Kurt Olsson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Devolution

 

The summer I turned eighteen I worked underground,

eight non-union hours spent scuffing a shopping cart of tools

through the long damp linking one laboratory to the next.

Damnedest thing I ever saw: a mutt bleary from sleep

wracked in the rictus of an eighty-year-old smoker’s cough.

I apprenticed for Rick, who weekends burned himself

electric red and drank a case of beer and who talked for hours

about devolution, learned from a rock band, and how

mankind was sliding back to slime. Sometimes he made sense

in those tunnels lined with hollow lockers, lab coats squishing by

in cheap Keds. They never told us what happened to the animals,

a lecture hall-sized room lined with cages, pink eyes rolling.

After Rick, there was Ned, who lasted a week, then Bob,

a Vietnam vet who drove a VW Bug and had been beautiful once

before his hair fell out and who looped his ball-peen under his belt

and strode about stoned, looking for a room. One morning

he went AWOL, then returned a week later and cried when Lou,

the boss, canned him. After my first day, Lou never came to site.

He was home dying of emphysema, or maybe it was a bum liver,

maybe he wasn’t dying at all, but by summer’s end all he was

was the static on a speaker phone doling out assignments and pleading,

Please, do whatever Mr. Liberaci tells you to. Which wasn’t much.

Liberaci’d already hired the next contractor, guys in buzz cuts

and the bullhorn tones of those who can afford the new houseboat.

By my last week everybody had quit but me. Lou didn’t call anymore.

A coat told me a subject had escaped, to keep an eye out,

the whole complex a maze of vents. It might show up anywhere:

frightened, hungry, drugged, who knew what it was capable of.

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Kurt Olsson’s work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and the Southern Review. He’s published two award-winning collections of poetry, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press) and What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out later this year from Fernwood Press. He lives a stone's throw from Lake Michigan where he's pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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                                                                         VW bug, photograph by Rebecca Korpita

Comments

[lally]

wow

[Clarinda]

Ok my mind is officially blown. All power to the rabbits’ revenge

[Geoffrey Himes]

The world has too many poems about romantic relationships and not enough about work, as this poem so capably demonstrates.

[Sr. Leslie]

Wow… I have read it 3 times and keep getting pulled back to it…Thanks Terence and thanks Kurt!

[Kit Robinson]

Works on work work for me.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, Leslie.

[Grace Cavalieri]

Some art is terror made beautiful.

[Bill Nevins]

. "They never told us what happened to the animals"t
R We Not Men? We R Devo!

A poem of that job in hell. Yeah, I worked there too. Hey how bout that New Mexico cap? Hope you come out this way to Albuquerque one day

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

The “rock band” was obviously Devo, a New Wave group out of Akron who had a spell of success during the 1980s. The pall of mechanization was their insistent subtext, reflected in donning inverted, flower pot-like hats or helmets intended perhaps to fend off mind-controlling signals from afar; wearing identical jumpsuits to caricature regimentation; using synchronized body/dance movements like robots; and constructing a mechanized musical sound often propelled by a drum machine. Devo was so devoted to looking and behaving devolved that they became hip. Their biggest hit was “Whip It.” Another, mantra-like nugget was “Through Being Cool.” What Kurt S. Olsson has done brilliantly in his poem “Devolution” is apply partly the ethos of Devo to a flesh-staining, soul-blighting milieu of work marked by “long damp,” “rictus of an eighty-year-old smoker’s cough,” “pink eyes rolling,” and speculation about “dying from emphysema.” That coat near the poem’s end suggests someone or something “had escaped” yet might return “frightened, hungry, drugged.” Olsson is not our Charon ferrying dead souls across the River Styx in Hades. But his poem “Devolution” does give us one hell of a ride. Kudos, Kurt!

[Terence Winch]

Earle---you're back!  Thanks for the comment.

[Judith Skillman]

Since I first read it I've been in awe of this poem by Kurt Olsson. And I applaud Cavalieri's sentiment "Some art is terror made beautiful."

[Nancy Naomi Carlson]

What a powerfully driven poem! Kurt co-organized the 2023 Kensington Day of the Book Festival with me (in Maryland) and we all had the pleasure of hearing him read in person.