Charles Rammelkamp

Doped with Religion, Sex and TV

“Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat.
“Pampered British rock star’s more like it.
He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,”
she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married.
She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.”

Darleen and I worked on the assembly line
at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs
into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes,
the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy
to take them away to the loading dock.

“I used to like some of them early songs.
‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’
but you can have this stuff. Working class hero!
Who does he think he’s kidding?”

I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon,
point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool,
the broken family, the absent sailor father;
mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism,
pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed

from generations of farmers on the prairie.

I was a college student, working part time
while carrying a full course load.
She was a farmer’s wife, supplementing
the household finances; in the same boat, really;
only difference was I read books and she didn’t.

What do they say?
Never argue about religion, politics, or music.
“We got many more Plastic Ono Bands left to package?”

I asked, ignoring her diatribe.
I’d like to take a cigarette break.”

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also recently been published by BlazeVOX Books and a collection of flash fiction, Presto, has just been published by Bamboo Dart Press. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? will be published later this year by Kelsay Books.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Mike James

The River’s Architecture for Louis McKee, d. 11/21/11 The river has a shape you follow with your whole body: shoulder, footstep, and ear- those who know how to listen hear how river wind is like breath, alive in lung and line. Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has published over 20 collections and has served as visiting writer at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. His recent new and selected poems, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last collection, Back Alley Saints at the Tiki Bar, was published in April by Redhawk. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN.

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t

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