Myth of Arrival

I could listen to Janis all day long. Her backup band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, though, never pleases. This video is a good example. The first 3 minutes and 20 seconds of the folktune Coo Coo don't even have her singing. Some unwashed hippie with no vocal range sings with a voice that makes Bob Dylan's sound like a heavenly choir. But that's the tastes of Baby Boomers for you, man.

I am amazed that in an age where Hollywood cranks out endless biopics on every warm body under the sun no one has brought this woman to back to life (or what passes for it up on the silver screen).

But this really isn't about any of that. I was reading Apparition (Favorite Poem) by Mark Doty and marveling at how it's rather Methuselahish to claim that the younger sprat poets just don't “get” the good poems in the same way he does. “The old words are dying” Doty begins but salvation is at hand in the form of some hayseed youth with “loping East Texas vowels” reading “without irony” the famous Shelley poem. See? Texans can read! It's satire, riffing on a line by Stephen Colbert. Doty then closes the poem by simply quoting the good part of Ozymandias, which feels like cheating.

When I first started writing poetry a comment by my mother seems like good advice here too: “When the quote you are using is better than the poem you are writing why read the poem at all?” Reading this particular poem (which was included in The Best of American Poetry 2009 “without irony” as well) was a lot like watching the video posted above: sure, everyone gets their turn at the microphone, but sometimes we still have to wait until the end to get to the good stuff.

Just stop and explain why we're acting
like this? Huh. Eve in the Garden. That's why
we have this Virgin and Whore thing going?
Sucks to be you. That's why we're screwed up, high
on meth or sleeping with (ugh) God knows what
ate up Janis, fucked up on tequila.
This is the ease in which we love: faggot,
dyke and endless breeders. Mamacita,
bless me. I love them all. If love is more
or less letting go why do we still cling
onto this odd myth that calls women whore?
turns sex into smut? this world bristling
with hate. Even then I'll take smut over
it all, everything they have to offer.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Original Poetry, Original Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.