34:1 Summer 1983/35:4 Fall 1987

TURNER CASSITY

Mainstreaming & Lazy Afternoon

Turner Cassity became a frequent contributor to Chicago Review during the 1980s and early 1990s.  His poems were featured in special sections on “Poetry and Politics” and “Poetry and Mass Culture,” and an essay on Martial appeared in the issue devoted to “Neglected Poets.”  In the Summer 1983 issue, Donald Davie published an appreciative essay on Cassity in which he suggests the poet’s motive is “to always astonish, outsmart, upstage any conceivable reader,” chiefly through his masterful, witty use of traditional verse forms, which Davie associates with the aesthetics of camp.  “Mainstreaming” appeared in this issue.  “Lazy Afternoon” appeared in the Fall 1987 issue; it was included in Cassity’s Between the Chains (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).  Cassity has offered these remarks on the two poems:

The events with which “Mainstreaming” deals are, appallingly, factual.  I was in Basic Training in South Carolina in the Fall of 1952, although I was posted to Puerto Rico before the horror story played itself out.  I had the end second and third hand.  As anyone who has been in the military know, Napoleon was only partially right: an army may march on its stomach, but it exists on gossip.  As it happens, I was staying in San Francisco (Russian Hill, not Nob Hill) in 1995 when the Commission on Base Closings finally phased out the Presidio.  I heard the last salute fired there.  I might mention that grip refers to a cable car operator, not a suitcase.

“Lazy Afternoon” is also factual.  In Atlanta’s Midtown, in the high 70s there were several bars of notable squalor.  More squalor than I have put into the poem: the yellow dog asleep on the pool table, as became apparent when he jumped off, was a three-legged yellow dog.  My art, great as it is, is simply not equal to that degree of grunge.

[DN, 1996]

previous | next