I am only just discovering the "politics of the day". |
"It was Wallace Stevens who thought of the poem as an oral event."--Diane Wakowski, from a reading in Pittsburgh, 1980. If you told me you was pro-nuke and I told you I was once no-nuke HEY maybe I was plumb crazy wrong. I think I was mixed with feelings of anger, of love, of fear, of the Eve of Destruction, of Hiroshima, of gooks, of unsettling vendettas, of Abbey Hoffman's book, of The Theory of Leisure, of Bierman and Gould's Philosophy book; so let me take it back the way I shouted my bandwagon performanace like an oral event of turning on the shower and singing up a storm and tell you that the only reason I'd been no-nuke was because Jane Fonda was on the platform like a Barbie doll with her case about it and she'd been my favorite actress and if I meet her, all I want to say is come to bed with me, you daring Venus, Missie Sex Queen of the Appocalypse Then. Forget your ex, Jane. Come with ME for the silent night. I'll raise a banner for the cause . . but, ah gee. Catching a sure home run at the ole' Forbes Field is an extinct exclusive fantasy. Forget that that Tom Hayden was legend, if not President of a philosophy. He's the kind of guy who mooned my half-sick books declaring Port-Huron activism when I picketed around little Irwin Tower and asked for forgiveness for knowing that he was too smart. But us now? Naaah. If I told you I had really really been no-nuke, and I told you are so pro-nuke, you'd just yell back I was now so pro-nuke too. It's our opinions, prophecy, Balzacanne petunias growing higher and higher in the flower gardens, products of our environment. It's my ingenuity wanting to argue about how to incorporate sci fi and Dr. Strangelove's numbers 13 & 36th American dream on finding Alex riding Satin the wild stallion. It is the finale of the world's best nuclear economy package findings its way into the home of some poor village foreign to this country. Yes Jane Fonda loved Vadim and soon after was immortalized by him. But that was then and who is getting immortalized by now? So forget that I was no-nuke. Diane was as pretty in 1980 as she was eating a college dinner in some posh place with us in l969. Oh! Look at the way this little girl's face is crying in her Rice Krispies over how much sheer energy it takes to dream her up. |