Masks Of Poetry

Talk about masks!  Chris the Lachrymose.  The Tearful, the Tragic.  The Woeful, the Penitent Comic, the Blubberer.  The “I am not a Bully.”

 

We had forewarning of this, of course.  Remember the special election?  This poem of mine was published by New Verse News, in slightly different form, in June 2013.

 

 

Chris Christie

 

Friends, Americans, countrymen, hear me out.

I come to praise Christie, not condemn him.

The good that men do lives on after them,

While their mistakes often die with them.

He is an honorable man, who has at heart

The welfare of the people.  His critics cry,        

He has ambition.  But did he not embrace

Even Obama, prince of the other party,

After Sandy?  Ambition should be made

Of sterner stuff.  Did he not excoriate –

Excoriate, I tell you – John Boehner,

Leader of his own party?  This is not

A man who puts his own ambition Ahead

Of the people’s weal.  His enemies complain

He’s costing the state $24 million

For two special elections to fill Lautenberg’s

Senate seat.  To save the people’s money,

Did he not cut pensions and health benefits,

Slash $8 million in college tuition subsidies,

$10 million in after-school programs

And $12 million more in charity care?

Would a man of overweening ambition so flaunt            

The common people’s needs?  Just to “win big”

In his own re-election and impress the fat cats              

Who dominate presidential politics?

Chris Christie, my friends, has the people’s good

At heart, and he is an honorable man.

 

One of my very earliest memories, maybe age 3 or even 2, so far back it is surrounded by darkness, is my father’s face, immobile, stone-like: a mask.  Much later, as a young adult, I came upon a family photo of us at that time in life, and the image of my father stunningly confirmed the mask in my memory.  This was long before every-day pictures bore the happy-happy-buy smile of people selling themselves.  His face was poised, posed, serious, unsmiling.  I have a 2-foot high mask hanging in my dining room, bought a few years after I saw that photograph, of a Mexican god with huge, vacant eyes and a deeply down-turned mouth: forbidding, foreboding, like an Old-Testament God.

 My father was not, in fact, like that.  Inscrutable, what I’ll call covered-up, he had a friendly, rational outgoing surface; behind it, an interior we – not just me, almost everyone – hardly ever saw.  I don’t think it was hollow – I don’t want to think that – but it was certainly behind the face.

 Perhaps from that, from my father, from his inscrutability – and my un-access to him – comes my fascination with masks.  I have half a wall covered with African masks, others scattered around the house, and I couldn’t tell you how many scattered in my memory banks.  It’s not just the externality of masks: I am fascinated by the masks we present of ourselves, to ourselves.  ( “I am an honest person.… Sometimes fib a bit, but I am an honest person….”)  We live by our masks of self, affirming and re-affirming them with our incessant, perhaps desperate, certainly eager, selfies and tweets.

The masks of poetry: doesn’t all poetry project a mask, if not multiple masks at once?  The “I” of the poem, the voice of the poet, the form itself of the poem, all these imply facades, and structures.  Unlike the iconic masks of comedy and tragedy, the masks of poetry (to me) suggest the virtually infinite variety and complexity of the art.  In its way, poetry suggests the virtually infinite dimensions of a single human being.

 But it is not just the masks of ourselves we present to ourselves.  Poetry must deal with not only the masks we present to others, but the masks of others that we take in, the masks we interpret, as I, as a small child, interpreted the ur-mask of my father.  Indeed, I would say much of our political and societal dysfunction is linked to the masks we project and the reception we give the masks others project toward us. 

 And this, finally, forms the heart of my the fascination with the masks of poetry.  In form and content, poetry offers a virtual infinity of opportunities to explore, examine, and take in the outer and the inner, the multiple surfaces and the multiple behind-surfaces, of life.