February 16: Poet of the Week, W. Todd Kaneko, "It All Began With Strangler Lewis"

Well, I promised that I was going to make W. Todd Kaneko the featured Poet of the Week on Saint Marty.  So, tonight I'm going to start with one of the first poems in his book, The Dead Wrestler Elegies.

Kaneko started writing poems about dead wrestlers as a challenge with some of his friends.  The challenge was to write a poem a day for a month.  Kaneko wrote a poem about a dead wrestler.  Then he wrote another.  And another.  Eventually, he had enough dead wrestler poems for a book.

The Dead Wrestler Elegies is stunning.  It weaves together victory and heartbreak and love and death.  These elements meet in the ring.  Grapple.  Body slam.  Headlock.  The result is a brutal ballet of words that somehow cuts to the soul and sets it free.

Saint Marty is in love with this book.

It All Began With Strangler Lewis

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

He started it all, the Strangler
choking men out with that yoke
of wrist and elbow.  My father said
Ed Lewis was the greatest wrestler
of all time, that I was too young
to understand what that meant.
Don't trust a woman, he said,
until you know how it feels to lose
your breath.  His mouth drooped
open, words flitting into dark
before I cold identify those
shapes of their wings.

On television, Jake the Snake
posed with his enormous constrictor,
Doink the Clown sprayed Brooklyn
Brawler with seltzer.  It's a circus,
he said.  No one appreciates men
like the Strangler anymore.
Outside, I imagined the world waiting
for my father to wrap it in his arms,
break it into three parts--one for me,
one for him, and a knife curved
like my mother.

The Strangler