Poem of the Day
Kathy Acker’s “President Bush” (link opens Realplayer application).
Acker died in 1997, so the “President Bush” of the poem is presumably Bush père rather than Bush fils. I’ve listened to this poem half a dozen times and I never tire of hearing it. Poetry seems to me so much better heard than read.
Another interesting aspect of this poem is that Acker herself did not set the poem to music. Apparently, a group called the Kill Rock Stars created the music for her reading of her “autobiography” Redoing Childhood, from which “President Bush” is taken. One assumes the band had the permission of her estate.
This is intriguing because such collaboration really problematizes the reader/listener’s effort to divine intent. Whose intent? Acker’s? Or the Kill Rock Stars intent? Who really created this poem? It cannot belong simply to Acker anymore. And by transcribing it, as I do on the next page, have I added another layer to the poem? This is the ultimate collaborative work of poetry, it seems to me.
I love this. It makes me wonder if poetry as a print genre may soon be subsumed by the digital media. I can imagine a poet using Apple’s Garage Band software to create their own background music to a reading of their poem.
For more audio of contemporary poets reading their work, browse the Factory School Digital Audio Archive.
For my transcription of “President Bush,” click over to page 2.
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I’ve only read one novel by Acker, but she is truly out there, incredibly experimental. She almost makes Delany’s Dhalgren look tame. I’m looking forward to reading her work in entirety. Having said that, I’m not terribly impresed by the poem. Lots of great novelists can’t do poetry though–Joyce and Borges for instance.
Comment by Todd — Thursday, 21 April 2005 @ 2:43 pm
Philip Larkin actually said writing a novel is harder than writing poetry, which I think is absolute bullshit. His rationale for saying that is that in a poem, one has only to decide on a particular emotion one wants to convey. To me, yeah that’s easy enough. The hard part is distilling that emotion into a very few words. And if you want to add rhyme and rhythm to the mixture, then that adds another level of difficulty. Poetry is much harder.
Obviously, Acker is writing prose and calling it a poem. I still like it, though, particularly how she creates a rather startling metaphor for the fetishization of state power. The head rose bone emblem reminds me of the boar’s head in The Lord of the Flies.
Comment by Matthew — Thursday, 21 April 2005 @ 2:51 pm
Quite an interesting resource.
Comment by Mel B. — Friday, 22 April 2005 @ 6:45 pm