A poem from HOLD TIGHT: THE TRUCK DARLING POEMS by JENI OLIN

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“Paxil” from Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems by Jeni Olin

(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2010)

Paxil

If I had a million dollars, I mean

if it weren’t all tied up in securities,

I’d give all the poets 2 weeks in Pacific

Daylight time. For serious. Sometimes

I romanticize the proletariat. Other quarters,

I join trophy wives poolside: human tempura

banging White Russians back to back & in the moonlight,

the oleanders look like bosoms heaving

drowsily over the unexperienced lake. Wait,

I swear I’m coming it kept whispering…

Your come: teeth-whitening serum or a snail’s trail

across a sack of ice under Goan strobe lights,

as sticky and heavy as Asian rice & about as candid

as a Masonic Lodge. Or as personal as a Nerve ad:

“Zero abortions, zero dependents, & financially secure

in a quasi-geisha way.” Corks bob in our wine

like the pageboys on the women on Park
as an Amstel sun burns over a flock of
buildings. Your eyes are like the green pools
of drowned toddlers, your kneecaps –

the skulls of inbred dogs, your penis
which resembles a sun-burnt baby’s arm

& smells of chlorine brings me to —
tears? No, thank you awfully much,

it’s positively rain. Me I’m strong,

can do the Hercules One Arm Bed-to-Bed Transfer
but can’t do much anymore without feeling

dirty. Please take out the garbage of this poem &

if you’ve ever read a poem this bad,
then welcome back.

*

This feels like an LA poem by a New Yorker. New Yorker’s are often ambivalent about SoCal, tho the same is not so vice-versa. This poem opens with humor, and without ambivalence, though it’s possible that the “for serious” is a kind of gentle mimicry of “valley girl” language, which is still quite prevalent:

If I had a million dollars, I mean

if it weren’t all tied up in securities,

I’d give all the poets 2 weeks in Pacific

Daylight time. For serious.

The second stanza, which begins with the last word of the first and drifts into the third, notices something inescapable and important about the LA experience, which isn’t quite true of New York or all that many other major metropolitan areas:

Sometimes

I romanticize the proletariat. Other quarters,

I join trophy wives poolside: human tempura

banging White Russians back to back & in the moonlight,

the oleanders look like bosoms heaving

drowsily over the unexperienced lake.

What I’m talking about is LA’s rather extreme segregation by social class. Tell me your major cross streets, and I’ll tell how much your house or apartment costs, what kind of car you’re likely to drive, how you live, even what language is spoken in your home, Of course, this isn’t 100% accurate, but it is. Olin, or at least the narrator here, notices that if you’re hanging with the plebs, you’re nowhere near the stars, and if you’re with the trophy wives, you’re nowhere near the people who work in all those stores or offices, or with their hands.

I assume the unexperienced lake is one of those obviously artificial big ponds that anchor so many developments.

… Wait,

I swear I’m coming it kept whispering…

Your come: teeth-whitening serum or a snail’s trail

across a sack of ice under Goan strobe lights,

There is something sexy about the way the big plants seem to wave in the warm breezes, and there’s always the promise … It appears that the author / narrator has succumbed to the paxil, the alcohol and the warm breezes and has just sexually pleasured some guy or other.

I don’t know what Goan strobe lights are. Perhaps she’s not in LA, perhaps she’s in Goa … perhaps she’s at a party of Goans in LA … I’ll just have to not get this bit, and move on. (I’m old; by Olin’s photo on the book, she’s not. So there are bound to be bits like that in this kind of poem, which is loosely, nth generation New York School).

as sticky and heavy as Asian rice & about as candid

as a Masonic Lodge. Or as personal as a Nerve ad:

“Zero abortions, zero dependents, & financially secure

in a quasi-geisha way.”

She continues to describe the come. Perhaps something about the encounter’s impersonality and lack of intimacy and communication (his come is “about as candid as a Masonic Lodge”) has struck her. I get the Masonic Lodge bit, and I get the impersonality of the “Nerve ad”, tho I have no idea what or who Nerve is. (Try googling the word “nerve” why don’tcha?) Maybe “quasi-Geisha” is a clue? I don’t know yet.

… Corks bob in our wine

like the pageboys on the women on Park
as an Amstel sun burns over a flock of
buildings. Your eyes are like the green pools
of drowned toddlers, your kneecaps –

the skulls of inbred dogs, your penis
which resembles a sun-burnt baby’s arm

& smells of chlorine brings me to —
tears?

Something about the corks remind her of the women Park Ave in NYC, but it doesn’t make her homesick, she passes on to the Amstel sun that I take to be a billboard (because it’s established earlier that they’re drinking White Russians in the moonlifht) visible in the distance (perhaps this is a party in the hills (there are lots of hills in LA, and the poor and proletarian don’t live in any of them).

And then she passes on to a description of her sex partner, whom she doesn’t seem to like much, with his dead baby eyes and his inbred dog kneecaps, though she does seep a bit impressed by his penis in spite of herself, and the way it smells like a swimming pool.

Somehow all of this, which is post some sort of sex (which I doubt to have been coital, since his spilled come rests on what would have been, I presume, a highly uncomfortable surface for her ass or whatever, a bag of ice, brings her to consider her emotional state.

And she has one, and tho it isn’t happiness or contentment, it isn’t tears.

(Aside: I can only imagine the response of the person who comes along next to refill the ice chest …)

 Anyhow, her emotional response. It isn’t tears, or is it?

            … No, thank you awfully much,

it’s positively rain.

I’m not crying it’s just raining is the oldest cliché in the pop song book. She continues for a line or two with her non-heart-felt denial:

… Me I’m strong,

can do the Hercules One Arm Bed-to-Bed Transfer
but can’t do much anymore without feeling

dirty. Please take out the garbage of this poem &

if you’ve ever read a poem this bad,
then welcome back.

She does feel some shame, I guess. Is it her, or the Paxil and booze? I think it’s her, I think she thinks it’s her, I mean, tho it’s hard to tell, especially if she’s written this poem either on or in an attempt to be true to the way she felt while on the chemical(s). I mean, we’re always a bit chemical. Whydo I think she thinks it’s her? Because she’s calling attention to her feeling that this kind of dirtiness/garbage (her words, not mine) is to be found in many of her poems. Even the ones not written on or about Paxil.

*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review.  To wit: NEXT.  And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.