Sunday Pages: "red, white, and blues"

A book of poems by Sean Murphy

Dear Reader,

Sean Murphy is a believer.

He believes in the power of poetry—to expose the crumbling foundations and leaky roofs in the structures of our American mythology, to offer sharper lenses through which to view the world, to stir debate and foment dissent, to dazzle with language, and, most importantly, to tell truth to power.

In the introduction to red, white, and blues, his new collection of poems, Murphy writes that “poetry can still tell the truth when other forms have failed us.” He’s right. Other forms—newspapers, television, social media—have indeed failed us; poetry remains undefeated.

I’ve known Sean for something like 15 years. We met through my now-defunct arts and culture online magazine, The Weeklings, but I can’t for the life of me recall how we met, who introduced us, or the circumstances by which he became one of the site’s contributing editors. All I know is, he’s a great writer, a great guy, and a true team player—someone who cares deeply about other people, about the community of artists and writers, about the state of the country and the world. So I was delighted—for him, of course, and also for us, as readers—that his new collection, which drops on Tuesday, is so good: creative, smart, powerful, and above all urgent. These are poems of the moment.

And it’s not just me who thinks so. No less an authority than Junot Diaz—who, unlike Donald Trump, won a prize that wasn’t made up on the spot by some criminal lickspittle—calls red, white, and blues “a trickster collection, perfect for our demented times; sly, honest, impossible to cage and yet absolutely liberating.”

Murphy covers a lot of historical ground in these 60 pages, from the “discovery” of America by the malignant narcissist Christopher Columbus to the grotesque accumulation of wealth by our contemporary Columbuses Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The title of each poem is a possessive proper name, followed by a noun; any one of them could have been a Twitter handle along the lines of “Lincoln’s Bible” or “Devin’s Cow.” By way of example, here’s the first page of the index:

Dig the double-entendre of Mr. Knievel’s entry—at once a paean to his testicular fortitude and a complete sentence uttered many times by members of the audience who watched him make some impossible canyon-clearing bike-jump.

This titular conceit is gimmicky, perhaps—or would be, in the hands of a lesser poet. But Murphy has so much to say, and mixes up the poetical styles so adroitly, that there’s never a moment where the poems don’t feel fresh and exciting. It’s also interesting to see who he chose to include, in this book about America—how many real people, how many fictional characters, how many apotheosized heroes. (Too many dudes, is my only gripe; Pam Grier is awfully lonely.)

If he didn’t have me at “Jake Gittes’s Nose” (an allusion to Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown)—and he did!—he certainly won me over with “Allen Iverson’s Crossover.” (To this Georgetown Hoya, Iverson will always be the only AI that matters.)

These poems are perishable, a critic might allege; in fifty years, who will recognize Willy Loman, or Roy Batty in Blade Runner, or the aforementioned daredevil Evel Knievel? To which I counter: so what? I had to Google the Peterloo Massacre of 1819—as well as Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Eldon, the Lord High Chancellor; and the DeSantis-like Home Secretary, Sidmouth, all of whom are prominently mentioned in “The Masque of Anarchy. That doesn’t make Percy Bysshe Shelley’s masterpiece any less enduring. You don’t need a thorough understanding of British history to be moved by this:

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’

Poetry, Murphy has determined, “is the best way to mash up history, media, political commentary, and a succinct formula for connecting dots in ways Op-Eds, fiction, and social media grandstanding can’t and won’t.” And to prove the point, he uses as a epigraph to his collection a line from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” a poem by William Carlos Williams. I wrote about the poem a few years back for “Sunday Pages,” and cite it also in my book of essays, The Age of Unreality:

Below is the end of the [WCW] poem. I read this as a celebration of the power of poetry, which can provide solace from the madness of the horrible events swirling around us:

The key line: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” That is, the lack of what is found in poems. Poetry deficit. Art starvation. Beauty dearth.

Now, more than ever, we must turn to art, to literature, to poetry to restore our souls. Even the artless need poetry in their lives, whether they realize it or not.

This is what Murphy provides here—an antidote to poetry deficit, satiety for art starvation, surfeit of beauty.

The poem about Columbus has the explorer still navigating the Atlantic, where, after months at sea, he begins to hallucinate mermaids dancing in the waves. “In 1493,” Murphy explains in a footnote, “during his voyage that led him to the ‘New World,’ Christopher Columbus described three ‘mermaids’—which were in all likelihood manatees—as ‘not half as beautiful as they are painted.’”

This false vision is a harbinger of what America will become:

Such absurdity, both fabrication and fancy, says much
about libidinous men who stared too long at nothing
but brutal blue horizons, unbroken in every direction.

What of the breasts, they lamented, seeing little
but scales and whiskers, more man than fish;
nothing at all like a woman—much less a dream to get lost in.

And during the last stretch of more lonely days at sea,
they became yet another miracle that wouldn’t materialize,
not unlike those new lands decreed by divine providence.

The Chinatown poem is enhanced by a familiarity with the plot of what is, to me—vexingly, as the vile Roman Polanski directed it—the best film of all time other than Casablanca. Part of the fun is being in on the joke. But the lines still sing even if you’ve never seen it, because in the context of U.S. history, the villain—John Huston’s Noah Cross, who certainly would have been in Epstein’s Files if Epstein was operating in the 30s—is archetypal:

The bad guys always get away with it, obviously—
as criminal enterprises are often incestuous affairs.

And the rare exceptions to the rule only ensure
those clever or corrupt or ruthless enough are
capable of…anything, including owning police.

If you can’t bring the desert to the city, bring the city
to the sea: complete God’s work—or at least Cortez’s.

Everyone knows a fish rots from the head—
but think of the future, and never forget you can’t
smell anything if you’ve lost your nose.

A horse will lead you to water, but we die of thirst
searching, not aware that we’ve already drowned.

Murphy takes turns of phrase, idiomatic expressions, old sayings, lines from films, and turns them on their head, exploding them, imbuing them with fresh meaning. This is from “Joel Osteen’s Soul”:

And these meek shall inherit the dearth, paradise lost
to finance extensions on churches filled past capacity,
presided over by profligate men with $500 haircuts.

Let us prey: God will help those who help themselves,
proselytizing a gospel of prosperity, sins redeemed for
untaxable alms recouping the apostasy of false prophets.

My favorite poem in the book is “St. James’s Place.” Because all of the titles have the same structure, this one forces us to think of St. James as an actual person—although the poem is about Atlantic City, which street-names are used in Monopoly, St. James’s Place being one of the better burnt-orange properties.

Too, Atlantic City was once the stomping grounds of Donald Trump, who had to pay tribute to the Philadelphia mob to build there. Atlantic City is where he went bust—where he bankrupted a casino, which in a system where the house always wins is statistically almost impossible. Murphy’s poem feels all the more relevant with the current pervasive corporatization of gambling—ads for the various sports books featuring glittering celebrities and still-active athletes (which seems like a scandal waiting to happen) running all afternoon, sucking in the kids with promises of wealth that never materialize. (The only good gamble, children, is what Trump tells you to buy before he makes some policy announcement.)

This city on the sea, reincarnated like a borrowed life: Babylon
redeemed by way of junk bonds, the world’s eighth wonder—
according to He-Who-Didn’t-Compensate-His-Contractors, busy
building anything but wealth, born off Broadway, blue-blooded
and blind to any colors on the wrong side of the strip: his palace,
courtesy of the Community Chest, all faux gold & laundered bills.

Here hotels were built and then abandoned, blithely named after
barons whose fortunes came and went—like trains moving money
and tourists from the boardwalk to more secure settlements
the salted waves won’t reach: their utilities of inherited wealth
conceiving wholly new empires that extended from the ocean
to outer space, fresh time capsules incorruptible by commerce.

Casinos thrive as micro-monopolies: the rigged arenas of dreams
where gladiators die nightly, leaving emptied wallets in sad piles,
like so many bandages on a battlefield, these personal lotteries lost
one slow suicide at a time; the city finally a reflection of the system
it was built to sell, where fortunes are amassed faster than paychecks,
dynasties erected like pyramids, and the stock market is scientific fact.

This impossible promise ruined, patrolled now by cops & cab drivers;
pushers and pimps role-playing tokens, the forsaken streets creeping
with orphaned dogs amidst smoked out bars and boarded up buildings:
dinosaurs unaware the comet was coming, like some divine justice—
finally—as if Christ returned to the money taker’s temple, flipping over
every blackjack table and consigning sweaty pit bosses to eternal fire.

Churches and funerals homes remain in business, starving with vacancies
for the converted or deceased as the least of our brothers, now ghosts,
cover the waterfront while mothers and sisters bear the burdens and babies,
keeping stillborn bloodlines from extinction, and silence herself gives last call
as the Eye in the Sky smiles down on James—patron saint of all who suffer—
reconciled to his place and begging forgiveness for those that trespass.

But the poem that will one day—and one day soon, Inshallah—be especially relevant is “Pol Pot’s Purgatory.” In addition to being a dead ringer for Elon Musk…

…the Cambodian strongman was, in terms of percentage of population killed, the most genocidal despot in recent history. His Khmer Rouge regime slaughtered some two million Cambodians—in a country that had a population of eight million when he came to power. That would be like Trump exterminating 85 million Americans.

And this unspeakably odious man, this bloodthirsty tyrant, did not meet his Maker like Mussolini, or Gaddafi, or Saddam Hussein, or any of the scores of brutal emperors of Rome whom the Praetorian Guard violently turned upon. No—Pol Pot died peacefully, in his sleep. Trump will almost certainly go out the same way; hell, if Polymarket offered odds, I’d bet the house on it.

But what might have seemed like a peaceful death for Pol Pot, Murphy assures us, was anything but:

And perhaps it’s only at night, alone and unprotected,
while in the grip of forces that control craven tyrants
and their puny designs, the balance is laid bare—
this is where an evil soul is imprisoned, powerless
to prevent or escape the cascading spiritual horrors
that exist only in the killing fields of the mind, forever.

When the bells at long last toll for our current strongman, is this how the chief of the Khmer Orange will wait out eternity? Will cascading horrors haunt his imprisoned evil soul until the end of time? Will karmic justice succeed where Merrick Garland’s DOJ failed?

Hey, a fellow can dream…

---

ICYMI

We did a “neat” episode of The Five 8 on Friday—no guest, just me and LB:

And sang “The Donald Trump’s Marines’ Hymn”:

And LB and I will be in Saranac Lake this very afternoon. Come say hello if you’re in the neighborhood: