Please raise your hand if you also go into glycemic shock when exposed to It's a Wonderful Life. Yikes! Like two layers of grocery store lard icing. I'd always heard that its status as a classic was due to its ubiquity; it rolled into the public domain in the '80s, and TV stations ran it a lot. And because it was always on TV, people assumed it was a great movie. "Hey! They're playing It's a Wonderful Life again. It must be a classic!" (The film's Wikipedia entry bears this story out, kinda.)
As far as seasonal redemption tales go, I'll take Dickens, or even better, some nice, ancient text written before the Victorians ruined Christmas. I guess my reservations with this flick are very similar to others who dislike it (well, except for the FBI, who thought it was a piece of Communist propaganda). I like the way it champions the little guy, but there's also this frowning attitude towards free will, or towards chasing your star; the implication being: if you are good person, you'd better go fall on a sword. There are echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne's creepy Puritans there; and you know what Goody and Goodman so-and-so were really like when no one was looking. Not hanging out with second-rate angels...more like having a spot of tea with Old Scratch! (Or maybe getting a DUI with Thomas Kinkade.)
But this year, Aaron Belz—who founded the Observable Poetry Series at Schlafly Bottleworks—sent out a poem that made me feel better about It's a Wonderful Life:
it’s a wonderful life, alternate ending
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
In which a middle-aged Harry Bailey,
no longer a war hero and still depressed
about his older brother’s attempted suicide,
himself begins to consider jumping off a bridge
but is interrupted by an absent-minded angel
who compels him to walk through Bedford Falls
not as it would be if he’d never been born
but as it would be if he’d been born Mr. Potter’s son:
He never would have gone to war—never
would have won the Medal of Honor. Every man
on that transport would have died because he
wasn’t there to save them, but it wouldn’t
have mattered because he would have been
Harry Potter! Kid wizard, loved by all!!
Aaron is in California now, so maybe all that sunshine gave him the fortitude to invent a mental escape hatch from what I'd call the most depressing movie ever made (because if there was ever a Muggle's Muggle, it was George Bailey). In any case, he'll be back in January to read from his book Lovely, Raspberry (but we'll save that story for a later post, coming your way in a few short weeks). When Aaron left, he handed Observable over to the St. Louis Poetry Center, and they've got a fantastic reading scheduled just this side of the new year, on January 3. It's a trio of local poets, Kristina Marie Darling, Steve Schroeder, and Eileen G'Sell; these readings are always free, always start at 8 p.m. and always take place at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest in Maplewood.
Here's full bios:
Kristina Marie Darling leads an insurgency of young St. Louis writers concerned with the tropes of non sequitur, metonymy, and hyperbole; the prose format in the small press poetry volume, and, from her point of view, the too well-joined regime of psychopharmacology. A proud suburbanite from those parts of west St. Louis County that matriculate to Parkway West High School and beyond, Washington University (MA English Literature and American Culture Studies), and beyond the beyond, University of Missouri-St. Louis (where she's studying philosophy), Darling repudiates literary culture's come-lately gatekeepers-the publishing houses-by joining the ranks of the self-published, the digitally mediated sub-culture of the web distributed authors who bring variety and fearlessness into the literary culture at large. As she has said: "With the popularization of e-books, self-publishing, chapbooks, and D.I.Y. publication, I see the privileged role of editor being increasingly democratized, thus allowing a greater range of voices to be represented in any given person's library. Darling is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010) and Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2010). She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Colgate Writers Conference. Her editorial projects include an anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (VOX Press, 2011), and a volume of critical essays forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press. To read samples of her work, click here.
As you might guess from Anti-, the title of the online journal that he edits, Steven Schroeder is the poet of the counterpunch. Irreverent, insightful, funny, keenly aware of our culture's contradictions. To do this well, of course, one has first to be a good reader, both of the literary tradition and of culture. Schroeder is. The proof is in the poems. "In Torched Verse Ends," writes Richard Newman, the editor of River Styx, "Steven Schroeder pulls poetry out of its too-small boxes and scatters it all over the room. One poem imitates form, the next mocks mental health surveys, and the herky-jerky music mixes high diction and slang, pop culture and wordplay, solemn hymns to nature and geeky robotic laws." But for all their range and punch, these poems are not about battering or bewildering the reader. They are playful; they are smart; they offer pleasure; and they accord respect. They invite us to pay attention to our cultural rituals and routines that too often go unexamined. The best seek to keep us from the fate of the video-gamers of the poem "Deathmatch Mode" where "Everyone murders and rises and dies, / and no one says or even knows / what life is like after they lose." Schroeder's first book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared in 2009 from BlazeVOX [books]. His poems are available or forthcoming from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Indiana Review, and Verse Daily. Besides editing the online poetry journal Anti-, he serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. To read some of his work, click here.
Eileen G'Sell is an adventurer. Last summer, as World Cup fever gripped the globe, she traveled solo across South America, celebrating soccer matches with locals in cities across the continent. She surfed couch to couch, working her way slowly from one adventure to the next. G'Sell's poems exhibit a similar sense of adventure. They are surprising and vigorous, full of unexpected turns and language rich enough to make a meal of. They are witty and nimble and, even when they spin the reader dizzy, they are self-assured in every move. "If I had the money, I'd travel like that every summer," G'Sell said of her South America trip. Instead, she travels like that in every poem.
Born in St. Louis, G'Sell has lived in Scotland, Japan, Germany, New York, and California. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as the Boston Review, Harp & Altar, Super Arrow, Ninth Letter,Conduit, Interim, and Zone 3. She received an MA from the University of Rochester in 2003 and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, where she currently teaches English and serves as assistant editor of publications at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. In 2010 she launched a bi-monthly reading and creative writing program at the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis. You can read some of G'Sell's work in Inknode, the Boston Review, and Verse Daily.
Since we're talking about life in the new year, please note that Jake Adam York and Alison Joseph are reading at River Styx at Duff's on January 17, and Sonia Sanchez will be at the County Library on January 28. Until then, I leave you with Jimmy Stewart, reading a poem about his dog Beau on the Johnny Carson Show.
