#363

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All right, begin by imagining George C. Scott and Shirley Jones (as she was presented in the cinematic musical production of Oklahoma!), moaning in bed… Wait, do I have to? Skip it…

It gets better: Here’s a segue, right into a profound pronouncement for you, about the geopolitical state of the world, after B./Henry declares himself a “potent” Communist:

                                    —as we all know,

            the peoples in the East

have no sexual problems, have no problems

but housing & food & ideology:

Um…Really?

So Lenin crossed the border and took on the Revolution in Russia, and we all know the result of that little junket. Ideology, no food, etc. But there’s compensation for us back here in the West.

            But the issue of Miss Jones & Mr Scott

            comes at us lovely & sane.

Perhaps I’m missing something regarding the loveliness and sanity of this “issue.” It took me awhile to make something out of the Spanish Armada poem, DS 361, and that paid off. This?

            God bless our fate in the West.

Now, maybe there’s some kind of sarcastic criticism here of Western mass media’s exploitation of sexuality, its cynical tapping into base-level psychological drives in order to sell its product, and “God bless our fate in the West” drips with irony. We in the West are consequently so loaded down with psychological insecurities that it’s a wonder we can ever pair off and have sex at all. (Maybe, fifty years on, that explains those Viagra commercials and all those Cialis emails that flood my Inbox!) But no. The poet is really saying, if those movie stars “should not prove hot”—the West’s last, best go at a valorizing public eroticism—then I’m moving to the USSR, where people there (as they say) with no hang-ups “f*** like minks”. (That’s a phrase that circulated widely during my misguided, misspent Western adolescence.) Them Soviets, you know, raised a lot of minks, both as models and guides to uninhibited weasel-like fornication, I’m thinking, and as a reliable source of fur for ladies’ coats and those cool fur hats with the ear flaps and big red stars on the front the men wear when it’s forty below zero in Siberia.

Maybe. But whatever its true object in the poet’s mind, I rather tend to think this poem slips on the ice and falls flat on its face. Likely it’s a drunken poem, fantasizing as the bedroom ceiling whirls, just before that inevitable confrontation with the toilet, that Scott and Jones are getting it on, lovely & sane in all their pro-Capitalist XXX hot moaning. (Geez, I swear, some days, this project takes a practically inhuman commitment…)