Whither American Poetry?

 

Even though there's a perfectly instructive word in the dictionary, chthonic, pronounced with the silent c and meaning "Pertaining to the gods and spirits of the underworld," fans of Lovecraft have long pronounced the name of the dead god that lies dreaming in his home of R'lyeh ka-TOO-loo. Meanwhile, Beverly and I are very happy here in Berwyn. Not that there aren't problems. The mortgage is a bit steep, especially on a poet's salary. And when we walk our dog--Sammy's his name; he's a black lab/border collie mix--some of the neighborhood folks are overly sensitive about Sammy so much as sniffing their lawns. That's right, their lawns, not their gardens, which you might could understand. It's not like their grass is anything to brag about either, has a kind of grayish hue. Have you noticed how both H.P. Lovecraft and T.S. Eliot use initials for their first and middle names? Both men had what you might call marital problems too. Both divorced, although Eliot did re-marry. Oh, and did I tell you about the raccoons? So I'm complaining about the downside of dogwalking to Glynis, who lives nearby but in Oak Park: "I can't believe what pigs people are around here! You can't walk half a block without coming upon broken beer bottles. And all the damn chicken bones . . ." "Raccoons, Frank," she laughs at my knowledge of nature. "Raccoons get in the garbage cans and pull out the chicken bones." "Hmm, interesting theory," I say. "But how do you explain the beer bottles?" Lovecraft himself weighed in with his own pronunciation of the mad god's name: "The actual sound--as nearly as human organs could imitate it . . .--may be taken as something like khlûl'hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally." Then there's the occasional meteorite to worry about. One bounced off the next door neighbors' garage roof and almost hit one of the four dogs they leave in the yard. As usual, by the next day the space debris had just melted away into the earth, leaving nothing but a spreading gray stain on the grass. Neither Eliot nor Lovecraft have much good to say about sex: it's tedious or gross with the former; with the latter it's out of this world, and I don't mean that in the positive sense. And large bodies of water are inauspicious in both their writings: a watery grave in Eliot, the place from which the fish things spawn to mate with Caucasians in Lovecraft, who was very concerned about miscegenation, which is a word that first appeared in 1864 in a fake abolitionist pamphlet designed to frighten voters away from Lincoln's Republican party. Of course, the town of Berwyn has a long history of--how shall we say?--fear of miscegenation. But that's pretty much in the past: there are a number of Latino families living in Berwyn today, and even a few African Americans. Very few. I dream of a visit to the neighborhood bar, Starry Wisdom Tavern, where dead philosophers and political figures gather to converse and imbibe. Still brushing silphid beetles and dirt from his burial suit, Alexander Stephens complains aloud to any who will hear: "Darby's Prophylactic Pills. That's how I ended my days, hawking some phony nostrum. 'No family should be without them,' that was our slogan. Vice President of the fucking Confederate States of America, and my so-called colleagues and supporters couldn't help me do better. Lee they built a big monument at Richmond. They got Jefferson Davis's name on at least one street and public building in every godforsaken town in the godforsaken South. But me? I 'm peddling placebos 'til the end of my days. Is that any just reward for loyal service and honorable fulfillment of duty?" Meanwhile, Plato picks at a greenish protuberance in his cranium and cajoles Theodor Adorno, "Dialectics are fine, you just don't have to be so negative about them." Before Adorno can answer, I awaken to an insistent scratching at the bedroom window. The neighbors' tree had always leaned toward our house, but now it positively looms at the window before me, branches clawing at the glass as if they'd a mind of their own, hell-bent on breaking and entering. And clinging to a thick gray branch on the neighbors' side of the fence, a family of overly large possum with what look to me like all-too-human faces. I try to calm myself with a "Wimoweh" or two, but instead of "In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight," I find myself singing, "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Notice I pronounce the name THOO-loo, because I believe the c should be silent. Oh, and did I mention both the poet/critic and the pulp fiction writer were anti-Semitic as all get out? What I'm trying to get at here is this: you've never seen H.P. Lovecraft and T.S. Eliot in the same place at the same time, have you? This knowledge leads us to only one conclusion: Lovecraft's Miskatonic University is none other than Harvard. "Where's the evidence?" you ask. Wasn't Harvard the alma mater to many a Southern plantation owner's son, sent to learn the mysteries of empire and the embarrassment of miscegenation? Wasn't it the home of men of science such as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, who found the mulatto "peculiarly inflammable material," for "from the white he inherits a refinement unfitting him for all work which has not a certain delicacy about it; from the black a laxity of morals"? And wasn't it the site of famous blatherings-on by Oliver Wendell Holmes, fresh from finding draft resistance and socialist speechifying "clear and present dangers" punishable by long imprisonment? Blatherings such as, "But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds . . .the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign in which he does not see the use"? Now answer me this: If you were an insane dead god who wanted to destroy all of humanity, what dreamier place would there be to begin from? This is not good news for a poet. Beverly tells me not to worry, never mind the possum-people staring in the window, go to sleep, but I get up and walk the streets, ignoring the stench of the neighborhood's gray, brittle grass and the raccoon-men tossing beer bottles from their cars, but sick with the thought that almost every significant trend in American poetry since WWII has emanated from Harvard, Cthulhu's home away from home. What was it back in the day? Academic or non-academic poetry? That would be Harvard's Robert Lowell versus Harvard's Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery. No wonder Allen Ginsberg was howling! And by the way, did you know that the term Caucasian was invented because Mount Caucasus is a hop, skip and a jump from Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark is supposed to have set down? Get it? Caucasians are supposed to be the new, improved chosen people. A gray squirrel falls from a sycamore and shatters with an odor of drain scum. Great Caesar's Ghost! Even Language poetry more or less originates at Harvard! Is there no end to the infernal design? And the c should be silent not only for the sake of the connection with the word that pertains to gods of the underworld, but also because ka-TOO-loo sounds like something you answer with a gesundheit. Now that I think about it, the c in Caucasian should probably be silent too. The remaining awk sound of the first syllable would closely relate the supposed racial identity to the word awkward, which would disentangle the designation from mythological origins and more firmly tie it to the realistic assessment of these people's dancing. I walk up the alley to my own yard, and, searching for my keys, notice the four dogs next door have all crumbled into gray, stinky powder. I turn myself around, thinking, "Why that low-down, dirty, abysmal, gibbering, gelatinous, cephalopod-headed, cyclopean deity! Even those poets who don't come from Harvard have been trained or influenced by those who do, haven't they?" Past the backyard gardens of overgrown tomatoes, basil and rutabagas that smell like exudate off a real case of gingivitis, down lanes alongside the houses fronted by gray, white and blue American flags, all the while avoiding the occasional noisome meteorite winging by my noggin, all the way to the Starry Wisdom Tavern, where I sit myself down between Julius Caesar and a six-foot raccoon who turns to me and demands, "Aren't you the guy with the dog I saw pissing on my lawn?" On the jukebox the Harvard Alumni Choir chant the return of the Great Cthulhu, but cosmic conspiracy or no cosmic conspiracy, I'm quick to defend Sammy: "Listen, Bud, that's the parkway; it's not your fucking property."

 

[This poem first appeared in Oyez Review,Volume 30, Winter 2002.]

 

Frank Rogaczewski