American Kids

The flappers and the jitterbugs

The beatniks and hippies never die.

The rockers and grungers speak nothing of the wars

Interrupting our good time

Meaningless things, wars

In which nothing happens really

But you can feel it when a war ends

And the music can continue

After World War One

The survivors of that war became the first generation

Of Americans to do it in the back of an automobile.

Perhaps it was the sex lessons they'd learned in Europe

That led to the American sexual revolution of the twenties.

(Thousands of them returned from the war with VD

after being encouraged by their moral government

to not use condoms, because,

what could be worse than contraception?)

Time passes

And face paint hair band rock and roll

Becomes the turgid flannel and corduroy of grunge

But say something about marijuana

How it sneaked itself into white American culture

Disguised as Jazz

White kids listening to Gene Croupa

The drummer of a Negro band

The first white person ever charged

With possession of pot in 1938

Devil music they called it.

Ecstatic energetic multi-cultural vibrations

Intoning fierce emotive dancing and rhythm

Shocking to puritans

Frightening to moralists who were sure

That swing signified the beginning

Of the decay of American culture:

“The family system will disappear,” they said

“Society, sapped at its very base

Will have to find new foundations,

And Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free

Will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower

Through a sunlit world¹”

Those moralists were right all along

The jitterbug craziness the ecstasy and dementia

The refer madness (the poem pauses while I

crash through the window and fall out onto the street)

In the nineties kids were cool

We were stoned beautifully and there can be

No status among the equally beautiful

All very confusing for young women of common sense

For if there is no status among young men

How is a girl supposed to know who to mate with?

Perhaps she should just sample us all and then choose

Her- mother- said- to- choose- the- very- best- one-

And-you- are- not- it

A kid today has a different bent

He's a straight edged non-drinking non-smoking ass kicker

Whose greatest vice and outpouring of spirit is his violence

And his willingness to repeatedly fall off of a skateboard

Breaking his ankles and cracking his head on a plywood ramp

He tells stories about getting kicked in the face at the metal concert

And relishes the pain of tattooing and piercing and cutting and scarring

Pain is what galvanizes his memory to the moment of life

He loves pain, and so the decadent hedonism of my generation

Has become the masochism and asceticism of his

And what can we say about the movement between the decades

The different faces, the masks of the American spirit?

Perhaps one cannot participate in the emerging incarnation

Without completely disconnecting with the past

As though an awareness of the past disqualifies us

From participating in what is new.

1The moralist is quoted from Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow

Toward a Literary Anthropology

We may have noticed that the old books are gone

No one reads the old books anymore

The authors of the old books are dead

The old crotchety crotch-stuffers-- the old white men-

The Muppet critics snoring in the balcony of literature

Have become extinct

And so the task of the literary anthropologist

Is to discover what killed formalism

Where have the new critics gone?

Were the reader response critics killed off

By some natural catastrophe

Or were they hunted to extinction by over-zealous feminists?

My own theory is that the old critics died out

Because they failed to impress upon a new generation the necessity

That their torch of knowledge be carried further

The project of the old school codified and crystallized

The old critics simply died guarding their elaborate castle in the sand

This failure began in the 1970s when the old school

Refused to engage emerging feminism in a critical dialog

A dialog that some feared would legitimize feminism

They simply ignored the feminists and continued in the old vein

Never recognizing feminism as the vital force

In the criticism of the age

Then they promptly died out leaving no heirs to their throne

And feminism inherited the lordship of the lit. crit. mountain

Because the feminists were breaking new ground

They were the living coral rising from the skeleton of the old

Popping off new intellectual polyps

Filling the brine with the spermatozoa of their knowledge

And now have we come to the place

Where feminism itself has begun to calcify?

Is feminism repeating the mistake of the old dominant hegemony?

Is it trying to guard its finished castle in the sand

By resisting a critical dialog with emerging thought?

Perhaps criticism only thrives as it is rebuilt

The old dilapidated structures of thought

Need to be tested continually and torn down if necessary