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Tue, 04 Dec 2007
Book of the Day: Wicked, Excellently by Brent Terry
Brent Terry's Wicked, Excellently is challenging in its humor: Terry's comic linguistic riffs bring a smile to the reader's face, but often rupture conventional meaning, requiring the reader to puzzle through some surface difficult to grasp the deeper meaning beneath.
This poem is a good example of Terry's mind at work:
Sentiment, Not Sentimentality
Go ahead, weep if you want.
Sob. Keen. Howl Spanish curses at French nuns
on a Swedish bus crawling across New Mexico
like a bug. Like a silver centipede on a skateboard
at noon, under a sky obscene in its beneficence.
Mother told me never to trust a sky like that.
Told me my father was a sky like that, and
we all know how that picnic turned out.
Use the word sorghum in a sentence.
Mother would write my name in my underwear "just in case."
It's noon and the landscape is jagged
and endless and red, bits of green scattered here and there
as if someone had disemboweled the earth
and the earth had just eaten a salad.
Because I'm crying on a motorcycle, the earth-
guts look like a DeKooning--abstract,
yet in one corner a hint of a figure presides.
Orange bed. Mountain with coyote. Nuns exclaiming.
Otherwise it's just shapes and squiggly lines playing
connect-the-billboard from here to Denver,
where the nuns visit the Mint and all my former lovers
meet each Tuesday for tea and embarrassing stories.
Embarrassing for me, that is, except
I'm not even there, so why be embarrassed,
and besides, when I'm drunk I recount vividly
how each of their faces contorted while coming.
The little monkey noises.
So, who's embarrassed now?
East of the Rockies, the roadside is littered with Nebraskas.
Iowa's guts are sutured and healing nicely.
Des Moines. DuBuque. Davenport.
What is sorghum and how is it used?
I stop for gas and a candy bar at a station next to a river.
The parking lot's an insurrection of toads.
It's hard not to squish them, hard not to want to.
I am paralyzed before the candy case.
The radio says sorghum prices are down.
Our Grandfathers fought in the war,
so now all roads lead to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The nuns clamber back onto the bus, one
munching a Reese's, mumbling of toads and plagues,
though in French it sounds sort of sexy.
Dieu is a dominatrix with garters
under Her habits, a wooden ruler,
and don't even think about saying no!
There is a highway and there are tears--
a blurred and furzy Panorama. There is a driveway,
a light on and more tears. There's chicken
and Mahler and candles and beer.
My love is in my arms and still there are tears.
She takes off my clothes: inside my underwear
there's someone else's name. Inside my guts
there's a knife, and it feels like the sky.
Sorghum is a grass, cultivated as grain or forage.
Taking the old writing cliche that "sentiment"--feeling--is OK but "sentimentality"--excessive feeling--is not, Terry embarks on a jaunt through the various nuances of this issue. The poem's breakneck pace leaves little room for consideration along the way, but a lot of food for thought at the conclusion.