Dumbed Down

It’s almost the end of January, I promised to post some newer poems, and you haven’t seen one yet. So to that end, this week’s poem is Dumbed Down, appearing here for the first time.

Dumbed Down is one of those poems that skips through history – much real but some imagined – like a stone skips over water. Except in this case you get some commentary along with the hop, skip and jump.

It’s also a sort of ars poetica, or commentary on the art of poetry. More directly, the commentary is on painting, and appropriation and misrepresentation of subject matter. But at the beginning, there’s the commentary on written material, or the material that becomes written material, becomes poetry, or art, or history.

The Ars Poetica tradition starts with Horace (65-8 BC) and continues through to the current day–because there is always room for commentary about or advice on the making of art in any form. Humans are nothing if not opinionated and what can trigger more opinions that a piece of (purported) art?

Dumbed Down

can’t remember the history they were told to study
or tested on or what was dumbed down
into filmstrips then videos then CGI then graphic novels

it was just a hurdle to jump
and not a high one either
being sanitized and all

i remember mom arguing with gramps
about whether i could play with those kids
and how empty was the big bus with only a few
kids forced to come the first year

i remember the fights which now we call riots
(maybe they really were riots, then)
and wondering if the city really burned

or if it was only summer-hot
remember my elementary school
named after the dead astronaut
but don’t recall the dying

if it all happened in one lifetime
tell me why we forget it all

tell me why the romantic plantation
still sounds so romantic

slaves grew coffee same as cotton

serfs in Europe were supposedly free
and in Dutch Java too
why pretend it was some bucolic life

who would dig up the bones of the past
and expect them to set off dancing
celebrants of death and dire straits

even little boy blue probably wasn’t
so prettily resting there by the haystack
horn ready to blow on command

probably his arms ached from holding a scythe
and he wondered whether he could sneak a nap

and some fool of a romantic
so-called artist stood at a distance
looked at the leading lines of the haystack
the smudge of a working child
braced against the base
and thought how timeless

and went away and painted it
and never asked nor paid the boy

Did it live up to the hype?

Maybe the poem lived up to its intro, maybe not. What I see isn’t always what someone else takes away from the work–let me know what you think.

I really did attend an elementary school named for a dead astronaut — the Virgil I. Grissom School No. 7 in Rochester, NY. All that bit is true. Obviously, I had to make up the part about the painter.  🙂

If you enjoyed Dumbed Down, you can read more of my work on this site or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves which is available in both ebook and print.

Have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday. As always, comments welcome.

January Poem of the Week Roundup

If you missed any of the earlier poems from January, here are the links to find them:

Wormhole – January 1, 2018

Sisyphus, Birding – January 8, 2018

Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves – January 15, 2018

Visiting Howe Caverns – January 22, 2018

Illustration credit: Margaret Tarrant, used under creative commons license, non-commercial 2.0.