THE SMART DUMB CAT WRITES TOP CAT POETRY
an appreciation of James Gendron's Sexual Boat (Sex Boats)
By Zoe Brezsny
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“Where are you tonight, my personal party?” asks author James Gendron in his first full-length book, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats). It’s the poetry book of our generation, if only our generation liked poetry and reading. It’s devastating and comic, each poem a reminder that everyone else is as twisted and lonely as you. It’s also more than that, making paradoxical associations that most of us never think of: the afterlife with alcoholism or angel sweat with the odor of corpses. Gendron enters a consequence-free zone where language can be dumb and all the better for it. Transcendence rises out of the most banal moments and in the best of poetry makes it sing.
In the poem “Licking Your Pussy ’04,” Gendron writes, “I felt cilly (silly), having my picnic blanket fall/on so many skeletons from the Iraq war, which had recently begun at that time./I just want six days/to prove I’m not an animal.” He makes the gentle fall of a picnic basket over skeletons seem like the most natural thing in the world, the kind of surrealism that is not heavy-handed but as light and airy as whipped butter. His voice is chatty and casual, which makes it easy to digest the internal and external wars raging throughout Sexual Boat.
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| Every bouy has a journey--climb aboard! |
The titles of eight of the book’s poems are variations on Sexual Boat (Sex Boats). Inside the sexual boat are more sex boats, like a funhouse mirror that goes on and on forever. Gendron’s prose connects love and sex to the U.S. military and burn victims and then to Pizza Nite and the wings of Christ. Everything is allusive and connected. He gets that intimate relationships are intrinsically tied to world politics, but also to the blinking lights of an ICU. One moment he’s writing about how it’s always December three feet from a bullet, the next he’s hiring a witch to kill his lover’s boyfriend.
Gendron’s poems lack the egotism and stiff formalism that are turn-offs in a lot of contemporary poetry. It’s evident he hasn’t been affected by the M.F.A. writing programs that breed a safe, uniform style or a pretentious and false experimentalism. He’s over being anything but Gendron, highs and lows included. He makes auto caricatures of himself, poking fun at his vulnerability. He embraces so-called ugly language, inserting pop culture references, Internet slang and made-up words—"graynbow" and "Wolfwater" being personal favorites—with the ease of a modern-day William Carlos Williams.
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| G is for Gendron's Great Poetry! |
In “Shade” he writes: “I swear: when you leave me alone, every part of my body is having its own nightmare.” His clean, micro-specific poems restore my faith in an art form that many have left for its oversentimentality, a slice of stale cake that has been left out too long. Some of his lines are brilliant in their simplicity: “Glass is a liquid actually. So earlier, when you said being around me was like eating glass, you really meant drinking.” For all the overly careful writing of the literary world, much of it never really touches on uncensored human emotion. But that's not true in Gendron’s case. He is obsessively concerned about the precision of his words, demanding that they convey something real.
Other lines reel with a surrealism that lends clarity rather than confusion: “I love you like an asshole/loves his best friend the sun./Is half your face his?/Turn it away./Is half your car his?/Sell it for cash./Love sews the faces of burn victims with moonlight and sexual hope/until they’re perfect, gleaming/teeth in the Human Chandelier./It’s a strange feeling, wanting/to kill someone.” It’s a brilliant summation of what it’s like to be with someone. In a genre where the superfluous relationship poem reigns supreme, I get a love poem that I can believe in, finally.
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| Be a smart, dumb cat! |
Gendron aspires to be what rapper Ghostface calls the smart dumb cat. Instead of getting lost in the ether of lofty post-modern jargon, his readers get revelations about desire, car crashes, the Internet and isolation at parties. What Gendron deems “the ill-logic and deformed language” in Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) takes us on a journey through adulthood (eating anger and cancer scares included), the World Wide Web, and the dark crevices in between. When you finish it you will feel like, in Gendron’s words, “the germs seen by the beautifulest person on the bus, who is never me,” and that is just one of his many startling lines and insights that will shake off any preconceived notions about poetry. If only every poet applied the smart dumb cat philosophy, and with as much vision and skill as Gendron.
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| Major American Poet: James Gendron |
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