The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Seven): Dylan Loring [by Angela Ball]

Pardon My French

I couldn’t decide between
French bread and French fries,
sipping French roast
I made in my French press,
preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch
for the woman who began the previous evening
in a brown French braid
before we started French undressing
and spent the night French-kissing.

If French bread, why not
French toast, my mind rotated,
biking from Normandy to Paris.

Instead I chose to retreat
through the French doors
to the yard so I could get
some dirty air, chain-smoking
and coffee-sipping, smelling
like someone’s Grandma’s house
until a cartoon-looking skunk walked by.

Inside, she was eating French
vanilla ice cream, thinking about how
she had to take her bulldog
to the vet before showing up
to work for the day
--she’s an au-pair for the CEO
of French’s, the mustard company,
and was supposed to make little Stephanie
onion soup for lunch.
But first she suggested we hop in the pool
and take a French dip.

24 hours of thinking
I was le man later,
we met over cans of LaCroix at the coffee shop,
and I told her the one about the guy who mistook
a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone
into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse
and turned to me all serious,
saying she only liked me
for my American accent, that I spent
most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.
So I told her I was just trying to show her
my level of commitment
and teach her about American culture,
and she said she didn’t have time
for a relationship anyway and that she would learn plenty
about American culture on her own
since she was going to be in a community
theatre performance where she’d get to wear
a pink jacket and pretend
to be a beauty school dropout.

                                                  -Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire – Barron County. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, jubilat, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, and Forklift, Ohio. Along with his friends Kate MacLam and Jordan Deveraux, he edits Lost Pilots. Dylan’s first book of poems This Smile is Starting to Hurt (SEMO Press) will arrive March 2024.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 67): Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring’s “Pardon My French” deadpans us through a series of idioms that function both as a challenge for the poet (à la Oulipian obstructions) and a humorously obsessive send-up of our commodified culture.

The poem may remind us of Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” with its oppositional invocations of matrimony; and even more of Kenneth Koch’s brilliant “You Were Wearing,” in which young love is abetted by clothing including an “Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse” and “George Washington, Father of his Country, shoes”—a prophetic example of product placement. All three poems end with a drastic and inspired change of tone.

“Pardon My French” begins with breakfast ideas and a skillfully engineered flashback to the night before:

     I couldn’t decide between French bread and French fries, sipping French roast

     I made in my French press,

     preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch

     for the woman who began the previous evening

     in a brown French braid

     before we started French un-dressing

     and spent the night French kissing.

From the start, the poem mainlines its artifice. That is, it acts as if its Gallicisms are the most natural thing in the world. Rather than tipping its hand, it displays it.

As in life, the real and the ersatz change places. Is the French au-pair’s “bulldog” related to John Ashbery’s “bouldogue,” a real breed that sounds like a humorous affectation?

Loring’s characters’ Gallicism is no matter of mere appearance—it defines them. The speaker may not be able to join the Tour de France, but his mind can. He chain-smokes while sipping coffee and “. . .smelling / like someone’s Grandma’s house”—the latter detail not so much "French" as simply an inspired description. We get a cameo from the much-missed cartoon character, Pepe le Pew. Soon after, the French girlfriend punningly suggests a “French dip” in the pool.

Loring’s poem reminds us of the apparently universal predilection for exoticizing or villifying things or phenomena by assigning them to a foreign country.

Take for example Algernon Charles Swinburne’s choice for the most beautiful word in the English language: “syphilis.”  The English, the Germans, and the Italians termed it "the French disease,” while the French referred to it as the "Neapolitan disease,” and the Dutch as the "Spanish/Castilian disease.”

Such labels may function as distancers of something undesirable; but also, of course, as vectors of glamor. Our speaker has begun to regard himself as “le man”—an affectation whose downfall begins as the two share a fizzy water named “LaCroix.” The name is explained at the website “thrillest” by Meredith Heil, who says, “The fake Frenchy name is actually a cross between the St. Croix, a river that runs along Wisconsin's western border, and LaCrosse, the beverage's Wisconsin hometown.”

     and I told her the one about the guy who mistook

     a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone

     into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse

     and turned to me all serious, saying she only liked me

     for my American accent, that I spent

     most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.

At least two things of note happen in the poem’s final stanza: the girlfriend defies the poem’s apparatusto become three-dimensional, and the poem’s tone fails to shift into one of transcendence—a shift that happens in both “Marriage” and “You Were Wearing.” It ends by comically exposing the woman’s chauvinistic and superficial notions of “Americanness.” Then she takes her French leave:

     So I told her I was just trying to show her

     my level of commitment

     and teach her about American culture,

     and she said she didn’t have time

     for a relationship anyway and would learn plenty

     about American culture on her own

     since she was going to be in a community

     theater performance where she’d get to wear

     a pink jacket and pretend

     to be a beauty school dropout.

The “genuine” French woman has more specious ideas of America than our speaker does of France. America is a country populated by airheads, and she is going to “learn plenty” from impersonating a “beauty school dropout.”

Dylan Loring’s very funny “Pardon My French” reminds us not only that when we think of other countries we largely think in cliché, but also that we surround ourselves with words and objects that connote glamor and desirability: with “Frenchness.” At every turn, language connives with self-deception. As when watching a play by Molière, we learn that it’s fun to witness the foibles of others—this time by way of a poem that is both a tissue of false attributions and an agent of truth.

-- Angela Ball

Comments

[David Lehman]

Vive la France! Et les French! Thanks, Angela. Charming and funny.

[Angela Ball]

Thanks so much for this generous comment, David.

[Sally Ashton]

Love it!