[Newspoetry] Newsplay 1

[william at spinelessbooks.com]

Portrait of a Chicago Newspoet

An Election Day Newsplay

William Gillespie


ACT 1:
3 October 2004

[seen: newspoet on stage with typewriter ashtray, typing while reading the
following newspoem into a telephone receiver cocked beneath ear]

Newspoem 4 January 1999 Portrait of a Chicago Newspoet


Newspoet Yeah hello you still there? Whattaya think run it tomorrow? Same
to you pal. Yeah. Hack. Yeah. Bastid. See you this afternoon. [he hangs up
the phone it rings he answers] Whattayafizzle... [begins angry but loses
interest immediately]

Voice On Phone Tell me about how it all started for you.

Newspoet It started innocently enough, a poem about the snow.


Newspoem 12-5-1995

It was a cold night. Why do I do it?



VOP Why do you do it?

Newspoet I would put them in newspaper machines. Y' know, pretend to buy a
newspaper and instead stick poems into the Trib. But I think they'll be
putting me in their papers themselves before this whole song and dance is
done.

VOP What?

Newspoet What do you want, I'm supposed to sit there and eat what they
print? The passive voice has the final word, and leads me over a field of
type? A polished copywriter with a silver slipper manicuring captions,
widows and orphans? I'm going to write out of this quagmire. Someone has
to. I've had it with trite partisanism. The first site of political
struggle in America today is the language. English? No: American. It's our
native tongue, work it. Hell yeah, I speak American, I write in it, I even
think. We need to rescue it from the marketing guys, limber it up, make it
articulate. It's either the smoke that suffocates us or the oxygen that
leaves them winded. They've got a plan to roll back language. And I'm
lying in that bulldozer's path.

VOP Are you desperate?

Newspoet No. I'm not lonely anymore. I'm not alienated, disaffected, none
of that. Sure I got some problems but. I'm on the front lines of
democratic reform in this country.

VOP What else?

Newspoet Marginalized? Hell yes. I live in the margins. I'm a newspoet.

I'm currently unemployed, but never mind that. No. When they fired me from
that proofreading job I told them that they were all that stood between
the mountaintop and the avalanche that buries everything for thousands of
years beneath a layer of frozen white, paper with no writing, a blank
history. In the end I may not amount to more than a breeze. A current of
air. If I make the right people shiver, just for a second, that'll be
enough.

VOP How did you get started?

Newspoet The story always starts here, today. October 1st, 2004. The story
always starts now. The story starts, the story starts, the story starts.
The public has a short memory you see, the news has trained them that war,
comics, and weather are all the same, so why end a story? Now, nowadays,
the way so many stories seem to start is in place of the ending of a
previous story.

These stories are really good but they don't know how to write an ending.
World War II never properly ended, it just became the cold war, for
example... The cold war? Remember how the world was sick for nearly half a
century? And then suddenly it was healed. But the symptoms continued,
breaking out in Iraq? Well... The curtain story rises revealing the action
behind, itself a curtain that rises. You start to pay attention, you get
involved, and the lack of closure comes as a blow. Their writers are
clearly promising something they don't intend to deliver, again and again.

Every morning mom would force a comb through my hair.
And feed me a glass of orange juice
Every Sunday I was required to eat an egg
And brussels sprouts were mandatory
At school I learned multiplication tables
To write there they're their it's its hear here
To write a page on Rhode Island, another on Thailand
And to hide beneath my desk from bombs
I fell for the cold war, i thought that shit was for real
I totally fell for the red square red scare, nuclear missiles were no
Joke! I fell for the Cold War, and so too did the Soviet Union

When the Berlin Wall fell I would have danced in the street
if I could dance. Now war was over, we could get on with the business
of peace solving world hunger, making better music. There's a new war.
Who knew. You can keep your Marx on the coffee table, but hide your Koran.
I fell for the Cold War, I thought wow if they're so huge
once we buy them onto our side we'll have no trouble at all.

All the actual wars—Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Vietnam—were presented as
skirmishes at the base of the gigantic unfought war, the central war, its
uneasy peace against which these small wars were forgivable. Was the Cold
War, then, a war? It was a metawar underlying many literal wars. Then came
the war on drugs, which was not a war, just a futile ongoing
militarization of rhetoric culminating in a militarization of public
health policy—prisons instead of clinics. And now we have the war on
terrorism—again, not a real war—real wars are fought only against nations,
not nouns—a metaphor war as a cover for various literal wars against
nations, not terrorism, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, since WWII,
“war” has come to mean many things, among them war, substitution of
enforcement and prisons for health policy, ideological difference, and
defending one’s self against individual criminals or small organizations.

This year started last December with the capture of the evil dictator.
Remember how the mass of our quivering, shimmering military might was
poised to invade a third world nation crippled by years of devastating
economic sanctions? Remember how that war was built up to, fought,
declared over, then it ended, and now it continues? Wait, okay here it is.


[takes file folder from file cabinet]

"Friday May 02, 2003. FOX NEWS. Bush says major combat in Iraq over.
WASHINGTON - hours after making an historic landing aboard a moving
aircraft carrier, President Bush told sailors manning the USS Abraham
Lincoln Thursday that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."


At that point, 150 American troops had died. By now, a year and a half
later, we have passed 1000. The war gets further from its end each day.
When the president made his historic landing, a certain idea of the war
had ended. The sales pitch for the war was brought to a close. The
administration completed the purchase of the war by the American people.
Although the administration made it seem like the war was over and done
with, they knew in the back of their mind that the war would start to
smoke and sputter as soon as the customer tried to drive it off the
showroom floor, but the papers were signed. Their saying the war was over
was their way of saying that we are stuck with it. The beginning of the
war is safely over, the endless future of war is now beginning.

The war we thought would be short and clean is over.

Then, half a year later another idea of the war ended, an idea that had
been forgotten. I am referring here to the capture of the evil dictator.
Remember the man who threatened the world with weapons of mass
destruction, such as aluminum tubes? Many months after we had expected to
have him, as well as the still uncaptured terrorist, villain of the
previous war, delivered to us? He was pulled out of a hole in the ground.
Next to a hut. An old man with a beard. Living in a hole in the ground who
surrendered peacefully, bedraggled and filthy.

How did I respond? I responded the way any American citizen has a right
to--by intervening directly in the language used to conceal the digestion
of its own atrocities--I wrote a newspoem. I inverted the noise-to-signal
ratio on this one. That's newspoetry. [hangs up]


Newspoem 16 December 2003 In the Streets, a Shadow Lifts


So the story of this year began last year when the evil dictator was
captured. This would have been the ending of one of the ideas for the war,
but that idea had already forgotten itself. The capture of the dictator,
the people of Iraq liberated from their oppressor, ding dong the witch is
dead, an end to combat, and finally, a historic landing on Abraham
Lincoln's aircraft carrier, where three speechwriters, with the able
abetment of the speechgiver, failed to pull off what Abraham Lincoln
pulled off on the back of a train in a graveyard--a train, incidentally,
that Lincoln did not claim to have flown. Remember: American Presidents
used to write.

So the story of the war didn't have an ending. Instead it has been
absorbed into the next story--the election. America needs better writers
in or the language could unravel altogether. The story starts, the story
starts, the story starts.


Newspoem 24 September 2004 Philly Kerry Rally

[enter the new york times, an impeccable gentleman in a suit, stands in
the corner and daintily picks a stray thread off his sleeve]


Newspoet What are you doing?

NYT This is an important day in our nation's history.

Newspoet Don't fuck with me.

NYT [chuckles] Fortunately, I have more important things to do than not to
fuck with you. I am the newspaper of record. You are barely a comma.

Newspoet You're a mouthpiece.

NYT Hm.

Newspoet A hairpiece.

NYT Tsk.

Newspoet If the pentagon were a big fat ass, you'd be flatulence.

NYT I don't appreciate that. Now read me.

Newspoet "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die
miserably everyday / for lack / of what is found there"

NYT William Carlos Williams. An important day, today, in our nation's
history.

Newspoet Why? What's today?

NYT Sunday.

Newspoet [heaves a sigh, stands up] Christ. How much?

NYT Four dollars.

Newspoet [getting crumpled bills and change from jeans pocket] Jeez. You
made more off one paper than I did off all my poetry last year.

NYT Hm. [straightens bills, sorts change into various suit pockets, hands
Newspoet a paper, whistling a swung "America the Beautiful."]

Newspoet The New York Times.

Why are we so easily seduced, floored, by its particular typography, its
scent, the bold layout and the grid of authority and reason it suggests?
How many thousands of words are pummeled into our hearts by its
photographs, their helicopters, the serious expressions, the ashes and
ruins? These photos that seem to offer a frank view of anything in the
world except their photographers. The complete and refreshing failure to
be self-critical, the omniscient observer everywhere in the world at once
without being connected to anything, fearless, able to dictate the truth
without consequence to self, a fanatical scrupulousness with regard to
writing things exactly as they are, earnestly accurate and truthful. All
the news that's fit to print. But what news fits? Why are some stories
larger than others, on the front page but broken in half? What news does
not fit? Why doesn't it fit? We know from Heisenberg, from Weiner, that
the observer affects the observed. The Times is a business reporting on
business, but it is not the business of business to report on business,
that is just an angle, it is the business of business to profit. This
would be the nature of business but business is unnatural. This means the
Times writes history out of reverence for its competitors, the other
papers.

Like the Tribune, America's real paper. The last independent metropolitan
daily.


[Tribune enters, wearing stocking cap, scarf, flannel, cheeks red as if
from a cold wind.]


Tribune Hey you wanna buy a copy here or what?

Newspoet Yeah, yeah, sorry. [walks across the room and buys a paper]

NYT You don't even read them.

Newspoet [stiffens] What?

NYT The paper. You don't read the paper.

Newspoet You mean-

NYT Read it.

Newspoet [opens NYT, immediately gets delighted, tears to page A8,
finishes article, stands up]

That is great.

NYT I know. So. Do I?

Newspoet You still got it.

NYT [bows, exits]

Oh my goodness, this is so wonderful. It covers so many pages. Whole
spreads in which the story is laid out uninterrupted with carefully
deployed, relevant photos. Look at the excellent infographic showing the
relative circumferences of aluminum tubes! It's an article the size of a
pamphlet. How can it ever be condensed into a poem, especially given that
[phone rings] Hello?

VOP You were saying?

Newspoet Especially given that the upshot of this article, as with that
article in the Globe on September 11th 2004


Newspoem 11 September 2004 Double Negative Positive Standard


is that something we already knew may be truer than we thought, or if not
more true, at least more spectacularly corroborated. The article
culminates with a speech given by Colin Powell to the UN Security Council
that I wrote a poem about because I saw it on TV because I was in a
waiting room at a hospital where I had taken my friend to have her wisdom
teeth removed. By coincidence I saw a historic speech I thought was
bullshit we now know was bullshit. [hangs up. dials a number.]

VOP Yes?

Newspoet Hey I got an old newspoem here that just became relevant again. I
think you should print it. Got a pen? Ready?


Newspoem 5 February 2003 I am sitting in the waiting room


[hangs up.] How am I going to write this? How much time do I have left?