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William Ross
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Getting the Sweet and Stupid
After Claes Oldenburg & Philip Levine
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Look around you for the real juice.
The lintels and laser beams, bigamists
and small talk, tin cans and iron curtains,
podunks and potatoes, bath water and crybaby
wahwah pedals, true hearts and false teeth,
football and hand guns, black eyes and blood
pudding, malware in your trojans, x-rays
and Ray-bans, blue gas leaks and yellow hydrants,
back taxes and chest hair, nipples in the rain, hair
gel and claw hammers, Clorox and Christians,
bagels and lockjaw. And that’s just the tip
of the steaming mess. Place the pencil’s tongue
on paper. Let it sing.
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​Notes:
1. F​rom Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 "I Am For...":
"I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."
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2. In 1996, Philip Levine gave a talk at the New York State Writers Institute, in which he encouraged poets to open up their poems:
"Why don’t you put garbage cans and waitresses and paratroopers and, you know, skunks and chipmunks and sparrows and Buicks... Why don’t you get America into your poetry?"
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William Ross is a Canadian writer and visual artist living in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Quarterly, Humana Obscura, The Hooghly Review, Underscore Magazine, Amethyst Review, Bindweed Magazine, Topical Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others.