Jerome Sala, Glop: Poems

 

from A Guide to TikTok
                                                —After Kenneth Koch 

Look at this TikTok video.
There is a tiny dog in the foreground.
There is a tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the background yells
to the tiny dog in the foreground:
“Hey, what is your name?
What is your name?
What is your name?”
The tiny dog in the foreground
finally hears the tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the foreground yells back:
“Toby!
My name is Toby!”
The tiny dog in the background yells back:
“Fuck you, Toby.”

I have to admit, upon opening New York City poet Jerome Sala’s latest, Glop: Poems (BlazeVox Books, 2026), I caught the first poem, and was immediately prompted to share a photo of it with at least half a dozen friends via text. As an opening poem, there is something quite remarkable about it, including the absurd ridiculousness of the narrative. The poem strikes, clearly. The first full-length collection (unless there’s something else I’ve missed) since the publication of How Much? New and Selected Poems (Beacon NY: NYQ Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Glop: Poems presents itself in three titled clusters of shorter poems—“Searching,” “Headlines” and “Poetic Economy”—Sala’s is an approach to narrative lyric oddities and the surreal that connect his work to the work of other contemporary poets such as American poet Ron Padgett and Canadian poet Stuart Ross, akin to a particular flavour from within the New York School. “I know where I’m going / when I walk with a zombie.” begins the short poem “In the Key of ‘I’.” “Once I was a male war bride / now I am an idiot, walking / through an ice storm.” With poems for or after Kenneth Koch and M.S. Merwin, and further referencing Huckleberry Hound, Marianne Moore, Charles Darwin, Vallejo, William Bronk, Auden, Joy Division, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Blade Runner and the Fantastic Four, Sala writes to and through his literary heroes and pop culture icons, individuals both real and invented that figure heavy across his imagination. His poems are populated, set as responses to his immediate world, one that lays heavy in books and other media. “the dead stay that way / only momentarily,” begins the poem “Football World Reacts to Famous Coach Getting Fired,” “soon they command / the attention of suitors // a married corpse / is a born-again value // those under the whip / of the resurrected boss / scoff at the rumor / of his demise // they can feel his new life — / he takes it out of their hides [.]”

The key to Sala’s poems is almost one of perspective, of perception; offering poems-as-little-essays that each work against any kind of expectation, but also each work toward a kind of narrative inevitability. Once the poem lands at the end, the distance travelled makes complete internal sense, even if one could never have imagined the ending from the beginning. “What’s the opposite of a still life?” he asks, to open the poem “Smokin’.” “Maybe the Museum of Television and Radio / where I’m watching old commercials / for cigarettes. These elaborate plugs / look like ads for psychedelic drugs. / A woman lights up and her yard / becomes a blooming meadow. She’s pleased: / above her brain are budding trees.” Where might this poem finally land, you ask? His poems are inquisitive and quietly joyful, offering poem-bursts not always short but certainly immediate, composing a layering of lines that almost overwhelm at times, piling observational lick upon observational lick like an old pro, wildly inventive and intelligent, forever fiercely young at heart.

Bladeless Fan

The breeze propels itself
as all things do
from out of the void. 

In this case an oval —
a form that recalls
the oblong box
of Poe’s story. 

But instead of a corpse
the oblong fan
registers the absence
of any body
or any blade
offering instead
a zero —
that breather
between positive and negative. 

A moment of
the new
from which
a cool wind blows.

 

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.