Poem-A-Day #247 : Sartre Means Tailor

Sartre Means Tailor

The bag of a thing - it hangs like felt thickly and fort-like
          draw the chalk lines across the dark surface - crimp it in
the drawstrings will pull will shear - the cliff face of a scissor will slice

The internet sends endless photos of cats - of politics with cats
          politicians wrapped in cats - there are cats running for President
your one friend who likes dogs will have to be culled - blood let

Crimp the edges cleanly - find the matter in the matter
          discard - this pile of left overs is a heap of could have
it is the hair on the brush - the egg cracked for breakfast - blooms in November

There could be a burn along the rough edge - fingers working
          along the splitting fabrics the wools trying to resheep themselves
the sheep - for their part - care nothing of what was lost they are fine

There is no meaning here - the internet is a vast mirror in which
          we constantly ask who the fairest is and constantly find only others
a shrink-wrapped bar of chocolate tastes only if we can imagine instagrams of it

Let's not Luddite on this - crimp the edges - find the chalk lines
          eventually a jacket will appear - eventually it will fit form well enough
eventually it will be discarded for another slab of unform

Unform and unform this fine felt in lines of calcified thought
The internet has patterns for it - has plethora of them - has litte rboxes full

Top 40 : Meme

The meme is hardly a 21st century phenomena, though the word originates with Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. At its core, a meme is an idea that spreads until it is ubiquitous. They are useful in their carrying of cultural knowledge, norms, even news.

Meme is a shortening of the Greek mimeme - 'something imitated'. Good examples of old memes are teaching games for learning to tie your shoes, or Ring Around the Rosie. Dawkins intended the word to describe evolutionary principles in the spreading of ideas. Today we use it to talk about the weird repetitive jokes on the internet.

Like Rickrolling or Texts From Hillary.

And while they are frivolous and silly, they still connect and convey information across great distances. They are still sort of doing their original job. It's just that they are now doing it through the many ways Michelle Williams has been dissed over the years. Are we teaching each other how to survive the plague? No. But we are disseminating cultural baggage.

Into this discussion steps Susan Wheeler's book, Meme. Published by University of Iowa Press in 2012, Coldfront placed it at 16 on their year end Top 40.

The book takes stock phrases, sayings, jokes, and places them along bits of conversations taken out of context. Wheeler uses these selections of dialogue to craft strange elegies. To her failed marriage, to her recently dead mother, to herself.

The poems read like the leftovers from these relationships. The strange magnetic echoes. Like remembering a smell. Or touching the surface of something and having a flash of memory. It is broken, and haunting.

The poems are named Canasta, Turkey in the Straw, Jeehosaphat. Here is Ten Conniptions:

           Hold your horses.

          If you don't knock it off now there will be no cake for you. You're

skating on thin ice.

          That's it. That's the last straw. You get down off your high horse,

young lady, and shape up or ship out.

          Can I pack your bags?

                    Yes, divided blessings: banishment, ruin.

                    Dragging its lines, the trawler

                    buckles under.

At times the language gets difficult to take in. The endless barrage of 'momisms' and pat phrases begins to make your brain glaze over. The effect is something akin to a scolding from a parent. But a strange one; one that you wanted to happen.

I liked the book, but mostly found the poems to be forgettable. This is the problem with memes in general. The ephemera quality of them. We remember things like 'pot calling the kettle black' but they sit idly in the back of our mind until we are reminded of them.

Wheeler's book is interesting. Her use of these well known phrases forces us to reconsider them. To rethink the language of them. In the context of a poem like Ten Conniptions these phrases begin to sound like a collective childhood. I'm not sure they become more than remembrances though.

Wheeler was a finalist for a National Book Award. I agree with Coldfront's John Deming, 'its sub-current of autobiography–the poet’s and everybody’s–alongside a barrage of sometimes-recognizable phrases will leave you with a ghost in the room.' I just don't know that the ghost wasn't already present.