Jerome Sala, How Much? New and Selected Poems

 

Look Slimmer Instantly!

Read this poem.

While I will revive my usual complaint about selecteds produced sans introduction-for-context (an oversight I consider nearly criminal), there is something almost preferable to experiencing American poet Jerome Sala’s introduction-less How Much? New and Selected Poems (Beacon NY: NYQ Books, 2022). Having read poems here and there of his over the years, this is the first collection I’ve explored, and it includes selections from his prior full-length titles I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent (STARE Press, 1985), The Trip (The Highlander Press, 1987), Raw Deal: New and Selected Poems, 1980-94 (Jensen/Daniels, 1994), Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2014) and Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books, 2017), as well as a healthy opening section of newer work, and a closing section of poems produced prior to that first published collection. It is interesting that the book is structured chronologically in reverse, the opposite of how selecteds are often compiled, offering the newest poems at the end. Whoever put this selection together (another frustration I have with certain selecteds; whether the author, an internal or external editor with the press, it should be offered somewhere as a credit) chose for the reader to catch a sense of where Sala the poet has been most recently, before launching further back into that panorama of his publishing history. As the back cover offers, this collection “offers a panoramic view of a poet whose work has often been a cult-pleasure until now. Spanning Sala’s early years as a punk performance poet in Chicago to his career as a copywriter/Creative Director in New York City, these poems offer satiric insights from the ‘belly of the beast’ of commercial and pop culture.”

The People on TV

The people on television move so slowly.
They walk through big houses and stare into wide spaces
where meaningful discussions appear. Animated clouds
of talk, stirred by laughter, tears, anger, and catharsis
produce thunderstorms on the plush rugs
where they roll around with each other,
disrobing in awkward clenches, wrestling
with the narratives foisted upon them by invisible
characters off screen, who theorize our desires
and write to them. you can’t help but feel sorry
for those earnest, two dimensional souls, who struggle
mightily with the stereotypes prescribed to their situation
like drugs that enhance socially desirable dialog.
For in every episode, even as they bask in their own beauty,
you feel we make them anxious, as if we were problem children
whose hang-ups their masters could only hope to solve.

There are elements of Sala’s work that remind of Canadian poets Stuart Ross or Gary Barwin: imagine either of those poets writing corporate-speak, and with far more swagger, confident or foolhardy enough to be brightly coloured in such swagger-subtlety, of course. If Jerome Sala had appeared in Toronto or Hamilton, say, over Chicago, I could easily have seen his work alongside that of Alice Burdick and Lance La Rocque, or even that of Victor Coleman or the late Daniel Jones, offering highly literate and literary poems that might best be experienced from a corner of some dark music venue, listening to the author read aloud between sets of local bands. There’s a propulsion behind these poems that offers observation, documentation, critique and a kind of first-person reportage from a slightly surreal perspective of shifting soil. The ground will give way, but Sala manages to hold on. His poems capture culture, politics and cultural movements through language, whether across tone, subject or speech, and probes best when swirling across all simultaneously. His gestures require attention, whether screamed from a stage or as a whisper; his poems don’t simply require or demand one’s attention but provide openings for one’s attention to fall into. “The map to be redrawn grows stubborn,” he writes, to open the poem “The Globe Fell Off the Table,” “refusing the clumsy crayon-holding fingers / of moronic manipulators. / Things stay as they were the day before / yesterday began. Forget about tomorrow: / you can’t hit that pitch.”

Lately, I’ve been reexperiencing (through reading aloud to our nine-year-old) the “wit and comic grace” of Winnipeg writer David Arnason’s short story collection The Dragon and the Dry Goods Princess (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1994), and there are echoes, too, I can find between these two volumes, in how Sala approaches elements of humour and narrative via the prose poem, as the first stanza of the poem “The Fakir” reads:

            I am not Elvis Presley, yet I am in love with a woman who loves a man who thinks he is Elvis Presley. That man is me. But if she knows I don’t really think I am Elvis Presley, she will no longer love me. She loves the deluded and only them. So, all day long I pretend I am Elvis Presley back from the dead. Like the majority of the people who voted for the postage stamp, I prefer the young Elvis. I myself look more like the older Elvis, as I am middle-aged and gaining weight. But you can see how this makes her love me twice as much, for I am, in her eyes, doubly deluded: on one level I am a mere mortal who thinks he is Elvis Presley. On another, I am the old Elvis who foolishly thinks he is still young. I know I am neither. I also know I want her love more than anything in this world and will do anything to get it.