Poetry, Popular Culture, and Political Confrontation

Ugly Music. Diannely Antigua. YesYes Books, 2019. 99 pp. $18.00 (paper).

Cruel Futures. Carmen Giménez Smith. City Lights, 2018. 88 pp. $15.95 (paper).

Catechesis: A Postpastoral. Lindsay Lusby. University of Utah Press, 2019. 64 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Soap for the Dogs. Stacey Tran. Gramma Poetry, 2018. 136 pp. $16.00 (paper).

At times, it seems that popular culture and poetry exist on two separate ends of the artistic spectrum. While pop culture is often described as mass-produced, mass-consumed, accessible, and flashy, there’s no denying its dominance and power in our everyday lives. On the other hand, poetry is often viewed as a high art that is “unreachable” to the masses. In thinking about these seeming polar opposites, I’m reminded of something my teacher Alice Fulton once said: “When people ask me what I do for a living, I prefer to say that I am a professor, and not a poet, because to me, saying one is a poet is similar to saying one is a chimney sweeper.”

I understand Fulton’s sentiment. In an age when we use Twitter to get our news, the word poet feels especially old-worldly. But I’d like to offer a thought that seems counter to Fulton’s statement at first: in an age when we get bite-size news and snippets of information on the internet, poetry is more relevant than ever. After all, poetry is an efficient and accessible form, one that is filled with emotional resonance. Sure, reading a poem is not equivalent to reading a New York Times article, but poetry will always be political. In today’s political climate, you can count on a poet to tell the truth and, moreover, to give immediacy to that truth.

The four collections reviewed here—Diannely Antigua’s Ugly Music, Lindsay Lusby’s Catechesis: A Postpastoral, Carmen Giménez Smith’s Cruel Futures, and Stacey Tran’s Soap for the Dogs—all present poetry as political confrontation. These books use popular culture to convey feminist and intersectional messages, presenting an ekphrasis of the moment. They help us consider one way female poets can combat the cruelties of the world: by incorporating pop-culture references and turning them into a higher form of art that, in turn, comments on our world. They portray the birth and rebirth of fearless women who confront trauma, childhood, family, sexuality, and viewpoints on women’s complex roles.

Antigua’s Ugly Music is organized into sections called Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, and Outro, an ekphrastic setup that allows for the repetitions of the collection to become a postmodern collage of references. Antigua’s “Re-Education,” the first poem of the first section, is truly a stunner. It opens:

I listen to podcasts to learn about feminism, 
watch porn to make sure I’m doing it right. 
I dance on the bar because Coyote Ugly, 
because these shoes, this drink.
I’m almost 30.
And I still think Bloody Mary is
a game with a mirror. Sometimes 
she appears at 2am. Sometimes she’s
in the toilet, piss reflection before the flush.

“Re-Education” brilliantly invokes the idea that popular culture teaches and reteaches us. The mix of “podcasts” and “porn” is alliterative. It’s smart. It’s a nod to popular culture’s pervasiveness, which is a kind of power in itself. Podcasts are associated with higher-educated listeners, yet they are as readily downloadable as porn. In fact, the speaker’s matter-of-fact tone in the first two lines here is key in linking podcasts and porn. In both cases, the speaker wants to make sure she’s “doing it right,” a nod to the sex-positive third wave of feminism and the internet-oriented fourth wave. I also sense a tinge of irony in the phrase “doing it right.” In this socially conscious age, we all want to make sure we’re “doing things right,” whether it relates to our own pleasure or political stances.

Antigua places the short statement “I’m almost 30” on its own line. We might think about one of the downsides of popular culture: the problematic glorification of youth. In fact, that line is followed by a childhood belief: “And I still think Bloody Mary is / a game with a mirror.” This image opens up a string of associations that creates a cinematography of sorts: There’s Bloody Mary and then the toilet and then “the time I took Plan B, then / the other time I took Plan B   / There could’ve been / a mother in me.” Later, Antigua’s speaker stumbles into Tacos Lupita and accidentally says that she wants “baby” in her burrito, rather than naming an actual filling:

and I think I said baby. I think I
spun around three times and whispered a name.
And there was no floor 
when I fell, when a queen
flew from my womb. There was glass 
and napkins, and the doctor
saying, Wake up. Wake up.

Antigua gives us a dream sequence that transports us into a new landscape, one in which the speaker literally, rather than figuratively, loses her “baby.” I admire the complexity of emotion that Antigua presents in this poem: The speaker takes Plan B and “bleeds for two months” but then is faced with the weight of this decision. The speaker tells “no one, except the man at Tacos Lupita.” The prefix “re-” in the title of the poem signifies a relearning or a rebirth, and the ending of the speaker’s trance state with “Wake up. Wake up.” gives us that sort of rebirth, which addresses the beautiful and complicated nature of being a woman and having the power of childbirth. While the speaker makes the decision to take Plan B, preventing a pregnancy, she still thinks about how “There could’ve been / a mother in me.”

Antigua’s “Diary Entries” is another strong series distributed throughout the collection. I appreciate the variety of intersectional feminist and gender issues that come up in “Diary Entry #9: Undoing,” from “I’m still a sort of virgin. I’m still / in college” (societal scrutiny of young women’s romantic encounters), to “Today I have a weird anxiety attack at Wendy’s, my boobs / swell like a baby’s diaper, like a Botticelli girl perhaps” (society’s shift toward openness about both physical and mental health issues), and “For a few minutes, I want a white girl’s symphony, to live / the Mamma Mia soundtrack / and wear the pink lace dress. But I already know / who my father is” (the lack of representation of Latinx women in culture). I think back to Audre Lorde’s statement on the “multitudes” of women and the ways in which we analyze and defy tropes and depictions of women in popular culture. Antigua gives us the image of the Botticelli Venus, an image repeated and remixed so much that she’s become a symbol within mass culture—one that both promotes feminine beauty and limits the definition of what is beautiful to Western beauty standards. The speaker’s quip that “I already know / who my father is” serves as a calling out of the romanticism that Mamma Mia! presents, because really, how much does a father figure really figure? Unlike Sophie in Mamma Mia!, the speaker knows who her father is, but she does not want to associate with him, in a way that speaks to feminism’s response to patriarchal standards. Antigua’s poem “Ode That Doesn’t Pass the Bechdel Test” also brings these ideas to light: “Last Wednesday, I prayed to the goddess / of fourth-wave feminism.” I appreciate the directness of this piece, along with the overall directness of the entire collection.

In thinking about patriarchy, and what it means for our literary predecessors, it’s powerful that Lindsay Lusby opens Catechesis: A Postpastoral with a quote by Emily Dickinson: “How odd the girl’s life looks / Behind this soft eclipse!” Catechesis totally transports the reader into a postapocalyptic world, and Dickinson’s quote brings out the horror of Lusby’s collection, casts the oddity behind the “eclipse” as ominous. This collection is aptly titled “a postpastoral,” a genre that calls into question the patriarchal conventions of pastoral poetry, a full-on confrontation that modernizes and feminizes that literary tradition for today.

The first series, “Woman of the Apocalypse” (the first of three sections with this name), heavily relies on the image, an effective unifying force that helps Lusby feminize both myth and horror. In the first poem of the book, “Girl with no Hands,” we’re presented with a different kind of rebirth than Antigua’s. The poem opens with a scene ostensibly from mythology:

Her own father mistook her for an apple tree, 
full-trunked and red-cheeked.

So he hacked at limbs,
a bedlam of branches and hands.

Lusby creates the postpastoral by taking traditionally pastoral images, such as an apple tree, branches, and fruits, and then transforming them into new things. For instance, in “Girl with no Hands,” the daughter is mistaken for an apple tree by her father, and so the female image is the one destroyed. Throughout the book, speakers have challenging connections to fathers; in the second poem of the collection, “Interlude,” for example, we learn that the girl does indeed have the choice to leave “her father’s house,” a move that mirrors the poet leaving the patriarchal literary tradition. What’s striking about this collection is how Lusby can take a familiar mode, such as the pastoral or fairy tale, and turn it on its head. Working against patriarchal limitations changes the audience’s view of such modes, creating a political argument. For example, in “Interlude,” the tree and forest do not exist merely as scenery; instead, the girl has the choice “to be a tree or / to be the forest.” While in the previous poem, “The Girl with no Hands,” the female image was destroyed, here the body is alive, filled with agency.

On a structural level, Lusby provides us with a hybrid text, both poems and illustrations. On top of that, the references to popular culture—from The Silence of the Lambs to Grimms’ fairy tales—work with these elements to create a sense of the remix/collage nature of postmodern popular culture. In “Girl with Cloven Feet,” later in the book, the female voice is in the driver’s seat in a poem that remixes myth into a feminist standpoint:

The hunger for knowings 
starts in the fingers,
                                                plucks every thou-shalt-not,

holds each petal on her tongue 
like a sacrament:

                                            He loves me.
                                                                     He loves me not.

While “He loves me. / He loves me not” is usually synonymous with a potential boy-meets-girl relationship, Lusby makes this notion more complex with the “hunger for knowings.” Simply put, the girl with the cloven feet is hungry, and Lusby gives us the beautiful syllabic and sonic teasing of “thou-shalt-not” with “He loves me. / He loves me not,” the admonition against romantic involvement paralleled with the desire. Lusby juxtaposes such sonics with the genre of horror, for example in a sequence about The Silence of the Lambs’s Clarice, titled “Lamb of Law.” In poetry, repetition is often used to extend the sound of a word or phrase. In popular culture, a repeated phrase or image might allude to a mass-produced effect. So, in “Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling?” the repetition chills the spine: “redthread. red thread. redthread.” The poet is interpreting the script of the movie in a particular way—Hannibal Lecter does ask Clarice the titular question—but what follows is Lusby’s artistic reinterpretation. “redthread. red thread. redthread.” answers the title’s question, the image of “removing their skins” becoming “redthread,” as the body of the sparrow is peeled back. On the other hand, “redthread” could be taken as the red thread of fate or the way two lovers are tied together. A disturbing sexualization of the body exists here, not only with “peeled back” but also with “You are plucked up. // Ready for love / to wear you like a girl-pelt // and preen.” Lusby also repeats images, including a fly, Birdfoot Violet, and bones in the poem:

Are you a bird
                in a woman-suit, Clarice?

Some pretty little blood sparrow—
such lungspan,
                                        such bright palpitation

The direct address of Agent Starling / Clarice brings out the haunting nature of the piece. What starts out as a question turns into actions related to Clarice. The audience feels Clarice’s lack of control, and we can sense Hannibal Lecter’s quick-changing nature from calm questioning to rapid and violent instructions:

Peeled back,
                                     you are the same shade 
of robin-redbreast.

                                                   You are plucked up.

That parallel of “Peeled back” and “plucked up” is purposeful. We get the alliterative p sounds as we picture and almost feel Lecter’s imagined flaying of Clarice. Again, the poet’s control of the lines is remarkable: Wehave the added layer of the female poet taking on the male persona as he addresses a female character. Though in the story it’s Lecter who wants to torture Clarice, the reader sees female control through the poet, who is crafting what happens. When female poets explore male personae, something powerful occurs. In this case, arguably, though Lusby’s Lecter still wants to torture Clarice, the poet gives us beautiful and vibrant images to land on, such as “you are the same shade / of robin redbreast.” This move empowers the female character, not only because she is the final image but also because while in the film Lecter tries to control Clarice, in the poem, Lusby controls Lecter, altering his original lines. We still end on something grotesque, but beautifully grotesque.

Carmen Gimenéz Smith’s Cruel Futures is a fascinating contrast with Lusby’s Catechesis. Though the world of Gimenéz Smith’s poems is late-capitalist America, it’s striking to see how much of an apocalyptic quality the collection has. The title is part of what gives us this warning, as is the Gloria Anzaldúa quote that serves as epigraph: “There is no one who / will feed the yearning[.] / Face it. You will have / to do, do it yourself.” Right away, Gimenéz Smith gives us a sense of urgency in the political realm. We must “do it ourselves,” fix things ourselves, but the book can serve as our guide.

Gimenéz Smith uses two key tropes that help us understand how to take action: the confessional poem and the woman as “monster.” The confessional mode, often associated with women writers, has been stigmatized because of such an association; Gimenéz Smith turns this patriarchal notion on its head. In “Dispatch from Midlife,” the poet proudly confesses how she goes against society’s desire to restrict her within her gender. For example, she speaks about aging in a culture that values youth. The poem opens: “Gender is the civic center / of my adrenal gland. / I am bound by certainty / to keep it in a shell.” The poem presents a truly striking question: Why must gender be “contained,” meaning boxed up, based on category, based on societal binary notions? At the end, the speaker contrasts her own experience with those of other women:

  What are you, demand
              the witches from the throne 
of their own infallible
       femininity. I’m a monster
             of my own making who quit 
         one guile for this new one, 
      wanton with indifference.

As her own self-declared “monster” is juxtaposed with those with “their own infallible / femininity,” the “monster” becomes truly the “infallible” one. It’s the speaker’s declaration that really emphasizes this. By reclaiming her gender, despite restrictions, including “past fertility,” the speaker becomes the most powerful. Gimenéz Smith’s speaker challenges us to consider that we have certain notions of both sex and gender based on age, that women of a certain age feel “terror” when confronting their own femininity. Finally, taking inspiration from the opening Anzaldúa quote, the collection urges us to be proactive in confronting these harmful notions, to be “wanton with indifference.”

Gimenéz Smith has a distinct ironic tone throughout. Take the poem, “TV, Mon Amour.” On the one hand, the speaker points to this harsh truth: “I watch therefore I have a seat / at the table of mild conversation / the symptom of thinking / what I feel is significant,” starkly placing us in late-capitalist America, where watching television gives us a vocabulary for participating in popular culture. Gimenéz Smith confronts the reality that news outlets make us think our own point-of-view is the most important. The poem also expands on the female as all-powerful “monster,” by bringing in the speaker’s relatability to well-known television characters:

           My sister likes to tell me
                        I’m like Monica from Friends 
             And like Niles on Frasier
                                  and like all the other tightly wound 
                            narcissist neurotics on television
       I think she’s trying to 
tell me something

The speaker’s invocation of Monica from Friends means that she relates to the character’s “narcissistic neurotic” tendencies, even bluntly using the description “tightly wound.” The speaker admits to being “like Monica” and “like Niles.” She states this proudly: rather than create additional stigma for these neuroses, the speaker owns her affinity for these characters and moves away from shaming those with psychological challenges and anxieties.

But then, in the next (abrupt) turn, Gimenéz Smith ends the poem with a very different kind of scene from a television show:

                                                        Did they just put a Latina maid in
                                                        a giant gift box on Suburgatory? Yes 
                                                        Yes they did

On the previous page, the speaker related to white characters on television shows, but this harsh truth of “a Latina maid in / a giant gift box on Suburgatory” brings up questions about representation in the media. The speaker references the white characters of Monica and Niles because they are her only options for relatable protagonists, and she concludes with this harsh truth: the only example of a Latinx character not only invokes the stereotype of a Latina maid, but also imprisons her, literally, in a box. If Gimenéz Smith’s speaker in “Dispatch from Midlife” proudly reclaims her gender, making her more powerful, then the audience of “TV, Mon Amour” is called to action to reevaluate tropes in American television and reclaim identity in a different way. Sure, characters may be created so we can follow story lines better, but it’s important to question what demographics are represented in television—and how accurately.

Representation of immigrants’ and children of immigrants’ stories is a major theme of Stacey Tran’s Soap for the Dogs, in which the poems’ speakers relate American popular culture to Vietnamese immigrant experience. One of my favorite poems, “Mimus Polyglottos,” connects Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with both the speaker and her mother:

In eighth grade we were assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird & I went back to my mother’s closet to borrow her copy. I wrote my name in permanent marker in a corner of the book cover, so as to claim it was mine, to protect the fact that I am my mother’s—her only child—that I am the sole custodian of her narrative & any threads that touch it.

The sensory details of the poem—like the name in permanent marker and the pair of binoculars that appears later—provide a strong sentiment: the daughter’s reclaiming of the book as a claiming of her mother. The iconic novel ties mother and daughter together.

Similarly, the title poem uses a sense (in this case, smell) as the speaker recounts her father’s experience of America:

I count on one hand stories like these. I prod for more, not understanding the pain he must feel in recalling these memories. Bars of soap were his idea of how America smelled.

My version of the American smell is not too far off. Cheap hotels with ashtrays on the nightstand, white towels under the white light of the bathroom where I accidentally dropped my mother’s ring down the drain. My father would save the little complimentary bars of soap & take them home. He called them soap for the dogs even though we never had dogs & he himself bathed with the soap.

I relate these lines back to immigrant mentality—the ways in which America is envisioned and idealized on a cultural level. While the father associates America with the pleasant and clean smell of soap, the speaker herself deconstructs this idealization, associating America with cheap-smelling hotels. But her father keeps this soap, and while he may call it “soap for the dogs,” he still uses it on himself, his idealization come to life.

From smell to taste: another standout of the collection, “A List of Herbs I Want You to Taste in My Mind in Another Language,” which is presented vertically on the page, gives us glimpses into American popular culture in the speaker’s household. Tran mentions Wheel of Fortune icon Vanna White, for example: “In dreams, a pixelated avatar of Vanna White walks across the stage revealing letters one by one / Vanna White’s birthday is a day before my mother’s birthday in the year my father was born.” Yes, Wheel of Fortune and White’s dresses are glitzy, but the greater emphasis is on how the show’s premise is filling in English words and phrases, which the speaker uses to parallel the acquisition of English by her parents. Later in the poem, she says her father “would read tabloid headlines out loud to me at the drugstore / He would take me to the barbershop where I read National Geographic / Where the barber offered me Nilla wafers & Dum Dum lollipops.” Once again, she uses examples of popular culture—magazines, treats—to explain her relationship with her parents. The speaker’s mention of Vanna White’s birthday in relation to her parents’ links them to their early idealization of America. White, a glamorous figure as hostess of Wheel of Fortune, becomes another brand name of sorts, just like Nilla wafers and Dum Dum lollipops, all of which help the speaker understand American culture.

I live for the quirks within this collection. I love Tran’s whimsy—for example, the way she reinvents the haiku into several series of “fake haiku” that break the traditional syllabic bounds of the form yet maintain its minimalism. I’m drawn to this one in particular:

                                                   We slip into a daily performance 
                                                   Discovering micro-utopias
                                                   A matter of loving the wind

These “micro-utopias” may relate to how the speaker’s parents envisioned America, as well as to how the country infiltrates the dreams of the speaker as she reflects on her family history. And the final line, “A matter of loving the wind,” prompts the reader to reflect on the “wind” of language, how it’s both adaptable and fixed in culture. Our use of language may stem from our parents’ speech, along with what we experience in culture.

By creating their own unique structures and forms, these four poets have elevated popular culture in their collections. These references aid confrontation, whether it’s Tran’s inclusion of a television show to examine her Vietnamese parents’ acquisition of language, Gimenéz Smith’s argument about how lack of representation in culture affects identity, Lusby’s examination of the female through the lens of horror, or Antigua’s depiction of the multitudes within female sexuality. Popular culture serves as a dynamic way of looking at our late-capitalist society. In my own work, I often use pop culture as a “hook” into the poem itself. But what results is a dance: an “it” trend/item/figure may seem to be in the poem merely for pleasure, but on a deeper level it echoes something important about our political and social moment. In fact, because of its appealing nature, the audience is lured to reflect about those politics. Popular culture is what gives these collections a heightened immediacy—another pop.

Read more from Issue 16.2.