He resigned in the uplifting summer,
The TVs were on, the airports crowded,
Cocaine disfigured the public figures,
Temps were up, as they say,
All the teleprompters agreed
The day of his resignation was a bright clear day.

The radios played Sonny and Cher,
Walter Cronkite’s intonation was good,
The Washington Post glittered in triumph.
The nation was saved.

The self-inflicted conspiracy
Was kept from the real conspiracy
Hatched in New York City in nineteen sixty five
When George and Patti’s love was blossoming,
(According to Patti their love was “alive”)
Long before George fucked Ringo Starr’s wife
In a nineteen seventy three haze of brandy and heroin.

Pretty Patti Boyd left Harrison for Clapton
The summer the big resignation happened,
The betrayal by Maureen Starkey the last straw,
Eric begging his best bloke’s wife with poetry,
“Layla,” and three years of sorrow on hellish smack.
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The Beatles were not coming back.
George hated fame, trapped at Friar Park,
Alternating between chanting denial and partying.
“The temptations of the flesh always intervened.”

The loud fucking sounds of John and that woman
In the big bedroom where the coats were
So no one could leave Rubin’s party,
The Upper West Side affair, election eve, 1972,
Yoko standing among the guests all listening
To John’s fucking, O leftwing, O rightwing dick.

You were stoned like us, your guitar survived it all,
The groupies, the drugs, the physical decay,
Nixon; John and Paul bossed you with their poetry,
But Sinatra knew “Something” as a love song would live,
He told this to you personally,
Your wife listening from a proper distance, nervous
From the stares of Sinatra’s short, wide friends.

Patti was with you and got scared
When you visited Haight Ashbery,
Summer of nineteen sixty seven,
And saw the “spotty youth” and felt the menace
Of the stoned mob crowding around you
Yearning for a song and wisdom…
And that was the end, Patti said,
You and George walking faster, scared.

Poem, receive an honored guest:
Rachel Loden is the best
At putting Nixon into verse,
Singing songs within his hearse.

In the nightmare of bad poetry,
Quit it, Dick, you’re scaring me,
And the living poets prate:
My interview will have to wait.

Intellectual disgrace
Makes this a pretty groovy place;
We are acting as if we know
Where the line is going to go.

Follow, Milhous, follow right,
To the slim, divided night,
Shining up your Quaker shoes,
Let us go and watch the news.

Patti’s hurt; her streaming tears
Will wash away regrets and fears.
Eric cheats as much as George.
O flower! O strange gorge!
Report this comment

A New Critic in the making…
Report this comment

“Plath sucks and so do you”
Report this comment

“this is not literature. this is poetry.”

Isn’t that lovely? Perhaps flarf’s raison d’être, if it has one, is our need to come to terms with bright flashing bits of beauty like that.
Report this comment

The Sylvia Plath Story

First, are you our sort of a villain?
Do you wear
Jodhpurs, a codpiece or a crown,
That Meihkampf look,
Black boots or a riding crop,

Stitches over your heart? No, no? Then
How can we cast you in anything?
Stop puling.
Open your head.
Empty? Ah, empty. Here is fake blood

To ooze when her teeth snip your cheek
And a cheque with a paltry
Six zeros.
Will you star in it?
It is guaranteed

To send rugged sweater sales soaring
And gas bills
Through the roof.
You chew scenery, it’s an Oscar.
Will you star in it, star in it, star in it?

–

I came across this poem at about the same time I stumbled upon this frightening stuff:

http://www.urbanbaby.com/talk/posts/51120606
Report this comment

Beautifully said, Rachel. I think poets are often so obsessed with the “new” of “make it new” that they forget to acknowledge the fact of the “it.”
Report this comment

I hope “Milhous” becomes something very much other than “Rabbit,” as Steven Fama suggests. It’s meant as both homage and travesty, and fails if it doesn’t convince on each count. If it alternately amuses and annoys the hell out of the ghost of Wallace Stevens, I’ll be very happy.
Report this comment

The musical cover uses the essential constituent parts — the same words, the same notes — but runs those things through a different performer’s style or approach. For example, there’s Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” and then there’s the Dead’s version. The latter is an interpretation. Garcia and the boys didn’t re-write the words or basic structure of the song (maybe transposed it to a friendlier key, punched up the rhythm here and there, etc.) so it’s different from what Loden did here, I think.

The analog would be Loden reading aloud the exact same words of Wallace Steven’s poem, in the Loden reading style. That’d be a cover.

The poetic re-use of a text, with a change of the actual constituent parts (the words), almost always is going to have or raise the question of a parodic or comic effect just because there’s a difference between the remembered original and the new, substituted words. It sort of works like a pun except without the homonym-istic (is that a word?) overtones.

There is an analog to what Loden did here that maybe can be pointed to in music: “cover” songs that change the words. The far-end of that spectrum is somebody like Weird Al, who had a bit of fame when he took Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and made it “Eat It” or took the Knack’s “My Sharona” and if I remember right made it “My Bologna.” Those were pretty simple (but fun!) and any comparison to what Loden actually did in her poem here really is silly.

A remarkable thing about this particular Loden poem is how convincingly it becomes something other than a parody, despite the natural tendency to see or hear that given the borrowing of another’s work and substituting in new words.

Maybe more remarkable in that way, if only because the poem is so much better known, is her “take” on Creeley’s “I Know A Man.” This too in Dick of the Dead.
Report this comment

I must further say that in addition to Loden’s poem having inherently parodic elements, it is AT THE EXACT SAME TIME,

an homage to Stevens’ poem as well . . .
Report this comment

Instead, and this is hard to word-ify — “Rabbit” as used really reinforces a key thing in “Milhous.”

Okay, here is something sort of specifc about what I’m thinking. “Rabbit” is about the self merging, transcendent like, with the world, maybe the poetic slef entering it’s sphere as evening turns to night. It’s about the loss of self.

“Milhous” ain’t about that at all, but about ol’ Nixon becoming totally ego-ized. “Myself” and “me” and the “head like a Rushmore in space.”

And then there are things that are just fun, like the turn of peaceful August into cruel April, with all the latter connotates to poetry readers.

Thanks for this post, and yes thanks too for the mention of the post about Loden’s recent reading.

Does that make sense?
Report this comment

I think I even knew about the spelling difference.
Report this comment

When I said “That [Rachel Loden] has chosen to appear in public after all these years is really quite an event,” I was thinking of this:

http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/08/reading-report.html

Kent
Report this comment

Here is an interview I did with her a couple years or three back, “Poetic License and the Powers That Be: Rachel Loden.”

http://jacketmagazine.com/21/loden-iv.html

I had her latest book and my son stole it in June and took it to Chicago.

Kent
Report this comment