achieve, vanish

A lot of the poems I love the best are difficult for me to show in this space because of line lengths or spacings and indentations, or just the length of the piece.  Or because of the prosody pedigree, because of a. rhyming and b. the Billy Collins thing.  I just cannot get started on a & b there, but I will say that a lot of this work reminds me of so-called "modern art," in that people who should get it are really very threatened by and hostile toward it, and then people who don't get it at all say dopey & ridiculous things like "I could do that."  To which of course, the answer is, ""But you didn't."  Or if one is generous, "So, go ahead!"  It is the difference between Robert Frost and Robert Fitterman.

I mean, I like plenty of vanilla poetry, but I like Monet, too.  OK, actually, I hate Monet.  But I like, um ... I like Renoir!  And Cezanne!  Seurat!  Not everyone can be a Fontana or an Arbus or a Van Gogh.  The difference between Vermeer and Van Gogh is the difference between like and love. 

So, for example, there is "Metropolis 16" from Fitterman that I was explaining to Mari a couple of days ago, which is so, like ... whoa.  Also, Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, which is fabulously say what?  Paul Violi's "Index," over which he gives an interesting chat on his process for that.  Christian Bok and his endlessly euphonious Eunoia is a piece that I adore (there is a lot of making clicky on those pages).  Katie Degentesh has a whole chapbook sitting right here on my desk and I cannot pick just one.  Also, Merry Fortune. 

Then there is the poet whose work I do not like at all.  She reads this poem on an audio collection we own of poetry read by the poets.  I would be driving the car, listening to her tracks without realizing it and then with it stuck in my head endlessly make fun of it, endlessly.  Whenever the children were being naughty, I would declaim in a fake & dramatic accent the first line, and tiny 4-year-old Fillette would finish the stanza.  Years of therapy for my daughter, I guess, which it seems this gal really needed.

Daddy
Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Here is a more nuanced discussion of this poem, in case there should be more in the world for it than ugh.

Comments

[Carlos]

I didn't know you liked Eunoia! It's right under my mom's old copy of Profiles in Courage.

"I flirt with girlish virgins in miniskirts." Hm.

[lala]

yes, but you know that I hate Plath and surely that counts for something, guy.