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Dean Gorman Crashing the Garden Party: Some approaches to reading Joe Wenderoth's The Holy Spirit of Life The poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy a breakfast. (He) lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind ... But I had a scientific education and a radical youth; am old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress—the progress I see and the progress I wish for and do not see. So I say what I have said about the public, and their world angrily and unwillingly. - Randall Jarrell, from "The Obscurity of the Poet" A few months ago I caught a new animated series on the Cartoon Network called The Boondocks. It is based on a popular, controversial comic strip about two black kids from the south side of Chicago forced to live with their grandfather in an affluent suburb. One of the brothers, Huey Freeman, is an aspiring revolutionary. In this episode the grandfather drags the boys to a lavish neighborhood garden party where Huey mingles with the party's eccentric socialites in an attempt to inform them of America's injustices toward its destitute lower class and minorities—at one point claiming that Ronald Reagan was "actually the devil" (one indication being the conspicuous six letters in his first, middle, and last name—his middle name is Wilson). But no one listens to his little diatribes, his own shock and awe campaign. The wealthy white guests just clap, leaning down to tell him how "well spoken" he is, adding to his frustration and disillusionment: "Are you listening to what I'm saying—I just told you Ronald Reagan was the devil!" Later that night I turned off my television and picked up a book I'd been enthusiastically reading, Joe Wenderoth's unruly new collection The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self. All of a sudden it hit me: Huey Freeman is Joe Wenderoth. Here's the antagonist, the dangerous intellectual, the merry prankster who writes parables about a dickless Jesus having an orgy with his disciples. Here's the Wenderoth who fantasizes about Dave Thomas' corporate-fictional daughter in his epic prose poem collection Letters to Wendy's—forever pushing the envelope, challenging the status quo by targeting social and political taboos. One essay in The Holy Spirit wryly claims we should start revising the image of Martin Luther King Jr., as we did with the image of Jesus, into that of a white man—to "revise (his) image in a way that will bring more respect to the great man." His satire here falls somewhere between Vonnegut and Dave Chappelle: "So what he was considered a black man his whole life? What have you got against freedom?" Joe Wenderoth's crisis is the same as that faced by Huey Freeman—an outsider finding himself suddenly on the inside. The Freeman boys in The Boondocks are now welcome amongst the rich and powerful. They're enrolled in a well-funded private school, with more resources than they could ever imagine. In Wenderoth's case, Letters to Wendy's made him something of a cult figure, but now, for all the people he might offend, he is undoubtedly an insider—teaching, judging contests, publishing steadily (not to mention that he, himself, went the MFA route)—a rebel for sure, but one protected by the gated walls surrounding The Academy's not so Eden-like garden. In one essay from The Holy Spirit, Wenderoth, in an effort to expose the timidity and unscrupulous nature of mainstream academia, prints the chronological string of e-mails from an editor at American Poet magazine which systematically—and excruciatingly politely—reject an essay he wrote for them on irreverence (the essay, along with the e-mails, also appeared in the Summer '05 issue of Fence). Publishing these e-mails seems a bit stentorian and juvenile. After all American Poet wasn't guilty of censorship, just cowardice. But why is Wenderoth making all this noise? Why is he being so obnoxious? Why does he package himself as a self-indulgent novelty (the essay collection, for example, is riddled with pictures of Joe with 80's hair, with drinks, fondling a Ronald McDonald statue, even pictures from his own colonoscopy)? Is this interesting? Funny? Does poetry need a Howard Stern? Why does someone as smart and talented as Wenderoth choose to risk coming off as a mere shock writer, a peddler of cheap thrills? Unfortunately, many readers may miss out on Wenderoth's fierce intelligence and constant self-evaluation. Maybe they prefer thinkers who keep their rectums to themselves. What I'm interested in, however, are the motives one might have to write a book like Wenderoth's, the spirit behind such dissention, and what this kind of document might mean to a younger generation of poets. Is it absolutely necessary right now to attack the mainstream? Do we need someone to strike a nerve in the status quo? My answer is yes. And in his essay, "Genuine People: Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves," Wenderoth strikes just right. He begins by illustrating how important Robert Hass' poem "Meditation at Lagunitas" is to a certain demographic of the mainstream, referring to it as "perhaps the most influential American poem of the past fifty years," and then proceeds to decimate the poem line by line. Well, to suggest "Meditations" is the most influential poem of the past fifty years seems to be an overstatement—it's an admired poem, but not that admired. Yet he's amplifying for effect here, in order that his dissent seems all the more iconoclastic when it arrives: "the poem...equivalent with an explicitly sentimental ad for that which allows us our casual comfortable lives." Finally Wenderoth offers "Meditations at Cleveland," a lampooning imitation of Hass' poem, suggesting how, with some slight adjustments, "Lagunitas" might be improved. It begins: All the new thinking is about drugs.Yet the thing Wenderoth doesn't do—and where the real dissention lies—is much more fundamental. He doesn't politely accept a poem that's been lauded, canonized, and name-dropped for the last thirty years as a model for contemporary American poetry. In other words, like Dylan, he's gone electric. The Hass essay and the imitation are a criticism against a tendency in mainstream American poetry to write and view poems as some sort of vacation from thinking, its "stand against poetic knowledge." The problem he has with the Hass poem, which is to say the general attitude of the "meditative" movement as a whole (of which Hass is the central figure), is a problem of unqualified laziness—a kind of sanctimonious arrogance, what Wenderoth calls the speaker's "celebration of his own power." And Wenderoth's work is, in many ways, the opposite of this. He is highly aware of logic, thought, and theory. His essay is not really a personal assault on Robert Hass or his poem, but a defense of poetry with intelligent purpose and risk—as opposed to one that rests solely on the power of language or memory. This isn't a book of essays about poetry. In a sense, it is poetry. Wenderoth's collection explores politics, music, poetry, television, drinking, campus life, racism, pornography, religion and love—all with the passion, suspicion and wonder of a poet looking out at the world and finding himself very much a part of it. And his embrace of popular culture is much livelier than those many academics and poets who fashion themselves culture specialists (Dana Gioia, Tony Hoagland, and Mark Haliday are a few that come to mind). Consider this passage from "The Imaginary Tunnel." Here Wenderoth analyzes The Roadrunner in relation to a passage from German philosopher Martin Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking? : The Roadrunner strikes me as the most powerful of cartoons because it is able to demonstrate, keenly and unflinchingly, our relation to that which withdraws from us, that which "must be thought about." ... This is certainly the countenance of the coyote: the thinker. He is possessed by his consideration of how better to pursue what he most desires. It follows, then, that the roadrunner itself represents "what must be thought about." The roadrunner is more than the coyote's potential sustenance—it is the living symbol of his whole desire ... (The) unthinking, unmoving coyote, successfully alone with his desired object, is never the subject of the cartoon, and we must be grateful for that. Wenderoth is able to capture the profundity of Heidegger through the symbolism of coyote and roadrunner, a familiar if antiquated cartoon most of our generation grew up watching (note: I use our here very broadly—I'm 27 and Wenderoth is, I believe, 39). He takes philosophy and pop-culture and shows us, without sounding bookish or smug, how they reflect back upon our society's beliefs and desires. Wenderoth's biggest fear, the thing he's perpetually railing against, is the same thing Huey Freeman is so mystified by: a society of polite clappers whose ideals aren't felt or lived, but learned (or worse yet, simply inherited). After being scolded by his grandfather for trying to embarrass him in front of the new neighbors, Huey says: "They don't care what I say. They don't care that we're black either—they're so rich they don't care about anything. Whatever you do or say, they just applaud." And isn't this a fear that has everything to do with American institutions? Corporations and universities are run and managed by individuals with an increasing sense of applied duty, a buying in to some vague and unaccountable machine willing to make all the big decisions on our behalf. Wenderoth challenges this machine and all its delusive promises: It is my suspicion that in truth you have nothing whatsoever to offer, and that the "Manager" position you occupy exists as the direct result of a specific recent history. That history is a history of organized and massive brute-force and the armed occupation that always follows. It is also my suspicion that, as this occupation wears on, it's brute force, as it becomes less and less apparent, becomes all the more despicable and foreign to us, the few on-earth beings not yet dissolved under its weird vague hope. (from: In Response to the Disciplinary Action Taken Against Me by the Human Resources Manager) Joe Wenderoth is "In"—in the sense that he is among the chosen. And the way he's using that position is by trying to make himself, and his readers, as uncomfortable as possible with the very notion of "In-ness." But he's not iconoclastic for the sake of notoriety, or book sales. He's trying to shake up a culture of apathy and complacency— a fraternal academia that is afraid to take risks, that churns out passable, yet mostly unaffecting, writers and critics. When approached openly, Wenderoth's work is conscientious, unpretentious, unpredictable, and entertaining—especially in the wake of other poet-critics who, historically, make for rather austere or dyspeptic company. So is the poet, as Randall Jarrell says, "a condemned man?" Is Wenderoth acting out unwillingly in reaction to the unsatisfactory state of America letters? Will he succeed only in maintaining his cult status—doomed to remain obscured by a cloud of juvenile stunts and sexual innuendos? Or will The Holy Spirit of Life gain Wenderoth the respect and serious critical treatment he deserves? I can't say. But the walls securing the garden party don't seem nearly as imposing as they did to me six months ago, and if I scaled one tonight, perching myself on top, I might with the right moon look down amongst the guests to see coyote and roadrunner engaged in an epic struggle for the fate of humanity—the starched men and women blithely applauding, stopping only to refill their martinis from the open bar by the gazebo. And if I looked hard enough I might see Joe Wenderoth in their midst, domestic beer in hand, speaking refractorily to some tweed coterie next the hors d'oeuvres—putting his money on coyote. * Let's continue the conversation. Send me your thoughts. deanfgorman@yahoo.com about Dean Gorman |