Portable Altamont is amusing.
There’s nothing wrong with a funny poem, is there? Not everything needs to be gloomy like: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” blah blah blah . . . Why not a poem about the sexy tomboy from The Facts of Life?
Davis writes: “Nancy McKeon, more beautiful than an airplane, is / sitting on the monkey bars, holding the cup of life.” Why not poems about Tony Danza’s genius, Axl Rose’s hairplugs, or an anarchist Reese Witherspoon whose smile is a “knife in a capitalist’s back”? I love the image of one-time Beach Boy Glen Cambell sitting at the bar, like Charles Bukowski, telling strangers: “Y’all got your / chakras fucked up somethin’ fierce.”
It’s the clever absurdity of these poems that give rise to the feeling that Davis is saying something (do I dare use the word?) profound with this work. Something about modern culture and the cult of celebrity.
Maybe you’ll read these poems and think I must be on crack for thinking they have substance (and that Davis must be on crack for writing them in the first place.) Maybe we are on crack, and that’s none of your business. You might think the poems are just thumbing their nose at the establishment, like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. You know that piece? He took a urinal and signed it R. Mutt and pissed off the art world back in 1917. Whatever. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Duchamp’s “Fountain” and Davis’s Portable Altamont are cream pies tossed in the face of the establishment. I like these poems a great deal, regardless of their intent or meaning, and I like cream pies too. A slice of Boston cream and a cup of coffee? That’s heaven. (Vincent Ponka)
by Brian Joseph Davis, $14.95, 93 pgs, Coach House Books, 401 Huron St. on bpNichol Lane, Toronto, ON, M5S 2G5, chbooks.com