Soft Skull News

In the spirit of a liberal interpretation of Fair Use, I am reposting an entire posting from the blog Conchology (in part because he rightly permits himself to quote an entire poem from Jennifer Knox's A Gringo Like Me. Read on—it's a thrill to see a poem like "Chicken Bucket" read so judiciously...

First it's not because Erasmus was born with the name Gerrit Gerritszoon. Which he totally was. "Jennifer Knox" does not sound like "Gerrit Gerritszoon."

It's because Jennifer El Knox writes mean poems. Or apparently mean ones. Here is her poem "Chicken Bucket." If this is totally not fair use please let me know.

Chicken Bucket

Today I turn thirteen and quit the 4-H club for good.
I smoke way too much pot for that shit.
Besides, Mama lost the rabbit and both legs
from the hip down in Vegas.
What am I supposed to do? Pretend to have a rabbit?
Bring an empty cage to the fair and say,
His name's REO Speedwagon and he weighs eight pounds ?
My teacher, Mr. Ortiz says, I'll miss you, Cassie,
then he gives me a dime of free crank and we have sex.
I do up the crank with Mama and her boyfriend, Rick.
She throws me the keys to her wheelchair and says,
Baby, go get us a chicken bucket.
So I go and get us a chicken bucket.
On the way back to the trailer, I stop at Hardy's liquor store.
I don't want to look like a dork
carrying a chicken bucket into the store—
and even though Mama always says
Never leave chicken where someone could steal it—
I wrap my jacket around it and hide it
under the wheelchair in the parking lot.
I've got a fake ID says my name's Sherry and I'm 22,
so I pick up a gallon of Montezuma Tequila,
a box of Whip-Its and four pornos.
Mama says, That Jerry Butler's got a real wide dick.
But the whole time I'm in line, I'm thinking,
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
The guy behind me's wearing a T-shirt
that says, Mustache Rides 10¢.
So I say, All I got's a nickel.
He says, You're cute,
so we go out to his van and have sex.
His dick's OK, but I've seen wider.
We drink most of the tequila and I ask him,
Want a Whip-It?
He says, Fuck no—that shit rots your brain.
And when he says that, I feel kind of stupid
doing another one. But then I remember
what mama always told me:
Baby be your own person.
Well fuck yes.
So I do another Whip-It,
all by myself and it is great.
Suddenly it hits me—
Oh shit! the chicken bucket!
Sure enough, it's gone.
Mama's going to kill me.
Those motherfuckers even took my jacket.
I can't buy a new chicken bucket
because I spent all the money at Hardy's.
So I go back to the trailer, crouch outside
behind a bush, do all the Whip-Its,
puke on myself, roll in the dirt,
and throw open the screen door like a big empty wind.
Mama! Some Mexicans jumped me!
They got the chicken bucket,
plus the rest of the money!

I look around the trailer.
Someone's taken all my old stuffed animals
and Barbies and torn them to pieces.
Fluff and arms and heads are all over the place.
I say someone did it,
but the only person around is Rick.
Mama is nowhere to be seen.
He cracks open another beer and says,
What chicken bucket?

Well, that was a long a time ago.
Rick and I got married
and we live in a trailer in Boron.
We don't live in a trailer park though—
in fact there's not another house around
for miles. But the baby keeps me
company. Rick says I'm becoming
quite a woman, and he's going to let Mama know that
if we ever see her again.

__________________________________________-

"Chicken Bucket" takes me back to Erasmus's _Moriae Encomium_, The
Praise of Folly, 1511 them were the days. My students and I read parts
of it last sem. It was cool. In one way it's a very mean book: making
serious unending fun of fat people, stupid people, etc. The speaker is
"Folly" who says stuff like "and the merchants are the most foolish of
all" -- so it's like folly is praising all these people but doing so
from an inverted perspective. A lot of it is against church folk etc and
movers and shakers, but a lot of it is making fun of little folk too. He
says that all children are the product of madness and oblivion.

And tho E doesn't "say" this in the book, the thing that
shines thru -- and the thing that makes it a really amazing read -- is
even tho this is a wholesale condemnation of all of society and its
actors, there is also conveyed this sense of *weird admiration for the
Energy* of the people. Even tho everyone is a fool, they have admirable
energy -- and it DOES turn into a kind of denigrative encomium. At the
very end is a kind of coda, tho, in which E finally puts forward a grounding clavis, a key to good
xtian values. "So much better are
things spiritual than things corporeal, and things invisible than things
visible," he finally says toward the end, among other things, but then
returns to a kind of "positive dissing" by praising madness and
witlessness at the book's close.

There is a way, I think, where the denigration can be so wholesale,
mean, and scathing that one gets a sense that that wand of ire cd easily
be turned on (a) anyone in the audience, and (b) the poet herself. And
that's redemptive. That's the redemptive hint -- the hint that we are
all damned together, we are all fools together, even the least of us.

This is what menippean satire does: it's absolutely chaotic, destroying even those who are "lesser." There are 2 kinds of satire: (1) where a select group is being destroyed on behalf of something that is being conserved, (2) where everything is being destroyed. This latter is called menippean satire or chaotic satire. If we look at Knox's poem from teh standpoit of (1), we think "she's dissing the poor, so she must be conserving the rich," but if we look at it as (2), we think "she's dissing hte poor now but she'll also diss the rich later."

If we see it as (2), which I do, then Jenn Knox's "chicken Bucket" cd only happen in an era of great openness and understanding, in a loosening, in an era that *starts out* knowing that *the "least of us" is also dignified enough to be picked on*.

The poem seems to be saying, "yuh okay this pathetic person is trapped but despite that she's also in love (yes with a twit) but she's still thinking of her mother, she's still invested in it all even if what's she's invested in is really degraded" -- and that's positive, even tho she's in Boron, a town that sounds like moron --
and too the trailer girl is speaking directly to "us," those of us not in Boron, which itself means her voice is traveling far (a positive thing).

I can give Knox that credit -- because the details ARE so carefully observed: it's the act of observation that bespeaks a kind of patience and care, even if what's observed is then gathered into an insult or caricature. It is not, I sense (or credit), a real insult but a ritualized one -- and it's instructive, it reminds us of the fact that we too are busting into the trailer to look at someone's fat little titties - taking us a notch lower too because now we're voyeurs. Watching a soap opera with fascination is not something to be proud of.