Happiness in "Verse"

Happiness, for me, is often something channeled into words. Especially when I read something that just makes me smile. This poetry review did just that. I want this book. I want to shake the poet's hand or buy him a coffee and say, "Rock on!" For now, this will have to do. One thing though, the reviewer explains that some may wonder why the poet is so angry. I always wonder why more people are not. Oh and I agree with Herron, I would take John Lennon anyday but add Jim Morrison as well. So many forget he was first and foremost a poet. peace!


NEW! Review of Patrick Herron
American Godwar Complex by Patrick Herron.
BlazeVOX, $10.
Reviewed by Heidi Lynn Staples

And the just man rages in the wilds / Where lions roam. --William Blake

Some readers simply won't be satisfied with the particular execution of the political agenda in American Godwar Complex. Patrick Herron, surely, is aware of this, and his “Fuck You O Elvis” might be read, in part, as a response to anticipated critiques that demand a front-man of more lyricism and less didacticism:
... Fuck you O Elvis your cloudy pool is airless; the fish float on the surface with marble grin rotated sideways.Fuck you O Elvis your rotted Picasso-sloughed corpse you had no taste for voluminous fervor you absented toiling clam and skinny tie flim-flam spam man.Fuck you O Elvis you are the icon of my gilded excoriation.
Fuck you O Elvis fuck you I'll take John Lennon any day.

The epigraphs by Bertolt Brecht and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who worked from a belief in the poem as relevant site for public discourse, suggest we read the book not as the overheard musing of a solitary speaker but as the openly proclaimed indignation of an angry citizen. American Godwar Complex commences with a bit of revolutionary disturbance: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes the collection's first poem, “The Blood-Spatter'd Banner”:

Oh, say can't you see, by the bare dangled light,
What so loudly we nailed with our nighttime's armed reaming?
Whose blood stripes and barbed stars, through the one-sided fight,
O'er the ghettoes we watched, were so violently screaming?
Does the vanquished's dead stare, uranium bursting in air, Give proof to our night that our flag is still there?
O say, can that blood-spattered banner yet wave
O'er the land ruled by blind decree, in a world we enslave?

This presents more than bare pastiche; across the collection, Herron employs (not always with sufficient force) the Situationist strategy of d'etournement--the subversion, devaluation and re-use of present and past cultural production to demolish its message while pirating its impact. What Adbusters does to the corporate, Herron sets out to do to the government: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes “The Blood-Spattered Banner”; “My Country Tis of Thee” becomes “My Country Steals from Me”;“Hail to the Chief” becomes “Hail to the Thief”; “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” becomes “Take Me Out In the Maul Game.” Herron's saucy speaker mouths off in poems of a wide assortment, including skeletals, epistles, definitions, transcripts, and this one-liner:

“Parade”
I used to love a parade.

By evoking a fallen enthusiasm for processions--those actions in which things (words, cognitive patterns, policies, people) move forward in regular formation--Herron expresses disenchantment with, among other phenomena, high-stepping lyricism. Instead of a well-wrought yearn, the reader will find, for example, acerbic political haikus:

Politiku 1

Word from our sponsors:
please place your television
on the ocean floor.

Politiku 2
american re
olution: pollution, de
plete uranium.

solution: dig ahold to permanently keep
armed forces covert.

Sustained anger, a distinct feature of the collection, alienates the reader--perhaps purposefully. As anyone who has been in a good row knows, anger creates distance. Most obviously, anger introduces questions of judgment into the reading experience: What's he so angry about? Should he be this angry? What does he want me to do about it? Such questions interrupt the reader from her dreamy identification with the poem's speaker and ask her to wake up, participate in the making of meaning, and decide the issues for herself, goddammit; however, the best culture jamming--using an enemy's resources against it--is shocking and unexpected. The book's accomplishment in these terms can be unclear, particularly when words rhyme predictably, the syntax goes unsubverted, and the subject and sentiment can be anticipated, as in
“Amurika Eins:”
Follow the bouncing ball
to wherever Osama will fall.

Our might will take it all.
To fill the lives of young soldiers with thrills,
to inspire our leaders to gobble their pills!

There's oil in them thar Caspian hills.

Very likely these lines play better as spoken word, an indication of the collection's inherent theatricality.To everything there is a season. A time to laugh. A time to cry. And a time to tell off the motherfuckers. American Godwar Complex identifies our current epoch as this latter sort.
--from Verse magazine.--

"Stand your ground, this is what we are fighting for. For our spirit and laws and ways
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. For heaven or hell we shall not wait.
Shall I think of honour as lies or lament it's aged slow demise?
Shall I stand as a total stranger on this day in this stone chamber?"
--VNV Nation "HONOUR"

"We who build great works just to break them down. We who make our rules so we never fail."
--VNV Nation "Joy"