On Garrison Keillor's Good Poems:

I'd Rather Tune In To a Fucking Mime Show, Please

by A. Gusty Kleinputzelah

Readers may remember how neighbors blared Van Halen and others at me during the 1980s. Those who never lived with me will be pardoned their ignorance of the situation, since they are undoubtedly new readers, at least of my writing. The ghastly affair ended with an ignominous agreement involving my closing the blinds when I chose to perambulate through my own quarters au natural, despite the fact that the true obscenity was — and still is — to be found in the policies of our government, the pages of our textbooks, and of course, the lyrics of songs on children's programs. A reliable source who will remain unnamed for reasons of nonexistence, tells me that the Barney theme music breaks terrorists, and it is not surprising. Other nameless insiders tell me that Ugandan Cannibalarch Idi Amin followed like a rat behind a pied piper to the strains of "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," and that Mikhail Gorbachev hummed a song from "Peewee's Playhouse" as Boris Yeltsin faced down entire armored divisions armed only with his impressive girth and a fifth of vodka. The lesson here is that if you want to break terrorists or be deposed by a coup, theme music from children's programming is the way to go. Failing that, I would recommend reading them a tenuously connected introductory paragraph from an essay in Poetry. And if that does not break them — as a last resort only — make them stand in a ghost costume and convince them they'll be electrocuted if they move, then strip them naked and build human pyramids out of them. Then make them simulate sex while a female soldier points at their genitals and laughs, and some other yahoo snaps pictures. This seems to be more effective than either Van Halen or Barney. In fact, it makes me wonder whether the reliable source who will remain nameless was pulling my leg about the whole Barney thing.

But assuming he wasn't: If the terrorist or dictator still hasn't buckled, hello? Am I the only one that remembers woozy drug-induced fugue states? A little sodium pentathol and they'll sing like horny Pavarottis making mating calls to rhinos in rut. I don't know what that means, but it sounds nasty, and that can't be a bad thing.

And speaking of woozy drug-induced fugue states: you could also subject said terrorist to a round-the-clock tape of Garrison Keillor reading poems on his daily Writer's Almanac show.

Now, had Keillor not "strayed off the reservation," he makum heap big wampum with Prairie Home Companion show. Mm. No Harmum, no foulum. But stray the old dolt did, directly into the realm of culture, the realm of poetry, in short, into the realm of A. Gusty Kleinputzelah. And for this the tiny mortal fool must pay.

Had he only stuck to bachelor farmers and Lutheran bake sales, in a sort of Leaves of Grass, with the naughty bits edited out, condensed by Reader's Digest, and spoken into the wireless, a figurative spiritual chicken soup so chunky you'll be tempted to eat it with a metaphork, a contemporary equivalent to the Lawrence Welk Show of years past, but without the smoking accordion solos, I'd have left him alone. But he was warned, and he's in Kleinputzelah's world now. Why wouldn't he listen? Why don't they ever listen? Now, sadly, Keillor must die. The voices command it. It shall be done not by me, but through me.

Metaphorically, of course. Fortunately, the voices always go for some sort of allegorical action, allowing me to at once style myself a firebrand of the surliest sort, and avoid messy altercations, or extended incarceration. But if it were up to me, you can bet I'd be flushing Keillor's holiest books in a heartbeat, shocking the old bastard's genitals till he pissed ozone, and dragging out the Iron Maiden.

I don't know right now whether I mean the torture device or the heavy metal band, but being unfamiliar with either, I'll say the latter. But since Iron Maiden — indeed, any commercially successful music, past or present — is far too common for our purposes, I would instead drag out the Albert Ayler saxophone solos until this "much beloved radio personality" got a clue and somehow, through some divine agency, became a lot more like me: self-consciously literate and exclusionary, rather than inclusive and forgiving.

Now, I have never listened to Albert Ayler, but another poet said something about him being edgy, and edgy is what Keillor needs. Despite — nay, because of — his runaway popularity, Keillor annoys any true artist. Keillor speaks to millions, and now speaks to them about the very things the true poet holds dear, to wit, poetry. Poetry must be jealously guarded against this sort of thing, or any unembittered ignoramous with a community college associate's degree and a dogeared American Literature Since 1800 textbook will fancy himself interested in poetry, as if such a thing could be pondered by anyone other than a member of a small incestuous elite. And I am not speaking of the usual small incestuous elite. I am speaking of myself and a half-dozen friends, who look at the rest of the elite as entirely too comfortable and polite. Really, I am speaking about me, but my half-dozen friends needn't know that. Yet.

So Albert Ayler, who, I understand, is jaggedly hip, could only act as a much needed enema for Keillor — an enema we will forcibly administer to him as hardened prisoners force themselves upon younger non-violent offenders — because Ayler is apparently the cure for what Ayls Keillor. Everything that Keillor does is positive, uplifting, and intended to make audiences feel better. As I understand it, Ayler makes you want to tear your own head off and spit down your own neck. Keillor is about reassurance and continuity. Ayler is about gritting your teeth, wincing, and suffering, until you're convinced you appreciate something that is, at first blush, just plain painful. If the poetry we must demand others write is to be edgy, painful, and impolite, we cannot have other more gentle sensibilities running around loose in the world unchecked.

Ayler is all about excess, anger, challenge, exploration, risk, they say. It's a simple enough matter to discern what is beautiful and produce it for the enjoyment of others. But Ayler is braver than that. I think. His mission is to explode conventions and expectations. That's what music is for, all music. And by extension, all poetry. No poetry should be familiar or reassuring, ever. Nor should it be presented as such.

There is a passage from a William Carlos Williams poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," dear to the hearts of those who would peddle poetry, or the idea of poetry, to the masses. Whether or not he's ever read the Williams poem aloud, Mr. Keillor is one such peddler. I'm pretty sure someone on NPR read the Asphodel thing once, although I do not know who. But Mr. Keillor reads on NPR, thereby closing the circle. Just pretend he read this passage on the air, is the point. I'm getting paid by the word here:

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
     I come, my sweet,
          to sing to you!
My heart rouses
     thinking to bring you news
          of something
that concerns you
     and concerns many men. Look at
          what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
     despised poems.
          It is difficult
to get the news from poems
     yet men die miserably every day
          for lack
of what is found there.

Ooooo, I'm getting goosepimples. La-dee-da! Poetry keeps people from dying miserably on a daily basis. Well color me fundamentally transformed by the sentiment.

The trouble is, it isn't true, as anybody who's seen the perversions of nature masquerading as homo sapiens at supermarkets and ballparks can attest. People live fine, happy, full lives without poetry, and, having never had a conversation with these mutants, I assume they are prime exemplars of the banal happiness of poetry-free existence. Ninety percent of adult Americans can spend their entire lives without ever actually experiencing the fine high art of good poetry, and by that I mean poetry I like. They do things like play at indoor boules; go to the "talkies," that peculiar brand of motion picture so out of step with how I believe drama should be savored; and amuse themselves with the latest stereophonic idols.

In a word, they entertain themselves. Their lives are not diminished by not standing in front of a Cezanne or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have no inclination, desire, or training to properly appreciate art — that is, to pursue it to the exclusion of gainful employment. They have neither the money nor the family connections to get training I for one can respect, nor the radical avant garde sensibility to demand such a system be burned to the ground, a viewpoint I also wholeheartedly embrace. They are, truthfully, not so much human beings at all, but types to be written of in works by those with apposable thumbs and cerebral cortexes, or painted in the background, to lend texture to the depiction of truly psychically present individuals, whose advance degrees in the fine arts I abhor. They need poetry like they need another hole in their penises, a fad they are still not avant garde enough, ironically, to pursue.

And if they need poetry at all, it's not the poetry Garrison Keillor reads on his Writer's Almanac, which I would describe — you'll love this one — as not poetry at all, but prose with linebreaks. I don't think anyone's ever described the poetry of others that way, but I cannot help it. I was born to break the mold. That's just how Kleinputzelah rolls.

Keillor reads things that are anecdotal, wistful, and more to the point, not by me. More often than not he reads the observations of some middle-aged creative writing instructor like the ones who've least liked my own daring, edgy work, instructors who didn't understand and still don't, and never listened. Instead they talked: they talked about the geese, and their reminiscences, and good childhood friends, and touching moments out of their uncomplicated adolescences in the country, idealized adolescences wherein nobody ever received an Indian Armburn, a Tittie Twister, or a Wet Willie, and everybody had a date for the big dance, and nobody was ever alone, alienated, and dissatisfied. But alone, alienated, and dissatisfied we should all be, particularly in times like these.

But Keillor refuses to recognize these are times like these. He thinks these times are like those, and so vomits forth the following:

People listen to poems while they're frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet.

I'd rather tune in to a fucking mime show, please.

Now to be fair, Keillor's Good Poems isn't as bad as it should be, given how very, very much I hate Keillor. It does not remind me of his radio show, and you don't have to read it with Keillor's inoffensive, gentle, terminally wheeze-verging plea of a voice, unless you enjoy doing so with some equally evolved poets who will get the joke. Ha. Try to find more than a half-dozen of them. But the better and more daring choices in the anthology were no doubt made by others, leaving only the inoffensive, bland, predictable choices to Keillor. I rest my case, to wit, we need to grow up and look upon the world with disdain.

Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the best art is never read, or heard, or seen, and that it becomes worse and worse as it is understood? Why can we not admit that an utter void of art is better than art I would not allow you to read if I had my way, even if I and my friends read it with great gusto? Why can we not understand that art cannot truly be good or bad, since its only function is to entertain, that it is no better for your soul than a literal can of chicken soup, and not one painted by Andy Warhol? Why can we not grasp that there is no human spirit to move, there is no God to have a funeral for, and that death, war, love, in short, life itself, is an utterly meaningless event, on a par with a rousing threescore-and-ten-year game of chutes and ladders, longer, but fundamentally not different? Can we not understand that not only does poetry not matter, nothing matters, and somehow represent that in that greatest, most meaningful art form, poetry, in such a subtle and understated yet edgy and impolite way, that only a very, very few people will ever read it? What about this principal is so difficult to understand?

This is without a doubt the worst time for poetry ever, and the worst place for poetry ever, and it is only getting worse as you read this. Nor is the future promising. Now, when we most need to understand that poetry is meaningless entertainment, cultural and economic forces are conspiring to bring it to ever-wider audiences, with an ever-increasing promise of meaning. This only suggests further devastation of a vital literary culture, which can only thrive in obscurity and penury, not in the cold hard light of radio. Only a very few poets will matter down the road, which is not surprising, since none of it matters at present. And those poets who will matter are hard at work on Final Phantasy VI, because the only true poetry now is in X-Box videogame scripting.

I cannot blame Garrison Keillor for all of this, only for most of it. If his voice were not so sweet and avuncular, oozing compassion and understanding; if his sensibility were not so thoroughly democratic; even if his tastes were a bit less conventional, he might do a bit less damage. Perhaps we could rate him a Category 4 nuisance to the literary arts. But this is not the case. Keillor — or Keillor Poetry Media, Inc., as he should rightly be called — is a Category 5 poetic disaster, and his Good Poems has burst the levee of rightful disregard for poetry, filling the bowl-shaped depression that is the common man's soul with foul, contaminated, corpse-strewn waters for years to come. To mourn this book is too little, too late. To burn it would be preferable, but it's possible the evil of Keillor's soul would be dispersed and spread in the smoke pouring off the pages, permeating whole towns with his diseased essence.

Allow me to conclude with the final verse of The Bloodhound Gang's miracle of musical hostility, "Shut Up", which embodies the bold, cutting-edge sensibility, the disregard for politeness, and the mature understanding of the times we most need to get beyond the childish, romantic notions of poetry foisted on us all by lesser lights:

I hate a lot of whites and I hate a lot of blacks
I hate poopin' in public places but we all hate that
I hate lesbian feminists because they're all so damn ugly
I hate Spin Magazine cause they never ever plug me
I hate Regis and I hate Kathie Lee
I hate every single movie by that midget Spike Lee
I hate people that think I care what they think
I hate people that think their ass don't stink
I hate Jon Bon Jovi but I hate his music more
I hate killing people because I hate to keep score
I hate you but you hate yourself too
I hate to be honest but I'd hate to be you
And I don't give a damn if you don't like me
Cause' I don't like you cause you're not like me
And I don't give a damn if you don't like me
Cause' I don't like you cause you're not like me
And I don't give a damn if you don't like me
Cause' I don't like you cause you're not like me.