First off. Stop. Like stop doing money, or stop the telegraph, or stop feeling bad about how much you have, or stop trying to count what everyone else has, or stop stopping the wealth from spreading, or trickling down. I don’t know why Moschovakis wants me to stop when I read through the poem she has in last summer’s issue of FENCE. She tells me to, at different points. And I wouldn’t mind stopping, because she is the director, which means she’s a really, active, involved speaker in the poem. And I like doing what she tells me.
She builds her authority. Like that house in Arrested Development. You can see through the construction, but it’s OK that way. When she tells me what to do, when she memorializes the trivial. And especially when she uses her own experiences, there’s this veracity, and I like to believe it. If you’ve read any poetry from the last thirty years, you might recognize this as the Confessional mode, where the poet uses a moment of personal revelation to infer a larger, capital-T moment of Truth. Moschovakis really doesn’t understand wealth. She tries to add up all these different parts of her life: a full inventory of odd jobs, what she understands about Max Weber, what life was like at her house growing up, things she’s looked up on the internet. And all these things come to conflict with the conclusion it seems like she was just about to find. Moschovakis really doesn’t understand wealth, and those of us who read her poem should realize that we have no idea of what wealth is either.
But, God, if Moschovakis isn’t willing to try and figure this whole thing out. Or, it may be, this is the magic in this poem. She knows she’s not going to find out, but she fools us with each of her pop culture references: we want to believe she wants us to know the capital-T Truth about wealth. I like this poem so much, because the speaker isn’t really looking that far out of herself while she tries sorting through these things. The value of pop culture in a poem might be how it makes me feel like I have access to “poetic material” everywhere I look. How much are those guys getting paid when they leave flyers at my door? What kind of car do people who see me in the mall assume that I drive? Why did Joel Olstein go with his wife to get interviewed by Piers Morgan? Moschovakis isn’t the first poet to make pop culture poetic. It’s just she does an awesome job doing it.
recommended links:
Anna Moschovakis as a PSA New American Poet
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
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