{"id":1576,"date":"2009-09-01T13:51:55","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T21:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/01\/three-new-poems-from-1976\/"},"modified":"2009-09-02T07:33:07","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T15:33:07","slug":"three-new-poems-from-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/01\/three-new-poems-from-1976\/","title":{"rendered":"Three New Poems from 1976"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 1976, when I was starting to be a writer, in Geneseo, New York, at night I\u2019d write poems on my red IBM Selectric typewriter. Not that I bothered sending the poems out to magazines\u2014submitting my math papers was heartbreak enough. A friend on the English faculty encouraged me to join in the periodic faculty poetry readings, where I\u2019d hand out my works in mimeographed form.<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, I\u2019d run into Thom Metzger, who\u2019d been a student of mine at Geneseo, and has since become a successful writer. He still has what may be the sole surviving copy of my mimeographed handout, and he shared a Xerox of it with me. Most of my old poems are in my Transreal <\/em> collection, but the three below have never been reprinted.<\/p>\n


\n[Today’s photos are from the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Dick Tracy With Crutches in a Bucket<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Imagine
\nA national restaurant chain with
\n\u201ccrutches\u201d\u009d of french-fries and
\n\u201cchicken\u201d\u009d of Tracy
\na pot of honey with each meal
\nand French ticklers in the men\u2019s room.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I remember exactly what I mean by that Dick Tracy <\/em>poem. When I was a country kid in Louisville, my favorite restaurant was called Pryor\u2019s. They had a big sign showing a tousled rooster playing golf. Their specialty was a dish called \u201cChicken in the Rough\u201d\u009d\u2014 a huge mound of French fries, with pieces of fried chicken nestled into it. The meal came with soft dinner rolls and a tub of honey. And, as I think I mentioned earlier, my favorite comic strip as a boy was Chester Gould\u2019s surreal Dick Tracy, with its peculiar insistence on grotesque criminals and the details of physical objects, often with lettered labels. So in my poem, I imagined a large bucket filled with dismembered and deep-fried limbs of Tracy, packed in among soft limp crutches of the kind you\u2019d see in a painting by Salvador Dali. Of course!<\/p>\n

Here are the other two poems. The first has to do with some mandatory vaccinations the government was promoting in the name of preventing that year\u2019s flu du jour. And the last one is maybe, in part, a kind reminiscence of high-school.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mr. Jones<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

One fall the
\n     people were vaccinated before the
\n          Election.<\/p>\n

There are four plausible interpretations.
\nOr were.
\n     Now we are again singularities surfing
\n          on the wave of story.<\/p>\n

Spore replication,
\n     Virus wars,
\n          it was there all
\n               the time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Up All Night<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

I could fall
\nI realize as
\nThe upturned faces begin
\nTo shake
\n    Insanity is not a
\n    Habit but a \u201cjackal\u2019s
\n    Head\u201d\u009d inside\/outside the
\n    Lambency \u2014
\nImagine the hair-line cracks
\nSudden black-dipt
\nInnards of a wind-faired
\n    Auto laid out in
\n    That basement with those H-2-0 trains
\n            Back there
\nAfter graduation the cars were empty
\nI was searching the glove compartments
\nFor a pint
\n    Never mind
\n    We started kissing with thunder coming on, yeah
\n            thunder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 1976, when I was starting to be a writer, in Geneseo, New York, at night I\u2019d write poems on my red IBM Selectric typewriter. Not that I bothered sending the poems out to magazines\u2014submitting my math papers was heartbreak enough. A friend on the English faculty encouraged me to join in the periodic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1584,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}