FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| MR. SMUTTY You really should get to know me, reader, for I'm quite the chap. Did you know I think exclusively in Latin? And that I then translate these thoughts into French, then Hebrew and then into the Queen's good ol' English, by which time they resemble the handiwork of a Supreme Court stenographer taking dictation from a spastic gorilla w/ a Speak 'n' Spell glued to its booty? (Which is to say: brilliant.) Did you know I'm of average height, but carry myself magnificently? There is more culture in my pinkie finger than in the yogurt crusted around your mouth, gentle reader. Did you know my head swims w/ poetry 24-7, including leap years? S'true. I can, for inst, find beauty in a hospital implosion, and not just 'cuz I hate hospitals and all they represent (i.e. sick people). In my poetic mind's eye, tumbling smokestacks transcend pedestrian political metaphors: they become elegant swans, plummeting to earth thanx to malnutrition 'cuz people fed them Glossette Raisins all summer & now they're too dumb to forage or fly South or whatever it is they're supposed to do right about now. On sec'nd thought, they're more like faulty Labrador helichoppers, screaming into terra firma. No wait, make them emus diving for fish offa the German coast, and the piles of dusty bricks are tourists clapping their hands in childlike glee. I constantly quote poetry. The especially attentive waiter/waitress/squeegee kid may find a little E.Dickinson along w/ her/his 15% gratuity; on chilly morns the paperboy (a 45-year-old divorced father of two, I've watched him grow from "scalawag" into "disappointment," yet he'll always be "boy" to me) is greeted w/ a steaming mug of cocoa & some O.Nash. I reserve the final lines of Yeats's "The Second Coming" for my weekly Who's-Afraid-Of-Virginia-Woolf-style dinner parties, punctuating "rough beast" by hurling my half-full (I'm an optimist) glass into the fireplace, sending Scotch into the flames and timid guests into the night. An untitled poem by Mr. John Lennon is expected to fetch "shitloads" at an upcoming auction. Altho a clever indictment of post-industrial Europe, the poem (a certain 4-letter obscenity - I shan't ruin the surprise - repeated 104 times around the single wd "you") is far from his best lit'rary effort. A quick peel thru The Penguin John Lennon (1966, collecting A Spaniard In The Works and In His Own Write, and featuring a delightful cover photo of Winston O'Boogie decked out in Superman threads) ('tis ironic to the contemporary eye, given that Lennon's illustrations have a decidedly Callahan-esque wobble to 'em, and what w/ Callahan & Chris "Superman" Reeve both being, y'know, kinda on the quadsy side) reveals intricate wdsmiffery, like, "Arriving at the station/ Always dead on time/ For his destination/ Now He's dead on line / (meaning he's been got by a train or something)" or "There were no flies on Frank that morning - after all why not?" (The latter echoed by Great American Poet R.Meltzer, some 20 years later, in "I'm The One Without": "shitist heo new ithf li esonit/ shit tist heo new ith f li e son it.") Anyway, even if [expletive deleted x 104] is a minor work, Lennon still kicks rump on that hippie-guy from Phish. Heck, as far as rockstar poets go, JL's right up there w/ D.Berman from the Silver Jews (he's got a poetry collection coming soon and the new Silver Jews album's out 10/20/98 on Drag City): "I point to a place where kids had made angels in the snow and then, for some reason, told him that a troop of angels had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground./ He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer." Next week: diction, poise, grace and etiquette made E-Z! |