cry “Read me! Hear my words!” when it is immediately obvious that there is nothing worth reading here? What strange madness is this, that in spite of every force that society or reason or economics or anything else the “real world” can array against it, insists upon being heard? Thus my initial interest was piqued beyond reason due to the lonely cultural space I had only recently departed, and it was great pleasure to finally find the Author’s Bio of Mattie Jaxx.

Like all those who search for the Grail, I was bound to be disappointed. Would I have been sated to learn that Ms. Jaxx was the “mother of three beautiful children and a wife of a man that left twelve years later and said it was all her fault”? Could any mental picture I had created to place alongside the chilling cover photo have done justice to my initial frisson? Would anything have been gained by learning that she was born in Dothan, Alabama? Or that she owns a daycare center? For that is what I actually found when at long last I read Ms. Jaxx’s biographical note. The cover photo, uncluttered this time by the strangely broken last name across the waves in the background, sat above the text “About the Author”. But some dissonance sounded within me. The bio began “Meet Felicia Floyd”, confirming my suspicions that “Jaxx” was a nom de plume, and a few grammatical errors and the careless way she described being born in Alabama “but don’t remember anything about it” tried to aid me in reimagining Ms. Jaxx as a heavily burdened part-time poet. But a search for the name behind the name, “Felicia Floyd”, brought back another work of the Xlibris press, The Tears and Joys of Love. Another book by the same poetess! My heart leapt! But…. I once again perused the previews, and found … poetry, of a sort. Not terrible. Not great. Not Mattie Jaxx. The same Author Bio I had read for Ms. Jaxx can be found on Ms. Floyd’s Web page, www.feliciasheart.com, sans most of the unintentional grammatical errors. My conclusion, I am sad to confess, is that both Ms. Floyd and Ms. Jaxx chose to use the Web Design Marketing Service of Xlibris, paying another $359 to create the sites mentioned above. Unfortunately, for myself at least, at some point mistakes were made and the biography of Ms. Floyd ended up on the Web site of Ms. Jaxx. Alas! The sadder fact is, that should Ms. Jaxx wish to correct this error, the charge will be $65/hour, billable in 15 minute increments.

But perhaps I should count my blessings, or as Mattie Jaxx put it in her poem “Gratitude”,

Give thanks for everything in life,
And that includes your wife.

For the pleasure of her poetry might surely be alloyed by the harsh considerations of any reality she might occupy, a reality she has successfully kept at bay in her determination to deliver her inept message unto an uncaring world. An ignorant beauty shines forth in this self-called poet, beauty which would have been ignored by lesser (or greater) souls. Her vitriol is deadly to her enemies, real or imagined:

Traitors have a tide of lying tongues,
Full of shame and scorn they beguns.
People’s flesh is weak with blood ran chill,
But Socialism will always kill.

(from “People”)
But her love is also ever present:

The valleys exult, the hills acclaim,
Living water is our fame,
Water! Water! is the name.

Do you want to stand in the water, and wave your fist?
Or come here and be kissed!

(from “Water is Wild”)
What other poetess could so beautifully summarize our current political scene, as did Mattie Jaxx in her delightful description of the “Internal War Within”? Who else would dare to write such verses as these?

Step on the cock roaches,
Carve the pumpkins for coaches.

…

In a torrent power of song,
Raise your voice to old King Kong,
Decisions can be right or wrong,
A glorious day can be long.

(from “A Glorious Day”)

And so I will now leave Mattie Jaxx, praying that I shall learn no more of her ever, and grateful that for a moment she came to dispel the granite hardness left behind by the feckless Rimbaud. I salute you, Ms. Jaxx, and bless you, and hope never to cross your path again. In your struggles with Poetry, I cannot in good conscience desire your victory, but I do feel the noble humanity of it. And so I, too, with you and with all others of good cheer, will raise my voice to old King Kong!

Whatever that may mean.

Tombs I

I crawled deep into the crypt, hoping to find some answers there, entombed in the time before brands walked the earth like Gods, smiting all meaning before their benevolent strides, full of smiles and pleasures of hearth and hope. The nacre lay beneath the dusty webs and musty air of the damp departed. I crouched for a telling moment, the awful shriek of the rusted gates still echoing in my ears like the tortured photons crushed beneath my oppressed palms of a teenaged night sky. I remembered the swaying, the rattling rocking of a hundred miles of spring-weary seats in the flashing back roads under the dark night sky. The emptiness of those full buses sated with half-tuxedoed rocking passengers before the abyss did not comfort like the weary tomb of colorless silence and granite before me. Each step made its own music in the harsh quiet, each breath pushed back the shadows and silence deep in these recesses hidden from love, nectar, and daylight. The candle I placed in a recess of stone and ash, lighting it quickly while heartbeats hesitated in the dark detritus.

Are those roots? Some oak, perhaps, seeking as I seek, finding only a vacuole behind the rock ceiling it bore through in hopes of water or nutriment? The cracks and dirt midst the vault are less loathsome than the sterile vacuum entombed by the once-polished rock banks on either side. The fluid flame illuminates a dozen shades of grey, all retreating to the darkness that shrouds the banks of bone-colored biers beneath the stone sarcophagi. If my purpose had held, the spade and pick I brought would have pried off these stone lids, but the first ring of rock against the metal blade jarred me back into consciousness. How can I pry away the covers, how pull back the lids and reveal the coffers’ secrets, how thrust elbow-deep my fearful arms into the wrecked masses therein? To what end? A solitary pursuit of the madness from whence I came, to make a talisman of bones against the lowering dark and the enfolding night. A cicada dies above, crying and starting suddenly at its own futile revelation. We dream of diaries and photographs, a plaything of the past, pored over remnants of lucid nightmares that might reveal the voices behind the throne, on bended knees the supplicant waits steely-eyed before the three tests, but a lone cry of stone on stone had ended the challenge before it began.

Are there sinews, or bindings to hold bone to bone? Or a loose agglomeration of sketched out fragments in dirt or vermiculate satin? Is the nacreous moon shining through the gaping stairwell down which I have come? I tasted the sweat on my upper lip, salty in the cold air. A vision reaches me, pulls to me vanished friends who never again will we see, mock, avoid, lose, call, touch. Only these missing guardians could understand and report back the urgent silence of three AM. The absent mirror holds itself before me, a lingering doubt shivering the reflection in the too bright candle light. Only the choking fictions remain in the sepulchre.

Letters From Hell

I have just finished reading The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, and they have left me very sad, sad for days, in fact, as I trudged through the final, banal, exhausting, bourgeois two thirds of the book. Such a waste! I could gather some telling quotations from the letters of his post-poetic existence, could mine the veins to pull out some durable ore, but the whole prospect just leaves me sighing and broken. No matter how transgressive his youth, no matter how wild his poetry, how vile his passions, how bitter his refusal, to read his endless letters of complaint and hopelessness to his mother, to watch him importune his family again and again to send him some money, some books (on mechanics, not poetry), even to see him — seemingly — mature and cease his endless demands upon his family, to read his reports on the Abyssinian situation and pretend to see some flashes of the brilliance left behind, all that is too much, too little. I doubt that I shall ever be able to read Rimbaud effortlessly again.

I recall watching a teleplay in France about Rimbaud’s late life, my viewing companion and I both agreeing that it was turgid and lifeless and boring. Now I know that the reality upon which it was based was even more boring. Yet the worse thing, is that tragic ennui of someone who appears to have forsaken his talent completely, to have shut himself off from all commerce with literature after having left Verlaine with his final poetry in 1875. It is as if Dr. Seuss had become a salesman for a medical supply house, and never so much as doodled again. Or perhaps Rimbaud was furiously writing poems all the while, only to burn them as unworthy or to reject them for any one of a myriad manic reasons. God, I would like to think so! But instead I am faced with the actual evidence, the letters of his life, collected and hoarded by those with a bent and a talent for such, and the letters are not pretty.

Do they reveal a spoiled brat who never knew anything but running away? A selfish sod who squandered his gift? A deeply disturbed man who could not bear to face what he’d done with his youth? A prematurely middle-aged failure who teased himself with dreams of one ‘big score’ which would enable him to return to his abandoned home on terms of a tentative triumph? No, no, no, and no. Oh, I can convince myself that I see all these things in these letters. And if I were to read a biography of Arthur Rimbaud — but I never, never read biography — perhaps if I were to read of his life I could make these letters fit into some sort of pattern, could find some meaning worth knowing that would explain away all the banalities, the complaints, the boredom. But the truth is, the letters do not explain anything. The early letters are heady with a sophomoric purpose and verve, though even in these one gets the feeling that to be beholden (or thought so) to M. Rimbaud might be unpleasant. He is too pushy, too quick to presume on an imagined favor. But even this! At least he seems driven by something, to have a spirit he himself struggles to contain, but once he departs for Africa — all is lost. He finds a loneliness which must have attracted him as much as the vibrant call of Paris attracted him as a youth from his provincial town in the Ardennes. As much as he complains of the heat, the boredom, and the wearying existence he chooses for himself, he explains the impossibility of his return to France. I would love to be an exegete, to draw out several parallels where no lines exist, to state that when Rimbaud sees return to France as impossible, he is also speaking of his simultaneous longing and loathing to return to poetry. But the evidence is not there.

What is there, instead, is page after page of his too formal letters to his mother, his importuning and wheedling and idle dreams — not of the richer poetry he desired for Delahaye, wherein pretty flowers will be made to give space as well to the seagull’s turd — but instead his dreams are of making 10,000 francs, 30,000 francs, perhaps then he can return to France. There are a hundred lessons in this book — Don’t Stop Believing, Be True To Your Gift, Better To Burn Out Than Fade Away — but every one of the lessons is a lie. It is not a nihilistic existentialism which I am left with, reading these missives, but a disturbing unshakeable sadness. What waste! I can say. But then I must say it of everyone and everything. The story reads all too much like those people who showed such promise in high school, but then we all have to get along, have to take a job to feed the child we now have, have to make compromises. But there is no compromise here. No child, either to care for or even to abandon. For even that would be a definite act. Instead, Rimbaud lived in one of the more treacherous parts of the globe, doing fairly well it seems (which meant not dying or losing everything), and yet… And yet nothing.

It is not the waste. It is the easy renunciation of all that came before, with no signs that it meant anything. No hint of regrets beyond the usual petty regrets we all have of purchasing (or not purchasing) that house last year when the market was bad (or good), of forgetting to keep the paperwork on that major purchase when the time came to use the warranty. It is as if Rimbaud the poet never existed. Perhaps then he did not. After a decade of trying to “make it” by trading in eastern Africa, Rimbaud was finally forced off the continent by a horrific inflammation in his knee, leading him to Marseille where his leg was amputated. After a painful and lengthy “recovery”, he died, sixteen or seventeen years after his last known poem. He was thirty-five years old.

Valentine’s Day 2011

Alone and homesick among the masses
In this rain-grimed city, bejeweled
By bail bonds’ neon and carts of tear-streaked cans,
I ponder love, without even the cloud-hidden
Moon to palely reflect the warmth of your eyes,
Smoldering, angry, sick with worry,
Or smiling in my mirrored gaze.
And I know, love is not a flower
That blooms once, yearly, or as it please,
That worships the sun while wondering
If some other orb might perchance arrive.
No, love abides even within the wet asphalt
And lonesome winds and dreary dark,
Unhidden it faces the buffets and pains
And smiles in the returning sun’s warmth.
No petals to fold, no leaves to conceal,
It grows through even distance and time,
Steady in storms and delights in the dawn
Rising against my beloved’s true form.
No, love is not a flower.
A flower plucked, smiles and dies.
I smile, and die, and say
Pluck me again.

Hell’s Toilet

The towel I use to dry myself
Smells of meat almost spoiled.
Humid condensation leeches
Brown ichor from wallpapered walls.
Athwart an unsteady ignoble seat
Ringed with grime and decay,
I ponder the spider building his web,
Then dash his life away.
No small bird to peer within
This dank windowless room,
Sunk in miasma of unpleasant thought
Bitterly jealous of the tomb.
Ten units of plasma barely kept him stable.
They taped the tubes and his eyes.
Kept him on the table for six, seven hours.
And after all that, he died.
Brooding, claustrophobic walls
Close in about my knees.
My head free from enclosing constraint,
But not from what lies beneath.
The scars may be hidden above
But bore deep into bone.
Cannibal emptiness looses its stench
Upon the cloaca of the world.
Man was born to eat and shit,
And fail to digest for a time.
Would there were toilet paper enough
To wipe this ass of mine.

Driving on the Right

I drive on the right-hand side of the road. I do not do this because I believe that there is something inherently ‘better’ about riding to the right of oncoming traffic. I do confess that am habituated to this mode of driving, that it feels somehow more natural, but I do not doubt that if I were to move to England and were to get behind the wheel of an automobile in the United Kingdom for any length of time that I would be able to accustom myself – perhaps after several weeks of terrorizing the poor innocents who found me hurling toward them unconcernedly on the right-hand side of the orad – would be able, I say, to get used to driving on the left-hand side of the road. The right-hand side of the road, that is, is not the ‘Right’ side of the road, no more than the left-hand side of the road is the ‘Wrong’ side of the road. It is simply a matter of custom – as well as the apparent fact that, given any significant volume of traffic, we need to agree upon some such standard, if only to keep the roads moving, leaving aside the inevitable disaster, injuries, and deaths that would ensue from attempting to let the ‘unseen hand’ of the Market determine whether we should all drive on the same side, and which side that should be.

Now, it is interesting (to me; I make no claims for any other) that our Modern Age has seen a peristaltic tension and release around the idea of Custom or Tradition, sometimes erupting, as society decides it cannot quite digest changes normally, into a vomitous urge either to condemn Custom entirely, or to uphold Tradition in a reactionary and rigid manner. The widespread religion of Science which many follow has led perhaps to the preponderance going against Custom, as when we bewail those silly superstitions that will not die (say, that walking under a ladder is bad luck) and pat ourselves on the back for being oh so superior to those benighted fools who lived in Medieval times, or in the 19th century, or in the 50s, or in the 80s, or before 9/11, or in Canada. Putting to one side the question of whether walking beneath a ladder, while it might not actually cause misfortune, might still be unwise, I find myself filled with despair – not for society, oh no! – but for myself. I feel greatly inferior because of all my own superstitions, prejudices, bigotries, inadequacies, and my inability to loose the shackles clamped upon me by the world and time in which I live. I am inferior before the vastly more enlightened denizens of the future that will be able to look back at my times and decry that anyone could have believed the claptrap which – unfortunately – I believe; I believe it without even knowing what it is.

On the other hand, there may arise a great cultural battle between those who believe in driving on the right-hand side of the road and those who believe the opposite. Perhaps a study may come out comparing the high mortality and injury rates of the US versus that of the UK and, grasping the obvious, a movement shall arise to get rid of our backwards unscientific custom of right-hand driving. Perhaps a group of left-handed citizens of my country shall arise and demand an end to the tyranny of right-handers, that no more should the left hand be thought of as ‘wrong’, the tool of the devil, ‘sinister’. And the neutral voices – which really just don’t care, so they do not speak very loudly – will be joined by those who point out that, not only does the majority of the world drive on the right-hand side of the road (majority is right = democracy, or do you hate freedom?), but that our forefathers fought a revolution to secape from the hidebound constraints of the English, so why should we want to put those shackles back upon us now? Still others will point out that Leftists are bad, thus…. Another faction might point to the fact that in some cultures the left hand has only one, unmentionable purpose. Still another will bring up that many members of those cultures are kind of, well, you know, in the Middle East, which opens a whole other can of worms.

And so the battle will be joined. If you are liberal or gay or a ‘friend of Science’ you may insist that we eschew the barbaric custom of driving to the right of oncoming traffic. If you are Muslim or conservative or a ‘friend of Liverty’ you will fight tooth and nail against any change whatsoever.* Protests will be made, with cars hurling down the Interstates, poised for collisions to mirror the culture wars. Gridlock and mayhem will follow. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “and so it goes.”

And my inferior benighted superstitious barbaric self of this day and this time takes some solace from the thoughts of the imagined superior peoples to come.

*But remember what I said about my use of the word ‘you’†

† (I haven’t actually written this yet)

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I See Nobody

Ah, crafty, wily, quick-tongued Odysseus! Was there ever such a hero before, relying upon his wits rather than his brute strength? A fighter, too, and brave beyond all reckoning, willing to test himself against the siren’s song, though only after espying the loophole in their magic and challenging their beckoning music with prior restraint. Tennyson’s poem exactly captures the man, a hero for whom the eternal “now” of existence is the purpose of existence itself, and for whom the point of being is to always be on the move, pushing back the horizon by ever seeking it. Odysseus is a king among kings, a man among men, truly worthy of striving against gods.

Yet he is everyman, as well. James Joyce famously remarked that each man reenacts the Odyssey each and every day, and then the Irish writer proceeded to craft Ulysses and place the unheroic Mr. Bloom smack dab in the bowels of Greek heroic poetry. Whatever faults may accrue to Joyce from his idiosyncratic deconstruction of the English language in his magnum opus minus one, he understood all too well the power of this most primal of our culture’s tales.

Which brings us to Anon(ymous), a play by Naomi Iizuka purporting to be “a modern retelling of The Odyssey”, which I saw tonight at a high school production at Canyon Creek Academy. It was a very interesting production, and the title role was – as they say – very “ably performed” by one Izzy Pollack. The staging had its moments of brilliance and many of the cast teased out the best meal from the meat they were given. But ultimately the play – by which I mean the play itself, its dialogue, characters, scenes – left me quite unsatisfied.

I would blame Ms. Iizuka for this, if it were not for the fact that I really have no standing to blame anyone but myself for my own dissatisfaction. First, I have so little knowledge or comprehension of drama – of any stripe – that any pretensions I might have to critique even a Punch & Judy show would be quite laughable. After all, Naomi Iizuka is “one of the freshest voices in modern theater” (it says so in the program), and I am truly a nobody among nobodies, particularly in this realm unknown to me. Second, I fear I am a poor critic, unable to channel the true “suspension of disbelief” required for the theater, and too easily distracted by petty inconveniences such as the last-minute rush of people interrupting our place in line; watching twenty or more people push ahead of us to grab the few well-positioned seats in the very small Black Box Theater, I fear, tempered my enthusiasm for the forthcoming presentation of the dramatic arts. Third, I confess to an inability to temper my judgments based on the specifics of the situation; that is, I cannot tell a brilliant performance by a fifteen year-old from a passable one by a veteran, cannot distinguish faulty acoustics from my own wax-clogged ears plagued by tinnitus. And fourth and finally, I came to the play with an odd mixture of highest expectations and low interest; the former from the high regard I have for Homer’s masterwork and the love I have for its descendants from Tennyson to Joyce to the Coen brothers, the latter from the resigned way in which I backed into going to this play. But of that, more anon. For in spite of all these quite cogent reasons why I should not dare or deign to critique Anon(ymous), I have made up my mind to do so.

In this retelling, the Odysseus character – here called Anon – is a stranger to American shores, an immigrant, a refugee from some war-torn land. The play opens with the basic question of “Who Are You?”, to which Anon has no good answer. He cannot remember where he came from, how he got here, and doesn’t really know anything about where he is now. Anon declaims “Where I came from is far away from here” and a song and dance breaks out among the ensemble, evincing the far-away land of green tea and enormous butterflies that Anon cannot seem to recall clearly. During the drama Anon gives several names for himself – often by reappropriating a nearby sign – but most frequently calls himself “Nobody”. While of course this is a clear homage to the source (I would have loved to have seen the Cyclops, sorry, the one-eyed serial killer butcher Mr. Zyclo in the play, scream out “Nobody blinded me!”, but … well, we don’t always get what we want), the constant reinforcement of Anon as a “nobody” underscores both his impotence before the vast forces about him in this new land as well as the “everyman” nature of the lead character. His journey – or rather the series of vignettes, flashbacks, and a few unnecessary set pieces dictated by the original epic – is the story of a person coming to terms with who he is, trying to discover his self when that self has been uprooted from its past and has not the solace of home, for home is an unremembered nightmare and the place where he finds himself is a strange, inhospitable foreign land. Blah, blah, blah.

The preciousness of this play, signaled well in advance by its oh-so-clever title, reveals itself in earnest caring for the infinitude. The poor, the downtrodden, the forgotten, yes they deserve our respect and attention, but the pale character of Anon, who can’t clearly remember where he came from and is not quite sure where he might be going, is too shadowy a nonentity upon whom to suspend the weight of “all the lonely people”. Anon recalls the war, the crowded boat which foundered, separating him from his mother, but these plastic recollections do not give him character; they are merely hollow back stories for a work that would like to be heartfelt and caring for the uncared for, but which fails to stoop to pick up Elenor Rigby’s rice. The easy set pieces continue, hung like a shabby coat on the frame of The Odyssey: the spoiled rich girl who saved Anon’s life when he washed ashore on her father’s private beach (Circe), the one-eyed serial killer butcher (Mr. Zyclo), the sweatshop where the oppressive Mr. Yuri Mackus importunes into marriage Nemasani (also known as “Penny”, in case you couldn’t figure out that Eurymachus and Penelope are intended). But these scenes cloy with the accumulated nullities of fervent significance; yes, sweatshops are bad, serial killers are bad, rich people who own beaches, I suppose, are bad. But what then? The primacy of the little people before these fearsome evils is assumed, but little case is made for these people as true individuals. Or, as Dash says in The Incredibles, “If everyone is special, then no one is.”

Not that these scenes weren’t interesting, at times. Lisa Berger ably directed the production, giving ample credit to her high school case in the playbill for their contributions to a production full of sparkling visual effect, fascinating staging, and the almost dance-like physicality the actors brought to the performance. The presentation of the sweatshop was staged quite impressively, with the ensemble creating a factory with their mechanical movements as actors threaded a long wave of fabric through the all-too-human (and thus inhuman) machine. Mr. Zyclo processes his “meat” in another human machine fashioned by actors passing a red skein of yarn through a device implied and constructed from iron jetsam – a garbage can lid, a series of ducts – to produce Zyclo’s sausage for cannibals. In a later scene, as Anon and a girl he has rescued receive a ride from a lecherous truck driver, the truck is connoted onstage by sheets of corrugated tin held behind the seated actors, with other ensemble members rotating black umbrellas to show the spinning tires of the eighteen-wheeler, while the driver circles his hands on a garbage can lid cum steering wheel. The long sheets of cloth, used with great success in the sweatshop scene, are also used unsparingly to connote water, both as the lapping waves on the rich girl’s private beach, and – in one of my favorite scenes – stretched and billowing towards the audience and Anon and his protective goddess (Naja? I confess a difficulty mapping the characters in the play to those listed in the program) “swim” between the undulating sheets of blue. The effect was most pleasing.

Perhaps my favorite among many quite interesting scenes was the terrific fight between Anon and Pascal. Pascal has rescued Anon from the unseen menace of approaching men of ill intent (“The cops? INS? Rent-a-cops?” Pascal answers with a shrug when Anon asks who their would-be pursuers were), and has led Anon into tunnels for safety. In typical Hollywood fashion, the two must fight to become fast friends, and they proceed to do so over implied or express insults that one or the other may have made towards his partner. The subsequent fight itself was the showstopper of the evening – literally, gaining a spontaneous applause at its conclusion. This brilliant sequence was beautifully choreographed by Christopher Watkins, who mixed the fearsome action with live “slo-mo” sequences at each powerful blow, thus greatly heightening the dramatic impact while ensuring the actors’ safety. Well done! The character of Pascal was performed by Josh Guicherit, who gave a natural credibility to this turn as a streetwise hustler who takes the clueless Anon under his wing.

Alas, Pascal is doomed to die, turned into sausage for Mr. Zyclo’s beastly hunger. But then again, one of the hard aspects of the Odysseus trope is that everybody around him must die.

Yet notes of dissonance creep in whenever the parallels between this play and its epic source are underlined, as during our introduction to the sweatshop where Senator Laius and his wife Helen tour the sewing shop, assured by the oily Mr. Mackus that this is no sweatshop, in spite of the angry dance of the oppressed seamstresses which assure us that it is. This useful irony is not the dissonance I mean, but rather the haphazard sprinkling of Menelaus and Helen into the place which must represent Odysseus’ palace at Ithaca, where Penelope waits oh so patiently for her king to return. (As Kenneth Rexroth pointed out, The Odyssey can be read as a sailor’s ultimate fantasy, wherein the sailor goes out and fights and whores around for years, all while his wife sits chaste at home, waiting for her man to return from the sea.) In the source, of course, Menelaus and Helen welcome Telemachus into their home and encourage him to resist the suitors eating him out of his birthright. In Iizuka’s play, however, they are mere nonentities, especially the again cleverly named Senator Laius (played by Jordan Cavanaugh, who also plays the murderous Mr. Zyclo with perhaps a bit more relish). Helen, at least, moves the plot along by attempting to purchase the shroud Penny works endlessly on for her lost son. Tracy McDowell does a nice job of parroting the imperious tone of the entitled rich, as well as Helen’s simpering sympathy for Penny’s loss, though her amazing turn as Mr. Zyclos’ pet bird, emitting shrieks and cries that quite pleasantly reminded me of the best Dada poetry, was one of the high points of the performance for this ignorant audience member.

But making Mulligan stew from Homer’s meat and potatoes bothered me greatly. Beyond tossing characters hither and yon in an attempt to claim the sheen of Homer’s poetry for her own, Ms. Iizuka’s decision to make Penny the mother of Anon – rather than Odysseus’ wife – struck a heavy blow against my appreciation of the play as a retelling of Odysseus’ tale, a blow which resonated shrilly through many of the other elements and characters lifted from Homer, both shattering this connection (in my mind) to the masterful source and detracting (I felt) from the work before me. For at this point, when Odysseus becomes Telemachus, I begin to wonder why bother make a connection to The Odyssey at all. Scrub the names to remove all connection from “Yuri Mackus” to “Eurymachus”, give me a reason beyond the Cyclops episode to explain why a stranded immigrant might come face to face with a serial killer, and perhaps I will see a story shorn of its needless decorations. Invoking a masterwork means summoning its ghost, and unfortunately that ghost runs circles around Anon(ymous), though the chains that fetter Ms. Iizuka’s play are not those brought by Homer’s spirit, but are heavy iron forged by the play itself, its would-be weightiness instead becoming a deadweight that sinks the drama in spite of its light and music and action.

For Anon is no Odysseus. The merest hints of craftiness are given his character – his cleverness at making up his aliases mentioned before, distracting Mr. Zyclo by questions about wine or pretending to hear a lost bird – but for most of the play Anon merely stumbles into and through the action around him. Others drive him on his journey – Pascal rescues him, a rich girl rescues him, a kindly family with a curry restaurant lets him know his mother still lives. He has two fights which prove that he isn’t a complete wimp (it is left as an exercise for the reader to guess with whom the second fight takes place), and he insists the truck driver pull over as questions about its cargo arise, but…. Ultimately Anon’s passions are plastic and feeble. The vigorous lust Odysseus has for the eternal “now” is replaced in Anon(ymous) with mediocre maunderings through an eternal “here”. There is no point to Anon’s wanderings; his quest is made complete only through deus ex machina happenstance. (“It’s a smaller world than you think.” Really?) Anon(ymous) claims to be about trying to find a home, when home is gone and unremembered, but no home is presented, only an ill-realized “Golden Age” of a land long gone, and the frenetic, senseless vignettes of Anon’s new circumstances, Anon’s eternal “here” as easily replaced by an eternal “nowhere”.

Ultimately, of course, Anon(ymous) must be judged upon its own merits, and not upon the spirit of Homer with which it seeks to commune. That that spirit hovers above Iizuka’s play in vibrant contradistinction to the pallid characters in Anon(ymous) only heightens the lifeless nature of the easy caricatures presented by this modern drama. Anon, in portraying Everyman, more often than not becomes the Nobody he claims to be, beset by the unfathomable events which occur around him rather than shaping or being shaped by them. And while Odysseus had his own share of being put upon by the gods, never did the wily, crafty-tongued mariner simply submit to his fate. Truly the king of Ithaca insists upon drinking life to the lees, while Anon is left with the merest dregs of life, as the scintillating staging and banal platitudes of interconnectedness cannot distract, in the end, from Anon’s ponderous helplessness before the contrived chaos of his manufactured drama. In the end, Anon(ymous) falls flat, victim of its own hubris as it overreaches its powerful source, grasping instead a vacuity of “messages” that lie lifeless before the still living ghosts of The Odyssey. The dazzling smorgasbord of Ms. Iizuka’s play provides all-too-little meat for men and women hungry for meaning.

The play makes a great show of beginning in media res, with Anon’s muse urging him to “begin in the middle” – more homage to the blind poet of Chios. But the play’s middle is everywhere and nowhere, its circumference everywhere and nowhere, and it has no center with which to hold its chopped bits and pieces together. The play seems to “breathe” most freely when exposing its creaky machinery, as it processes Homer’s yarn to make it an unfortunate and indigestible sausage. The showy staging and innovative machinery of Anon(ymous) cannot hide the lack of nutrient within the play’s core.

Stupid, Stupid

Stupid, stupid, not so bright,
Leaving on the lights at night.
What masochistic fantasy
Absolves my sin ‘gainst synergy?

Killing dolphins in the sound
With wasted oil clawed from the ground,
Power purposed to gladden lives
Instead spewed forth to darken skies.

With every heedless step I make
Scores of living beings break.
With each unthinking breath I steal
A furry mammal’s share of weal.

How to assuage the spirits gone
Because I left the power on?
How to berate myself enough
For sqandering such precious stuff?

No debt so small that I can pay,
No sacrifice that I may make,
Which ever can erase this day
The thoughtless blight of my mistake.

What hammer sufficient to strike the blow?
What words so vile to excoriate enow?
O let me stanch my primal force
Sooner than blanch the wild water’s course.

Crack my head upon a rock,
Encase my heart in concrete block,
Buried beneath lifeless sands
In half-payment of life’s remands.

Stupid, stupid, not so bright,
Leaving on the lights at night.
What masochistic fantasy
Remits my sin ‘gainst harmony?

Psalm

A Psalm
for the Master of Music, and Leonard, if he’s still here

Who can make fun of God?
Is not His sense of humor apparent to all?
The platypus, mucus, the big toe,
Do they not proclaim the Lord’s laughter?

Who can mock the vast oceans?
Or belittle the mighty forests?
If I laugh at the least of God’s creatures,
Does the splendor of the Almighty dim before my derision?

The dog stirs and twitches
As it chases after dreams.
So too are my feeble japes
Mere dreams of Thy cosmic laughter.

How can any gag of mine
But pale before the smiling Holy Spirit
That blessed the world and its creatures
With hiccups, the sneeze, and flatulence?

If I tell of Thy jokes and wonders,
They are too many to be numbered.
I hear not the lying voices of the humorless.
I will bend mine ear to the heavens
And hear the laughter in the wind’s whisper,
The wave’s crash, and sudden thunder.

Enfold me in Thy infinite humor.
Protect me with lovingkindness.
For I am beset on all sides
By vile lies and passionless evils;
Detractors and unbelievers
Spew their bile at me.
The gall of the unfunny
I cannot swallow.

Though one thousand sullen ones
Stand stupidly in line before me,
I shall laugh with Thee, O Lord.
Though five hundred minutes
Are poured out upon a waste of rocks and sand,
I shall chuckle as I stub my big toe.

The sun rises in the East;
I shall awaken laughing.
The stars shine in the darkening skies;
I shall recline to sleep, laughing.

May I laugh all my days,
As you have laughed since the beginning of time.
Help me in times of torment,
And may I laugh at Thy jokes,
Even those I do not get.