Re: The poetry of Beto O'Rourke

> Poetry Dude wrote:
> George J. Dance wrote:
> 
>> What Beto’s Weird Teenage Poetry Tells Us About His Politics
>> 
>> Virginia Heffernan, Politico, March 30, 2019
>> 
>> "Great news for us apathetic types born around Woodstock and Watergate: No need to dig up Thomas Pynchon or an Alanis Morissette CD. Look no further than Beto O’Rourke’s recently revealed teen involvement in the Cult of the Dead Cow, America’s original cell of computer hacktivists. The rad cDc, founded in 1984 in a slaughterhouse in Lubbock, Texas, was an ironic project par excellence"by turns infantile, enraged and bleeding-heart.
>> 
>> "O’Rourke’s membership, which was exposed by Reuters and gamely confirmed by the candidate himself, surely reflects his libertarian-skater proclivities, which he flaunts to this day. But, while O’Rourke did use the Cult’s resources to cop some free long distance, it turns out at the cDc he was less pirate than poet. As the group’s old posts reveal, he mostly saw the cDc’s online board as a zine, where, under the pen name Psychedelic Warlord, he could pop off on alternative music or write indie experiments. O’Rourke doesn’t have a campaign memoir yet, but the presidential candidate now better known for winding Medium posts also has some online juvenilia that’s worth a look.
>> 
>> "What do Beto’s musings reveal about him as a politician? 'Self-invention' was a watchword of the 1980s and ’90s, with all it implied about the fictions of identity, and Beto was no stranger to persona-shuffling"then as now. In his adolescent oeuvre, he tried his hand as a critic, punk and journalist. As time went on, he experimented as a musician, outlaw, idealist, family man, skater, fundraiser, politician and, maybe, leader of the free world.
>> 
>> "But is Beto the writer any good? Sure, he was in high school, and his stuff is mostly record reviews and snark. But never mind the bollocks. O’Rourke genuinely understands genre and tone; he’s economical and makes good words work hard; he’s playful and takes chances; he can deftly conjure odd worlds, especially interior ones; he’s recessive"or maybe afraid to commit"as a narrator; he steers clear of the projection and judgment that muck up the work of many young essayists.
>> 
>> Reader, he had me at the opening paren. Yes, O’Rourke used ASCII, a retro affectation that brings the top-shelf nostalgia in O’Rourke’s poem “The Song of the Cow,” which features this mini-moo-sterpiece:
>> 
>> ((___))
>> [ x x ]
>> \   /
>> (` ')
>> (U)
>> 
>> "That use of clashing symbols for nostrils, suggesting that one is more flared that the other! And, of course, the x-ed out eyes that conjure the slaughterhouse! O’Rourke’s teen stylings suggest the hand of a bona fide artist. Or at least a little nerd fleetingly willing to rethink Texas iconography. Then, off he goes into a pastoral poem that tackles the topic of butts or bollocks. 'Wax my ass,' reads the verse, which turns liturgical in rhythm. 'Scrub my balls. / The Cow has risen. / Provide Milk.' Cow has died. Cow is risen. As we approach Easter, we might consider the paschal cow to be O’Rourke’s radical critique of the paschal lamb. Cow will come again. Alleluia. Devastating commentary on the resurrection.
>> 
>> "While it has fewer balls, another stanza caught my attention for its evocations of Nathanael West’s 1931 The Dream Life of Balso Snell, in which the hero searches for meaning strolling around inside the entrails of a Trojan Horse. O’Rourke writes:
>> 
>> Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more,
>> Live your life, everlusting joy.
>> Thrust your hooves up my analytic passage,
>> Enjoy my fruits
>> 
>> "Thrust your hooves up my analytic passage"come on, that’s not bad. It works well as an ultranerdy answer to Bruce Springsteen’s manly, earnest innuendo from the then-loathed 1970s: “Strap your hands ’cross my engines.” “Everlusting” is a nice neologism in a countryside poem that doesn’t shy from evoking eternity and bestiality at once. It’s hard to remember how important irony"not just snideness and polyester coveralls, but what Richard Rorty called “liberal irony”"was to Gen-X slackers. O’Rourke was never going to let himself be seen lolling around like a farm boy writing hymns to country life and milkmaids. But, like all young poets from William Wordsworth to Bob Dylan, he also wanted to try his hand at a traditional lyric. Irony, and the elastic space of the brand-new internet, let O’Rourke come to romance at a punk angle."
>> 
>> Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/30/what-betos-poetry-tells-us-about-his-politics-226338
>> 
> 
> 
> Bizarre....



Agreed, I barely remember this.

😏 


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