The democratization of media means that we’re all stars now. Self-styled comedians flood TikTok with their bits, musicians upload videos, retired English teachers with lowly BAs spew cultural observations in blog posts as if they’re social scientists.[1]
You don’t need any talent or expertise to do any of this, only the right software and an internet connection.
Seems as if everyone, whether it be Marjorie Taylor Greene or Mr. Disgruntled Cattleman from Wyoming, has the infomercial eye-contact, emphatic-hand gesturing down as they look you in the eye from whatever sized screen they appear on.
I noticed years ago that Trump himself had incorporated some stand-up body language in his rallies, particularly the [cue New Yorker sarcastic voice] who-would-have-thunk-it shrug.
More than ever, politics has morphed into showbiz. Do the above-referenced MTG and her not-all-that-comical sidekick Laura Boebert ever attend committee meetings, or is all they do is hold mikes and pace back and forth pretending that they’re rightwing incarnations of Paula Poundstone? [2]
Seems like a waste of taxpayers’ money from where I’m scrolling.
Each winter, our English Department requires students to memorize a poem that’s at least the length and girth of a sonnet. We select whom we consider the best, and they compete on grade levels to represent the freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior classes in front of three judges and an auditorium packed with their peers. We call the competition Porter-Gaud Outloud, and once students reach the finals, they’re spot on. Believe me, choosing the ultimate winner is difficult.
I, too, memorize a poem out of solidarity, and even though I’m renowned (yes renowned, dammit!) for having put to memory veritable library shelves of verse, I’ve discovered this year that if I’m not all that familiar with a poem, I have trouble memorizing it.
Now, if it’s a poem I know well, like Yeats’s lament “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” I can memorize it in no time and spit it out like a Gatling Gun:
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.[1]
Last year, I did “Adam’s Curse,” a poem of forty lines, and had it down in a day.
This year, however, I’ve chosen a poem I’ve read only a dozen or so times, Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” a hyper-Romantic ditty suitable for someone bound to drink himself to death at the Chelsea Hotel at the age of thirty-nine. I chose it because I’ve always dug the lines
The thing is, I keep mucking something up, like substituting “practiced” for “exercised” or swapping out a “nor” for an “or” or dropping the line “On the ivory stages.”
The good news is that I’ll have it down by the due date of February 25, but the bad news is that now I have Thomas’s rhythms and peculiar diction looping non-stop in the tape deck of my mind.
There’s only way to exorcise these voices, and that’s to write some doggerel, and because misery loves company, I’m sharing it with you:
From the Juke Box of Dylan Thomas
In my scratched and dented car,
With a broken right tail light,
I drive to and fro from bar to bar
Squandering a day that turns to night.
Not for the dead left in my wake I drink,
Nor for the lasses who have broken my heart,
But for the tunk-a-tunk-tunk, rinky dink dink
Of lovely pints on a luscious lark.[2]
[1]How apt a poem for the Age of Trump.
[2]If I weren’t channeling Thomas, the last line would be “Of yeasty brews on a beer-slopped bar.”
You Do Hoodoo 