Mr. Monroe Doctrine, Mr. Monroe Doctrine!
While I was in Purdue I picked up G. C. Waldrep’s new book, Archicembalo, and oh man is it great. For me at least Waldrep always gives the impression of the poet who operates on a completely different plane than the ordinary people around him; he experiences the world in a deeper and much more humorous way than we plain folks do. And of course, his vocabulary is far far better than ours.
Usually when I run into words I don’t know while reading, I look them up on the spot. But having read Waldrep’s books before, I knew that it would save time to just start a list of all the unfamiliar words, look them up at the end, and then return to the poems. The new vocab came out to 66 words — in a 64 page book! Some of my favorite new acquaintances include perlustration; corm; scumble; shirr; armigerous; imbrication.
This is one of my favorite poems from the book:
WHAT IS A HORNPIPE
(But when she called to me it was always Mr. Monroe Doctrine, Mr.
Monroe Doctrine. I wanted the sieze the moment very badly but the best
I could do was Brazil. That, or plastic surgery. Or else my ragtime in cold
cash. She crossed her arms: Wrong century! Ka-ching. I was devastated.
She set a bonfire for my ruffles & jabots. All the small countries attended,
even a few that weren’t really countries yet but had set up embassies
in hope. It was hard to tell their flags from the flames, at least until I
realized that some of their flags were flames. That’s right, I thought, but
said nothing aloud. By then she was busy with her welder’s hood and her
gemstones. I sauntered over to the concession booth and ordered an
Ashoka Pillar with a side of fries. Looking back, that’s what I regret most
about those years: the philatelophagy. I was sending messages to all my
most elementary particles. Sometimes they would tap back, as if welded
into a steel hull. Doomed semaphore! Can a part haunt the whole? I was
absurdly coifed. All my friends were working for Parker Brothers. In
the end I sold my collection of antique thuribles, no longer having any
shelves to store them. She’d say Jump. I’d say How sly.)