coldhearted scientist وداد

I have now as a header image a different slice of the same image I have used before, of the market at Chichicastenango. The smoke and mist you see is incense mixed with evening dew.

Ian Frazier’s article “The New Poetry”, in the July 22, 2002 New Yorker (34-35), reminds us that several British and American poets of the early twentieth century were less staid, at least when young, than we may have been led to believe they were, if we studied them in school. Here are some examples.

Thomas Hardy wrote this:

The land’s sharp features seem’d to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
That booty-licious booty there,
Show ’em what you’re workin’ with!

and this:

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited:
Hunh! Hotpants!

Ezra Pound liked big-leg women, and Hilda Doolitle was a professional wrestler before she became a poet. Her first collection was entitled Booty Call. When Edwin Markham wrote “The Man with the Ho’,” Doolitle took it as a personal slight and wrote this:

Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms;
Spare us the beauty
Of fruit-trees,
Chump!
…
Pomegranates already broken,
And shrunken fig,
And quinces untouched,
I bring thee as offering,
Suckah!

D. H. Lawrence was famous for “The Thong Song”, and did his best not to glamorize the aethereal-yet-decadent ‘poetic’ lifestyle.

W. H. Auden, soon after his arrival in New York, wrote:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street;
I am a sex machine
And I’m super bad.

As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade,
You gotta get up,
Now get back. Good God.

and:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn:
Get up off that thing,
And shake, and you’ll feel better.

And Auden’s “Ten Songs in Praise of Yo’ Booty” uses phrases such as “gettin’ jiggy wit’ it”, in multiple repetitions.

Frazier’s point is that there was a time “when the new poetry broke the rules”. But there is something he does not mention. Let’s make it at least three things: jazz, and ‘Ebonics’, and African-American writing. Does it not seem that there must be some connection? Have the anthologists ‘whitened’ the record of these poets’ words? Made a specific effort to downplay the African-American connection?

Axé.