The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas. Lorenzo Thomas
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teens clasped Japanese-manufactured transistor radios to their ears and tapped their feet to a theme extolling the virtues of a Japanese vehicle. What tenor was being read out of this as troops enplaned again for war in Asia. The opening stanza of the eighth canto of “Fit Music” begins, in Poundian fashion, by incorporating the chorus of “Little Honda:”
First gear it’s alright
Second gear. Lean right
Third gear, hang on tight
Faster
But the poet’s report from the beach ends on a more ominous note. Where the Walter Cronkite of the time signed off on his daily reports by intoning, “That’s the way it is” (this authoritative voice itself the very reason many on the Right to this day hold Cronkite personally responsible for pronouncing the war in Vietnam a losing proposition), Thomas declares, “That is what’s happening in the time warp.” This is a time warp he shares with all who, like the Canadian “dangling man” of Saul Bellows’s novel, await war. Back in the day, no matter our draft number, we greeted one another with a most sincere request for a status report. Asking “What’s happening?” of one another had a particular edge at a time when one’s fate could so easily change from moment to moment. Brian Wilson’s “First gear, it’s alright” was one Zen-like response. More to the point was Stevie Wonder’s “Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.” Here, in the time warp of our own habitation, as we again wait to find out if we will be at war, our answer is the much attenuated “aiiiggghhhhtt.” Wilson’s gear-shifting response had existential concision to recommend it; rather like the old joke I first heard from Gil Scott-Heron about the man who jumped off the Empire State Building. As he fell past the open windows of each subsequent floor, the workers inside could hear him saying, “So far, so good.” As the ’60s became the ’70s, the question was how that sense of alrightness was to be asserted against the conjoint madness of war and racism. Thomas offers us his “Proem” to “Fit Music” as a gloss, “Deja vu more or less,” and what could be more familiar to us now, as the raptures of rampant globalism give way to the same old saber rattling, than the Proem’s beachside second-person address:
You spent childhood rehearsing the Korean War
You fucked up in college and picked the wrong major
And in 66 everyone faked concern for Asia
It was all more fitting than you thought;
The staging.
It was Chuck Berry who warned us to look out for the safety belt that wouldn’t budge. When the orders reached us in that long, dark staging area of the soul, what was left but to seek fit music? “Without character,” Kung cautions in Pound’s thirteenth canto, “You will be unable to play on that instrument.” Pound or Brown, Beach Boys or Berry, all go to comprise the poet’s character as he confronts the calamity not of his own making, as “An ignorance and circumstance // somehow involve [him] / in their fathers’ greed.”
There is an envoy, a return to California at the end. Thomas’s “Envoy” recalls us to its double reading, and the poet, like the reader, has much to answer for:
How did you like being the envoy of a monstrous epic
Or saga of Western corruption
When the white guys blacked their mugs
Before the ambush, what did you do kid?
What sort of ambush is it when the Beach Boys borrow blackness as a means to be white? What does it mean when bleached boys blacken their faces to attack in the night? Why are they so ready to fight at the mere mention of Isis? What might it mean that this envoy wraps itself around a strand of musical DNA contributed by James Brown?
As it says in the song making me
Suffer was it fun
Making me suffer
Now I want to know
In Thomas’s lineation, it is the song that makes him, as well as the song that makes him suffer. (I remember a great song by John Lee Hooker, one of those existential Blues that underscores our basic sense of our condition, titled, “It Serve You Right to Suffer.”) One thing the poem intends is a counter narrative.
In the aftermath of withdrawal, a time often marked by a sense of regret and exhaustion, a myth took hold in the American media, a story of returning Vietnam vets being spat upon in the airports of our nation, as though these were filled at the time with impolite, well-traveled Leftists. The fact that not one credible historian has been able to confirm a single instance of this behavior has done little to dislodge the mythology, whose political power is still deployed in contemporary debates over war and patriotism, though, to judge from the malicious treatment of Vietnam vet Max Cleland in his re-election campaign, those who have availed themselves of this mythology are seldom really interested in benefitting any actual veterans. What Thomas’s envoy tells us is of an infinitely more disturbing order:
I wanted somebody to stop me at the airport
And ask me all about Vietnam
But nobody asked me
This surely is part of what it means to stand as an envoy of a monstrous epic, to feel oneself an unattended afterthought, to stand on the stage after the song itself is through and ask, “Was it fun / Making me suffer?”
What welcome does greet this envoy is the golden arch of a San Francisco McDonald’s:
A beckoning out the cold, windy night
A rainbow promising nothing
And a warning that that nothing
Is serious business
Square business, indeed. It was just a few years earlier that James Baldwin had reminded readers, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.” Capital, not God, raised the golden arches to heaven, spanning the babel of international consumption. The descending poet knew “That nothing was bringing me back / Back to de Plantation.” Home on the plantation people don’t ask about Vietnam; they ask, “Did you by lucky chance / Buy a camera a stereo deck.” These were the icons of conquest our vets were expected to bring back with them. The golden arches, in their ubiquity, signal something else about being an envoy. The Beach Boys, in the chorus to “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” mine a mystical paradox: “Inside, Outside U.S.A.” The war in Vietnam was about, among other things, what was termed in those days “spheres of influence.” A poet who knew enough to come in out of the Cold War would know the difficulty of discerning just where the American sphere begins and ends. Inside, Outside U.S.A.—not your grandfather’s double consciousness, as Thomas would observe.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Across a long writing and publishing life marked by experimentation with language and innovation in forms, Lorenzo Thomas was inconsistent in his usage when it came to matters of capitalization and punctuation (for example, his on-again off-again relationship to the lowly period), and he often used non-standard spellings. One has only to compare his poetry to his published prose to see that these were matters of conscious choice, not accidentals. Most of the poems in this edition were published more than once, and so we are able to see when Thomas chose to leave a poem as it was and when he chose to make an alteration. In our effort to honor Thomas’s methods of composition and editing, we have chosen as copy text the last version of the poem that appeared under the author’s supervision. In a very small number of cases we have made silent corrections to anomalies we were persuaded had not been intentional.
Early Crimes
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