Archetypal pin-up art by Alberto Vargas.
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Seems like everyone savors
these dippers from Time’s stream,
pulling to view the hologram
of a glass of purer water:
The smiling bobbysoxer standing
next to a VistaVision Plymouth
rises like Isis from the past
dreaming of Frank Sinatra at the Sands
and their love-children
watching Roy Rogers on
the Sylvania Halolight
in a posh fur living room.
Old in retro’s lenses seems
such much better than the new,
stabler and more durable too,
the way my own youth seems
to my bland middle age;
foolish and stupid as it was
it still had a permanence
I can’t find today,
seeing me to here
through a skein of years
while I can’t know if I’ll
survive this day
or write another poem
with half the jazz I once
unzipped so effortlessly
in those old noir-neon nights.
Memory serves me well
severed from the sewage
of the real, its pontoons
gliding sleek and fast over
my errant flotsam,
an unlived life’s
Sargassan dreck.
Oh for the luminous veneer
of old days and ways again,
”Kiss Me Deadly” and torpedo bras,
Carl Perkins on late-night a.m. radio.
chinos and deuce roadsters,
garage pin-ups who showed
it all without quite having to.
Oh for that pubescent daze
and starry appetite for World
having tasted almost none of it
but vowing to devour it all,
from bow-toed pumps
to Betty Page red bangs.
Preciptal gaze and swoon
leaning forward from the high dive
arms spread wide
and falling in a slo-mo
swoon that grazes
every unreal world
before splashing
into a crystal uterus
of bluest water,
home at last
in a hipper past
bleached of all
present stain
and future zero,
a pure and perfect stillness
as a dozen purring sirens
rollerskate round me
with saucy eyes and wide smiles,
smiling like an ad for Lucky Strikes,
serving all their milk to me
in perfect retro curves.
Feb. 2012
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Submitted for D’Verse Poets’ Writing Visual Challenge.
There’s something about this litany of great retro imagery that felt quite serious and weighty . . . until I got to that Lucky Strike ad, and it just made me laugh. Were things really so fine? Or did censorship and propaganda make us believe they were. Those airbrushed babes really are appealing, even knowing they aren’t real. But isn’t that what keeps us going, believing there is something better, more fine, more solid . . . and sometimes the desire for it, even if it turns out to be veneer, just feels good!
Thanks Ruth — Culturally, we seem to have this fixed stare 40 to 50 years back, making that era much hipper than it surely was — the Madison Avenue and Hollywood images rather than those of the McCarthy Era and Korea …. Maybe folks of that era bought the advertising more wholesale, with wounds so great from the Second World War, wanting to forget, embrace another dream … I don’t make the distinction as I probably should, but there is a difference between vintage — actual artefacts of an era — and retro, which is a stylization of the period. In all, though, I think it’s regressive and infantile, a booze that helps erase the bleary knowns of the present and growing anxieties about the future. My work is now taking me a lot into the nostalgia market, and I’m immersed in these images — they appeal, though the way most masturbation fantasies do. No wonder Marilyn and Jayne Mansfiled and Betty Page are such ikons of the era. -B
The expression on his face makes me wonder what is in those cigarettes.
Fun reading.
Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!
serving all their milk to me in retro curves….lol…nice brendan
“fasten your seatbelt boys, it’s gonna be a bumpy night” seems to run through my images as I read this hipster homage. Most excellent ~
Thanks Angela, good to see you here again. – B
Wish I’d read this yesterday. I went on a long rant on facebook about the ills of the 50s in response to one of those “golden days when we were worry free” assertions there. Instead of laying out my angst about people my age glorifying those fifties, I would have linked this poem which says it all so much better than I did. The horrors for me were not only McCarthyism, the fact I was living on top of the Hbomb manufacturing place and still being forced to get under a little school desk that would have blown to the moon if we’d had a nuclear event; the fact that I never talked to a black person until I was twenty because Jim Crow was in full throttle, that people next door were allowed to do anything and we were told not to interfere unless it came to murder, children went missing as much or more, but families were told they’d run away and no one looked for them, and mentally ill people could look to having their memories and lives erased by electric shock. No I have spent my life moving far away from those times. I”m still running as fast as my gnarly old feet will take me to the future.
I so love your work. I don’t know why it always touches something raw in my center, something I might be afraid to explore myself, that is so buried I haven’t uncovered it entirely although heaven knows I feel like I’m continuing to pull back those onion layers. This affected me very much:
“home at last
in a hipper past
bleached of all
present stain
and future zero,”
Thank you for writing what I don’t know and can’t.
Thanks Gay — You make me think that the appeal of retro zeroes on an age far enough back for those who relish it not having had the chance to actually live through it, experiencing such horrors as you mention … And then there are those fundamentalists who think the 50s is some kind of medieval Eden, scot-free of sexuality and vice and other cultural distractions. Guess they forget wetting their panties to Frank Sinatra and Elvis, or losing Biblical authority to TV, or atching all the legit porn in Hollywood’s sassy starlets. It wasn’t paradise in either sense. I wonder how hipsters of the 2070s will retro-fashion the ’10s. … – B (p.s. I remember “duck and cover” exercises in grade school)
smiles…love the lucky strike…serving milk line…and who wouldn’t have dreamt of Frank Sinatra…nice…
I’m with Gay–I was a child of the Fifties, and I’m still running also. To me it means atom bomb, repression, McCarthy, repression, Man in the Grey Flannel Suit conformity, repression, kitsch, and repression, moral, ethical and physical, sometimes, brutally so. The idea of a tattoo on anyone but a Marine or a convict, a body piercing anywhere but a girl’s ear, a strand of hair on a man that fell below his color–anathema! A mixed race couple–blasphemy! Gay–don’t even go there! And I grew up in a liberal urban environment. It does clean up nicely in the Madison Avenue moneyworks, tho, and look much cuter than it really was. Same with the 70′s–that’s also become a nostalgia fest, and it’s not even fifty years behind us. At least it isn’t going back to the joys of the19th century, like some in our politics. Ah well. We always want/idealize what we don’t have, and that is kind of what your poem is saying, I think. I like the ninth stanza especially here, because it all really is a dive into a different element, a fantasia.
Thanks H — alkies so often go back to the hootch because all they can remember of it is the “golden moment”, that halcyon duration between the second and third drink where everything is a new freedom and happiness and release. Of course, what follows that for them is the nightmare, but memory seems to enclose its horrors in that sort of gold. Wasn’t it Hesiod who said there were five ages of descending greatness, gold to silver to bronze to tin to the present day? Back when is golden, far enough back to forget the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit so that he becomes a hirsuite ad man in Mad Men, with all the privilege and clout he deserved only because he was a white male. Cultural fashion does seem to be a klutzy way of addressing the soul’s need (Emerson, “every age requires a new confession”), and the recycling and recombinations of old artefacts for present purposes seems to be a form of psychic digestion, the half-life of the recent past remembered for a time before it becomes truly dead. Who lingers in memories of the 20′s or 30′s anymore? They’re gone. It’s weird to think that people of the 1950s looked back on those decades the way we of this day look back on the 80s and 90s.
This stanza really stuck to me, not that I have ever written anything with much jazz
while I can’t know if I’ll
survive this day
or write another poem
with half the jazz I once
unzipped so effortlessly
in those old noir-neon nights.
This brought back some Memories, though I was just a gleam in dear old pop’s eye I guess when this stuff was going down. You really got me with the tenderness of your nostalgia, not schmaltzy or bubbly like some I dread. The austerity of your line and the precision of your description make it a joy for me to read and envelop myself in. I can share your memories without feeling guilty or resentful, since this is who we are, and acknowledging and celebrating the things and scenes that filled our days with joy is one way to gain self-awareness.
I really liked the arc of these lines:
Memory serves me well
severed from the sewage
of the real, its pontoons
gliding sleek and fast over
my errant flotsam,
an unlived life’s
Sargassan dreck.