THE JILL KELLY POEMS
By Alessandro Porco
The thing about pop culture is that there's so much of it.
One of the effects this has is to make you feel like its message is inescapable,
that there's no way to shut it out. Another is the way its volume (that is, the
sheer amount of it) turns everything it says into instant cliché. It becomes a kind of subliminal conditioning. I remember
standing in the University athletic center one day in the early 1980s when a student came in with a t-shirt
featuring the Nike swoosh and the words "Just do it." It was the first
time I'd ever seen the words on a t-shirt.
"That must be Nike's new ad slogan," I said to the guy standing
next to me. "I'm sick of it already."
Alessandro Porco's The Jill Kelly Poems seems at times to be built
entirely out of such media clichés. There's a rapper's elegy (no "gettin'
jiggy", but rather addressing Death with an authentic "What up, Dawg?"),
an "Ode to Christina Aguilera" featuring some familiar words and music
("You complete me, Christina, like a genie in a bottle"), a sonnet on
"Rudy", Hollywood's wannabe Notre Dame football star ("I'm Ready, Coach . . .
Put Me In") . . . and those are just the first three poems. What we have
here is a sampling of sound bites, dealing with the likes of Rambo, King Kong,
and the Bush Twins (the latter poem being a proud pastiche of cliché: "a
cento composed of ESPN Sportscenter anchor catchphrases").
Shoring fragments against ruin has been a valid poetic method for a while
now, and it's really only the nature of the material that is changing. Somewhat
like a modern artist building statues or installations out of junk, Porco is
trying to make something out of nothing (or material that is as close to nothing
as you can imagine). One assumes from the weighty epigraphs and winking self
deprecation (we are given a heads-up on one "imminent rhyme") that he
is aware of the poverty of his material. But at the same time, and this is the
important point, he really likes this stuff. As Andy Warhol once said,
"liking things" is what pop art is all about. And so Porco grooves to rap music, Christina
Aguilera, ESPN, crappy movies, and, especially, porn.
Not sex. Sex is what the poets Porco quotes in his various epigraphs
(Virgil, Herrick, Campion, Yeats) are talking about. Porn is not sex. Porn is
mediated/media sex. This isn't to pass any kind of moral value judgment on porn.
It essentially built the Internet, so I'm not complaining. The thing is that
when Porco writes about porn he isn't really saying anything about love or sex
or men and women. He's still dredging pop culture for media bits (and "xxx
lingo").
Jill Kelly is a well-known porn star and
porn producer. (Porco even has a poetic tribute to the contract girls of Jill
Kelly Productions, describing them as a "League of Extraordinary
Women". The borrowing never stops.) As a Muse a porn star makes perfect
sense: they are unreal and untouchable objects of desire, and of course totally
inexpressive. And as a Muse of pop culture an "anal queen" is
even more perfect, since the only thing she produces is shit.
But why write porn poems at all?
The question is worth asking because Porco isn't saying anything about porn
(or love, or sex, or women). Since porn, as we all know, is just something to get off
to, he's simply enjoying it. He rejects - what he
feels "some critic might claim" (got me!) - that his pen is
"unable to sustain / A poetic argument of 'real' value". He revels in
sheer boyish spunkiness, a "love of bib-bubs" expressed in what can be
pretty juvenile verse:
We gulp, we plug, we jack & strap
Yo ho! A gang-bang on the seas
I'll drinkum your jizzum like milkum
Scuttle me buttle
Piddle me paddle
Tickle my piggle
Twattle my twiddle
It's hard not to like this, at least on one level. The baby-talk rhythms are strong, there is a
liberating sense of playfulness in the language, and his sheer enthusiasm for
his subject is infectious. It's dirty and explicit without being smutty or
dangerous. But that's also the problem. It's that same generic quality to his
material - is any media form more clichéd than porn? - that effectively neuters
these poems. It's hard to make something out of nothing, especially the nothing
that is pop culture. One wishes for more authentic, unmediated stuff, like the
terrific poem "My Sweetest Bi-curious", than all of the versified
television and singing the body digital.
Art can, and should, respond to pop culture. And The Jill Kelly Poems
is a response. But poets have to make the culture too. That's the next
step.
Notes:
Review first published online May 23, 2005.
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