Sweeping the States
They move in swift
on the Swift
Plants in six states
& sift
Through the faces to
separate
The dark from the
light
Like meat & seat
them in
The back of the vans
packed tight
Like the product
they pack
& who’s to
pick up the slack
The black &
white can’t cut it
So the beef stacks
sell
To feed the pack
the flock
Who block passes &
clog
The cogs of the
machine the process
Not so swift to give
& grant a wish
Of a place a
stake in the land
Handling the steaks
for the rest
To take to sate
the mouths
Of the stock who
have stock
In the business of
beef & beef
With the brown that
ground them (p.161)
November 2007
The speed and
inhumaneness of the meatpacking industry makes you feel for the
“human” beings who keep this process in motion. Probably, the”
brown” (Hispanics?) who do the messy jobs regular Americans won’t
stoop to. The ampersands reminds us of the speed and bluntness of
this industrial process.
It reminded me too
of the pleasure of remembering the juvenile joy I had reading the
first T. S. Eliot poem that I understood, ”The Love song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” (p. 33, June 1915). Written twelve years before I
was born! And at 22, not stumbling at love like Prufrock! I also
resent now as I did then at his six sentence epigraph in Italian!
What implicit contempt for the “ignorant” 99 and 44/100ths of his
putative audience whose Italian wad limited to the word for “hello”.
That copy cat arrogance in the classroom corrupted the first 100
years of our “Poetry”. So many of these poems are
Mystiphysics—reaching for a seriousness that isn’t there. A bad
habit Eliot spread like a disease.
LeRoi Jones’ poem
“Valery as Dictator” (p.25, December, 1963) reminded me of my
first ploy as an English Dept. chair at Arcadia University in 1962. I
had him give a talk to the whole student body on the place of poetry
in the civil rights dispute then spreading across America. (He would
soon rename himself Amiri Baraka.) I must say most of the English
Department questioned my judgment that day!
A very bright Jewish
girl (and a promising actress) asked him why he had a Jewish girl
friend if he felt the way he had just talked. No answer. A few hours
later we treated Jones to a splendid production of “Dutchman”
(which won an Obie in 1964). Starring that same Jewish skeptic!
Halfway into the play his pal whispered “Let’s get the fuck out
of here!” Leroi, bless his soul, answered tartly: “No! No! She’s
got it just right!”
Another thing that
bugged me about the editors’ selections was the absence of the
poets who turned me on to contemporary verse, such as Phillip Booth,
Karl Shapiro, Tom McGrath and especially Daniel Hoffman, whose “On
Crossing Walt Whitman Bridge” explores wittishly the irony of the
Camden locals naming everything Walt This, Walt That—but hardly
anybody was reading his work!
Now it happens that Dan went to
Columbia with Allen Ginsberg. Fate would have it that The Walt
Whitman Cultural Center asked me to introduce a Ginsberg reading and
serve as his “gofer” for the day. Before his reading he asked me
nastily, “Are you gay, Hazard?” I replied, “No, Allen, God
hasn’t blessed me yet!” “Then how can you teach Whitman?” I
replied, “Twenty years of teaching him helps!”
Then
we walked across the street to his mother’s house where Walt came
in 1873 after he had a stroke. I showed Allen all the minutiae that
we Walt freaks love, and told him how my girl and I after we had
celebrated her 23rd
birthday in Cape May, N.J. decided at the last minute (just before
crossing the W W Bridge into Philly) to examine his 1890 mausoleum
(based on a design by William Blake). Damn! It was falling down! By
what we American Lit folks call a providential event, the NCTE was
having its annual convention in Philly. They gave me permission to
wear advertising boards (Front: SAVE WALT’S VAULT! Back :A BUCK FOR
THE BARD’S BONES!)
When I added the $100 check from Buckminster
Fuller to the English teacher’s pocket money we had nearly a grand
to repair his grave. And in 1974 we invited all to a Graveyard he
poets in the Delaware Valley to a Graveyard Party, where we read
poems to and by Walt while we quaffed nine(for the Muse!) bottles of
Great Western Champagne (no tacky French stuff for our hero) and
Carmen Gasparri played his guitar suite “Perhaps Luckier” (which
is what Walt dubbed Death in “Leaves of Grass”9. National Public
Radio carried it live! Our only goof: the lilac bush we planted in
honor of Walt’s salute to Abraham Lincoln’s sad death
died—because of the ceremonial champagne we poured on it during its
planting! The faithful keep alive the custom. I moved to Weimar,
Germany in 1999.
Other poets in this
collection were not so kind to me. Reuel Denney, my colleague at the
East West Center in Honolulu, refused to discuss his poems on my
weekly Sunday TV series “Coffee Break”. (I think he didn’t
relish having so young a boss!) And in 1960, at the Daedalus
conference in the Poconos on MASS CULTURE, Randall Jarrell closed the
conference—I was the last lecturer- by waggling his Isaiah beard at
me at intoning to the audience of savants, “Mr. Hazard, you’re
the Man of the Future, and I’m glad I’m not going to be
there!”
Alas, he committed suicide a few years later. And I am,
grumbling with a smile, 42 years later. It saddened me because I
loved teaching his poem about the B-17 belly shooter. And I must
praise you for including Seamus Heaney who is to me what we in
Germany call “Mein Liebsling Dichter—my favorite poet. The poem
here is not my favorite, however. That’s “Digging”! The
highlight of my drab life was spending a week showing him Northeast
America, ending at the NCTE convention which that year was in
Atlanta. I was proud to introduce him as a third generation Irish
American. Heh, don’t miss this book. Nobody gave me a Nobel Prize
for Pickety-Pickety.
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