A POET AMBUSHES BUSH

CARTHAGE
By Baron Wormser
30 pp.
The Illuminated Sea Press. $10.
(order from the author through baronw@gwi.net)

Reviewed by G. W. George

Though satire predates even Aristophanes in the western poetic tradition, we’ve all heard warnings against mixing poetry and politics, usually on grounds that poets should focus on the universal, transcending anything so ephemeral as contending politicians, parties, and policies. Some poets who ignore that peril still make it into the anthologies, but, to take just a couple of examples, Philip Freneau is not represented there by his poems “Occasioned by a Legislation Bill” and “To a Noisy Politician,” nor is Richard Wilbur celebrated for “A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson,” his attack on President LBJ.

The outrages of today’s Bush Administration, however, are proving too egregious for poets to ignore. Indeed, Sam Hamill put together an entire book of Poets Against the War (selections from 11,000 of them) after First Lady Laura Bush, anticipating criticism of the Iraq invasion, cancelled a White House poetry symposium. And now comes Maine’s own Poet Laureate Baron Wormser with a satire on President Bush himself.

That is, a satire of a sort. This is not the kind of bitter satire that skewers its victims straightforwardly, peppers them with invective, and roasts them by name. Indeed, the name Bush does not appear in any of the fourteen short poems in Wormser’s collection. Carthage is both its title and the name of the president it depicts. And the poems sound as if written by an almost sympathetic observer who seems less interested in lambasting a pathetic president than in exploring, in various settings, how his mind works. The satire comes from repeated revelations of how it doesn’t.

“Carthage” likes to fly above problems in airplanes. He wishes he could shoot noisy crows that distract him from reading comics. He likes to watch himself on TV, which reassures him of his existence. “What he says doesn’t matter . . . What matters is what beams” such as “the lard of his smile.” Feeling that he is evaporating, “he keeps a diary to hold his importance in place,” but can’t think what to write about except his breakfast waffles. He prefers cards with cronies to sex with his wife but really wants to do nothing. “He can make audiences of patriots and rich Christians go crazy, but he gets tired of listening like some kind of half-educated monkey” to politely smarter advisors. When someone asks—“What do you do with the dead children?”—he just “smiles easily and waves a hand for the camera that never grieves.”

The key poem is “Carthage Hears about His Name,” in which he wonders “how could he be descended from something that had been destroyed,” as was the ancient city-state of Carthage by Romans and Arabs. Radio music helps inspire him with the thought that “everything came back” after the destruction. Carthage is Wormser’s metaphor both for the vacated, “leveled” state of the childish president’s mind and for the devastation his thoughtless policies have brought. Wormser considers Carthage too inane to charge him with evil, maliciousness, or deliberate malfeasance. His president is bright enough to know things are happening that he is not grasping, but not bright enough to know what to do about them; bright enough to see through his own poses and others’ patronizing, but not bright enough to do without them.

In dealing with the problems of political poetry, Wormser tries having it both ways. He makes recognizable for readers today the specific president whom he satirizes; but by leaving names, places, and events unspecific, he avoids dating his poetic sequence, hoping that the generalized character he depicts will remain indefinitely interesting. (Or so I surmise; I have never met or talked with him.) Will his strategy work?

That depends on the quality of the sequence as poetry. Wormser employs free verse in a conversational style. With short phrases and simple words, as in a children’s book, he reinforces the simple-mindedness of the character he depicts. Much of the work could be laid out as prose with equal effect. But I also find in it many fine poetic lines. In the concluding poem, Carthage admires a sunset, is interrupted by an official voice on a telephone, then looks again,

His head at an angle
                           As if listening to a distant, sublime sphere,
As if there were other voices to hear.

 

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