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02/08/2006: "THEORYLAND" by Bruce Price
an epic poem about academia by Bruce Deitrick Price
(Author's comment: "So-called Theory has been big in our English Departments for 25 years. The more I understood it, the more annoyed I was. These feelings swirled around with my memories of T. S. Eliot's best poems. And over two very intense weeks, THEORYLAND was born....It's one of the oldest stories there is: a young man wants desperately to be a big shot. I find this poem both funny and sad. I hope you'll enjoy both aspects.")
THEORYLAND
"The center is not the center." J. Derrida
CANTO I: AMBITION
Clarity is the cruelest mode,
patients aetherized on the table must be code.
How then do I hide my hermeneutic rear
as I fashion a career?
How do I swell a progress, start a fad or two?
Advise the Dean, like me an eager goose?
Ambitious too, so he hates to be of use....
In the rooms the critics come and go
sneering at the status quo.
On the dry grass, in a dry wind,
students throw a frisbee, joking.
The janitor laughs, smoking.
I suspect they see,
speaking ontologically,
to the other side of me.
So how do I weasel words to shapes all new
and make them mean what I say they do?
In short, how can I be profuse
but adequately abstruse?
How can I roll this campus into a ball
and have it all?
How can I be, as I promenade
about the quad,
a god!?
I hear the mermaids singing
but I do not think they sing for me:
If you want to get to Theory
let us tell you what to do.
You got to grease your thoughts
in Stan's Fish Stew,
then hold tight to the Devil's hand
and slide into Theoryland...
The dry wind steals their song...
Maybe I'm doing this all wrong.
Doubts spring like peonies,
now I'm retching on my knees.
How does one take a teeny, tiny pensee
and call it the Truth and the Way?
Do I dare? Do I dare?
Can I sculpt upon the air?
My moods are startling and spastic.
I can hardly choose--paper or plastic?
Nooo! A bald spot in the middle of my exegesis--
could anyone sell this cheese as thesis?
CHORUS
It's a dark noon in Gaza as theories clash;
books are not burned but analyzed to ash.
Look homeward, angels, and weep for truth,
Theory's good enough for youth.
In the rooms the critics come and sneer:
my intertext is all veneer.
I may have sinned, my closure fated,
Who knew this jargon was two months dated?
I can hear the co-eds cringing, each to each,
I'm scuttling claws, sunk out of reach.
I know now, as I promenade
up and down the quad,
I'II never be a god...
I want so much to be
a god. A bod!
I want to hear the co-eds singing,
singing for me...
CANTO II: DESPERATION
In the rooms the critics come and grump,
exfoliating Donald Trump.
Another tea for faculty and guests.
We stare and appraise: pests!
"She placed a piece." "What's it say?"
Shrugs and grimaces, grimaces and shrugs.
Still, we hate her. Dry wine. Dry wit.
We're so damn amused by it.
Lost at love, adrift at tea.
Preeminently, me.
Nod and murmur, murmur and nod....
I fully intended to be a god
or at least a gorilla.
Odd, I do not detect one scintilla
of the respect due a gorilla,
never mind a god.
Can they actually see,
dialectically speaking,
the antithesis side of me?
Greet and smile, smile and greet,
tasting the taste of my defeat. Oh!
If only! From teeny, tiny sophistries,
I could grow gigantic mysteries...
If I could prove that out is in
and thick is thin, that the hip bone
connects to the lip bone...
I can not, I can not,
I am academic snot....
Let me go then,
before despair overflows
into sneering bon mots,
let me go somewhere
and think,
I mean drink.
CHORUS
If Frankenstein hopes to stalk the academic walk,
first he has to talk the monster talk.
Grammatology meets eschatology--
publish or perish, mystify or die.
Next night as I ponder weak and tearful,
more and more and more hic beerful,
I feel the fact of my vanishing act,
and fall sobbing at my Mac:
"Oh, pretty please, poststructuralist Muse--
extract your dues!
I'll trade my soul like Faust and gang
if I could master Theory's slang
and kick my colleagues screaming down the slope
and then be crowned King of Trope."
Suddenly
around me
cheerleaders pangendered but ballsy
strut the postmodernist palsy:
"WITH PIPE AND TWEED AND TENURED GLEE
RIDICULE THE BOURGEOISIE!!
TERM THEM MOOT! TERM THEM BRUTE!
APPROPRIATE ALL THEIR LOOT!
YOU'RE SO, SO, SO, SO MUCH SMARTER....
HEY! CALL YOURSELF A GOD...LIKE YOU OUGHTA!"
I won't forget their festive, cackling shrieks
as they swirl closer to undrape me,
this gaggle of geeks, and rape me.
When I commence to squeal,
they snap: "A deal's a deal!"
The room explodes in the sensuous blurs
of ponzi schemes and nonsequiturs.
I seem to ascend the Power of Babel,
everyone else is merest rabble,
I'm aloof, above all human needs...
Theory Rules the lower breeds.
I know at last my life's mission,
dialectical fission:
bomb people with what is not,
explode the life they think they've got.
I know too I have the knack.
Memo to colleagues: I'M BACK.
-----------------------------------------
Canto III--VICTORY--will be published by March.
Bruce Price is also a digital artist.
