Barry Goldensohn: everyday is April Fool's Day

Barry Goldensohn can write with a snap and twist in his lines with the first part of "April 26,2006"his poem that prevent this from being merely a speedy itemization of habits he's had on his life 'til now. He has the sense to ease on the breaks, slow down, offer a side comment, an aside on the passing banalities he's bothering to tell us about.
It's a fast list, and it is not without the slight shock of recognition:

...the century in which I've lived most of my years
on an orderly, ritual-loving continent,
with well-regulated trash collection,
public gardens, smooth lawns, milk
delivered at dawn in cold bottles, clinking and sweating—

At age sixty nine and he's ready to burn all his old clothes, move out of the shabby house, develop interests and rituals that are seemingly irrational and ill mannered for a man who is supposed to have more dignity as he ascends to deep senior citizenship. Not so, the narrator implies, I've behaved and have been dutiful and dull all my life; why should I be more of the same as I realize there are more days behind me than ahead of me?

It's a question worth asking, and Goldensohn does a good job of setting us for a rant about living a fuller life full of rage and ecstatic abandon as the days get shorter, but here he does a hard left turn and turns what 'til now was a minor key bit of longing into something angry, outraged, morally offended:

screaming and glistening with blood
at the hour of my birth Guernica was carpet bombed
as practice for the time of saturation—
the horrified face through the window that sees
the broken bodies by the light of a bare bulb—
devastating cities thick with targets, human
and other items of civil life: school,
public sculpture in parks, music pavilion, musician,
library, literary life, the writer.

There are ways to present startling contrasts in differing views of the world , and there are ways where irony can emerge in the presentation and reveal the tenuous foothold any paradigm has on
defining the all of everything. But this isn't the poem, and for all his skill as a phrase maker--there isn't a badly written line in this poem--there's a cut and paste feeling to this piece; it's as though Goldensohn were rummaging through a shoebox full of parts, unfinished stanzas, templates of recurring poetic themes and slapped them together, a jarring wedding of two poetic styles, the wistful and vaguely nostalgic, the other hectoring, moralizing, humorless and grave. It is one thing to segue from the hour of his birth to horrible battle scenes, but Goldensohn's horror is just as aestheticized, abstracted and at several layers of remove as was his previously addressed assumptions about a lifetime of being a banal, dutiful citizen.

He relapses obviously and
conveniently into the seductive habit of writers using art and art making as subjects through which they tackle the confusing, the contradictory.
Here he winds up describing , plainly, Picasso's
iconic "Guernica" painting as a means to deliver the moral of his story, which is that artist ultimately fails to say anything fixed about existence in their work. This is material that thousands of poets, good, great, mediocre, have covered to the far flung best of their abilities, and as such all wind up saying the say thing, that the senses are fallible and that the best an artist can leave behind after they pass on is interesting evidence of their failure to uncover the big truth.

Goldensohn's big truth with this poem seems something written out of boredom, or typing practice, being the kind of self-inquisition that poses a hard question and then dodges the bullet of making something interesting from their set with a cheesy sleight of hand. It was a typical trick in high school debate class for someone to invoke Hitler or the Holocaust when the subject concerned matters of life and death, whether the death penalty, birth control, the draft. It was a ploy to stun and stall and defer, and a attempt to get the opposing debate team to cede points that hadn't , in fact, been clearly argued.

Goldensohn, stuck for an exit out of what was turning into yet another flyweight screed of casual irony, slammed us with Heavy Subjects and Grave Issues, and dares us to ask him for a better linking between the two voices, or to ask what it was he was trying to talk about in the first place.

Over Cooked

Discussing how unfunny Dane Cook's rubber-limbed stage pacing and artless mugging is to belabor the obvious after a paragraph. What he has is that callow yet bottomless self confidence of a Drama Club President who convey every character with the same mannerisms , ticks and gestures without giving off any sense that they've bothered with their presentation beyond the creation of a shtick. I watched his HBO special and kept waiting for his monologues to connect with an idea , a perception that hadn't occurred to me, a laugh to smack me upside the head. All that I got was his voice rising and falling, accelerating and slowing down crazily to instill some sense of comedy momentum and urgency, and that face of his, smirking stupidly,
oblivious. Perhaps he'll do better with a film career. Cook's freakish presentation of self --all mugging, no set up, no timing, no payoff or punchline in the slightest-- makes it clear that the only thing funny is his apparent conviction that he can get a laugh that isn't a nervous reflex.

Frank Bidart;Homeless on the Range

Frank Bidart is a poet of intangibles, someone who can creep on the edge of the inexpressible and make it a felt presence. Reading Poem Ending With Three Lines from Home on the Range was gave more than one instance of having a slight chill and tremor course up my spine, as if I touched the hem of a stray ghost's ethereal vestment, or someone having walked over the place where I would eventually raise a family, bury a parent, or be buried myself. It's a poem that deals with the expansive, miasmic core of getting older, when one has more experience and fewer years to live, and what there is in one's community and the larger world outside it seems more like a series of triggers, cues for the barely dormant unconscious to give forth a rush of intense, abrupt, rapidly faded remembering.

It's as overwhelming, for those scant seconds, as any drug I've taken, and it's after effects are a permanent condition. The veils separating past deeds and pleasures and inane bits of sordidness are continually lifted , and one's concentration is diminished. Sometimes it's nothing less than a sucker punch against expectation.


Barred from the pool twenty-three years ago, still I dove
straight in. You loved to swim, but saw no water.

Whenever Ray Charles sings "I Can't Stop Loving You"

I can't stop loving you. Whenever the unstained-by-guilt
cheerful chorus belts out the title, as his voice, sweet

and haggard reminder of what can never be remedied,

answers, correcting the children with "It's useless to say,"
the irreparable enters me again, again me it twists.

The red man was pressed from this part of the West—

'tis unlikely he'll ever return to the banks of Red River, where
seldom, if ever, their flickering campfires burn.


Clipped, epigrammatic, crystal clear, Bidart's recollection is less a stream of conscious than a fast, pulsing rill,
accenting the power of the memory with the concomitant knowledge that the past cannot be regained. You loved to swim, but saw no water centers the opposing the strands, the desire set against the cold awareness of unsentimental fact. The conflation of these elements--the pool, the Ray Charles song, the lines from a campfire chestnut-- are a skillfully arranged collage, remindful of the work of pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. Bidart, like Rauschenberg, seems fascinated by how a world of contrived , manufactured things ,designed for our use, entertainment and diversion, become a litter of our old selves and conceptions as we we pass over them, reflect upon them, as we consider our progress from relative youth to deepening middle age.

The poem suggest all these things without pretense, without tangential ramble; this is the way John Ashbery, a poet I admire, would write if he were more discriminating with what he wanted to bring into his writing. Besides brevity, though, what makes Bidart distinct from Ashbery is an engagement with the events of his life. Although not explicitly stated, there is something beyond mere resignation here; he can live fully if he stops trying to rekindle the campfire at the Red River and instead transform his present condition.

Overload on a brainwashing

Does reality sometimes gang up on you
when you sleep too long and finally walk outside on a bright sunny day? This is a poem about that feeling.-tb
______________________


Overload on a brain washing

You enter an idea of light
just beyond crass ivy walls
and find a room full of coats
tossed on the bed, rising and falling
again as if breathing deep
for snows, blizzards, a stream
of convertibles whose drivers
wear party hats, cell phones in one hand,
driving with a light wrist on the wheel.

At noon a bell sounds
and then the streets
are flooded with the sound
of hands rustling through paper sacks
digging past sandwiches wrapped in
cellophane and the apple or banana ,
proceeding until the fingers, holding pencils
or phones or typing orders, under orders,
just moments before wrap themselves around
a candy wrapped in foil that clings against
the rough textured chocolate like taut, tanned skin.

You put your hands over your ears
because the birds sing too loud
when the riot of color occurring in
the flower beds that stand guard
in front of each and every home
on the block reaches a pitch
which makes you feel to swoon
and brace yourself against
a brick wall in a side alley
tagged and pasted with graffiti
and torn concert posters,
these seems so much like a movie,
you think, and squinting just so imagine
you can see the edge of the film,
edge of the Earth
Columbus couldn't find
if you drew him a map
with arrows telling him where
he was and where he was going.

Threading the Space Needle

Space Needle by Kristin Fogdall is one of the finer poems that Robert Pinsky has presented for Slate readers, and it wouldn't be fair to him to not say that his choices have been more interesting of late, better conceived, less pretentious. Not everyone would agree, but I thought last week's poem Fourteen Final Lines by J.Allyn Rosser was a subtly drawn parody of "well made poems" and their last lines of neon-lit irony, the last words that encapsulate the insolubility of knotted circumstances with phrases that operate more as puns than as summations or
truth delivered.

Rosser, like myself and no doubt a generation of other readers have tired of these facile , clever, gutless conclusions, considering them as escape pods rather than fit conclusions, and have considered doing much as Rosser had done; string a series of 14 snappy last lines (or at least sentences that resemble parting remarks)together with nary an addition of connecting tissue
and then let it set there , impenetrable, a sonnet that makes an archaic and problematic form made even stranger by its refusal to let you in, to offer up a clue.

It's an inside joke, yes, and a poem about poetry, a habitual gripe of mine, but it's a joke I get and appreciate for the way it stands as both parody and protest against the ceaseless stream of shallow, gimmick prone verses that try to justify their vacuity with an entirely mechanical cleverness. Meaning is a useless thing to sift through this poems nooks and folds for; the meaning is locked in the sound of this thing, the rhetoric of adroit phrase making that attempts only to sound crystal clear. I consider "Fourteen Final Lines" to be like a gratuitous musical flourish, a sustained cadenza when none was required, a virtuoso bit of business. A fine send up.Kristin Fogdall's Space Needle is one of those rare instances where an author gives vent to a personal bit of vanity and succeeds in writing in a vivid, image rich language that retains clarity and succeeds as well in breaking beyond the suffocating solipsism of their own perspective and
taking into account an audience that would find empathy with his wondering.

If each foot took us back a year,
the dark below would be
immaculate, like a hole

in space, instead of stars,
or a jar of colored glass
someone shook

and scattered in a dream.
But from this height,
our childhood town

spreads out, a silver galaxy,
and tourists peer
into the giant metal scopes.


It's a neat trick of setting up perspectives, wondering how far one would need to step back in both time and space to see the odd connections of community and private behaviors that are the currency that binds us together. At first the vantage point is theoretical , abstract, a magic precipice one can still deny and and swiftly return to the drudgery of paying bills and wondering what secrets to reveal to one's wife,
husband, partner, but the wondering, the sheer heights make the narrator, and he or she gives themselves over something approaching rapture and imagines visions of roads looping over hills and through towns, every familiar detail of a life laid out in doll house fashion,

I scan the towers, walls
of windows, one small pane:
sofa, tiny people

face to face—a man
and woman talking,
as they may do every day,

or perhaps this is
the last time, or their first.
The lamp she crosses to

dims the room a darker gold.
It's like watching movies
on the wall at home

where we cavort across
some stretch of sand:
I want to step inside the frame

and take my own hands,
and look into my eyes,
and see what's true

and what's idealized.


It's an eternal gag, a joke of celestial origin, the human need for meaning, coherence, to be part of a narrative where events unfold and are connected and where each occurrence is part of a
meaning that is still coming into being. Fogdall connects this fantasy perspective of one's own life and the convoluted relationships and their implicit agendas with Hegel's version of the dialectic, that the secret purpose of one's life and actions is forever in flux, evolving, never static. All this can become rather ponderous, and better known poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery have tilled this soil to produce some of the most brilliant verse in English written in the 20th
Century. The soil, though ,is hardly arid, and what makes Space Needle as well as it does--I think Fogdall's accomplishment here is phenomenal-- is the poem's poise, balance and symmetry. Fogdall is a writer of grace, and is well capable of navigating abstruse ideas and odd perspectives with a style quite at ease with the difficult task of rendering an alluring self-critique of one's blinkered-concept of reality with a sense of place. Fogdall is sure and precise in her images of things that she has seen and remembers vividly, if imperfectly:

The wind is off the Sound,
and makes no sound

except a ruffle
at the rail edge.
On the tiny street below,

a man is working on the road.
Alone behind his truck,
lit by a magnesium haze, he turns

a little orange wheel,
some apparatus out of sight.
He is the perfect

model of a man, which means
we love his task in ways
that he cannot, and wish

to close the shutter on
the stars, our years, with something
like his gesture of repair.

This might have been written by Carson McCullers in Ballad of a Sad Cafe, or
John Cheever at the start of The Wapshot Chronicle; the beauty of the writing is that we recognize what Fogdall's poem shares with the writing of the other two writers, which is melancholy. For all the power and ferocity of dreams, aspirations and desires to make one's
place in history, there is the ceaseless dread of loneliness that colors each word we speak and every gesture we make. The never that Fogdall touches is that for all the language we use to define and justify ourselves, we are finally inexplicable alone, separate, with only memories to console our standing.

Smitten by fame

I know I railed against the worship of celebrity in the previous post, and be assured I meant every word of what I had to say regarding the general view that such
mindless adoration reduces us individually and diminishes us collectively. There's been thirty years plus of reading a wide swath of social criticism, from Marx, Adorno through Mills, Mencken and Vidal that's given my gut feeling a theoretical, if
densely phrased base. None of what I've said is original, I might say, though a phrase or paragraph might keep the torch lit a while longer. And yet I have to confess that tonight I am working an event at a local bookstore here in San Diego,
and that for all my objections against the the religion of fame that I am looking forward to meeting the acerbic and beautiful New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
She'll be appearing for the paperback edition of her recent book Are Men Necessary? My integrity is comprimised, and I am willing to be a slave, at least temporarily, for the smart and funny lady.

A week without Celebrities

It would be a fine Holiday gift if print, broadcast and internet media gave us a week without celebrity "news" or gossip and give us a chance to consider lives of less mythical proportions.

After all is said and done, someone like Jennifer Aniston is no more interesting than the bowl of cereal that sits in front of you each morning. Probably less so. But given the way this obsession with the increasingly banal coverage of the famed and moneyed, are we that far from stalking celebrities should paparazzi chance upon JoLo tying a shoe, or Matt Damon being told by counter help that the CD he wants is out of stock and then foaming, fuming and gasping at the impossibly demanding pressures celebrities have heaped upon their special lives? The possibility of seeing or reading about the over-renowned having tantrums , among other things, gives us the thrill of seeing ourselves as others would see us if we were given to
having breakdowns in ridiculously public places. I might guess that it assures us
the melt down and other egocentricities are okay after all. The inner child never takes the afternoon nap.

Why is it that we anguish collectively over whether Robert Downy is able to revive his film career and forget our personal obligations as citizens by failing to show to vote in elections, or offer our services to projects in our community that can really improve the lives of others. It comes down to selling papers, of course, but the level to which our obsession with celebrity has advanced suggest a religious intensity, a love of icons and their status among the heavens, which is precisely what corporate powers want us to become, passive investors in entertainment and distractions to keep their means of production running and in their firm control and to forgot about how to change the reality that confines us in grim and grey banality.

Shame on Alfred Corn

"Windows on the World", a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003,is an ill conceived poem commerating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissts who think everything in the world is in play in order to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the goddamned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find, and worse, it is beyond anything useful to others.

This is a wandering and traipsing along the subject matter like a drunk tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage. Connecting the ruin of the WTC with the crashing of Windows operating system is a ploy him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sene of.

Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagistic reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else.

This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor bound to donate the sum to a cause that actually gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he as in the instruction of writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift store.

Gregory DiPrinzio's Canary Sings the Hits

Although it threatens at first to become a sentimental gush, Gregory DiPrinzio's poem"Remember Baby?"is a nice surprise, a poem clear and clever and creating a sweetly constructed vernacular which makes the small intimacies between the narrator (who I assume is male) and the woman real, tactile. It reads like a belated postcard to an ex wife, a recounting of events after strife and turmoil where the wounds have healed and sufficiently scarred the soul and now there is only recourse to maintain a resentment or to laugh at what was said, what was sought. This poem is neither confession nor blame-placing, but rather recollection. There is a crucial difference.

There's a bittersweet quality that's appealing , alluring for the fact that just enough information and characterization is mentioned in the memory; although we ostensibly come in in the middle of a conversation, the situation is coherent, the narrator's monologue affectionate and insinuating all at once:

At first the house was so quiet you could hear the songs
no one was singing and you wanted company,
so you went down to the pet store and bought a canary.
You told the boy you wanted one that sings:
no bird in a silent blue-funk, no washed-up has-been
crying into his water dish.

This is as lovely as it is plain spoken, the description of the house empty of human sound and the solution of going to the pet store for a canary. This is a rush of detail, with all manner of knowing detail and action laid out in an idealized
speech . Remarkable, too, is Gregory DePrinzio's
deft touch with item and incident in the way he has the choice of canary reflect what is the dear woman in this poem fears, "no bird in a silent blue-funk, no washed-up has-been crying into his water dish." This is rather masterful, a salient element of anxiety made tangible without portentous and unwieldy metaphors and cliches that would clumsily botch the description of a more complicated and denser state of internal affairs. This is a confection that is spun and layered with a master's
sense of grace. Cheever couldn't have described a better scene of man/woman awkwardness any better, and Hemingway would have admired the exactitude of the phrasing. A male world, I would suppose, but there is poetry and beauty here none the less. For a change we have a male not moping over the failure of a relationship, but rather giving his account of what he's seen and thought of it. This is not a negoiation for a seduction, but a conversation that has continued after the sparks have gone out and the music has soured. This is a relationship that continues in some form, in grudging maturity.

DePrinzio sticks with the symptoms, the mannerisms, the glaring contradiction of what's avowed and what is actually done, revealed in an atmosphere where
a friend, a confident, lays out a memory. I am attracted to the absence of malice here; a fondness undistorted by lust or obsession emerges as the narrator goes further with the tale, citing the bird's name as Leo and how wearisome his songs became. More beautifully arranged details:

...Often
you dropped the purple cloth over his cage,
closing the curtain in the middle of his set,
but still he couldn't take a hint...


or

The cage
kept getting closer to the window, the sliding
doors kept getting left a little more open
as Leo pounded away at the standards
to an empty room, or competed with the stereo.

The tone is comic , the telling is unvarnished but tempered, and there seems, under the irony and exasperation, a feint hope that the woman, the girl friend, the ex wife might put the pieces together and gain an insight about how to stop making her life miserable. This is guess work, to be sure, since we appear to come into the middle of a conversation that had been going on awhile before we entered the the scene as eavesdroppers, but what is left out makes for the kind of speculation and wondering that gives us a richer experience. There is a shock of recognition here, slight as it might be; there are more than a few readers, I would wager, who had a sudden recollection of small matters with their wives, girl friends, life partners, the things said when the rest of the world was absent, that one carries with them and has little opportunity to reveal. DePrinzio's poem was a key that unlocked one of the doors in my available memory, and I mean that in a good way.

Maynard G.Krebs, America's Premier Existentialist

Machiavelli is said to have coined the subtle curse "May you live in interesting times", surely an extra jab at the dimwits he'd have been insulting who would be slow to realize that "interesting times", generally speaking, are the domain of periods of unflagging disaster. One would imagine a man in his living after the ceiling has fallen around him deciding finally that he needs to call the roofer for an estimate. So we are in interesting times with respect to the Iraq war, as unmitigated a catastrophe as the U.S. government has gotten us into. And now Hurricane Katrina, water logging and virtually destroying New Orleans, with the response from the Federal government being sluggish, half-witted, ill-prepared. To coin a phrase, it was as though we had Gilligan running the show from the TV Land archives. I made that remark to a friend the other day, as doubtless, millions had as well as we all witnessed the terror unfold from our TV screens. We were in a hand basket just a half mile from Hell's gates and buffoons and lesser thugs were in charge of those agencies that were supposed to help citizens in dire times, in a grievous emergency.Gilligan.Irony seems the only way a quizzical God can speak to society as fragmented, distracted and functionally insane as we often time again. Actor Bob Denver, who played the character on Gilligan's Island for three years in the Sixties, has died at age seventy. It was not a show I ever liked, not then, and not now, not even out of some gross romanticizing of the decade, but the surname did become synonymous with fucking up, falling apart, goofing off, a display of genius for doing precisely the wrong thing at the most crucial instance of an emergency.I preferred Denver as Maynard G. Krebs from Dobie Gillis, an earlier show where his character was a hipster par excellence, a jazz-loving, intuitively-inclined White Negro, but without the mind-expanding violence or star-moving orgasms. Krebs was a latter-day Candide in tow with Dobie Gillis's reverse Panglossian shroud; no matter how confounded Dobie found himself week to week, Maynard would appear and find something uniquely wonderful about the particulars and the world it existed in to remind his good friend. Not that anything he had to say was appropriate or useful as a curative for Dobie's gathering cluster of blue notes, but there was something sublime in the way Maynard G.Krebs saw the world as a series of moments that were unique and which needed to be appreciated for the surprise each waking hour brings us. Maynard was hardly a theorist of anything, but he was a better man to have around in a moment of crisis. This is a better legacy for Bob Denver. You have to honor a man who's best actorly creation explained that the "G" in his name stood for

Walter!

Frank Rich and David Plotz Fill in a Vacume

Photographer Thomas Hoepker was one of hundreds of his trade who worked on September 11, 2001, getting the images that would help us define a momentous day in our history. A photograph Hoepker withheld, pictured, has caused something of a stir in the Pundocracy whose members like to reduce complexity to tasteless and easily passed morsels. Frank Rich of the New York Times invests the shot with these words:
"What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and what's gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today."

David Plotz of Slate.com found Rich's summary distasteful and responded in opposite adjectives here.The fact of the matter is that we don't know what these people were talking about at that instance when they turned their gaze away from the smoking Manhattan skyline and toward each other. It's striking in contrast to the host of dramatic framings we've become accustomed to seeing in relation to 9/11; there is an eerie calm here, an image of people who seem to have stolen a moment for themselves to reflect, ponder, digress among themselves while the rest of the world collapses on itself.

All the, what were they saying? We don't know, and we cannot know for sure, and the lack of documentation makes some on the public soap box to tell us what it is they see in the details (or the lack of them) , later to be followed by yet another hack with a megaphone taking the opposite tack, emphasizing the same details (or ones he imagines) to suggest an opposing qualities. Disengaged? Debating vital issues? Bored and indifferent?Shocked and outraged? All the evidence, such as it is, is there in David Friend's photograph,and it strikes you, after reading Frank Rich's mandarin claims about this being a country that likes to move on and David Plotz's assertion that this is evidence of Civic debate, that we haven't the slightest clue, not the faintest shade of a hint to what these folks were talking about, nor what they felt seeing New York seem to give itself up to fumes and flame.

Idylls of the cave, to be sure, and one assumes smart men like Rich and Plotz have taken a variation to Intro Philosophy. I suspect they have and attribute this phony controversy to deadline pressure and the irrational notion that one must say something significant on a significant anniversary. So much eloquence and banality has come and gone in the five years since the attack that every truism has been mined, every fresh expression of outrage, grief, hope, patriotism has been formulated and put forth that there's a desperation to devise fresh metaphors, new simulacrums through which our rusty platitudes can be channeled. Centering on the photograph and it's alarmingly un-alarmed image would seem the perfect dust storm over.

But we don't know what they were thinking, nor what was said, and the suppositions of Rich, Plotz and other smart guys who might join this faux fray are engaged in undertakings that Daniel Boorstin described in in his 1962 book "The Image", a deft, precise and early description of how news organizations willfully create non-events to cover in order to sustain themselves as an economic entity. One may mention Baudrillard and his limitless meanderings, but this is something that is closer to a Don DeLillo novel, and is especially re-mindful of White Noise, wherein two department chairmen, one the head of the Department of Hitler Studies and the other the director of Elvis Research, confront each other for a colloquium.

What they wind of doing in front of students from both departments is citing various random factoids about Hitler and Elvis, the smallest scraps of information, the most arcane and useless tidbits only intense research could yield, all to no obvious purpose, nor effect. But everyone is happy and glad that reasonably sound and sane summations were uttered, however untroubled by a crucial absence of context. Rich and Plotz are people who are paid to say intelligent things about important subjects, and speak they did. But at the end of their respective days I can't help think that they're aware their words regarding this photograph were extensions of wishful thinking, and five years after the attack on the towers they, like the rest of us, are still reeling.

9/11

Five years after the attack and I've said and written nothing that equals this poem
I managed to get out between horrified periods watching the Towers burn and collapse. Suffice to say that I will just publish the poem here, five years later. I have nothing to add.--tb
__________________________________________
Rain of any kind

Everything is different
yet nothing really is

in the center of lives
hanging on every word

crackling over phone lines
and wireless transmissions

voiceless where smoke, glass,
the dust of humanity rises in billows

and curls and laces and balloon obscenely
where it seemed the center of the world

was a wealth of words and
sleep after hard work in the

twin aspirations of family dinners,
laughs, tears only when it was

the rain we cried about
when our plans were vacations,

escapes out of town,
toward the wonder of the world,

But everything is changed,
yet nothing changes at all

in the whitened streets choked
with the burning heart of

passion igniting twin spires that
fall onto itself, completely, like

a folding table over burdened with
ideas of desire that give up and

blow up and send us running toward the river,
into hallways, behind gates again,

the wrath of our aspirations gives up
its ideas of settling into chairs or sinking

into cushions while TVs tell us that we
all wear the black hat even

in our best week, yeah, right,
The center of the night, when clouds clear

the arc of the moon
and the crying children

and men is heard coming from cell phones,
face up in the dust,static and batteries going dead,

there are too many people to
say good bye to,
our city smolders on the river,

the moon rises over the skyline,
a hand is clenched and now two hands are clenched

and a rag is dragged across the
furrows of our brow as

every tool that was ever waved and plied and made to align a
home and a store front in the places where

our joy and our speech spoke the many tongues
we were blessed with and

sought to keep alive and on fire,
as we roll up sleeves and

make the world flesh again, a tall and visible pride that
argues with itself in many tongues speaking

all of the alphabets that fell on the world,

we go on
we go on,

and go on into the business that is the worth of the life
that was here filled with commotion of a life

that you either want to have forever
or want to kill

horribly in its sleep
while the children watch, screaming, I say

we go on because we must,

Everything is different
and it hasn't changed at all,

why we must go on
and take back the sky and its promise of

sun,
birds, and
rain of any kind.

A note on preferences, subject to change

The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.

In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled avant garde (rule breakers who don't the rules to begin with) has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with language, I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.

The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from an imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us. This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiturs , fragments, clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.

More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before. I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs.

Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

"Banish Misfortune"; a poem by Ralph Sneeden

It's a reflexive habit to grouse over Robert Pinsky's selections for the weekly Tuesday poem, and I even got into the extreme and admittedly attention getting spirit of the bashing by suggesting that it was time for him to do more to earn his pay as Poetry Editor, or to move on. There's been good reason for the complaints, the bashing, the dissatisfaction with his results,but there are times when one of his poems is soexquisite , finely placed and arranged that my ire dissolves .

For the moment, all is forgotten, if not forgiven. "Banish Misfortune" by Ralph Sneeden is a sweeping yet brief piece of music,a sweet and surely constructed composition that amazingly gives off the air of swift and sure improvisation. It is, I think, the poem of a poet with that well tuned ear that senses the balance of language as it unfolds on the page during the writing and who is able to sense how it will sound when spoken. The aspect I enjoy is that the language is almost impenetrable, a series of concentrated images that elide into one anotherin what can be described as an entranced narrator's soft murmuring description.

We are not out of the woods,maybe in the wrong neck,
like birds intending stasiswho weave their clot
of straw in the grill beside the headlight.

These are the things an attuned observer would almost miss had they been just a shade less impatient. This is a poem of sitting still in momentary respite away from traffic, cell phones,demanding children or creditors, where the mindbalances and weaves together a number of vaguely recalled strands of thought, while the eyes brings to the conscious level arrangements within nature that are there before our intruding gaze and seem extraordinary when noticed. Even more extraordinary is the fleeting feeling of stepping back away from the frame one's imagination has placed around the tableau and senses themselves as part of the strange little diorama, the observer feeling them self observed..Sneeden uses simple, clear words to make his motions clear and concise, and provides us with a descriptive style that gives us vision, like a slow panning camera simulating a set of eyes taking in the terrain and its incidental arrangements, as in

When we watch the dog
watch the bee's hungry circum-navigation
of the apple fallen to the fading lawn,
that burrowing amusesus,
as if the excavationof imploded rot were somehow
different than the steamrising
from our coffeeor eaves of the future's
sun-lit mud room and rusty nail

This is not a poem that tries to abolish the world in pursuit of the perfect imagistic center to find refuge within; Sneeden's soft spoken narrator acknowledges the material world beyond this delicate frame and finds a hushed wonder in actually seeing what one has known only in theory, that nature will eventually and always grow around, over and through the best constructions humanity can throw at it. The birds building a nest in the grill next to the head light of an abandoned car is the simplest , clearest evidence that nature will not be contained, fenced in, or asphalted over.

Give Robert Christgau A Writing Gig NOW!

The firing of pop music Robert Christgau from the Village Voice by their new owners gives me yet another reason to pass up the weekly on the news stand and to cease dialing up their web site. I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. Any Old Way You Choose It, his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of of my all time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's I Lost It At The Movies, for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery as yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA!"Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock,disco, reggae, folk, jazz and popwas like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art.


His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self indulgent as it may have seen, it was a fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music being an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice weekly campus newspaper, and was required ,in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theatre, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was alot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau , an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop writing style, ideas and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed a particular argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do.
Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture
expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal short hand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that.

Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories. His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain.

Blood on the Tracks was second rate Dylan

Joel Rosen of Slate gives the new Dylan album favorable hits all the expected marks when he declares Modern Times to his best album since Blood on the Tracks, which implies clearly that he thinks Dylan has been producing crap during most of that thirty-one years. I find it ironic that thirty-one years ago I reviewed Blood for the San Diego Reader and gave it a bad review. My grievances were Dylan's straying from the kind of blues-informed surrealism that typified what I still think is his best period--Another Side of Bob Dylan through John Wesley Harding-- in favor of a more conversational, chattier, looser, more cliche bound lyric style that cast Dylan's persona as a wandering stranger. Our hero would go from town to town, from job to job, meeting interesting men, having affairs with alluring, cryptic women, and then would be off again after some minor incident, some unsaid faux pau, walking up the road, sticking his thumb out, the sun setting, the lights of the next town in the next state glowing over the hillside, dreaming up vague strands of philosophy to assuage an even vaguer heartache he was feeling. He was Joe Christmas always intersecting with Lana Grove in some desolate, anonymous America, an angle interesting enough to work once or twice, but this was a field that was over tilled. It sounded constructed and contrived to me at the time, toned up on the energy and ramped up on the bullshit, and to this day I'm of the opinion that Dylan is a miserable storyteller and someone who has a difficult time creating narrators with a personality that don't seem to be recreation of how he spends his weeks. But I've softened my position considerably and now find much that I was too impatient to appreciate all those decades ago, and yet I can't bring myself around to say that it's one of his best albums. It isn't. My review ventured the guess that Dylan had run out of things to say, and had lost his knack for saying the obvious in interesting language and locutions--Paul Simon and John Updike could show him something in that regard--but he maintains his need to talk, to write, to prate continually as if the production of songs, albums, and tours in his late career were another shoring brick in is reputation and a hedge against death. There are a couple of stacks of meandering and mumbled music between Blood on the Tracks and Modern Times, and truthfully I think it's only within the last decade that Dylan has gotten his mojo back. Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft are strong music from an artist who's persona finally fits the gathered texture of his years. There is finally things he has to say before he offers his last guitar strum, and I suspect Modern Times will only add to what seems like a long and robust third act in this remarkable man's life.

Curtains for Christo

Christo is a ridiculous celebrity who has managed to make a famous and assumedly profitable living repeating the same trite idea, in this case a matter of convincing townships, city governments, government bureaucrats to grant him permits and permissions, and donors to give him sufficient funding so that he may wrap another building in massive amounts of swaddling cloth, or hang a Leviathan laundry line across an expanse of inaccessible space. Okay, we get it, you introduce one aesthetic element into an area where we wouldn't have expected to run into it , thereby creating something of a framing device which decontexualizes the familiar and forces us to reconsider our relationship with the spaces we inhabit, the spaces we pass through, the spaces we create where there were no space before.

It's a not a new idea, and scale does make the make the project any more important, let alone profound, nor does it make Christo and his cult seem any smarter, except one does admire the craft with which they manage to get usually positive press and use an accumulated reputation to marginalize critics (or just plain non-experts) who might wonder aloud how one succeeds in getting paid for engineering these philistine notions of art in public places. For the Gates, you suspect he and co-worker Jean-Claude were inspired while shopping for bath mats and shower curtains.

The fact that there is a line of them, going along a path doesn't diminish the out-scaled tackiness of Christo's singular idea; we have in our midst the equivalent of the bad joke teller who repeats a punch line not once but three times in the course of a stop-and-go round of small talk, with the wan and waning hope that someone might chime in with feverish paragraphs to explain the punchline, to create context and criteria, to invent terms from whole cloth (appropriate analogy) , couched in vague and mysterious use, that have the sound of authority in defending the failed attempt at humor, but lacks something in the area of a tangible , comprehensible idea that gives us a spark and makes us say aha!.

It seems unlikely that Christo and co will have as many defenders and contexualizers and exploiters of invisible success at their side with this effort; he is simply too old to get away with this stuff anymore. What he ought to consider is a marketing himself as a celebrity spokesperson for Tide, or Cheer, or some such miracle whitener; it would be a chance for him to admit that he's a hack in a way that's more artful than the work he's managed over the last dozen years. Metaphorically, it would a chance for him to come clean on his deal.

The ephemeral essence of Christo's applications of swaddling cloth can't hide his bankrupt aesthetic. Christo's body of work consist of one idea, and what's obvious is that it's the application of a gimmick, a trademark rather than an investigation of problematized proximities. There's more than a hint of the Dada gesture in the projects , but there comes a point where "Oh wow" is replaced by "So what?"

Nearly every artist who wants to commit public art gives a variation of this apology for what they've foisted on public space, and in fact this sounds like an echo of my paraphrase above for same such explications. Fine as the reasoning might be, you really can't escape the fact that large scale works are oftentimes only measurements of ego , not intellect nor talent. Had Christo done things with more variation in his life as a celebrity avant gardist, he might not be producing yawns.Art in public places is no less subject to criticism and value judgement than that safely on the walls of museums and galleries. There are public works that succeed brilliantly, like this from Picasso , in Chicago. Why and how they work are issues for larger discussion, but we in these famous cases we have the work of painters translating their visual notions from canvas to three dimensional space,working with materials they were not accustomed to. The spirit of surprise exists in these pieces, and it's both are in situations where one may indeed scratch their and wonder productively about their relationship to the community sphere. Christo is oblivious to such a real inquiry, and you're stuck with the idea that he was eager to clear off his drawing board and get the piece erected and ocumented in order to fatten up his portfolio. Where The Gates
went up seems unimportant

Time for Robert Pinsky to Pack His Tent

Robert Pinsky is a good if unspectacular poet, and acquited himself as well as anyone could have in his tenure as U.S.Poet Laureate, but there is an accumulating since among those who read Slate magazine's poetry section and discussion board that the man has outlived his usefulness. The selections he makes are maddening, half-hashed, and phony as the bulge in a castrati's leotard. His current choice, Jill McDonough's"December 12, 1884: George Cooke", from a series of sonnets she's been writing drawn from actual events in American history, has only one good virtue going for it; it spared me the purchase of the book.

This reads as if it were a combination of dry facts from a history book blended with a student's marginalia. Scissors, paste and yellow highlighter are all over this assemblage, which indeed seems more assembled than composed. There is a punchline McDonough wants to land on, an example of Fate's anonymous wit, but there is not enough here to make us, meaning me, the reader, care enough to interpret the poem so that it becomes whole and coherent. It would be easy enough to dwell on issues such as how a sensationalist media twists historical fact into personality driven events and fictionalizes the record with romantic constructions in the interest of selling papers, but that would be too much weight to lay upon such a slight and underfed piece of writing. Such speculation would be more than the critic's invention than the author's intent.The mistake was to approach this set of information as a poem, as this is a clear case where an unambiguous prose format would have achieved what resonance McDonough wanted to have us experience; prose seems better suited for such terseness. I'm thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who's masterly avoidance of qualifiers still provides a powerful kick, particularly his short story collection In Our Time is a masterpiece of what wasn't included in the telling. The italicized sketches between the longer stories are what McDonough should pay attention to, as they show how only a few facts conveyed in a paucity of words can still pull at your heart the way she wanted with "George Cooke" .

What do with Pinsky. Nothing ,truthfully, since it is the Washington Post that must decide whether they think they are getting the most bang for their cultural buck.The truth is that Pinsky does precious little for Slate other than select a poem for the week.Such is not a labor intensive activity,speaking from my own experience. What's gallling isn't just the log-rolling that goes on with the poets selected for the week--former students, colleagues, the like-- but it's the non-existent interaction Pinsky has with the readers. It would be one thing if he were to write a commentary each week about the poem and provide with some idea what appealed to him.

His remarks would most likely give Fraysters informed points of departure. He doesn't, though, and there's an inescapable feeling that he's getting a paycheck from Slate accounts on the basis of being a former Poet Laureate.

His Washington Post column is slight as it is and could use more heft and controversy in what it declares; he could at least give us the other portion of his half-measures in a column writ especially for Slate. If Christopher Hitchens can meet weekly filing deadlines for a half dozen publications, Pinsky should be able to manage an extra four brief paragraphs a week so it doesn't seem as if we're all getting rooked.

Ellen Wehle and the Art of Not Getting It Right

Ellen Wehle's poem "Augury" , printed in Salon in July of 2003 and which I came across last night surfing through that magazine archive of previously published, is a wonder, a poem about memory that achieves the epic without the expected drag of self-dramatization.There is none of the photographic exactness of detail that makes me think that there is fiction being passed off as truthful episodes; poetry is in large part fiction, I think, but poets (like myself) are reticent to admit that not every line we write is directly autobiographical. If it were so, we would have reams of duller poems, dreary and inane; there would be no art. Art is artifice, after all, and there is no good reason to equate artifice with lack of honest effort or glorious intent. But I like about Wehle's poem is the realism here, the way she gets at the moment when memory fails and details and context dissolve into dust. This is the art of not getting it right.This is a small and minor poem as I read it, but I like it fine, and think there's something honorable in the way Wehle left her undefined problem (her ennui, soul sickness, and terminal boredom) unresolved.

The language is mythic in the rhetoric it assumes, obvious in the choice of "fortune teller" or in sections that literally drip and ooze poetic flourishes, as in
": gabled night, the secret trees
spilling darkness around streetlights, blown roses
singing hosannas over a fence."

What makes the poem interesting, though, is that the world itself, the one the poet is actually walking through, does not really yield anything, become more profound, nor offers the slightest clue to a deeper, life-sustaining argument for all the beautiful used to describe the activity as it unfolds; this poem has the jammed-up literary haste of a restless mind that is certainly too self aware as it goes through the simple activities of executing the banal obligations of daily life.

The mind describes details in literary language, and yet the banal remains banal, ordinary and unreconstructed in spite the epic attempts at metaphorical largeness.
"Don't get me wrong, nothing was solved." is what Wehle writes in the middle of the poem and from there we see it all come apart after that meticulously scripted first stanza. This is a poem that is contrary to Wallace Stevens's notion of poetry being the intuitive and elevated means to get to the Supreme Fiction that lies behind the mere descriptive alacrity of words.

Wallace had a notion that art and life become unified in such a way that the barriers, intellectual and basely instinctual, that separate the primal and the abstract vanishes, disappears, and is gone as perception is heightened and we see the world we are born into as an entirely new place.

Implicit in that is the notion that to see the world differently is to also make it possible to make the world new and revolutionary.
Wehle, in this verse, can't make use of this mythic ability to penetrate into the secret heart of things; her malaise, her situation remains the same, though festooned with the garlands of intense description. The moment of the narrator's admission in the single line middle stanza marks the poem's wonderful disintegration. The language becomes choppy, monosyllabic.

Attempts to re-ignite the dramatic language turn into exhausted mumbles. I actually get the feeling that this a poem Wehle started in good faith and then soured on by the middle, and allowed the poem to gag on its failure to remain grand and dynamic in a field crowded with exclamatory poets and their noisy, incantatory verse. "

Smearing Johnny Cash

Pop music critic Jody Rosen writes in Slate that as if no one realized that Johnny Cash was really in Show Business and that it's his mission to point it out. Such is the strain of producing weekly columns where some little-discussed
"issue" or controversy with an iconic musician has to be brought to our attention and addressed with varying degrees of make believe alarm.

We've had a snippy, chatty, snarky little stretch recently by David Yaffe about Bob Dylan's interest in Alicia Keyes in particular and strong black women in general, leaving out the salient point that Dylan and the objects of his affection are, we assume, consenting adults engaged in attractions that have harmed no one, nor resulted in theft, destruction of property, or anyone being arrested. Yet Yaffe brought us a "scoop" every other news outlet overlooked or ignored, and his analysis of this decades long habit showed us ...exactly what? Only that Yaffe managed to get Dylan and Keyes mentioned in the same headline on the sheerest of reasons , and presented an outline of Dylan's career that was virtually pointless and dull. That's a hard trick, considering the subject.

Rosen on whether Cash's late recordings amount to cheese rests on the teetering premise that a musician cannot be a Celebrity and an Artist as well; citing hi jinks with The Monkees (or reciting corny poems with shlockmeister Rod McKuen) are things that come with the territory, and it ought not surprise anyone that Cash's best work , which is impressive and large , obscures the admittedly cheesier tasks done in the name of show business.

Comparing the marketing of Cash to the bloated, grandiose and drunken belligerent tough guyism
of late Sinatra misses everything you can name, whether it's the bus, the boat,or the point, if there was one to begin with.The examples presented are anything but cheesy; what's remarkable is the restraint in framing a taciturn icon's accumulating reputation as Great American Musician.

All work simply and effectively with qualities, virtues and image Cash has always had all these decades, variations on The Man In Black and the ongoing themes of sin, redemption, honor and the lack of it.Decorated and posed and framed and lit just so, yes, but the effect is classy by it's lack of baroque excess. Sinatra's presentation of self in his declining years, let us say, was a continual "fuck you" of self assertion (to use Robert Christgau's line) through which he took pride in his fuck ups, his infidelities, his crudeness, his dalliance with Mafia goons and brushed them off with the maudlin bathos of "My Way". Sinatra's reputation of being one of America's greatest pop singers, ever, takes on a foul stench that won't abate, like a dumpster in the back of a food market.