Howard Dean's Scream

A poem from the forthcoming collection 'red, white, and blues'

red, white, and blues is the fourth installment of a large, ongoing project acclaimed artist Matthew Shipp describes as “a kaleidoscopic, deep, and opulent journey.” Once more, I’m exploring America and its mythology through a series of poems that function as biography, history, and cultural commentary. Where the previous collections interrogated these concerns primarily through the lens of jazz and blues musicians, these poems home in on politics—and key players who have shaped our shared culture. A moral cross-examination covering history, war, religion, and pop spectacle, this collection asks what we worship, what we excuse, and what the stories we tell do to us.

I wrote red, white, and blues because I believe poetry can still tell the truth when other forms have failed us. These poems are not interested in neutrality; they are interested in clarity. They move through history and pop culture because that is where our myths live—where power learns to hide and where harm learns to look inevitable. (I also have come to believe poetry is the best way to mash up history, media, political commentary, and provides a succinct formula for connecting dots in ways Op-Eds, fiction, and social media grandstanding can’t and won’t). I wanted to write a book that names what we worship, what we excuse, and what we leave behind, while still honoring the strange, stubborn beauty that survives in language. If these poems bruise, I hope they also invite conversation. If they provoke, I hope they also connect. Art matters because it reminds us that we are not alone in our witnessing.

These poems are political, name names, and while I don’t have any illusions my modest efforts can affect the type of meaningful change we desperately need, it’s a flag flown in solidarity, and a middle finger to the establishment. As such, I think it’s coming into the world at the right time—and perhaps can inspire some dialogue or instigate something positive.

It’s at once more difficult and more satisfying to try and nail down a scumbag like Jeff Bezos and capture his essence, in less than one page, than it is to write dozens of impassioned, ultimately ineffectual and instantly dated Op-Eds. Hence what I’m trying to accomplish with this poetic project. Whether my modest efforts make the slightest difference matters less to me than the fact that this poem will be relevant and applicable one year, ten years, one hundred years from now. When the buffoon that’s helping wreck the planet is a gross footnote to an era when America was at its worst, and some of the sickest people who ever shared oxygen with other human beings ruled the world. Like Ozymandias, their time was brief, the damage significant, and their example used as cautionary tale.

Howard Dean’s Scream*

Was this the moment we shattered

the looking glass: seeing ourselves

but darkly; barely able to hear

talking heads above that scream—

not one voice, but the collective gasp

of an empire imploding, or surrendering;

needing so many things—to be entertained

above all, our boredom a breeding ground

for some virus that sustains then devours,

the spectacle of us feasting on ourselves

spun nightly via satellite from a TV studio?

*

Or four years before, when five justices stood

on the scale, appointed judges paid to pretend

being impartial, their unaccountable ruling

a preemptive strike against chimerical activism?

*

Or when a slick lawyer from Arkansas agonized

with consultants to drown our political discourse

in semantics, hastening our reluctant arrival

nowhere, debating what the meaning of is is?

*

Or when administration officials traded arms,

it suddenly being good business to do business

with bad guys—so long as The Gipper answered

every question in front of an American flag?

*

Or the regrettable evening a former peanut farmer

spoke to Americans like adults—this equanimity

unforgivable; shame and the lack of cynicism

a losing combination for fin de siècle malaise?

*

Was it the botched burglary at an elegant hotel?

Was it whatever really happened that day in Dallas?

Was it the Ohio Gang immortalizing blood for oil?

Was it that assassin’s bullet in Lincoln’s brain?

*

Or the bloodied axe of our founding father,

his cherry tree shading the unburied bodies

of the vanquished men who welcomed and taught

us to turn this hard soil into a seasonal harvest?

(*During a rally on January 19, 2004, Democrat Howard Dean—an outspoken critic of the Iraq War—was recorded encouraging supporters when his voice cracked; isolated audio was quickly sensationalized as the “Dean Scream,” and became a central distraction for several days, providing welcome ammunition for Dean’s opponents in both parties.)