Why is the Great American Poem So Hard to Write?
Dean Ellis, one of the Iron Lattice’s oldest supporters and a regular contributor, lives poetry as much as he writes it. A Jersey city native, Dean charted a course for a lyrical life in his 20’s when he boarded a ship in New Orleans bound for Brazil, as chronicled in his Volume 5 piece “The Ship.” According to him, there never was any going home again after that. “Coming back from Brazil reminded me of reading Buzz Aldrin’s book Back to Earth, about returning from the moon,” he remembers. “It was a real depression—I just kept thinking, “what do I do now?” I got out of it by getting in my car and driving back to New Orleans. I’ve been here ever since.”
Living as we do in trying times, Dean has been pondering poetry’s purposes, as Far Flung, his new poetry collection from Portal’s Press can attest. Throughout the volume he asks and answers the question, what can poetry do for a world that appears to be bleeding out anywhere you look? “This country is collapsing from within, it seems,” he says. “Poetry may be the lie that tells the truth, but what difference does it make?” When I ask him what difference it’s made for him, he dreamily returns to his lifetime of adventures. “A friend of mine in Brazil—he has something like a Brazilian Rick’s Cafe—set up a table where people would come up and I’d write them poetry on the spot,” he says. “That works well with the ladies—at least it does in Brazil.” But although Dean may be more of a lover than a fighter, he still considers his faith in the power of the pen a rebellious act. “It’s defiance against silence, giving up and just throwing up your hands,” he says. “Poetry is a connection between poet and reader. It’s a soulful thing.”
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Why is the Great American Poem So Hard to Write?
First of all, define great. Great as in good, as
in overarching, inclusive, perfect, profound,
lovely and lean? Or at once cryptic
and coherent, the kind that provokes
nods from critics and smiles from
commoners? One that makes
children giggle and scholars
sigh? A bipartisan poem,
perhaps, now that we’re lost,
chronic, incurable, terminal?
And when you say hard,
do you mean, hard
to write, imagine,
conceive, construct,
publish?
Second of all, isn’t everything
hard these days, isn’t everything,
these days, hard to write? I’m
sure you’ll agree. And
if you don’t, well, there
ya go, here we are. Okay,
so some things are easy
to write now: a polemic,
a pamphlet, a prescription;
a puffpiece, a panegyric,
a perfectly round O in
the mouth. A scream,
a screed, but a poem?
An American poem?
Good luck with that,
pal. Then how about
a lament, a hagiography,
a howl? A sob, a scar,
a suicide note? Piece
of cake, but a sonnet?
Tall order, my friend.
I could write
you, abracadabra
presto-change-o, a
postcard, a primer,
a recipe for potato
salad, a farce, a formula,
a job recommendation.
But an ode? To what?
Grief? Gamma rays?
Lady Godiva? Lady
Gaga, Good King
Wenceslas? Gas
guzzlers, single
malts, single
mothers, double
helixes? Pizza,
petrochemicals?
The NBA, NEA,
NPR, NRA? Oprah,
the opioid epidemic?
Bisons, bipods, bad
optics, biopics?
Let’s try again. You
say you want a poem,
an American poem,
a revolution. Well,
ya know, we all want
to change the zeitgeist,
the prevailing narrative,
the punditry, the memeitry,
our sex, our identities,
our partners, our politics,
our citizenship, but first,
let’s be honest, the playoffs
have started and we can’t
just look away. Look
away, look away, look
away, look away. I wish
I were in Dixie, she was
such a lovely lady, but
a bit of a racist, dontcha
know. See what I mean?
Can we turn down the
temperature while
we turn up our noses?
Shut our ears while
we open the doors?
Open our hearts while
we lower the volume?
And then there’s poetry
itself. Where is it going,
where is it taking us,
where are we taking it?
We can ask the same
questions of America,
and get no response.
Is America even
listening?
Some say its eardrums were shattered
by those hijacked planes downtown,
others say its teeth bashed in by
that con man midtown, its mouth
taped shut, its insides kicked in
by the mob that ran in his
wake, that the ink has
all run dry trying to
write about it all.
And you ask for a poem, an
American poem. Well, this,
I’m afraid, is the best I can do.
And what if I did? Wrote that damned
bloody poem, the Great American One?
What if I spat the moon onto the page
and ceased the seas from rising? What
if I scribbled refugees across the border,
melted Uzis with metaphor, beat back
the Invader with insurrectionist odes,
artilleries of alliteration, surgical
strikes of perfect verse? What if I
unmasked evil with iambics, created
a meter that sounded your car alarm,
and rescued your ride from getting jacked?
Or what if I drowned that Dodge with
oily refrains, combusted it with internal
rhymes? What if I synecdoched all sinners
and set them adrift on a lake of negation?
Or housed the sign guy on Claiborne
with homonyms, broke the Covid code
with a couplet? Could I universalize
health care with healing phrases fumigate
fascism with free verse pulverize poverty
with pentameter neutralize neocons with nonsense?
What if I scratched out a scroll that rescued
the rivers gave succor to the seas and solidity
back to the glaciers? What if I transformed
diction into dance made licorice out of
limericks Twizzlered away all young
men from Nantucket? What if I traded
in anaphoras that fed the hungry again
again and yet again what if I eulogized
inanity lifted every other voice with
song and silenced the rest? What
if what if what if what if?
But isn’t the essential thing,
when you get right down to
it (we gotta get down to it),
finding someone and something
to love, and having them love
you back? Once I loved America.
Once she loved me back. How
do you write a poem about that?
Well, this,
I’m afraid,
is the best
I can do.
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Image: The Tower of Babel Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1563