"The Inventors" [by Jim Dolot]

The Inventors

The man who invented spitting,

Archimandrus of Boeotia,

Was otherwise undistinguished,

And tends to be underrated and overlooked

Because of his contemporary, Thespis,

Who invented the drama, and Gogulus,

Who invented existentialism.

This is how it happened.

There was a drought, and everyone

Was too weak even to throw

A stone into the well to hear how

Far below the water was for hoisting, when

Archimandrus, crawling to the well wall

And lifting himself to the ledge,

Spat downward.  After two seconds plus change

There was a tinkle, and three minutes

Later, as if on cue, the rains came,

A downpour.  All of the Hellenes

Were ecstatic, carrying him on

Their shoulders to the Macropolis

Where they did the first spitting dance.

The more they spat, the more it rained.

Two weeks later, Gorgiolos of Argos

Invented sighing; and most

Experts concur that it was within

The same decade that Eugokrates

Of Komia invented slapping people,

Good and hard, in their stupid

Faces, when they get too smart-alecky

        For their own good.

-- Jim Dolot

Comments

the man who invented farting was named julius jaffe. the first man to be kicked in the balls was named george henry.

[david shapiro]

This poem splits open and keeps gathering its forcelessness like a parody of power itself.
All these beginnings, all these almost-ends. It is one of the most amazing poems
I have seen for the last few years. It has
a taste of infra-realism in Roberto Bolano.
It is very sadly Borgesian, but I will stop by saying it's as if someone had taken Cavafy and set him to a bizarre music.
So it's (the poem) anti-authoritarian and
traditional at once. Like a Chinese "acrobat" who is almost utterly'modern and then is also appealing to
forms of coercion we can onlky guess at. This is the best--very personal and, for that,
very tender. Not all the water in the rough rude poetryworld will wash the freshness of this annointed poem. It has the breath of Agnon, and his schlars gone mad mystically.

[jim dolot]

DS's allusion to the ancient caste of "schlars" in prehistoric Lithuania was probably overlooked by most readers. Their offices, to take the neapolitan census, to regulate money-supply, and to divide the onion correctly before using it as a shoe-horn, were assigned them by the chief schlarn, of whom they were regarded as mere fragments. The reference likewise to the kinship relation in that era known as "onlky," roughly great grandmother's third cousin, if in funds, clinches the historical burden. I am happy to see that someone at least understood the historicity of this work, not least its undercurrent of imitation of Kulintang music, not generally strifted into the metrical contract with as much skill as the poem has attempted here. Practitioners of sill apotropaics will know what to make of this, while those more innocent (may their tribe increase) will know even better. More anon.
--Jim Dolot