August 3: Opening Ceremonies, Kyle Dargan, "Olympic Drive"

Well, in two days the Summer Olympics in Rio kick off with the Opening Ceremonies.

I'm not usually a fan of sports.  I go to high school football games in the fall simply to see my daughter play in the marching band.  I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.  However, I love watching the Olympics.  I think it has to do with the combination of competition and cultures.  Learning about a country's history and people.

Well, I came across a poem by Kyle Dargan that I thought was about the Olympics.  It's not.  It's about race and poverty and the end of the world.  Another quasi science fiction poem.  It's a great poem, but has little to do with the Olympics.

Saint Marty thinks there should be an Olympic event in poetry.  How about a sonnet slam?  Or a villanelle vault?  Haiku high jump?

Olympic Drive

by:  Kyle Dargan

Across from the gorgeous dog park,

men dream against poodle-pissed trees — 

their pillows made from breath captured

in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate

climate offers respite. Let us suppose

they have tales, here in this city

where filmed stories turn a mint.

All around, one wide screen — the dark hills

due north pixel-pocked with villa lights.

Below, streets hemmed with haggard

brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies

ever unfolding. Who is pitching

this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.”

Voiceover: After the Integration Apocalypse,

one man must find his way in a land

where the sole survivors who look or speak

like him are those rendered disturbed

and indigent. Assume the Motion Picture

Association eager to levy a “Rated R,”

then remember that those who judge

violence never shared your definition

of savagery. A culling is all your eyes

decipher — your herd thinned. No urban

wildlife anywhere to be found,

yet hunger for a hunt remains.

Tagline: A hero must choose — 

between starving or bartering one’s own

skin. Plot: Amidst the solar famine, bio-

electric studies revealed melanin’s subtle

charge — the brown population gone

mad from being sapped like CopperTops.

Imagine The Matrix without the extra-

terrestrial machines. Imagine that among us

there have lived men churning statistics,

devising a human harvest, a brutal method

to subsist off fellow men and leave their bones

for the gnawing of next century’s mutts.

August 1: Technology, Poet of the Week, Kyle Dargan, "The Robots are Coming"

I think technology is a wonderful thing.  I started this blog six years ago, and I've written close to three thousand posts of greater and lesser quality.  Technology allows me to find a new Poet of the Week every Monday.  It allows me to teach a class of 30 people about film without ever meeting one student face-to-face.  (One of my students this semester is taking my course from India.)  Those are the great benefits of technology.

However, I still don't understand hashtags and Twitter.  Wouldn't know how to Snapchat if my life depended upon it.  Technology, I think, has its limitations.  I will never give up the pleasure of holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, reading it, smelling that new book smell.  My kids are technology hounds.  My daughter was out hunting Pokemons within the first hour that Pokemon Go went live.  I have a healthy suspicion of technology.  Technology is a tool, not a way of life.

Kyle Dargan, the Poet of the Week, has a poem about this subject.  It's a little social commentary, a little history, a little science fiction.

Saint Marty has always thought robots were a little scary.

The Robots are Coming

by:  Kyle Dargan

with clear-cased woofers for heads,

no eyes. They see us as a bat sees

a mosquito—a fleshy echo,

a morsel of sound. You've heard

their intergalactic tour busses

purring at our stratosphere's curb.

They await counterintelligence

transmissions from our laptops

and our blue teeth, await word

of humanity's critical mass,

our ripening. How many times

have we dreamed it this way:

the Age of the Machines,

postindustrial terrors whose

tempered paws—five welded fingers

—wrench back our roofs,

siderophilic tongues seeking blood,

licking the crumbs of us from our beds.

O, great nation, it won't be pretty.

What land will we now barter

for our lives ? A treaty inked

in advance of the metal ones' footfall.

Give them Gary. Give them Detroit,

Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten

nurseries of girders and axels.

Tell the machines we honor their dead,

distant cousins. Tell them

we tendered those cities to repose

out of respect for welded steel's

bygone era. Tell them Ford

and Carnegie were giant men, that war

glazed their palms with gold.

Tell them we soft beings mourn

manufacture's death as our own.