TOP40-DES37
This Old Poem #40:
David Mura’s Chorus On The Origins Of His Lust
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 12/7/02
Contemporary
poetasters hate it when they are called on how they use their own perceived
victimhood to foster literary careers that their actual literature cannot.
It’s OK for a Wanda Coleman to call herself a victim because Madison Avenue
only cares about young, attractive, pale-skinned, & pencil-thin females,
& she’s none of those things. But don’t you call her those things,
especially not without mentioning she’s a victim. It’s OK for Donald Hall to
literally weep on stage when he foists his dead wife’s doggerel on a cringing
audience. But don’t you call him exploitive of the dead & dull without
mentioning his IMMENSE grief. Similar to those 2 poetasters, in their
exploitation of their perceived insecurities & losses, is local Minnesota
poetaster David Mura.
Never heard
of him? So, why does he share traits with WC & DH? Well, I would not tell
you, normally, because it has little relevance to his startlingly dull poetry,
EXCEPT that the primary reason his dull verse has gotten published in book verse
is BECAUSE of his public self-flagellation of his insecurities & griefs.
You know the
drill by now. Here’s 1 of the several online bios of DM:
David Mura. DOB: 6/17/52, Chicago, Illinois. Author, poet, and
performance artist. Third-generation Japanese-American sansei. B.A.,
English, Grinnell College, Iowa, 1974; graduate work in English at the
University of Minnesota, 1974-79; M.F.A., Vermont College, 1991. Served on the
board of directors at The Loft, Minneapolis, 1982-84; president, 1987-88.
English instructor, St. Olaf College, 1990-91; visiting professor, University of
Oregon, 1991. Published in The Nation, The American Poetry Review,
Crazyhorse, The New Republic, and The Missouri Review,
among others. Awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a 1984
U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, the 1987 "Discovery"/The Nation
Award, and the 1995 Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award. National Poetry
Series Contest winner, 1989 (After We Lost Our Way); Josephine Miles Book
Award, 1991, and Minnesota Book Award in the Biography category, 1991 (Turning
Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei); Minnesota Book Award in the Memoirs
category, 1997 (Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality
and Identity). With African-American writer Alexs Pate has created and
performed in the performance piece Secret Colors and a movie, Slowly
This, for the PBS series "Alive TV."
So now you
have the bare facts. Yes, he is a dread Lofty, & his PBS piece with Alexs
Pate was a self-righteous tour-de-force of anti-nihilism, but- note the
sentence: ‘Third-generation
Japanese-American sansei.’ OK, what does that mean? Well, it’s a
redundancy, because if you ever hear DM read or perform he always prefaces his
art with that statement- YET a sansei is a 3rd generation
Japanese American; so the point is redundant. Another fact that the suburban-raised DM feels a need to torture his victims- er, audience- with is the fact
that his grandparents were interned during WW2. Of course, this was a violation
of their civil rights & our government belatedly recognized this fact &
gave meager financial remuneration for the wrongs. That none of this touched DM,
merely to serve as fodder for art his own humdrum existence could not give,
well- give him some props- at least he’s looking for raison, even if it
is emotional vampirism. The 3rd personal factoid that DM flogs his
audiences with is that he is/was a porno addict. But, instead of acknowledging
that this is his own cross, he blames white society for impelling him to lust
after milken-breasted Aryan babes. Most of his poetry deals with these 3 themes.
A small purview, granted, but DM seems to have taken on a dislike of his own
lifestyle, for he married & has fathered children with a white doctor. Oddly
enough, these failings have garnered him, at least, public praise from middle
brow white intellectuals & simple-minded liberals, even as they sneer at him
behind their back.
Again, I only
bring these points up because he has relentlessly done so, & it may help you
evaluate the titular poem with these facts- not in its success (or, more
properly, not) but in the origins of the poems & why they so often misfire.
The poem is from his book The Colors Of Desire. Cringe if you must:
Chorus On The Origins Of His Lust
Come, come, we've heard this before.
You think, in this age, anyone cares?
What we really can't forgive is a bore.
You seem to believe in sin
as if you'd been dunked as a boy
in some red-clay river and born again.
This is merely the excellent sophistry
of the age: that, in our sickness,
we can make of our guilt a family,
and instead of the proprietary
influence of stars, Orion
and the Dog snarling overhead,
or the Scorpion raising its tail
on our birth or bridal bed,
we say each disaster that assails
comes simply from the primal
Oedipal, Electric scene:
Father, mother, child in hell.
Or take this second dispensation:
That in the firmament rising
above a boy's masturbation,
the planetary dream of a world
whitened, nightmares of
yellow, dark-skinned hordes,
all fissioned desire, as if nothing
in his nature grew naturally
perverted, lecherous, wild. Your
goatish glint, where did it twinkle?
In the eye of mother? Father?
Or guards in the towers
at Minidoka, Jerome? Nonsense.
Cock, bull, you made these disasters...
--Yes, yes, I acknowledge my own.
Can a poet
self-examine his motives? Of course. But do it interestingly. This poem actually
has decent music, mostly because of its quasi-form. But the rhymes need to be
maintained in lines 1 & 3 of each stanza- the dropping of such would be fine
were the words used so imperative to the narrative that that imperative overrode
the benefits of form. They don’t. That said, drop the 1st 3
stanzas- just prosaic self-flagellation that is repeated throughout the poem-
dropping stanzas 1-3 makes the later appearance of guilt stronger & more
true to a depiction of real self-flagellation, by heightening the appearance of
each point by only 1 appearance. Also, why the word ‘Chorus’ in the title?
It has no real use, as the poem is clearly not a give & take (even with the
last line’s non-italics), nor is the term applied in the musical sense.
Let’s also tidy up some of the rhymes & the narrative:
On The Origins Of His Lust
And instead of the proprietary
influence of stars, Orion
and the Dog snarling cosmically,
or the Scorpion raising its tail
on our birth or bridal bed,
we say each disaster that assails
the planetary dream of a world,
whitened with nightmares of
yellow, dark-skinned hordes,
fissioning desire, is a nothing
that his nature grew naturally
perverted, lecherous, wild. Bring
goatish glints, where do they glower?
In the eye of mother? Father?
Or guards in the towers
at Minidoka, Jerome? You have sown
cock-bull; you made these disasters...
--Yes, yes, I acknowledge my own.
Note
that we dropped 2 stanzas:
comes simply from the primal
Oedipal, Electric scene:
Father, mother, child in hell.
Or take this second dispensation:
That in the firmament rising
above a boy's masturbation,
Again, DM is guilty of blatantly telling us what is going on in the rest
of the poem- his primary flaw as a poet is he has never learned the value of
concision. He has a horrible 30+ page poem called The Affair (in His
& Her versions) from the same book which could be a great poem were it
whittled to about 2 pages. But DM can’t help himself. In the rewrite we get
hints at the percipient’s problems, but enough shadow to make us reread. The
only reason 1 would wanna reread the original is in the vague hopes that 1
skimmed over the part where the speaker blows his brains out in a 1st
reading. & that’s no way to treat art, right?
Yes, DM is incredibly gauche in his exploitation of others’ sufferings
to justify his desires to be someone other than himself, & his use of dull
Japanisms can drone. But, worst of all is the fact that someone like this
teaches younger minds the exact wrong ways to approach art. But, who am I to
protest? He leads me in Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Awards by a hefty
1-0 margin!
Final Score: (1-100):
David Mura’s Chorus On The Origins Of His Lust:
60
TOP’s On The Origins Of His Lust: 72
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