EXISTENTIAL CRISIS IN AISLE SEVEN
Bro ghost crying naked hysterical
In a grocery store
fantasy on fire, face discovered girlfriend
you cannot empty a basketball court of dogs
or a face full of soy sausages
or a generation of madness///////////////
REMIX by: helpimburnt
ORIGINAL TEXT by: eyedoc11, vomitweet and ponsfordmcquain.
This is the best of these I’ve read yet, though I haven’t read them all. It’s hard to articulate why I like it so much, except that that it is, to bastardize Harold Bloom, good nonsense.
The full Bloom quote is:
I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.
This is what first made me think there could be something called ‘good nonsense’, and I gradually realized that of course there is.
I like how broken the above poem is, how all of the parts don’t work, but each one for its own reason. The basic sentence “you cannot empty … a generation of madness” actually makes more sense when the second part is last in a list of non sequiturs. It implies that it is as impossible to empty a generation of madness as it is to empty a basketball court of dogs, or empty a face full of soy sausages. Not only is it impossible to do, it doesn’t even make sense as a concept.
I confess I don’t have much attachment to the first three lines, except that they are the same fabric from which the rest of the poem is made, and so they have some kind of contextual belonging, like parts of DNA that never seem to get used, but maybe in a different arrangement would have an important job. For me, this poem is that rare mutation that produces something that, for some reason, works.
That’s why I think it is good nonsense.
Tweets are among the most disposable of our communications. Poems that recycle them might have some conceptual lessons for recycling/preservation/re-purposing more generally, in a way that I’m not about to puzzle out right now.
