I hate to come back to this, but…

…I have to.

I’m not trying to distract from the awesome recordings, posted below, of two sonnets I absolutely love.

I’m just going to quote Sarah Palin from a recent interview on Fox News (where she is now an analyst…who knew she was capable of analyzing anything?) in which she discusses the relative merits of the r-word as used by Rahm Emmanuel and by Rush Limbaugh, respectively.  You have to dig to find this, because the transcript of the speech that links to the Fox News home page is abridged (probably because this story is already catching some online attention).  For now–we’ll see for how long–the full inerview transcript can still be accessed here.

So, here’s the excerpt that interests me:

PALIN: That didn’t stop my passion, my commitment to reaching out and to helping the special needs community when they asked for it. And they did ask for it on this one. They reached out to me and said, can you kind of highlight the problem that we have the White House, with both the President and his Chief of Staff being so insensitive to the special needs community. And I said, I’m here. Send me. I will do so.

WALLACE: OK. But Rush Limbaugh weighed in this week. And he said this:

“Our politically correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards.”

PALIN: He was satirical (ph) in that –

WALLACE: Wait a minute, let me finish.

PALIN: OK.

WALLACE: “I mean, these people, these liberal activists are quote, kooks.”  Should Rush Limbaugh apologize?

PALIN: They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was using satire to bring attention to what this politically correct –

WALLACE: But he used the “R” word.

PALIN: Using satire. Name calling by anyone — I teach this to my children, you teach it to your children and your grandchildren, too.  Name calling by anyone, it’s just unnecessary. It just wastes time.  Let’s speak to the issues and –

WALLACE: But you know what some people are going to say, Governor, and have said. They say, look, when it’s her political adversary Rahm Emanuel, she’s going to call him out, he’s indecent, apologize. But when it’s a political friend like Rush Limbaugh, oh it’s satire

PALIN: I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with “F-ing retards.” And we did know that Rahm Emanuel, it’s been reported, did say that. That’s a big difference there.

But again, name calling, using language that is insensitive by anyone — male, female, Republican, Democrat, it’s unnecessary, it’s inappropriate and let’s all just grow up.

Look: you can read the whole interview if you like a giggle; it’s full of indecipherable Palinese.  She speaks, for example, of the advantage of having good, up-to-date information at one’s “fingerprints.”  Really.

But the above excerpt is plainly ridiculous. 

Let it be known: it’s okay to call people retards as long as you’re doing it satirically.  And on a radio show with millions of listeners.  And as long as you’re attacking political correctness.  (Palin makes a point of saying that her crusade against the r-word is NOT about being politically correct.  Whew.  That’s a relief.  I thought she was going all soft-and-bleeding-heart on us.)  And–this is the most important part–it’s okay to call someone a retard if you clarify that what you actually meant by retard was “kook.”  So.  It was a slur against people with mental illness, not one against people with mental retardation, and therefore, Mr. Limbaugh is a mature man with a heightened sense of satirical irony, whereas Mr. Emmanuel is an insensitive adolescent who needs to grow up.  After being fired.

Another thing…Sarah Palin has made it as clear as possible that she does intend to run for President in 2012.  If she wins, then Gen-Y will have occupied a unique place in history:

Twelve out of our initial sixteen voting years will have been spent under Presidents who display primary-school literacy levels and who routinely speak actual, certifiable, no-doubt-about-it, objectively considered, undeniable NONSENSE.  Sentences that defy parsing, idioms that defy etymology, metaphors that advertise their own opacity.  Such was the daily fare of Presidential verbiage from 2000-2008, and such will be the fare once more if the thrilla from Wasilla manages to capture the hearts and minds of fifty-one percent of American retards.

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Music and vocals by Rufus Wainwright

Arranged by Joseph Prestamo. Performed by Queens College Choir, directed by Dr. James John.

Sonnet 30

Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Recited by Alison Gayler

Recited by Kenneth Branagh

“R” is so NOT the new “N”

Stop the presses.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and disagree with Sarah Palin.  I’m also going to accuse her of sloppy thinking, political posturing, and using her family to serve her own public image.

Palin is angry because Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, once said in a private policy meeting that Democrats who don’t support the President’s pursuit of health care reform are “f—–g retarded.”  As we all remember from the campaign, Ms. Palin is the mother of a child with Down syndrome.  (I won’t say “afflicted with Down syndrome,” which is what the AP article cited above says.)  We can of course all sympathize with Mom Palin’s anger at such flippant use of the word “retarded,” and we can all also join her in urging people everywhere to stop using it to refer to things they don’t like.  Doing so is irresponsible and unkind.

After that, though, I start to think Palin is looking crazy.  Oh, damn…can’t say that.  I mean, stupid.  Mmmm.  Can’t say that either.  I mean, less intelligent than other people who have thought about the same issue.  Less well prepared to speak with authority.  Less logical.  Logically impaired.  Ummm…afflicted with a persistent mental state of illogicality.

So, in addition to saying that Emanuel should not have used the word “retarded” as an insult, Palin is also claiming that doing so was just like using the N-word.  “Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language,” Palin says, ”Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable.”  She goes on to call for Emanuel’s immediate dismissal as Obama’s chief of staff.

Eh? 

I won’t choose to dwell on the obvious ad hominem and tu quoque rejoinders, but I will list them briefly.  For someone with as loose a tongue as Sarah Palin has, no “f—–g retarded” comments allowed is a pretty high standard.  Should Palin have been fired for claiming that urban Americans aren’t real Americans?  For denigrating community service as unimportant work, and community organizing as a sinecure?  For saying that Obama pals around with terrorists, or that he doesn’t care about the safety of American troops?  I must say, calling someone “retarded” is about ten miles less belligerent and offensive than calling someone a terrorist; and insulting people with Down syndrome (if that’s what Emanuel did) is certainly no worse than insulting EVERYONE WHO CHOOSES TO LIVE IN A CITY.  The community organizers remark from her Republican Convention speech doesn’t even dignify comment.

But this issue is deeper than all of that.  Of course every reasonable American has a healthy contempt for Sarah Palin, the woman who told Katie Couric that she reads “all” of the nation’s newspapers and that the best way to reform health care is to cut taxes.  Sarah Palin is just too easy a target, as Andrew Sullivan has learned from the thousands of readers who’ve just been ignoring his diatribes.  (He can’t resist the urge to be known as the one who’s nailin’ Palin.)

What’s most important about this angry diatribe by Palin is that her logical mistake is such an easy one to make–one that many well meaning people might make, the consequences of which are, I think, a bit more significant than a few offended moms.  Let’s be honest: every mom has the right to be offended at slights to her kids.  Someone makes a short joke, or a four-eyes joke, or a skinny or fat joke or a joke about big feet–moms everywhere, get mad and go to work.  It’s good and healthy and right.

But insulting someone for being “f—–g retarded” is not at all like insulting them for being, say, a “f—–g n—-r.”  And the difference isn’t trivial.

Racial slurs are not bad because they hurt people’s feelings.  No self-respecting adult would play the feelings-hurt card, anyway; but even if he did, racial slurs wouldn’t matter for that reason.  Racial slurs are bad because they reveal an irrational and harmful prejudice against people of a certain race.  If I use “f—–g n—-r” as an insult, that implies that I think it is bad or undesirable to be black.  The attitude revealed by the comment is a pernicious one; it denies that a black person could be a valuable addition to the discussion.

Calling someone a “f—–g retard” implies that it is bad to be retarded.  It implies that retarded people have slower, less useful brains than do people who are not retarded, and that people who are not retarded count it a blessing that their brains work up to speed.  It implies that a retarded person would not be of much help in the conversation at hand (namely, the best way to reform the nation’s health care system): that such a conversation demands people with healthy and well working brains who can analyze the effects of multiple factors on a complex problem and who can discuss solutions to that problem in facile and precise speech.  Using “retarded” as an insult implies that it is bad to be stupid and better to be smart.

Emanuel’s words are not good words; they’re not even excusable.  He shouldn’t have said them.  But the underlying premise–that intelligence matters–is a true one.  If he had called those who disagreed with him “f—–g n—–s,” then he would have revealed a different premise–that race matters.  This false premise is pernicious and would have been grounds for dismissal.

Does Palin understand this distinction?  Does she understand that it’s reasonable (if, perhaps, inappropriate) to insult a man on a basketball court for being short?  On a tennis court, for being slow?  In a swimming pool, for being awkward?  In a choir, for having no sense of pitch?  These are matters of actual competence, and while it makes people feel bad to hear that they lack some competence or other, and tact demands that we do so rarely, if ever, and even then, carefully, it is nonetheless not reprehensible if we occasionally do so with less skill or poise.

Palin’s mistake has two obvious effects, and I cannot help thinking that both of these effects seem in line with her party’s goals for the future of this country.

The first effect is to make racism seem less abusive and less repulsive than it is.  People who have let a “that’s so retarded” slip from their mouths, now and then, can’t help thinking when they hear the N-word that they’re actually no better than that racist guy and, perhaps, he’s not so bad after all.  Given Rush Limbaugh’s recent statement that the Obama administration is giving aid to Haiti to curry favor with the black community back home (as if he needed to!), it’s just a bit eerie that Palin would jump on this opportunity to make racists seem as benign as…what do you call them?  Intelligence-ists?

Which leads me to the second effect of Palin’s error–and this is a bigger one.  The assumption hiding behind Palin’s rage is that it’s okay to be stupid.  There are a lot of problems with treating mental retardation  like race; but the most obvious one is that it makes a slow-working mind seem as benign as a shade of skin.  Does Sarah Palin really think the two are equivalent?  Instead of expecting workplaces and political parties to promote ethnic diversity, should we expect them to promote diversity of mental ability?  Should we require IQ tests to be distributed to employees in every company, after which we penalize companies who only hired quick-witted critical thinkers?

Or does Sarah Palin have some political interest in making people who know they aren’t particularly bright think that they have as much to say about politics as does anyone else?  What should we expect from the inevitable Palin rallies leading up to 2012?

Next Post

The Ogre

W.H. Auden

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

This poem is one of my favorites.  It is about physical power and verbal power, and how the latter is rare among people who possess the former.

Ever notice how people who pride themselves on their ability to throw their weight around are, almost invariably, ineloquent? 

There are two kinds of ineloquence–”drivel,” as Auden would have it–and both are associated with physical prowess.  The first is the George Bush/Elmer Fudd variety: the cowby-with-a-shotgun, kill-the-wabbit, I’m a-gonna get me a raghead type of drivel.  People who talk this kind of drivel are usually the front men.  They pretend to be folksy and down-homey, to connect with the average Joe.  (Who knew that the last election cycle would furnish us with an actual, embodied, ignorant person named Joe?)  This kind of ogre, after pummelling a village, says stupid shit like “mission accomplished.”

The second kind of drivel is the Donald Rumsfeld variety: it’s official-sounding jargon that is, at best, euphemistic, and at worst, downright cruel.  Rumsfeld has become well known since Farenheit 9-11 for his “what we know we know, what we know we don’t know, what we don’t know we don’t know” speech; but of course, defense secretaries and White House spokesmen before and after Rumsfeld have come up with much worse.  What’s worst about this kind of speech is its tendency to sanitize the reprehensible.  James Baldwin protested repeatedly against nationwide campaigns in the 1960s for “urban renewal,” which turned out to mean little more than evicting black people from their homes.

Anyway, I’m actually quite weary this evening, and I’m weary most of all of hearing folks talk about nothing…I’m weary of hearing it on news and in government and at work.  And–most of all–I’m sick of listening to it from advertisers.  Who gave all these people the right to assault my vision on my way to work?  I can’t go anywhere without seeing, hearing, being assaulted by the meaningless drivel–either jingoistic and simplistic like George Bush, or obscurantist and jargon-laden like Donald Rumsfeld–generated by the million and one corporations who think they have a right to my money (and, what is even more valuable, my attention).  I have the great advantage of being a graduate student who can plead “busy” and bury myself in quality books when everyone else is listening to chatter.  But when, occasionally, I raise my head from William Blake and hear what the world is saying, I feel oppressed, attacked, and ultimately, discouraged.  Why do people settle for drivel?

Well, language is a beautiful thing; and when I start to doubt its beauty, or its efficacy, I just quote the above poem to myself and it makes me feel better.  It’s a smug satisfaction, yes; it means that the rest of the world is composed of uncivilized ogres.  And it’s true.  I’m happy to be one whose immediate, physical, material power is quite small–one who can, if I try, master speech.  The worst thing about ogres isn’t that they crush the rest of us; it’s that they try to make us like them.  Keep quoting the above poem to yourself, and maybe the ogres will fail.

Avatar Is a Bad Movie.

No, I will not embed a picture of a blue person in my post, like every other reviewer of this movie feels compelled to do.

The visual effects in this movie–the realistic facial expressions and body movements of the Pandora people, the striking landscape, the 3-D effects that required painstaking work on every single frame of the film–are worthless.  I don’t care how good the movie looks.  It is a bad movie.

Never mind that, in principle, in general, I probably tend to agree with the movie’s message.  For-profit corporations, especially big and rich ones, especially ones that depend for their profits on exploration and extraction of natural resources, tend to be violent and dehumanizing, both to their own employees and to the people whose land they hope to exploit.

Modernization, especially industrialization and the frenzied exploration that fuels it, destroys naturally beautiful and healthy life, the intrinsic value of which we cannot understand because modern science tyrannizes over the human spirit while denying its existence.

“Primitive” cultures, though materially weaker (because less exploitative) than industrialized ones, nourish superior human minds, bodies, and spirits.  The best person in such a culture could never envy the best person in ours.  He sees our inferiority clearly.  Our weakness is obvious.

And the movie did us all a friggin’ favor by satirizing the modern military-industrial complex, which very few popular movies have dared to do. Okay, okay, okay.  It’s trying to be politically and socially responsible by bringing the story of Dances With Wolves to the post-Matrix generation.

I’m even willing to forgive the movie’s most obviously self-destroying paradox: it relies on the newest technology to criticize the dehumanizing effects of modern technology.  I would count this as effective irony if I thought there was any chance the average Avatar fan could appreciate it.  But even though s/he can’t do so, I’m willing to let it go.

Here’s what I can’t let go.  This movie has a really bad, self-defeating story line and unforgivably trite characters.

The premise is good enough; like I said, it’s just Dances With Wolves meets Star Wars.  A derivative plot, but not a bad one.

But I cannot stand the main characters: the way they interact, the acts they praise, the rewards they receive…first, not believable.  And second, not good.  I mean morally bad.  Outrageous.

So, the main character.  The happy ending is that he gets to become a blue person.  Yay for him.  He gets to join the good people; he gets his legs back; he gets his girl.  All good things.  But by what means?  The local divinity transmits his soul from one body to another.  From his original body to his soul-less avatar body.

Um…how did Ewah learn to do this, and how in Ewah’s name did the local priestess know about it?

There have only been avatars on the planet for a few years, and the blue people didn’t know what an avatar WAS until it was revealed to them at the end of the movie.  They were, understandably, distraught: these are demon bodies, the prince said.  Yet there’s already a time-honored and sacred ceremony by which the soul is transferred from an earth-human body to the blue avatar?  Please.

Second, and more important: no self-respecting, moral human being could possibly respect a person like the main character in Avatar. (No, I will not dignify this film by looking up his name on IMDB.  He’s the pathetic, ignorant, whining, self-possessed ex-marine, the walking cliche who is, of course, naturally more confident and competent than anyone else, by sheer talent–except that he’s deplorable.)

Before he knew about the impossible soul-transfer ceremony, while he was still a puny white boy embodying a big blue remote-control alien toy, he chose to seduce the princess of the tribe, getting her to break her betrothal to the prince and “mate” (i.e. consummate a marriage) with him.  He was a robot (albiet a flesh-and-blood robot), working for the enemy.  And he married the princess.

Act III of this film is all about the main character’s heroism.  He quickly becomes legendary among the tribespeople and saves their civilization by becoming, not only one of them, but the best of them.  He represents precisely the modern industrialized-nation attitude that this film PRETENDS to criticize: namely, that we can have it all–including the pre-modern innocence of tribal life–vicariously.  We can all be avatars.  Want to appreciate the beauty of nature, the interconnectedness of an ecosystem?  Want to join a tribe and feel like you belong?  Want to learn what’s wrong with modern society and criticize it from the outside?

Want to have an ice cream sundae afterwards, while checking facebook?

Just watch Pocahontas or Fern Gully or, for that matter, Dances With Wolves.  Vicariously, you can live the life of a shallow modern American who learns all about the depths of the savage soul.  Then, after two hours, you can have it all back.

The wierdest thing about Avatar is that it pretends this gulf can be traversed in a few months.  The earth-boy gets to be a blue person, forever.  It’s easy.  Just lay down here beside the glowy tree and Ewah will transfer your soul to the avatar.  It’s a perfectly safe procedure.  She does it all the time.

Fox and Scoundrels

A brief hiatus from my rants about poetics, to rant about the fact that Fantastic Mr. Fox isn’t making money.

This movie is both beautiful and important.  If you have a brain, a conscience, two hours, and ten dollars, then you should go to see it.  In the year of Avatar, for God’s sake, something good needs to make some money.

Check out Tom Philpott’s blog if you’re not convinced.

(A)symmetrical BEAST

Some reasons why Blake’s “The Tyger” (see below) is super-awesome.

1. The first and last stanzas are (almost) word-for-word the same.  They’re about the Tyger himself, and they’re set “in the forest of the night.”  The second stanza and the second-to-last are both set in heaven, where someone (who knows who?) made the tiger.  The third and fourth stanzas both speculate that maybe the tiger was made in a blacksmith’s forge.  So, considered on the level of stanzas, the poem is symmetrical: Tyger-God-blacksmith-blacksmith-God-Tyger.  You can draw a line under the first three stanzas and look at all the ways in which the fourth, fifth, and sixth mirror them.

2. The speaker points out several features of the tiger, all of which are symmetrical: eyes, heart, feet, brain.  When you split a tiger down the middle you see that he was given two of everything.  What confounds the speaker is that one of everything would have been terrible enough.  Why give the thing TWO burning eyes?  ONE set of paws and claws would already have been scary.  Who could possibly have built one set of everything, and then decided to go ahead and build another?

3. There are dozens of other images that represent polar opposites.  The tiger is “burning bright / In the forest of the night.”  He was built in the “distant deeps or skies”–that is, in hell or in heaven.  Wherever the forge was, there are four tools: hammer, chain, furnace, anvil.  Two of these tools are movable (hammer and chain), two stationary (furnace and anvil).  Two of them are used for bending things (hammer, anvil), two for keeping things contained (chain, furnace).  I’m sure there are more senses in which these four tools are symmetrical.

4. There are tons of word pairs: the repetition of “Tyger,” the juxtaposed opposites like “deeps or skies” and “What dread hand? & what dread feet?” and–my favorites–the alliterative “burning bright,” “distant deeps,” “what wings.”  Plus, check out the pairs of internal rhyme, like ”twist the sinews.”  The list goes on.  Word pairs, phrase pairs, and sentence pairs are EVERYWHERE.

5. The /ai/ sound is also everywhere–and every place it occurs, it signifies the tiger’s terror.  Every instance of “Tyger,” “bright,” “eye,” “sky,” “aspire,” “fire,” and–especially–”THY,” leaps off the page like a flame.

Every stanza has this vowel sound.  Some more than others.  I have counted them at least a hundred times in the past five years, and every time I do, I swear there’s a pattern.  More on this conspiracy theory tomorrow.

For now, suffice it to say that this poem is AWESOME because its sound echoes its sense: the pairs are everywhere, and they mirror the fearful symmetry of the tiger that terrorizes Blake’s speaker.

Like I said before, the brothers got skills.

That Fearful Symmetry

The Tyger
William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

Forget the erratic punctuation and spelling.  (You always have to do that when  you read Blake.)  What in the world is fearful about symmetry?

In how many ways–especially auditory–is this poem symmetrical?

Moods

a poem by James Weldon Johnson.

I love the sea when it is windswept
The ships ploughing up the foam,
The sailor man loudly swearing
From sheer excess of joy,
The shrill cry of a solitary sea bird,
And the smell of the sharp, salt spray.

I love the melancholy beach
Under the shimmering magic of the moon.
When just above the ocean’s rim
One loan star marks a path for me;
And the waves are moaning to the shore
Their monotoned love melody.

Few poems have stayed with me like this one.  I have worked it into my lessons at least twice a year since I started teaching.

After that rant on the intricate and infinite possibilities of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” I want to say something about a poem whose appeal is much simpler for me.  I’m not saying the poem itself is simplistic–though I might do so on another occasion, and without any slight intended to Mr. Johnson.  What I mean is that there is a simple reason, easy to explain, why I decided seven years ago that this poem would never be far from my mind.  The reason is that it demonstrates more clearly and simply than any other poem I’ve ever read what is meant by Pope’s injunction, “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Listen: what is the first stanza about?  The way to figure out the subject of a poem is not to ask what the poem means, but to ask what it sounds like.  What’s the dominant sound in the first stanza?  Don’t look at the page; just listen to the words.  Do you hear it?  SSSS—SHHHH—SSSS—SHHHH.

It sounds like the sea.

In the first stanza, the sea is represented by the sound of its waves, repeated two or three times every line.  Don’t believe me?  Listen again.  Read the first stanza and see for yourself.  /S/ and /sh/ everywhere.  If you listen with an attentive ear, there’s no missing it.

And the second stanza?  What is the dominant sound there?

/M/, obviously.  Why, oh why would Johnson repeat /m/?

It’s the waves again.  Look at the last two lines: “the waves are moaning… / Their monotoned love melody.”  For heaven’s sakes, what syllable represents a loving, relaxing, sensuous moan?  Why, /m/, of course.

In the first stanza, the waves are a thing.  A natural phenomenon.  The speaker represents their presence by making his words echo the sound that they make, physically, in the material world.

In the second stanza, he gets to know the waves a bit better.  He personifies them.  The beach is “melancholy.”  The moon is “magic.”  A star isn’t just shining; it’s guiding him.  And the waves?  No longer swishing.  They are now moaning: a sound of desire, of comfort, of intimacy.  In the second stanza, the speaker knows the sea to be more than a thing.  It is a lover.

You could, perhaps, have gotten all of that from just analyzing the meaning of each word.  But isn’t it more fun to feel it?  To hear it in the sounds themselves?

(No, I do not ask my high school students to do this, but now that you know, read the poem again and feel what it does.  Cool, eh?)

How to Sound Cool and Make Sense (like Gwendolyn Brooks)

Emma remarked on my previous post that she doesn’t know anything about poetry, except what she likes.  Well, I have loved this poem since I was a toddler.  (In poetry-reading years, a “toddler” is about sixteen earth-years old.) 

We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool.  We
Left school.  We

Lurk late.  We
Strike straight.  We

Sing sin.  We
Thin gin.  We

Jazz June.  We
Die soon.

I caught sight of this poem in my textbook when I was procrastinating and doodling rather than working on my assignment.  I thought I might like the poem because it was short.  It looked manageable, appropriate for a lazy and wandering mind like mine.  Ironically, the poem has been on my mind now for almost fifteen years.

Luckily I was the sort of kid who hadn’t learned how to speed-read by killing the narrator voice in my head.  But the poem is even better when read aloud.  Try it.  (You should always read poetry aloud.  If it’s good aloud, it’s good; if it sucks aloud, then it sucks.  Period.) 

Listen: this poem sounds like a sultry, swinging, slow-fast, street-corner gutbucket jazz tune.  Forget, for a moment, what the poem means; try not to feel concerned for the boys in the pool hall or ask where their mothers are.  Forget the shocking, slap-you-upside-the-head last two words and just LISTEN to the sounds of the poem.

Notice how Gwen (may I call you Gwen?) gets you to pause JUST A LITTLE at the end of each line–by putting the “we” at the end, rather than the beginning where it seems to belong?  There’s a forced, unnatural pause between the subject of each sentence and its verb. 

Most people pause too much, but some overcompensate and don’t pause at all.  The best thing to do is to feel the words coming out; notice the flow of every vowel through the walls of your throat and the placement on your tongue, lips, and teeth of every consonant.  Very sensual, reading poetry.

The “we” at the beginning of the first line, and at the end of every subsequent line, gets s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d out by this careful placement.  Plus, Gwen slows our reading even more by making us sit for half a second on each of the other words: they’re each monosyllabic, and there’s no natural accent on any of them.  (Some lines have natural accents, like the title of Chaim Potok’s book My Name is Asher Lev.  Say it aloud.  my NAME is ASHer LEV.)  In “We Real Cool,” every word, every syllable, has its own natural stress.  You can’t deemphasize any of them–except, maybe, for the “we.”  (Symbolic meaning to be explained later.)  Plus, most of the words participate in a percussive alliteration that naturally slows down the pronunciation.  (Try to say “strike straight” five times fast.  You can’t do it.)

So when you read the poem, you start to feel a jazzy triplet beat–like DU-WA, Du-WAH.  Like two snare rolls and a high-hat, or like like two legato notes and a staccato.  Like a sax solo by, oh, I dunno, Sonny Stitt or somebody. 

Don’t believe me?  Read the poem aloud, like I recommended above, four times.  If you’re not feeling the beat yet, listen to Gwen herself recite the poem.  (NO CHEATING!  Read it aloud for yourself, four times, first.  If you feel the beat, you’ll know it–you’ll feel it in the marrow of your bones and want to beat it out on the bottom of an upturned five-gallon bucket for the rest of your life.  If not, then and only then, click on the link.)

So, why do I care that the great Ms. Brooks (after listening to that audio, I’m going to retreat from the diminutive) creates such a jazzy rhythm in this poem?  Let me suggest a few things, some of which she might not agree with or have thought of.  (To paraphrase Robert Frost, a poet is worthy of any genius you may find in her poem, whether she consciously intended it to be there or not.)

1. The poem is super short, like the boys’ lives.  The sentences are short, the lines are short, the words are short.  But each word is a swinging, pulsing, drumming, humming, reverberating beat that you want to savor.  The alliteration, the internal rhyme, the placement of sliding vowels and percussive consonants throughout this poem make me want to writhe and spin and shake–things I don’t even do when I hear actual music.  If I ever went to a dance party, I’d ask the DJ to play Gwen (sorry, Ms. Brooks just isn’t working for me) reading her poetry.  Forget house music.

2. Putting emphasis in this way on each word, forcing us to savor each sound, recreates the temper and the worldly concerns of the boys themselves.  They, too, savor every moment; they, too, are aware of the shortness of their life before they start living it.  They, too, want to dance and embrace every minute.  But, as I’m sure you experienced the first time you read this poem, though they know the end is coming fast, it still catches them by surprise.  If you read this poem in a quiet environment, “We / Die soon” makes your heart jump and your cheeks flush.  You knew it was the end, but you didn’t know it was, you know–THE end.  (The kids in the poem talk about dying soon, and probably think they’ll die happy.  What do they know?)

3. The swinging rhythm creates, as I said above, a forced separation between “We” and the subsequent words.  How does this sound echo the sense that Gwen is creating?  I have an idea.  I think that, after the first line (“We real cool”), the poem echoes a growing alienation that the boys feel from their environments and their own actions.  Much as they might like to flaunt, they know they aren’t actually drunks or assailants or pool players.  They’re kids.  But their real, natural identity–”we”–is separate from everything they do.

Except, of course, for their vanity.  What Rousseau called amour propre.  The desire to seem cool, to be accepted, to be respected–to be seen as self sufficient or competent or above it all.  The irony of this self confidence is that it only masks their insecurity; and their arrogant, bawdy swagger (mimicked, again, by the swaggering rhythm of the poem) is ENTIRELY a show.  They’re posers.

3. Notice the longest line of the poem is the first one.  If “We real cool. We” represents the moment just before they realize they might act on their vanity, then it also represents their innocent childhood.  The longest period of life, until now, is their childhood.  Now, at the loss of innocence, they start living faster.  Three beats per line.  Until the end.

The shortest line–the one that flies by, or hits you like a bullet, or gets cut short (pick your metaphor and you’ve got an image of what’s actually happening)–is the last one.  “Die soon.”  Then?  No more “We.”  The rhythm is over, too.  One-two, not du-wa-du-WA.  A punch?  Two gunshots?  A screeching tire wheel, and then a crash?  A knife jab and a thud?  Or a funeral dirge?  No swinging dance, that’s for sure.

4. After the boys “left school,” the “We” is only an afterthought.  They’re no longer aware of themselves as selves, except incidentally.  The vanity is replaced entirely by frenzied activity.  Again, the placement of that little word accomplishes this effect only if you read aloud.

5. Check it out: After the boys “left school,” each new activity is represented by a new consonant.  “Lurk late,” “Strike straight,” and “Sing sin” are all alliterative; and each NEW activity seems new for, oh, about half a second.  (Linguistically, /st/ is a different consonant sound from /s/.  Ask me and I’ll explain, but get ready for a deluge of nerdiness.) 

Each activity gets old–repetitive–immediately.  Isn’t it characteristic of boys like this to stay cool by seeking a new, even more dangerous activity each time something loses its excitement?  The ever-changing alliteration mimicks this new-old, new-old pattern of life.

The only act (after leaving school) that isn’t alliterative is drinking.  The boys ”thin gin.”  (I suppose that means they have learned to mix tonic water with liquor, and it makes them feel adventurous or mature.)  But the drinking only leads to more of the same: sensuous and rebellious music.  The liquor takes them from “sing sin” to “Jazz June.”  The second one sounds a bit more exciting than the first; /j/ is more fun and unique than /s/.  And a song is always better with liquor than without.  Just like a joke.  But it’s still repetitive, and not even gin can keep this kind of life from getting old fast.

The last line is, of course, not alliterative at all.  Dying is the most final, but least boring and least repetitive adventure.  After death, what they wouldn’t give for another alliteration!  Another game of pool, or even another boring poetry lecture!  But there’s no longer any “we” to play or hear.

6. There are only two words in the poem that end on vowels.  They’re open-ended, unknown quantities.  (Consonant endings are closed, dead ends.)  The two words are “we” and “die.”

We–the open-ended identity of the boys continues throughout the poem.  They have choice; they are agents.  They are the actors, the subject of every present-tense, immediate verb.  They are as-yet unmade.

Die: what an unknown quantity this is to the boys!  How mysterious and open-ended!  Too bad Ms. Brooks (she’s back to formal now, for me) ends on a consonant “soon.”  Death’s finality is only exacerbated by its immediacy. 

Listen to the recording again, and hear her voice fall on “soon.”  What could be more final, more fatal, more tragic than that?  Death itself is open-ended; but that “soon!”  Say the word; listen to it.  It’s over, closed, finished!  As Robert Frost says elsewhere, “No more to build on there.”

So: the moment seems long, the day short; the song stretches out forever, but life itself is over in a snap.  Such is the experience created (not merely the truth stated) by Gwendolyn Brooks in this magnificently musical poem, the tersest (I’m convinced) of American verse.  I’ve found few poets–maybe Pope, maybe Shakespeare–but probably not–who pack so much sound and sense into so few words.

Tomorrow or the next day I’m going to suggest another who tries, though: James Weldon Johnson.  If you can find it, preview his magnificent poem “Moods.”