Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: Hatred
Abracadabra, says Mephisto, the fire fly
buddha of Rue Morgue, and the whole wide world
changes from a stumbling rick-rack machine
doing the rag time, the bag time, the I’m-on-the
edge-of-a-drag time to a tornado of unmitigated
fury. Yes sir, we are trampling out our vengeance,
grapes-of-wrath time is here again when I think about
Her Majesty, myself, all alone on her throne, tiara askew,
inconsistently worshipped, even by herself, and I could
just die to think how I betray myself in the great
Kabuki theater of my mind, the No Theater, so to speak, but
latitudinal issues aside, here I am starring in a
mystery play. Everyone’s in place–cows, shepherds,
no-good-rotten Herod and his ridiculous Roman soldiers.
Only the savior’s missing. What’s the point, then
putti aside, of the whole big preposterous
Quattrocento mess, the fights, the plague, the frivolous
rococo results, postmodern la-di-da incarnate?
So what’s a girl to do when stuck in the last vestiges of the
tawdry twentieth century–have a drink, a fling, say
Uncle? Oh, there’s no loathing like self-loathing,
vox populi, vox dei or something like that. I’m rejecting
Western thought here, monotheism included, shuddering as
xenophobic clouds gather over the darkening earth, yeah,
yeah, everyone hates someone, me included, cowering in my
Zen bomb shelter, longing for a thermonuclear whack.
From On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt, 2014). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press
Barbara Hamby is the author of many collections of poetry. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
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What a brilliant abecedarian–each couplet is incredibly powerful, so the whole poem just builds and builds!
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Just so…
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Agreed! In my experience, the two do go together!
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Damn I love this poetry and the folks who love it with me!
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Me too, Barbara. Thank you for being in the mix every day.
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30 years old and it’s more than relevant for this mud slog of misery the D.C. clowns are trying for.
I’m glad you new book coming has a couple of “long weird ones” included.
BTW, this site doesn’t let me like others posts but I would have liked them all today. 🙂
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Barbara Hamby’s poems are like brilliant traffic jams of the unconscious mind, and just when we think there’s no hope of moving through all this crowdedness, she comes leaping from rooftop to rooftop showing us the way.
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How do you DO it!!! Another mad, (yeah, yeah, pun intended) fury of a superb poem, Barbara — with magnificent lines like:
“I think about
Her Majesty, myself, all alone on her throne, tiara askew,
inconsistently worshipped, even by herself, and I could
just die to think how I betray myself in the great
Kabuki theater of my mind”
How damn lucky we are, thanks to Michael (vox populi, vox dei ), to get poems like this one delivered to us!
From my very own “Zen bomb shelter” (under a California jacaranda tree) to yours: Yay to you, sister!
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Laure-Anne, I give all credit to the abecedarian form. It was like crack for my brain. I was in the middle of a 26-poem sequence when I wrote this. I keep trying to stop using it, but I’ve got two long weird ones in my new book.
We’re dealing with a shooting on our campus right now, and for some of our students it’s their second one, because they were in the Parkland shooting in Miami during high school. I wrote this almost 30 years ago. As my mother used to say, “What’s the world coming to?” Our spring has been gorgeous, but all of this hatred is out there, too. How can we ever reconcile the two?
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I’m so sorry for your community, Barbara. So much unnecessary suffering… I’m sure that you and David are doing all that can be done to help your students through this grief.
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…I hadn’t noticed it was an Abecedarian — that’s how GOOD you are, Barbara!
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Barbara, I am breathless and (almost) wordless. This poem is a magnificent, elegant, edgy, funny, sad, sarky, masterly crafted tour-de-hate. Wow! Shall share it immediately! and then read it again.
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Thanks so much, Rosemary. This is a part of a 26-poem abecedarian sequence. Each letter of the alphabet brought out a really different part of my psyche. I love “tour-de-hate.”
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This part of a letter published on social media: The question was posed, “Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?” A lady named Bev answered it this way:
“You all don’t get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.
They don’t give a shit what he does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals, that’s it, period.
He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.
The fact that people act like it’s anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
If you keep getting caught up in “why do they not realize this problem” and “how can they still back Trump after this scandal,” then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It’s fuck liberals, that’s pretty much it. etc…
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This post explains so much, Rose Mary. Thank you.
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I think you, Rosemary, are spot on with your insight as to how hatred of liberals generates much MAGA energy and Trump support. Who are these liberals they hate so much? Barbara Kingsolver’s stunning novel Demon Copperhead shows us that for poor white rural communities, the liberals are teachers, pharmacists, health care workers, social workers, etc., All are perceived as outsiders who consider themselves know-it-alls, who really don’t understand local culture or what it values.
And then in Demon, along came opiate addictions, with crime, death, and the ongoing destruction of the communities. Liberals became the scapegoats for this, after some even sold locals on opiates as easy panaceas to solve their problems (recall the Sacklers). So when Trump preached border control as a way to cut off fentanyl and oxy, MAGAs saw this as not just sticking it to the liberals who they believed brought this death, but a reliever of grief. Trump, of course, fed this line of argument for his narcissistic reasons.
Also, I try to never forget the racism, sexism, and know-nothing tendencies of MAGA.
We liberals need to construct a compelling story to counter this mindset. Demon Copperhead showed me the difficult but essential need to tackle this issue. Is it too late? For Demon there was a way out. For his close friends, not so much.
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Oh my, I need to read Demon Copperhead….
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I read Demon Copperhead a few years back – I love Kingsolver’s books – and it DOES help to understand a lot. But I didn’t make the connection. Now I get it.
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I saw this. I have a brother who just sat around a smoked weed instead of going to college. Then he got Jesus. I think a lot of his anger is because of missed chances. Also marijuana fuels a lot of paranoia. I’m working on a poem about conspiracy theories and pot. I see a connection You heard it here first.
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I have wondered about this too. I do believe there IS a connection.
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Rosemary, all we need is a scientist, and we’d have a best-selling non-fiction book.
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And this poem here, following the shooting at FSU where you teach.
It reinforces the hatred you abracadabra-ize, the unmitigated fury, either outer directed or inner. Truly sorrow for the losses at Florida State. May we rise like phoenixes from the world of ash not all will escape.
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Thanks so much for your kindness. Some of our students were also at Parkland when the shootings occurred. This craziness is unbelievable. We’re picking up the pieces.
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Stay strong in your creativity, and keep compassion and presence alive as you pick up the pieces. Sigh.
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