How Much? New and Selected Poems, Jerome Sala
NYQ Books, 2022
“Language is a virus,” goes the famous William Burroughs quote. It captures the force (both creative and destructive; Shiva and Brahma in one) of culture itself. For, extending from the language virus, in the largest sense, is the culture virus – the eons-long construct that elevates humans from nature, creates civilizations and shapes minds. It has always been the poets to grasp this double-edged influence: They understand how it forms the “reality” which mediates communications, while they push its limits to pervert or play with its constructions/constrictions.
Where Burroughs and his progeny – prose criminal Kathy Acker, “new narrative” baffler Chris Kraus, or stylistic wrongdoer Dennis Cooper – undermine culture itself by exploding the norms of narrative, in the universe of verse there is a sub-group training the weapons of language upon itself, and upon the throbbing mass of the popular culture. Call them the “pop poets”
It’s a small group. For some reason, the most blatantly pervasive form of culture – pop culture – has gone relatively unexplored by poets. Leaving aside why this is the case (snobbery towards the “low-brow”?), and glossing over the handful of other pop poets of the past few decades, one always returns to Jerome Sala.
For decades now, Sala has troped movies, money, advertising, and other pulpy topics into deeply amusing verse. Much of this insight comes from his lifetime as a professional copywriter. No one else exploits, unmasks and elates the language of marketing and commodification to such edgy fulfillment.
(Here we pause to acknowledge others who have alchemized pop dreck into verse quintessence. Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems are in-the-moment mind-gasms plied from tabloids and bottles of Coke; writings so pith-packed, and embodying the act of poesis itself, that they propelled much of the New York School canon. In this group include someone naturally close to Sala: His partner, Elaine Equi, who for decades has wrought exquisite insight from quotidian stuff – from “Ambien” to “Unisex Cologne,” all the way beyond internet memes.)
Now, from NYC Books, comes a crowning volume for Sala – How Much: New and Selected Poems. It gathers his stunning past work, while its newest poems take on “the economy.” Again, I defy you to find another writer assaying such a vastly relevant subject – one that stares us in the face, not only impacting everyone, but also embodying themes ostensibly central to socially enlightened artists: wealth, privilege, injustice. Sala lets his wit loose. These are linguistic puzzles, solving/questioning, via sophisticated-but-clear wordplay, the weighty issues. Their rhetorical arguments are jammed with high-order puns. Like the “conceits” of John Donne and other 17th century Metaphysical poets, Sala’s verse unwraps surprises.
“Long Shot,” for
example, turns investment cliches upon poetry itself:
Long Shot
Like a pension plan manager who invests
in hedge funds because in a low
interest rate environment, where
people are living longer, bonds
no longer stand fast as pillars
of dependable growth, so too the
poem can no longer depend upon
the interest of others to
verify its own value, or even
existence. Instead, like a financial
steward, it must steer an uncertain
course through turbulent waters,
hedging its bets by telling itself
a tale about a future it knows may
be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.
For the waves of an uncertain planet
may one day wash its pages clean.
The disclaimers of a prospectus warp into a warning sign to the species. “Uncertain” investments and economies mirror the existential fragility of poetry itself (and, by extension, culture as defined above). The terms “hedge,” “bonds,” “growth,” “interest” and “value” do double shifts applying Wall Street jargon to the intrinsic “value” of art … especially (as the final couplet cautions) in the face of planetary destruction. The more you read it the more meaning it milks, including an “Ozymandias” echo in “stand fast as pillars.”
Sala and I recently discussed his approach over at The Best American Poetry: “I’m fascinated by how the spiritual values of our world have been secularized by media, commodification, and simulation,” he said. “To explore this, I like to take what seem like the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.”
You see the Sala trick apply itself to all manner of material. A major section of How Much? includes “Corporate Sonnets” – 30 formally satisfying and amusing poems layering clichés to gather gravitas. Their high irony channels sonneteers from Edmund Spenser to Ted Berrigan. My favorite (today) turns on the concept of a “personal brand.” Corporate Sonnet 20 dares to suggest that success in the poetry game comes less from what you write than who you know, or how well-known you are. (How big of a fish in that small pond.) Its first lines come right out and say…
A poem
is like an ad; it’s not what it says, but who says it.
What’s
taken for genius, the result not necessarily of wit
But of
the sorts of cultural capital displayed along with it,
Writers
sell shares of themselves on the literary stock exchange.
Some
advance through connections, the famous names they
They
can drop or pick up.
These sonnets are from Sala’s 2020 volume Corporations are People Too! It’s a title that plays off Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign admission of pro-business bias. In Sala’s reversal and enlargement of scope, people incorporate themselves into petit entrepreneurs. Even poets.
How Much? spotlights
another Sala specialty: product placement poems. These odes to commodities and
how language (specifically, naming, branding, concepting) sells them, display ebullient
yet jaundiced insight as only an ad man’s can, here’s…
Ice Breakers Spearmint Mints
The natural joined with the artificial
to flavor this aid to social ease
peppered with mint crystals
in the form of green pin pricks
embedded within a blank tablet.
False ice sooths as it melts, alluding
to the distant fires of sensual feeling
in that Eden some dream about
before such tingles got framed in the prefabricated
commotion a promising commodity brings
to the market. Ice Breakers is owned
by the Hershey Company, today trading
at $90.23 a share on the NYSE. By the time
this poem touches home in the book of the future,
this figure will date it, throwing its status as a member
of the tribe that eschews contingency into doubt.
For now, though, in the dissolving present,
Isn’t it enough to simply feel cool?
The gum allows one to chew colors, tastes, tingles, nostalgia, and sexy social acceptance: just what an ad agency likely pitched to Hershey. The poet goes further. He harkens to dreams of a lost Paradise while eyeing the company’s future value. It’s all cuneiformed into the blank slate of contemporary commerce. (And any decent creative director would have done the same in their meeting with Hershey execs.)
How Much? has more
tasty treats, including from his early days as punk provocateur in Chicago.
These items are formally unruly, and one sees him ranting them in a nightclub
reading. But even these divine social import from seemingly superfluous trends,
fashions, TV shows and celebs.
As
Sala said to me in Best American Poetry, “Instead of philosophizing about the
meaning of life, I have written poems debating the meaning of Coke.” Thus, the
book includes his hilarious series of Coke poems too. Frank O’Hara would approve.
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