"Poem in the Manner of the 1950s" [by David Lehman]

a prose poem from Michigan Quarterly Review

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Volume XLII, Issue 2: Mainly on the 1950s, Spring 2003

Poem in the Manner of the 1950s

Lehman, David

                         For Larry Goldstein

Meet Doak Walker, the last of the all-American glamour boys. Say a prayer for Gil Hodges, who went 0 for the World Series. There was one big secret that separated the men from the boys, and that was what a woman looked like without her clothes on. A naked girl in 1959 was not the same as a naked girl in 1939 or 1919, wasn't that true? It was indubitably true, but how would we get the girls to prove it? If one had pretty breasts we'd say she was "stacked" or had big "knobs." Of such remarks were many Friday night conversations composed. Rosemary Clooney cut a record with Bing Crosby covering "Brazil." Sinatra at the piano smoking a cigarette pointed out that it was great to "know your fate is / where the Empire State is." As nice as it may be to travel on the camel route to Iraq, it's a whole lot nicer to wander back. That was the consensus. The center fielder with the crewcut got the girl, Grace Kelly got the prince, and the heavyweight champ retired undefeated. Bill Holden blew up the bridge but died in the doing. There were no homosexuals yet one of them was expelled and no heroin addicts except jazz musicians and no card-carrying Communists except nondescript men in suits carrying briefcases with film canisters in them. The British meant well, poor suckers, but Europe was an old syphilitic with yellow teeth who smelled bad. We were the land of Captain Midnight and we took a correspondence course and we bought forty-eight commemoratives for twenty-five cents on a matchbook cover and the senators were Republicans, and Washington was first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. The old general played golf and there were bungalow colonies in the summer and drive-ins with Deborah Kerr and Dugan's blueberry muffins and chicken chow mein at the Hi Ho or the Min Ju on Dyckman Street, and a red Coke machine dispensed green eight-ounce glass bottles, and Archie liked Betty but liked Veronica better, and there was a jukebox and there were hamburgers and chocolate malteds, all the things that made America great.

Comments

[Ken Lauter]

How densely packed, vivid, richly satiric, and simply accurate this is--at least in my own memory of the era, as someone born in 1943).

And yet... maybe something missing? Windows in the culture to something else, something less "American," less "great"? At any one point in time, I suspect there are a variety of ways a culture might deeply re-invent itself (or think it can). What would historians like Braudel or Schama make of that idea?

And would Wallace Stevens be tempted to try a poem on the theme? My guess: yes. Probably fine one, if as usual a bit obscure. Probably already in his Collected if I took the time to hunt it down. Suggestions anyone?

Anyway, thanks mucho for the memories, David!