Regarding Ai

Ai, author of Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and other collections, died Sunday at the age of 62.

I first came across her work in a seminar on contemporary American poetry. The poems were shocking. A couple lines in and you were inhabiting the consciousness of a suicide, a masturbator, a serial killer, a child-beating parent, a kid (in “The Kid”) who calmly, almost sweetly, murders his family. I'm haunted to this day by "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981," in which, after disposing of the body of the boy he's just murdered, the speaker sits down to a nice cup of cocoa:

After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate
burns its way down my throat,
I open the library book,
the one on mythology,
and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.

At public readings and on recordings, Ai read in an exaggerated chant, an aural iambic that elongated almost every second syllable and that, with the scenes she set, the characters she created, created intense estrangement effects.

We spent a lot of time in that seminar on the fact of Ai’s complicated ancestry (her father was Japanese and her mother was of African American and Native American descent), though as I reread the poems now I’m not sure why. The poems are not about the poet’s ancestry, not, really, about the poet herself, at least in the immediate ways we’ve come, during the long reign of first-person, free-verse autobiographism in American poetry, to expect. The real fascination in these poems is with power – the power of the desired over the one who desires, of the one who is willing to undertake violence over those who hesitate, of our compulsions over our compassion.

Sin is especially interested in power, and perhaps the dominant sin in the book is the pride that drives such speakers as the Kennedys, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. For this reason, among others, it stands out for me as a favorite among Ai’s seven collections.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s been, and there will continue to be, a lot of ink and bytes thrown around about the voices of outsiders and the politics of outrage in Ai’s work (partly because there will be a lot of talk, as in that seminar, about who she was, and partly because there will be a lot of talk about her activism around Native American identity), and while these are not insignificant aspects of the life or the poems, the focus on them will mean a lot of readers miss what might be the real point of Ai's work. “I feel,” Ai has been recorded as saying, “that the dramatic monologue was the form in which I was born to write and I love it as passionately, or perhaps more passionately, than I have ever loved a man.”

The dramatic monologue. Remember that fusty old thing, relic of Victorianism, first envied then dissed and dismissed by Pound in his experiments with personae, reduced in our time to a couple of Browning poems in anthologies? Ah, but Ai, along with Frank Bidart, renovated that generic furniture in ways that not only brought the monologue back to life but also showed how interesting we’d forgotten it to be. Both Bidart and Ai built their poems around some sick speakers, but do you remember what Browning’s characters get up to?! (Hint: the speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" strangles his beloved with her hair and then enjoys a cozy moment recumbent besider her on the couch.)

Like Browning, Bidart and Ai offer characters in extremis. But also like Browning, and maybe more important for poetry and poetics than the sick and the criminal who inhabit the poems, they use these outsider consciousnesses to say something about poetry itself. I can't read "Porphyria's Lover" without seeing it as calling our attention to the necrophilia inherent in a certain ambition for literary immortality (the ambition we see at the end of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 -- "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") by literalizing its metaphors (I'll make the living woman into something that will be lasting and unchanging). There is, in Ai's best poems, a similarly searching critique of creative ambition, an examination of the ethics of doing things with words. Here she is on "Immortality":

I dreamed I was digging a grave
that kept filling with water.
The next day, you died.
I dressed you in a wool skirt
and jacket,
because you were always cold
and I had promised to do tha much for you.
Then I took a potato to eat, went outside,
and started to dig.

It goes on, and gets even creepier, and that's right, I think, for a poem about how the breath of the living is captured and stilled in the interest of defeating sluttish time, achieving stasis over mutability. And this is why it seems to me such a loss, this week's silencing of a voice that kept changing and kept breathing change.

A Plea to the Moaners

The Pill goes to a lot of poetry readings. This is a fact about which one feels some ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s sometimes interesting to hear how a poet vocalizes the verbiage on the page (“interesting,” itself is a quality about which one feels some ambivalence; look out, gentle readers, for a post soon about the sing-song delivery? in which every line? ends on an upward inflection?), and it can be fun to see how a poet has changed since that jacket photo (or to see that clearly a model was hired for the jacket photo). On the other hand, sometimes a poet’s reading wrecks a poem, or the patter between poems drains the enlivening mystery from a poem.

And then there are the moaners.

You’ve heard them if you’ve gone to many readings at all. The poet (all too often with a rising inflection? or a heightened . . . breathiness . . . during . . . the . . . exaggerated . . . pauses . . . between . . . words) delivers an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase that either really or, in the flawed judgment of both poet and audience, is striking, and a few in attendance “hmmm” with approval or almost erotic satisfaction. (It’s not that the Pill is never similarly moved; the sound I’m describing is like the one that involuntarily escapes me when, after a couple of meatless months, I bite into, say, an Arthur Bryant’s sliced beef sandwich.)

I once spent some time unscientifically surveying the moany terrain, trying to determine during readings which, whether, and why. Alas, this loose cartesianism, this unsystematic empirical study, produced no conclusive findings, and what can you expect when the phenomenon occurred not only among the couple thousand at one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s last readings or the hundreds at one of Stanley Kunitz’s – at that one, your correspondent felt as if surrounded by a flock of cooing doves, indeed felt this so strongly that he checked his shoulders afterwards for dabs of bird shit – and also among the dozens enduring (too many with pleasure, at which the Pill despaired) Marie Howe or Spencer Reese or a Dickman.

One hesitates to ascribe motives to the moaners, and one assumes there are in fact a multiplicity thereof. Some, surely, moan out of authentic emotional experience. Others, perhaps, assume the position of respondents in a sort of amen corner (“Preach it, brother!”) and see it as their duty to take up an antiphonal role, confirming the poet in his or her sense of being filled by the spirit. Many, though, I am convinced, are simply conducting their own performance, letting those around them know that yes, they had the proper emotional experience (like the guy who laughs at the just smile-worthy joke so everybody knows he gets it).

To each, regardless of a given moaner’s etiology, the Pill politely asks “Can you please f*cking stop that?!” I promise on behalf of those of us enjoying the silence at the ends of lines and phrases (whether because the silence lets us absorb the power of what precedes it or because we’re just glad the poet stopped) that we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you get it. I promise the poets are sufficiently confident in the movement of the muse within their words that they’ll get by without your cooing confirmation. And if you’re simply moved involuntarily, I’m working on a patentable nose plug that will convert the moaning exhalation into just enough electricity to administer a mild shock so we can condition you to keep it to yourself.

Listen to the silence, people, please. Let it ring on.

Review: Assuming Bill Berkson

All right, people: the Pill is pissed. Off. Where have you all been hiding Bill Berkson for all these years and why the hell didn’t anybody tell me about this guy? I mean, he’s published 18 collections of poetry since 1961 (the first through the Tibor de Nagy Gallery), as well as collaborations with the likes of Joe Brainard (among other artists) and Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer (among other poets), plus writings on and editions of works by and about Frank O’Hara.

OK. So maybe the oversight was mine. It ain’t like the man was hiding. Still, though, all you poetry pals of mine: why did you bogart the Berkson?!


Thanks to Coffeehouse Press, however, the secret’s out and I’m glad, at last, to meet this poet through the poems he’s been producing since the late 1950s.

That gets it kind of wrong, though, because Berkson’s poems, like the best poems in the humble opinion of this ever so ‘umble blog, are much less about Bill Berkson than they are about how language determines our perceptions. Our perceptions of Bill Berkson, sure, but also, and more importantly (not just to me but also, I think, on the basis of these poems, to Berkson), of everything else.

But that’s not quite right, either, because it’s not just language in all its languageyness (which is, of course, a very good thing for poems to emphasize, and even enact), but also language in, on, around, interacting with the physical space of the page. Not for nothing did Berkson collaborate with a collagist and detourneur like Brainard and spend attention on an artistically inclined poet like O’Hara (who engaged in his own collaborations with visual artists – e.g. the wonderful Stones series of lithographs he produced with Larry Rivers).

In a fairly early poem like “Still Earth,” for example, Berkson uses the space of the page (intralinear space, interlinear space, setting strophes off to one side or another rather than stacking everything out from the left-hand margin) in ways reminiscent of the Mina Loy of "Songs to Joannes," isolating bits and pieces of language not only to emphasize their lexical meanings but also to call attention to their look and sound. And in "Four Great Songs," we get upside-down lines so that, on first reading anyway, we encounter the unpronounceable and incomprehensible so that all the lines present is their appearance.

Given all that, though, I still find myself preferring here the poems in complete sentences, even when the relationship between subject and predicate is not immediately sensible. Or sensical. “What would the new fork bring me?” he asks in “Saturday Afternoon, “and why / are porticos assuming sulfur?” I’m not sure what either of these questions “means,” and while I could go on for a while about substitution along the syntagmatic axis (couldn't we all?), I’d rather just enjoy the way each twists, and by twisting renews, simple (or not so simple) words and concepts. The carrying of food on a fork, seen as “bringing,” so that the fork has agency, estranges eating, and the assumption of the capacity of assumption for architectural elements, and of the capacity for being assumed to a suggestive element like sulfur makes sitting on my porch and sensing the aromas carried there by the breeze suddenly rich and strange.

Let's say every poet publishes, from time to time, an ars poetica. Berkson's early stuff might be encapsulated in "History" (or these lines therefrom): "Trying to understand what it is actually like / on a balcony with one's hat off / though distinguishing between actual despair / and trickery / a certain passivity of habit . . . // History itches." Indeed. With their non sequitirs, strange adjectives (especially strangely adjectival forms of nouns -- "arsenical"), suggestions of narrative without narrative development or clear reference, these poems are up to both the attempt to understand what it's like and the attempt to inhabit the sentient subjectivity of that capitalized abstraction in its attempt (like Benjamin's version of Klee's angel) to understand.

Phew.

But then there's a poem like "East End," which captures pure and straightforward heartache like no other poem I've recently read (the very idea of a nearest consolation is rendered accurately in all its unhelpfulness):

Sometimes I think it's here too,
which is to say the joy your dress
drags in with it.
To go from that to the nearest consolation
is enough to tear my soul apart.
So stay.
The mystery has been proven.

Berkson's forms and rhetorics change over the ensuing decades. The poems get shorter for a while in the 60s, more prose poems show up in the late 70s, more dedications and epigraphs in the 90s. His preoccupations remain consistent, but not in a way that would suggest any Mirandized arrest of development, artistic or philsophical. Instead, a layered richness characterizes many of the later poems, a sense of familiar reference behind the witty, slip-slidy wordplay. I love the punning fun in, say, two poems titled "Parts of the Body" from the mid-70s, poems that shift the terrain of the blazon from the body of an individual person to what might be the embodiment in language and culture of what Eliot called the "mind of Europe." Berkson quotes a couple of prose sentences about Scriabin at one point, shortly thereafter renovates the cliche of aging ("over the hill") by imagining what we imagine we'll see when we get there, across the page glosses the gall bladder with the fact that deer have none, figures the "Phenomenology of Perception" in the bubbles that form in spit, quotes Tommy Edwards's "All in the Game," but rescues the pop song's falling tear from worthlessness by capturing its cleanness and clarity, and on and on.

And in the most recent poems, that itch of History, that attempt to get at what it's really like, that drive to renew language and perception by renovating the cliches into which we fall like ditches full of shit, all are directed at the violence done to our ways of speaking and seeing under the recent and current debased forms of our culture and politics. We live, "Without Penalty" suggests, during a time when "Traffic School becomes the ruling / Paradigm of higher learning," "Careening en route / To regime change, permanent and without end."

And given that, it's impossible to read a poem titled "Rendition," which explicitly complains about the song played at Willem de Kooning's funeral ("Aida -- fucking Aida," the angels mutter), without hearing in both the title and the narrative of bait and switch, subjects bagged and secretly sent off to black sites where they will endure torture to keep our freedoms safe.

Gamechangers, Dritten Stück

Don’t take my word for it on this one (and I know I’m teasing here for the eventual post about why I think L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is a game worth playing and how it changed the broader poetry game in fun and interesting ways). Just go here.

Review: Duhamel's Bankruptcy

There are, I suppose, reviewers who like going all Francis Jeffrey on poets and their poems, but I’m not one of them. This scrupulous blog, however, is dedicated to the impartial – or explicitly and admittedly partial but, one hopes, not unfair – reviewing of whatever volumes make it, by whatever means, over the digital transom. So it is not with pleasure that I am saying here that Denise Duhamel’s Ka-ching! (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009; exclamation point in title) is terrible, but that is indeed what I am saying.

I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.

The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:

I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.

One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)

What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.

And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:

from “Delta Flight 659”

I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant.

And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)

In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.

OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.

I mean lift and separate.

But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.

Gamechangers, Part Deux

A few posts ago, I promised you a Top Five list (with Honorable Mentions!), and though that post included only two main entries, a Top Five list, Gentle Reader, is what you have every right to expect and a Top Five list is what you shall receive. Herewith, then, further entries in the list of Gamechanger Volumes in Twentieth-Century Poetry. A recap: we’re sticking to 1925-1975 for this list (between the release of the Ezra Pound Cantos concept album -- you know, the one with the cool cover and a couple of great hits but also some drum solos and noodling keyboard bits you could, in retrospect, do without – and the release of Dolomite, starring Rudy Ray Moore); and we’re looking for volumes that a chock-full of great poems which, individually but especially when taken together, articulate a new direction for poetry, especially a direction subsequent poets have followed. And so, without further throat-clearing:

Number Three: John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Close readers of this here melopoeic blog might recall that the original terminus of the period to be covered by this list was 1974, but I have since realized that while the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon formed my political consciousness in profound ways, to link this Top Five list to an event in American political history would be like, well, it would be like an English department linking its distribution requirement to something like the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832. But I also realized that sticking to that earlier date would require me to nominate Ashbery’s 1956 volume, Some Trees. Now, I was sorely tempted by that possibility. The earlier book’s not only got some fantastic poems in it (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” “A Long Novel,” “Le livre est sur la table”), and it not only has cool prose poems like “The Young Son,” but it also has the benefit of what must have been the freshness of a lilac-soaked May afternoon amidst the monuments of Late Modernism and the well-wrought urns of post-Modernist formalism that littered the literary landscape at the time of its appearance.

But I’m plumping for Self-Portrait. Look, it boasts a bunch of poems that show up on numerous critics’ best-of lists: “Forties Flick,” “Scheherezade,” “Hop o’ My Thumb,” “Märchenbilder,” and the title poem. More than that, though, it adds to the Surrealist play and generally Frenchy feel (you know, like when you see the human arm torch-holders along the wall of the Beast’s palace in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete) of the earlier poems a range of cultural reference that stretches from Parmigianino (whose painting inspires the title poem) to Van Camp’s Pork and Beans (or a sign for same, which shows up in “Grand Galop” along with the only high-littrachah puke sound I’ve ever run across: “Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit”).

But wait, there’s more. There is, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a seriously playful meditation on the duties of representation and the responsibilities of evading them, an ars poetica at least partially encapsulated by these lines:

We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.

Am I wrong to read a not-so-subtle kick at Confessionalism in the penultimate line-and-a-half there? And am I not right that the last line quoted is the shit?

This somber blog will, in the near future, offer its own meditation on play in poetry and why those alliteratively conjoined terms are GOOD THINGS, but Ashbery was there first, was present, we might even say, at something like the creation of a poetics dedicated to the proposition that a Magrittean atmosphere, a Cornellesque knack for juxtaposition (Ashbery is also, it turns out, a hell of a collagist), and a healthy appetite for the strange within the familiar are perhaps more interesting than our individual psyches’ struggles laid out in self-portraits in institutional glassless mirrors.

But you know what? I’d put this book on my list for this stanza, which concludes “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”:

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Kind of like this book.

Review: Gizzi's Deep Deadpan

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)

As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to these poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.

Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.

But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:

The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.

Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).

I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.