getting high on my own supply - 12. lunch poems, pt. 1
(i've been working on a little web page for reading and listening to these (still WIP, thanks to deborah for the hero image and icons))
"having a coke with you" (september 2007)
i had gone to college to attend film school but despite a strong start (after tearing apart everyone else's first assignment in directing class, the teacher called mine "beyond criticism"), i had quickly flamed out my sophomore year, partly because social anxiety (making films required so many phone calls and talking to strangers and asking people for things), partly feeling a childish sense of the collaborative nature of film cramping my nascent style as an artist, partly because having a social life was a new and very important thing to me which was really cramped by having to be on sets at 8am on the weekends. the symbolic point of no return was when we were supposed to have this special night where we screened our first semester capstone films for the older students and i skipped it entirely (i was ashamed of my film, which i thought had a good script but which was marred by my inability to get a performance out of a bad actor who i had chosen because he looked like how i imagined the character in my head and so that i would not have to audition anyone else) to attend an early screening of the life aquatic at the student union (i remember wearing a paisley shirt and drinking out of a bottle of champagne before the movie and also how much we listened to the seu jorge bowie soundtrack after).
the semester after i quit film school, i took a postwar american lit class and read for the first time lunch poems by frank o'hara. (i remember a long stretch of college where lunch for me was a snicker's bar, a bag of chips, and an icee). i've written about how meaningful his work was before, how it was...
such a revelation because all the poetry i had ever been given up to that point was either antiquated or academic or opaque or corny or depressing or all of the above at once, i hated poetry, but this little lyric spoke to what inside i had always wanted (my) art to be able to do, which is to be a beacon, a chuckle, a sparkle, a spring in your step, a reminder of what is gleaming and good and possible. when we talked about the poem in class and were sharing our eager college sophomore surface level readings of the fun lists of happy nouns the professor asked if anyone had looked up what "beachheads" or "biers" were and what they were doing in the poem and of course we hadn't so he told us (beachhead: "a temporary line created when a military unit reaches a landing beach by sea and begins to defend the area as other reinforcements arrive", a reference to the landings during world war 2 where thousands of human beings rushed from the sea into carnage; bier:"a stand on which a corpse, coffin, or casket containing a corpse is placed to lie in state or to be carried to the grave") and showed us how in that turn, the poem is not abandoning the joy it started with but, amid violence and horror and death which strain our capacity for hope and dreams of progress, still trying to reach for it, to grasp at these baubles for solace
...and there will be a future episode with a setting of another one of his poems ("ode to joy (to hell with it)")") that i think is one of the best things i've recorded. today, instead, you get this weird rendering of "having a coke with you" where in the verses i read the actual poem and then that collides with this kind of pop punk chorus with dumb silly lyrics i made up quickly because i didn't have the confidence that not having an actual chorus would be "enough", but now listening to it in retrospect it feels like "too much" (the guitar is also treble overload). still i like listening to my twenty-one year old voice saying this poem, which was how i would have wanted to say i loved someone if there was someone that loved me too.