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03/20/2006: "Theoryland" by Bruce Price
In Cantos 1 and 2, our hero--an ambitious professor--traded with dark forces to gain the gift of Lit Theory. Now, in Canto 3, he enjoys his triumph.
Ill: VICTORY
Yet another tea; the topic
of course, is me
Faculty flutters 'round
fearful of my frown. The Dean, all astutter,
wants to chat. I can stand a minute of that.
Meet and sigh, sigh and meet,
tasting the taste of their defeat.
It's true, my articles stun and depress the best--
did I not prove East is West?
All wonder buzzily what might come next,
what daring new dance upon the text?
I have rolled the campus
into a ball. I rise above them all,
logically foxy,
a very paragon of paradoxy.
Students drop their frisbee to stare at me;
a co-ed teasingly squirms, wishing
intimacy with my terms.
And as I promenade
about the quad,
I detect the thought
behind the facade:
they think I am a god!
Now I hear the co-eds singing--
for me, of course.
CHORUS
Dante descends to a lower rung
and finds the critics there all well hung,
beating their breasts as they do time:
"Brother, can you paradigm?"
Ah, the joy of rearranging this world,
present and past,
so the first shall be last,
and the boy shall be girl,
of showing that everyone's
bonafide realities
are only signifieds
for disease.
In my students' eyes
I see their happy surprise
at my gifts
for detonating seismic semantic shifts.
Presto, I devise the incisions
to revise the revisions
and reconstruct the deconstructed.
"Don't you see," I ask,
"that is our task!"
They marvel to see
I am free epistemologically.
That's the meaning
of indeterminacy.
No proposition is so bizarre
I cannot turn it into law.
Everything's false! And anything's true!
Nothing means nothing
till I define the terms for you.
What glory to be free and on top!
So let's stop
this malarkey
against hierarchy.
CHORUS
The most strange of bodily fluids
intoxicate our new druids.
Through ruined classics they cavort,
and murder to dissect for sport.
So much brave new work to do--
turning old literary nags to glue!
Humanistic twiddle, historicist piddle...
Enough! I'll terminate this stuff.
The nerve of poets dreaming large,
thinking they should be in charge!
Here's a modest proposal
for their disposal:
stand Poetry before a theoretical ditch
and expropriate the bitch.
In the rooms the critics stand and stew.
Screw them--I am on a roll!
Stroll and nod, nod and stroll.
My career's hot
like the dry wind
that parades the quad
as I prominently promenade,
a very god.
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Canto 4--Crack-Up--will be published in April.
To read Cantos 1-3, please visit Theoryland.blogspot.com. (Bruce Price is a novelist, poet and digital artist. Reviews welcome.)
