OK, a long poem about a movie, The Manchurian Candidate.
It's about watching a movie, and if you haven't seen the movie,
hopefully, it doesn't matter.
If you have seen the movie, the poem
isn't going to make any more sense than if you haven't
seen the movie, I don't think.
So don't despair, as the plot fails
to unreel sequentially, OK?
"The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake."
"First shot, for the trailer, also.
Bang we see the crosshairs targeting
the spineless forehead.
Second shot.
Didn't you hear me the first time?
We know you know what we're saying to you.
Third shot.
They have such power over me, but Frank isn't bothered by them
all that much.
Ulysses lies there on his floor, a closed block with a big name.
Fourth shot.
Closeup of the dustjacket-- words.
They have power over me.
The dustjacket is orange and black.
But this is black and white, so I just say it.
The cover isn't part of the book, obviously.
I'm not in the movie, obviously.
Fifth shot, for the trailer.
A harpsichord on the soundtrack signals something's false.
This is the '50s, remember.
On top, they're hearty, fussy old ladies.
Underneath, they're murderous, cold-war hypnotists.
On top, they're discussing hydrangeas.
Underneath, they make soldiers strangle each other.
On top, it's a movie.
On top, the frozen war.
Underneath, markets wither.
Underneath, pleasure, all its eggs in one basket,
explodes at the sound of shots.
Underneath, you have to follow these words to the letter.
You are on top.
Sixth shot.
At last, the truth can be told.
Let all the spies stand naked.
I was sitting in the den, watching
a tape of The Manchurian Candidate,
secular, married, legible, American,
looking at what's showing.
Let all the words be sold at cost.
Let all the words be read at cost.
I was playing solitaire because of Korea.
The deck contained 52 diamond queens.
Seventh shot.
That was in the movie, but a picture
is exactly where I don't want to live.
Panda-- where would you like to live?
China?
Koala-- I'd love to visit.
The food, the umbrellas, the bicycles.
Where would you like to live?
Australia?
Panda-- Australia is too ironic for my taste.
I'd love to visit, though.
I've never seen a kangaroo.
Their leg muscles must be remarkable.
It looked as if I was coming out ahead, not quite victory,
perhaps, but what have we been fighting for all our lives
if not a New York where you can go into a bar in the '50s,
order a beer, and read Ulysses?
I saw paradise the other night.
It was as easy to read as breathing and writing
one's invitation to the world in progress, frank, surprised,
very amused.
It was a dream I can't remember, obviously, in a phrase,
not this one.
This is just an assertive shielding echo,
a deeply loved surface.
Then I woke up.
I was watching television.
Eighth shot.
The clicker and a right hand above gray couch material.
Ninth shot.
The gray voice never transgressing
word boundaries, the plate compartmentalized, the carrot
section filled precisely, never a spatter
of pureed orange slopping into the section for desire,
which was filled with a clear layering of deeply
loved picture--
the beautiful blonde biking by, tearing off
her blouse to bandage his leg where the snake had conveniently
just sunk his admittedly abstract, offscreen fangs.
But narrative homeruns over the abyss of incoherence
are America's ice cream.
I saw leaden geo-toy Raymond Shaw murder mother and father
in the snap of the plot.
10th shot.
While I was waiting for the kids to go
to sleep so you could nicely slip your underwear off,
oops, you went to sleep.
I never meant any of this.
I have not done these things.
Any of these things.
I write for you and strangers.
11th shot.
In her bra, outside.
Summer.
Some are others.
Not her.
Friendly.
Filmy.
12th shot.
I placed myself in the position of the viewer.
Then I view.
On the night in question, I was home all evening, viewing.
13th shot.
Frank Sinatra's had it.
The social cardboard's not worth the sweat he constantly
carries around on his face.
Wherever he looks, locked American lives.
No writing the grade book.
Might as well read the ashtray No loving
the great smile, no riding the city down to bodies
that can be yours for the right song, the instant aria
just before the light changes.
Too many cigarettes, too many buddies strangling each other.
Why?
Because.
Why?
Because the smiling Chinese totalizing science [AUDIO OUT]..
But now he can't read Ulysses.
It means nothing to him, just another big brick
of paper named after itself.
When the world is weird, being bounced around
on a word trampoline won't get you any rest.
From in front of the VCR field in the psychic past of the Cold
War, this is Bob Perelman.
16th shot.
Yes, mother, every word must count--
six.
Yes, father, I will count each word--
seven.
If any one of them gets away, then I
will be alone in a locked mess.
The warm curves, the grassy hills,
the actual caves I will want to write myself.
Please, I'll write it myself.
The way streets look from inside the house at night,
either end blocked or shielded by maple leaves
lit black green by streetlights, stating
my feelings of home, mouth and ear
and leading them out to the attentive spark.
I read Jack Kerouac who is free to drive
a Ford in the specific direction of heaven
where art is a very good investment, although you should
only say that well after the fact.
In 1955, the many love the few, or at least the few
are free to think that they do.
And it was a very good year, the present recording its pleasure
in being recorded.
Frank Sinatra is rewarded with a stage full of underwear and keys
while standing up and swaying, his inward light spotlit
smokily, his throat open to extort every sung syllable,
the bedroom board meeting smoldering, shareholders
on fire, humming along.
In 1955, art is as exciting as the perfect bid,
the sunsoaked homerun, the victory over the others
that they like, too, acknowledge, buy,
put on the wall.
Kids wait, but the early offscreen doors don't reopen.
17th shot, voiceover.
The Manchurian Candidate stars Frank Sinatra
as Benny Marco, Lawrence Harvey as the horrible Raymond Shaw,
Janet Leigh as Benny's girlfriend.
Angela Lansbury as Raymond's mastermind mother.
American soldiers are betrayed in Korea, captured
by the Chinese Communists.
After offscreen brainwashing, they are shown to the Russians.
Both groups are intellectuals, quoting conflicting studies
as the commonsense Americans sit,
bored but patient, in alternate shots, brainwashed into thinking
they're at a horticultural meeting in New Jersey
where matrons in white dresses and broad flowery hats
are attending a lecture extolling scientific gardening.
Quote: 'Another modern discovery which we owe to the hydrangea
concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant
climate,' unquote.
Slow modern harpsichord jangles the soundtrack.
The film is racially progressive.
When onscreen American soldier is Black,
his hallucinated matrons are uppermiddleclass Black.
There's no plantation subtext.
When Shaw is ordered to strangle another soldier,
he's almost too polite, saying, 'Excuse me'
as he brushes another's chair.
The soldier to be strangled is polite, too.
It's a liberal utopia.
Good manners have triumphed over competition.
The Chinese are jovial and authoritative.
They've perfected the procedure.
They can make the Americans believe anything.
The Camels they're smoking turn out to be yak dung.
It is to laugh, for the Chinese mastermind at least.
The Russians are surly and badly in need of dental work.
You can't believe what you see.
But you have to look.
Finally, the poem is beginning to focus.
We know you know what we're saying to you.
Koala-- I hit my head.
I had a dream.
Isn't that how it always starts?
Panda-- maybe that's the way it starts in the West.
It's not a collective form.
There's no rhetorical place for people to come together.
That's the way you started, but that's not
the way it's supposed to start.
Hitting your head is personal.
Koala-- I was cutting the grass, and I hit my head
on the branch of an apple tree.
An old one, 25 feet tall with two live quarters sprouting
north and south, two dead ones east and west.
It was not symbolism, only matter.
If you don't believe me, you can feel the ridge of healing flesh
on my head under the fur here.
It's as real as history.
Panda-- cutting the grass is a fairly trivial instance
upon which to balance the nonconcentric circles
of history.
Go in, I would have said, have a little lemonade,
and read Whitman or the Misty poets.
Particulars only exist by being collective.
Koala-- so audience-- fuzzy little me in the case
of your remarks--
becomes crucial.
Panda-- when you're a nation, being cute
is not enough anymore.
No, an audience is a serious, collective enterprise.
The ironic single writer in a cage,
treasonous or loyal or mad, riven
by pathos, unfamiliar tears.
It doesn't really matter much to the words or the world.
Once the hypnosis of the singular is snapped, that is.
Before, one can think that anything
might happen on the page.
Koala-- I'm willing to bob for very small favors, balls
of hard, candied poetry swimming almost ethically
in the sweat of irony's personal furnace
around which individuals are gathered into gendered masses
in lieu of lives for all lived under the changeable blue fields
of utopia otherwise known as international justice.
Panda-- international justice.
I think we might as well change the subject, don't you?
Koala-- fine.
Which do you hate more, symbolic poetry or poetry
that's all language?
Panda-- easy.
Poetry that's symbolic.
Koala-- but what about poetry that's all language?
Panda-- poetry that's all language
makes me cry when I'm asleep and can't
hear the tears hitting the pillow,
I mean the top of the page.
Koala-- I actually hit my head.
That means something.
It was hot.
I was one body for the duration, cutting the leaves of grass,
and I saw myself walking on air, on cloud
stilts of biological perpetuity and sweat of the word.
I was not a nation.
I was not a species.
I was a speaker, fully alive, just
because I like the sound of that, the noisome hiss of this
making a made world under me undergo
twisting birth and destruction just
to keep me saying what I was going to say anyway.
Or anything else.
Or nothing so what black hole blank.
An apple, an unoriginal rhetorical sin a day
goes astray into the many minds of the many, many others who
don't think this, and neither do I, neither we nor me.
Am I allowed to say this?
No.
I say it.
Thanks to the body beyond species, beyond genre,
thanks to the dictionaries, the strikers,
the Haymarket lexicographers, the Tiananmen Square
grammarians, I say it out loud.
Where was I?
Where are we?
Don't you love the intrusion of speech where no speech can be,
life where sounds are the slippery start to never finish
but get there already anyway?
Panda-- did you show that to your trainer
before you turned it loose on me?
Koala-- my teacher?
Panda-- I'm assuming your teacher
was your trainer before he was your teacher.
18th shot.
I can't remember the movie anymore.
Art means throwing scraps of code
to the bodies as appetite supplements.
The screen is softwired so the bars disappear.
After the primal shot, I can see eyes painted open
on the death mask of that lovely arrangement I used
to call the world, America, my life, the page,
the academy of the future, which, as it turns out,
is in the past.
They even move.
They're mine.
That was home.
It's plain that there was time and that it took place,
but its quick pleasures are now words in a language
with only scattered survivors.
A single word means nothing or a line without a world.
The present is full of survivors sentences
with disoriented conviction and memory
too deep for instrumental speech, swimming sinkingly
toward pre-owned futures hosed down the hyperspace of capital
where freedom spells the rampant logos turning
attractively bemused typefaces and bodies toward the traffic.
Or language it for yourself.
Make your own recipes.
Ironize, experiment, write wrong,
but don't forget the old pleasures--
skies, turkeys, playgrounds.
We know you know.
Meanwhile, one drives, an open lane a paycheck of sorts,
leading to the biography glimpsed in the gas station john
mirror.
Until the war is over, there's nothing to eat but information,
and the new mixes with the old down through all the details.
Taste.
19th shot.
Who folded my clothes?
You did.
I did.
Who watered my tears?
You did.
I did.
Who batted an eye each word I woke?
You did.
I did.
Who waited for me to sleep, so I could wake one
step further inside the world?
You did.
I did.
Koala-- to survive, you have to be willing to do anything.
Anthologies, that's where the money really is or might be,
at least so I imagine from my fuzzy animal distance.
Reprint the material.
Dominate the gene pool.
Rise like Godzilla and make them read you for fucking ever.
Panda-- if you use language like that,
you'll have a hard time even making it into the La Brea Tar
Pits.
20th shot.
To be free and to be Frank Sinatra, the pinnacle artist,
but to be pictured as Homo ordinarius,
keeping the public world private by visible quotidian heroism--
that's the lesson scorching the director's desire in every shot.
If you feel like arguing with the movies, then step outside.
21st shot.
The Chinese mastermind has the one successful marriage
in the movie.
Of course, it's offscreen.
You can't have everything.
He's really a most happy fellow.
He leaves the Russian doctor-spy's so-called clinic
in New York after making it clear
that Raymond has to murder his would-have-been father-in-law,
the honest muckraking journalist,
as well as the love of his life blonde.
Don't fall asleep.
This is plot.
Everyone has to sacrifice, except for perhaps
the mastermind, jauntily tugging his gloves tight, saying now
he has to get off to Macy's for some Christmas shopping,
smiles the happy social smile sans dissonance.
The wife gave him a list yea long, shrugs,
what are you going to do?
He knows how to get in bed with capital
and let it charm his pants off, having
them, quote, "tight enough so everyone will want
to go to bed with you," as Frank O'Hara writes,
is a youthful gesture under the dappled shade of capital's
frond-like pleasances.
That's one thing, but to live as a large system of control
is quite another.
As the mastermind leaves, the Russian stares.
He just doesn't get it.
He believes in history, not Macy's, inextricable direction,
totality, the concrete translucent materiality
of class truth, one world, one history at the end.
Meanwhile, one's provisional oneness
stands with oblique conviction against the waterfall of happily
pregnant wage slaves.
That rainbow spray is as guilty as Sunday, those sunny lakes,
those caves of ice, those miracles of rare device
forced from the deep romantic chasm of bourgeois
pastoral pornographic shopping, which
that fucking crypto-individualist Chinese
mastermind indulges with his credit flowing
past the respectful cashier like vodka down a mule's throat
or whatever.
Thus, the Russian revolutionary bureaucrat murderer actor
placed on the verbal screen by the all-too-human history
of this shot.
He never gets time off.
His face is a burden.
Closing shot.
Raymond's gunsight targets Communist McCarthyite
foster father's forehead, as said before, though
in a novel continuum.
The movie wants to reach the new world and, in the same gesture,
to conclude.
A narrative should hold you with concern, intimacy, but not
too close because you'll be heading out one day, pegged,
looking back for the recognizable trees,
the known cars, glad animal movements traded
in for manageable novelty.
Is the nostalgia for creation or destruction
or maybe for something continuous
that hasn't happened yet?
Underneath the place names, flags
of private longing fluttering against the vistas,
molecular revolutionaries dream of taking all desires to court
and setting them loose beneath the robes of judgment.
To pull the gown from knowledge, to pull the eye from noon
and not to see the catered wants of Tom, Dick, and Harry
navigating the street, the mall, the clicker, and the dust.
And Jane, Ketisha, and those tender technocratic shoots
and stumps, you and me?
On screen, nations personify the pursuit of happiness,
tearing families to shreds and the shreds
to costumed certainties of loss and rage.
Beyond the blinds, the end--
rain falling on cue, Frank Sinatra crying, Janet Leigh
wordless, the days regular as sprocket holes,
while decades slide by with unevenly layered minds
of their own.
You, hypocrite viewer, with nothing but mirrors
for pleasure, knowledge, luck.
My hand in yours if you read me.
Those deprogrammed people glimmering beyond the evening's
blocky conspiracy theories, willing their present
without shooting our past to a bloody parable--
have you found a way to call them yet?"
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]