‘The People, Yes’ by Bruce Dale Wise The Society April 30, 2021 Culture, Poetry 4 Comments . “I Lived and languished.” —Andrei Platonov by “Weird” Ace Blues Last year we learned th’ Empire struck back with fierce synergy. The populace was pummeled by the techno-tyranny. O, Obi Wan Kenobi—he was nowhere to be found. Across the Globe we lived and languished; innocence was drowned. From China to America th’ Empire’s power rose; from bio-war-fare to enviro-roar-scare, freedom froze There was no Princess Leia; Luke Skywalker had no guts, and Yoda couldn’t help the people nullify the Putsch. O, Planet Earth, though some fear you are warming far too fast, my fear is not for Moon, Earth, Sun, but people being gassed. . . NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. 4 Responses Joe Tessitore April 30, 2021 Mr. Wise sums it all up and “enviro-roar-scare” is brilliant. Reply BDW May 2, 2021 as per Wilbur Dee Case One of the best qualities of the fairly open poetic portal SCP, edited by poet, essayist and teacher Evan Mantyk, is its openness to literary criticism in its essays and its comments, with far fewer examples of censorship than most sites. That ability to criticize is vital to a lively poetic tradition. How might the history of English poetry have been if technical craftsmen, like Dickenson and Hopkins, had had a chance to explain their art to mid-19th century readers? “The People, Yes” is a poem by “Weird” Ace Blues, one of the many charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms of Bruce Dale Wise), who draws on jazz and Modernist poetry in his writing, as can be seen immediately in his title, a quote from Modernist Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). The poem’s structure is a tennos, one of the unbranded trademarks of the poet. A tennos is a poem of ten lines, five couplets, of iambic heptameter. The rhyme pairs are exact, until the last two pairs of guts/Putsch and fast/gassed, which suggest discord, a slightly ominous, prophetic dismount. It is also in the last four lines that the apostrophe to the planet is invoked. “Weird” Ace Blues uses a series of poetic elements in his tennos: alliteration, repetition, internal rhyme, and allusion, for example. Alliteration runs throughout the tennos. In L1, r, k, and s sounds “speak harshly” of the situation, compounded in L2 with plosive p and t. In L3 the repetition of the o introduces an assonantal focus. L4 is composed of two important allusions , one from Platonov (1899-1951) and one from Yeats (1865-1939), that feed into the almost despairing tone of the tennos. L6 uses internal rhyme to catalogue two of the poet’s present concerns: bio-war-fare, as practiced by the CCP in Wuhan, and likely origin of the ongoing worldwide pandemic; and enviro-roar-scare, as practiced by corrupt politicians, like Joe Biden, et. al. L8 also “fiercely” uses f and r alliteration. L7 and L8 use the central metaphor of the poem through allusion to filmdom’s “Star Wars”. The final couplet removes the poem to the Solar System, with an allusion to E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) and a final loaded term. Various general themes crowd this short poem: from the corporate take-over of America to the communist take-over of China, from the powerful pummeling of the people, to the rise of corruption “across the Globe”. The poet has the transnational crime syndicates in his sights, the disappearance of human rights, like freedom, and the specific theme of the Putsch—the fraudulent 2020 US election supported by the Socialists, the corporate media, like NYT, WaPo, ABC, CNN, NBC, CIA, FBI, Wall Street, corrupt courts, the FBI, BLM, Antifa, et. al. The poet’s fear, like that of PostModernist American poet Allen Ginsberg, (1928-1997) is the powerful, overreaching governmental dictatorship, now, in the New Millennium, the TransNational Socialists, that is, the T-Nazis; hence the fear of being “gassed” with its several meanings, from the oral to the material to the ominous. Obviously “Weird” Ace Blues sides with the populace, the populists, the very people the T-Nazis want to destroy. Reply Christopher Chellsen May 13, 2021 I would recommend you read “America” by Allen Ginsberg if you’re going to invoke his name. I’ll actually post it in the comment here to make it easy for you, and we’ll see how you feel about what you said here: “One of the best qualities of the fairly open poetic portal SCP, edited by poet, essayist and teacher Evan Mantyk, is its openness to literary criticism in its essays and its comments, with far fewer examples of censorship than most sites. That ability to criticize is vital to a lively poetic tradition.” America – by Allen Ginsberg America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance. I’d better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don’t really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I’d better get right down to the job. It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. Berkeley, January 17, 1956 Reply BDW May 14, 2021 as per “Weird” Ace Blues: Perhaps Mr. Chellsen has not read a poem of mine from last month. I will print it here to show AG’s influence on my poetry: The AG Report by “Weird” Ace Blues America, we heard it was the Russians for four years. They ate Ed Snowden when he told them all about his fears. America, CCCP fell 1991; they didn’t take the Commi-tsar but put in this here one. America, it was the Scarlet Dragon plaguing folks; the CCP, in 2020 hindsight, stealing votes. America, this isn’t 1961 no more; a doped-up President and bro, with mob and reds galore, America, this Resident, despised, old, blind, and mad, the puppet of G-Mafiat, Swamp Creatures and Great GAD! “Weird” Ace Blues is a poet of the Beats and Jazz, like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Here, by the way is part of my last email to Mr. Mantyk, which partially describes my poetic plight with the Postmodernist/New Millennial generation. I still believe you are one of the best poetic editors in America. Of course, for me, the irony is that my poetry gets a lot more positive play and likes at liberal poetic sites (despite meter, rhyme, traditional forms, and classical allusions!). Even @ SCP liberal commenters, though, nearly always negative, tend to be more serious and thoughtful (nothing new really, since 2013). Though I am too busy these days, I will continue to send poems, when the mood strikes. As for the Beethoven poem, it has already been picked up; but “The Purloined Lectern”, which I like in so many ways, has not. I know it could be revised, but there is no E.P. around who could help me with it. And so, I’ll probably just leave it as it is; because I have to move on. One of the things I find fascinating is how thoroughly my poetry is discounted, and yet I can think of no one who understands my poetry, and what it is about. I am thankful, however, for this last decade; because instead of the usual rejections of decades, my poetry is finally getting some play. A decade ago I was in utter despair, having only had two poems (about Saba and Eco) published in an Italian magazine. Still, no one has thoroughly analyzed my poetry. I am well aware of the poet’s fate, however, Cf. Ovid. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
BDW May 2, 2021 as per Wilbur Dee Case One of the best qualities of the fairly open poetic portal SCP, edited by poet, essayist and teacher Evan Mantyk, is its openness to literary criticism in its essays and its comments, with far fewer examples of censorship than most sites. That ability to criticize is vital to a lively poetic tradition. How might the history of English poetry have been if technical craftsmen, like Dickenson and Hopkins, had had a chance to explain their art to mid-19th century readers? “The People, Yes” is a poem by “Weird” Ace Blues, one of the many charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms of Bruce Dale Wise), who draws on jazz and Modernist poetry in his writing, as can be seen immediately in his title, a quote from Modernist Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). The poem’s structure is a tennos, one of the unbranded trademarks of the poet. A tennos is a poem of ten lines, five couplets, of iambic heptameter. The rhyme pairs are exact, until the last two pairs of guts/Putsch and fast/gassed, which suggest discord, a slightly ominous, prophetic dismount. It is also in the last four lines that the apostrophe to the planet is invoked. “Weird” Ace Blues uses a series of poetic elements in his tennos: alliteration, repetition, internal rhyme, and allusion, for example. Alliteration runs throughout the tennos. In L1, r, k, and s sounds “speak harshly” of the situation, compounded in L2 with plosive p and t. In L3 the repetition of the o introduces an assonantal focus. L4 is composed of two important allusions , one from Platonov (1899-1951) and one from Yeats (1865-1939), that feed into the almost despairing tone of the tennos. L6 uses internal rhyme to catalogue two of the poet’s present concerns: bio-war-fare, as practiced by the CCP in Wuhan, and likely origin of the ongoing worldwide pandemic; and enviro-roar-scare, as practiced by corrupt politicians, like Joe Biden, et. al. L8 also “fiercely” uses f and r alliteration. L7 and L8 use the central metaphor of the poem through allusion to filmdom’s “Star Wars”. The final couplet removes the poem to the Solar System, with an allusion to E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) and a final loaded term. Various general themes crowd this short poem: from the corporate take-over of America to the communist take-over of China, from the powerful pummeling of the people, to the rise of corruption “across the Globe”. The poet has the transnational crime syndicates in his sights, the disappearance of human rights, like freedom, and the specific theme of the Putsch—the fraudulent 2020 US election supported by the Socialists, the corporate media, like NYT, WaPo, ABC, CNN, NBC, CIA, FBI, Wall Street, corrupt courts, the FBI, BLM, Antifa, et. al. The poet’s fear, like that of PostModernist American poet Allen Ginsberg, (1928-1997) is the powerful, overreaching governmental dictatorship, now, in the New Millennium, the TransNational Socialists, that is, the T-Nazis; hence the fear of being “gassed” with its several meanings, from the oral to the material to the ominous. Obviously “Weird” Ace Blues sides with the populace, the populists, the very people the T-Nazis want to destroy. Reply
Christopher Chellsen May 13, 2021 I would recommend you read “America” by Allen Ginsberg if you’re going to invoke his name. I’ll actually post it in the comment here to make it easy for you, and we’ll see how you feel about what you said here: “One of the best qualities of the fairly open poetic portal SCP, edited by poet, essayist and teacher Evan Mantyk, is its openness to literary criticism in its essays and its comments, with far fewer examples of censorship than most sites. That ability to criticize is vital to a lively poetic tradition.” America – by Allen Ginsberg America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance. I’d better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don’t really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I’d better get right down to the job. It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. Berkeley, January 17, 1956 Reply
BDW May 14, 2021 as per “Weird” Ace Blues: Perhaps Mr. Chellsen has not read a poem of mine from last month. I will print it here to show AG’s influence on my poetry: The AG Report by “Weird” Ace Blues America, we heard it was the Russians for four years. They ate Ed Snowden when he told them all about his fears. America, CCCP fell 1991; they didn’t take the Commi-tsar but put in this here one. America, it was the Scarlet Dragon plaguing folks; the CCP, in 2020 hindsight, stealing votes. America, this isn’t 1961 no more; a doped-up President and bro, with mob and reds galore, America, this Resident, despised, old, blind, and mad, the puppet of G-Mafiat, Swamp Creatures and Great GAD! “Weird” Ace Blues is a poet of the Beats and Jazz, like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Here, by the way is part of my last email to Mr. Mantyk, which partially describes my poetic plight with the Postmodernist/New Millennial generation. I still believe you are one of the best poetic editors in America. Of course, for me, the irony is that my poetry gets a lot more positive play and likes at liberal poetic sites (despite meter, rhyme, traditional forms, and classical allusions!). Even @ SCP liberal commenters, though, nearly always negative, tend to be more serious and thoughtful (nothing new really, since 2013). Though I am too busy these days, I will continue to send poems, when the mood strikes. As for the Beethoven poem, it has already been picked up; but “The Purloined Lectern”, which I like in so many ways, has not. I know it could be revised, but there is no E.P. around who could help me with it. And so, I’ll probably just leave it as it is; because I have to move on. One of the things I find fascinating is how thoroughly my poetry is discounted, and yet I can think of no one who understands my poetry, and what it is about. I am thankful, however, for this last decade; because instead of the usual rejections of decades, my poetry is finally getting some play. A decade ago I was in utter despair, having only had two poems (about Saba and Eco) published in an Italian magazine. Still, no one has thoroughly analyzed my poetry. I am well aware of the poet’s fate, however, Cf. Ovid. Reply
