American poetry in recent years has tail spun like a wounded dragonfly and has threatened to make a lightweight puff-crash and disappear altogether inside rap music, comics, popular song, rock&roll, the blues music and rub itself into the long malleable ocean of prose. American poetry has taken a kindly midwestern neighborly tone to it — sort of like a polite backyard talk over a prim white picket fence about nice kindly kinfolkish things.
Gone are the days of Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Etheridge Knight, Aaron Kramer, Robert Bly, William Stafford, Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandberg, Vachel Lindsey, Andre Lorde, and Denise Levertov; their lines were bricks put against many sociopolitical and environmental hypocrisies; they explained it so well that it didn't need a name or title to know or to call it by.
Today in the post 9/11 twilight fade down to darkness, American poetry has wandered rabbit like into the tall grass to hide from the rap-rich night cats, from being spot lit by a smooth prosy moon, to hide from horn-rimmed innocent bending into scurrilous behavior of rock&rollers and blues artists, breathing whiskey and tobacco smoke like a flammable fuel wide spread over the night. American poetry hunkers down afraid it'll burn down to be forgotten along with the rest of the little remains of Saturday night in America.
Hold all that in abeyance to consider poet Mary B. Soda, whose works have risen in popularity in the last two years especially, with university English faculty nation wide.
Soda possessing a carbonated personality teaches at the Upper Mississippi State University [UMSU] in North Country. She has the Franz Erling Wassenburg chair and the endowment coupled with it. [Wassenburg and surviving family were the chief brewers of North Country form 1850 to 1990, when they sold the brewery. Now Wassenburg Lager is contracted out to a brewer outside the North Country and the quality badly down-slipped.]
Soda lives in an ole prairie style house on a flattop hill west of the UMSU Campus. She has two rottweilers named Morvis and Mervin. The dogs set themselves defensively and bark tough as verbal field artillery while Soda tries to quiet them on her way to the door. She puts them in a pen in the side yard.
She makes a pot of green tea and arranges pecan sandies on a glass plate. Her home is remarkably unadorned with books, a computer sits on a desk covered with a large plastic bag, a ream of paper sits next to it with its end flaps tucked and taped neatly. She carried the teapot and the sandies, then returns with napkins and cups. The phone rings. She cups the receiver between her shoulder and her ear as she talks she hands me a copy of The Upper Atlantic Poetry Monthly, her glamour shot’s on the cover. The zine is a straight-through glossy. Her photo make her resemble a famous Hollywood starlet. Her lips gleam like sun lit ice, a fan blows her hair as if wind inflating a bird’s wing feathers at the initiation of flight. Her cheeks are a makeup artists airbrushed artsy seashells. Her eyes have a current-Hollywood-hero prowling cat glow to them. Just like a Hollywood diva teasing a North Country farm boy into thinking even he can take her to the Friday high school dance.
“They sent a professional model photographer up here to do the shoot — it was done in the art department, it took all morning, he had me in all types of costumes— it was a whirl wind of his commands and flash bulbs and silky garments. Jay Frisbee’s the editor and thinks this mag is a watershed project to bring poetry to people who normally read People, Cosmopolitan, and other popular fashion and culture magazines. He wants poetry that’s what he calls post-modern — or poetry that is not in any sense convoluted or filled with figurative or what he calls drunken language— if you mean a straight line then write a straight line. He does not want feelings and does things through liquored-up double speak or contemplating how a jet fuel stream is a flat line compared to the ground — minus the effects on gravity —” she said.
“What about people that still like Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Yeats, The English Romantics, Herman Melville, Alex Pope, W.C. Williams and Emerson?”
“In my view they clotted their abilities to see this dark world for what it is — and by calling it something it’s not, to me and Fribee that’s a type of lying — calling a atomic blast an electronic mushroom makes no sense to me, saying our polluted water bodies and water ways have a permanent chemical memory is a way of adding sugar to make the bitter poison we and our offspring must deal and live with more digestible.”
“It seems poetry has fallen into quite a slump...”
“That’s because it’s too sub textual — and evergreen bush when the bird in the bush is more important than the bush.”
“How did you arrive at poetry?”
“I was a drama major and I needed an upper level division elective and I took a poetry workshop class — I knew nothing about poetry — I still don’t know anything about it and I have a Ph.D. In its practice — I went on my teacher’s praise — he told me that he liked to talk about my poems because he could say smart things that other people couldn’t challenge — couldn’t find evidence rolled in the poems convoluted layers to justify their opinions.”
“Your latest book, Black Anvil — the jacket blurbs said ‘straight shooting as black ink on white paper — and these poems can only mean one way.’”
“Hank Winegaard was my first workshop teacher — he made the other people in class angry because he said he could say such intelligent things about my poems — when I wanted to go to graduate school, Hank wrote me such nice letters that after I arrived, my new teachers said I should thank him for the nice letters. I kept on with my non-imagist non-figurative non-sub textual language poetry — although I had problems with teachers, who for the sake of their lack of enlightenment — maybe that’s too mean — but they were upset I didn’t have reverence for W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot. I told them before the class I’ve never read them and I’m not reading them now — let them collect dust on the bookstore and library bookshelves. To make a long story short, I told them I thought most of all poetry written up until I came up with my plain speaking lines stunk and was unreadable — they gasped at me — I said the only writing I trust are essays — I told them — I have bookshelves full of them. I did want them drawing black circles around me — I mean I didn’t want them to not take me too seriously. I was barely able to finish the degree. I had problems getting the Ph.D. Too; though, I had to deal with less people — but they thought better to let me finish than get in my way — and thereby having me as a perpetual problem.”
The green tea cooled enough to drink and pecan sandies crumbled like dandruff down shirtfronts and stuck like white flecks on sweaters.
“How do you think your work will be viewed in 50 to 100 years?”
“That’s not for me to say [she said taking a slim Henry Clay cigar from a wooden humidor, V-notching it, and rolling the tip slowly over a butane lighter’s flame until the tip was red and gray — she put it in her mouth and puffed until a Bob Marleyan-like smoke plum engulfed her head — she motioned her hand at the box for gestured directly; she received affirmative nods and the cigar was put in a shirt pocket for later] after I’m gone they can say what they want — but I think in a hundred years my work will be the granite headstone holding all English language poetry coming before it under the green grass. I get letters every day from college and high school teachers thanking me for writing poetry that they can say concrete intelligent things about — you see, teachers on all levels don’t like to be embarrassed by reading Yeats and Eliot and euh ... Water Closet Williams too for that matter and having students come back to them with different ideas that can be proved textually — teachers need a strong pulpit from where they are always in control and have mental mastery over students — my poetry will be remembered and read for hundreds and hundreds of years because teachers can say intelligent things about them.”
“What do you really think of the glamour shot of you on the zine cover?”
She dumps the gray ash in a convenient wine glass, and takes a long draw, making the tip glow bright red, them blowing a long gray smoke stream. The sandies, for their part, were buttery tasting and probably alive and seeded with pib fat shortening, something from science and medical science making the supply pipes to the poet’s heart issue grave quiet tocsins heard only in dreams and deep solitude. She hopes [as do many green tea drinkers] that the green tea’s antioxidants are inside her blood dog fighting the particles of heart disease, bladder walling them before spewing them out dead into the toilet water.
“You really want to know — I hope the photo ends up on Life magazine’s issue of the decade’s most influential people — I hope I’m on the cover.”
“Have you considered smoking a 52inch ring gauge — I find they draw better.”
She sat back and leaned forward and had a tea sip.
“You see, when you have a nose as long and thin as mine, you just have to match your stogies to fit its general overall length.”
“Have you read any of the lines of Dylan Thomas?”
“No. Who the Hell is Dylan Thomas?”
The green tea circles the cup like a river current bending around a boulder.
“What about Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath?”
“What about them. You don’t seem to understand — all poetry in the English language stunk until I started writing — now I’m training poets to write like me and they’ll train poets to write like me to completely negate and disarm the terrible misleading convoluted poetry of the past — if there’s a god, I can’t believe it has an ego or will stronger than mine.”
“What do you think of verbal melodies?”
“Stop trying to confuse me with the language of the past.”
“See that loud up there — what does it look like to you?”
“It’s just water vapor gathered together in the correct atmospheric conditions to create itself — science has it covered, I don’t need to say anything.”
“That cloud reminds me of my deep emotional heart.”
“Have another cookie. I’ll bet you’re a Pound-Yeats fan — think of it like this — when you’re in the receiving area to a place of commerce, when you hear a certain name or word — say you say to an average working class person, “golden apples of the sun” when they hand you a golden delicious apple, and you’re thinking of Yeats’ line from “The Song of Wandering Aengus” — they look at you like there’s something wrong with you — you hear a name like Marcia come over the intercom and most people say, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.” My point is that what’s great about my poetry is once people hear my lines they’ll stick there like the name “Marcia” they think of Jan Brady’s sulky plaintive remark. Average people will quote my lines.”
How can you be so certain of yourself — isn’t that something for someone else to decide, maybe 50 to 75 years down the line—”
“They may wither correctly or incorrectly,” Soda popped, poured and fizzed into sun-brighten almost crystal surrounding daylight.
“But to survive 100 years, poetry has to be champagne like, well kept to preserve its effervescence. Or it needed to be kept well corked and mitigated by extensive praise before its opened.
The steno book was flipped shut and dropped in a coat pocket. The photographer showed to take some photos at the departure time. Soda popped and spun smiles and whirled he hair like a fashionable helicopter’s chopping blades.
Soda hand-loaded her dogs in the house as the car engine caught. The car moved away from her “historic” curb. The notebook rumbled like a small volcano in the suit coat pocket beside the cigar.
But a deep thinking person well ensconced the art’s disciples must consider this —
In three months it’ll be cold enough that no one with good sense will go to bed naked. The snow and the cold will put a lid of white and ice on this land tight enough that no clarion cry of “rosebud” will provide no Hollywood-1950s-styled-pipe-smoke-tinged-wing tip-wearer any warm freedom — it’s all hoe big the imagination makes the warm cozy feelings, until after Valentine’s Day, when the ice and cold often give way to the beginning string moderation.
