Walking by the open door of a colleague’s
evening history class not too long ago, I was called in from the hall and
invited to join the discussion. Being adequately well-educated myself, I was
able to contribute to a discussion on modern European history, and I thoroughly
enjoyed the talk with a great prof and a great group of her engaged and fairly
bright students. In the ebb and flow of an exchange that had channeled into
social politics, this line arrived: “That stuff with Clinton was nothing, by
the way. There are women who line up to sleep with powerful men.” Not being
powerful myself, I couldn’t vouch personally, but it’s a well-known phenomenon.
I remember Henry F--king Kissinger’s dictum that “power is the ultimate
aphrodisiac.” I’m not going to delve too far into the psychology of this, but I
would bet that for the women involved the rewards for this kind of behavior probably
include a sense of power-sharing, and feeling of control (at least momentary),
and it would be founded on a broader understanding of the woman’s relative powerlessness
and her perceived lack of control. She takes in, as it were, something the
powerful man has and that she needs or wants. David Letterman got into hot
water sleeping with members of his staff, Kissinger, Clinton, Berlusconi in
Italy—just a few of a long, long list. It does seem that some men who attain
positions of power almost expect to have sex whenever they want with whomever
they choose—as if it comes with the territory, a perk. There is something insufferably
egocentric about that. It’s risky, but flaunting that risk serves to further
validate the man’s power. I also understand that as women more and more attain
positions of power in our culture, they’re showing the same behavior. But
powerful women haven’t caught up to their male counterparts in this arena yet,
not by a long shot. It’s young attractive women and rich powerful men. If this
is nothing more than a stupid, baseless stereotype, I’m willing to drop it. But
I think it’s not. And of course the reason I bring it up is because B. does
here.
I’m leery of this poem. If it’s “honest,”
then fine. According to Berryman’s legions of hagiographers, that’s the very
thing that rescues The Dream Songs
from run-of-mill bigotry. Sure I’m an asshole, but I admit it! In demonstrating
what a complete asshole I am, I’m offering a meta-critique of what it means to
be an asshole, thereby rescuing myself. I pull myself up by my own jockstrap. And,
by the way, it gives me license to behave in whatever jerk-off way I want to, because
the more ridiculous my behavior, the more pointed my meta-critique of what what
I’ve done stands for. It’s a brilliant no-lose situation!
I don’t totally discount some of
that, actually. While I do have some serious problems with the minstrel
business and the contemptuous cultural appropriation of that whole institution,
I understand up to a point what B. was up to in turning to it time and again. I
don’t like it, but I don’t have to. This, poem, though, I see it as a fairly
uncomplicated instance of self-aggrandizing erotic myth-making. And for heaven’s
sake, I recognize simple sexual braggadocio when I see it, to put it more
plainly. You can’t be a guy in this culture and not have run into it endlessly.
He’s older now, of course, not so
obsessed with the “heat of the chase” as he once was. The poem is a look at how
things were back in the day. The poem centers around answering mail: requests
for poems, readings, whatever, which were routine and dull and which he declined
in polite, routine, dull terms in his slippers. But there were those few from Amy (!) and Valerie (!) who “hotted up his mail.” That’s the phrase that set
off, is meant to set off, my ruminations about sex and power. Amy! Valerie!
Lovely feminine names—and the chicks themselves? Va va voom! Oh, we know what happened when some girls hotted up his mail,
don’t we? It’s all about planting the implication that it all happened because his
fame—it may be filled with tedious mail, but let’s not forget, he’s famous—attracted these girls. Along with
famous comes powerful, right? So, of course, along with power came sex. And now
the speaker is in the even more powerful position of having progressed through
those days of chase-obsession to where he can look back and say, yep. Oh yeah…
Let me drop you a few hints about what that
was about… Boy, was I something…
A girl in college sent me a
letter anointed with perfume, once. I guess that qualifies as hotted up mail,
right? It was Charlie, which I never much liked, but college girls were wearing
it a lot in the 70s, and anyway, I certainly appreciated the gesture. It made
the ballpoint ink run, this oily smudge where the perfume soaked through the
card. Her name was Susie. I ran into her once at a party. Totally cute, and not
the least bit shy about what she had in mind. Clearly she could tell I was a blockhead, but that didn't seem to be that big of a problem. Huh? What? Me? was my response. I kept the card for years, pulling it out and
smelling it often. Did I call Susie, write her back? Arrange a date? Um—no. Just
smelled the card a lot. For years. There’s the difference, I suppose, between a
powerful man on one hand who takes action then brags about it to guys in suits
over martinis, or in poems years later, and on the other a nineteen year old schlemiel,
unaware of the simple and less manipulative power of just being young and not a
total jerk, but who knew he wasn’t ready for all this stuff.
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