How to Get Over Your Second Wife Jan with Class
You want to know what a man does/
In a shanty town like this after dusk?
Without a gal like his second wife Jan barking at him/
About everything he does or doesn’t do?
A free man/
Planter’s Punch in one hand/
And little Carlos fashioned me a cigarello ashtray of mango rind, God bless
him.
Large plantation style porch to sit on/
And you can almost hear terrific Negro spirituals.
Jan knew what she was getting with me/
Mysterious, like a deaf person /
Or Dick Cavett /
when he would do voice over work.
And now I’m free/
finally free/
good Christ above.
Myers Coconut rum/
Bite of my loco grande appetizer/
Lady Bonito, I’m sailing solo/
and I don’t owe you an explanation.
So I ding dong up some doper type of/
word play to let the night rumble:
Tick tock cuckoo clock/
I’ve got the gumption/
to drink an ocean/
Missy Ping Pong with the backrubs/
I’ve got a very classy boat/
to make it on/
don’t get mixed up with less of a man/
than this.
Planter’s punch/
Coconut rum/
And something Carlos makes with Melon Liqueur/
He calls it Deadman Dick.
Perfect, but then Consuelo Sr. takes my keys and.
tells me I missed the last marina shuttle to my mooring
Look, I know I’m stewed/
But my rental car’s a premium/
Class H/
Pontiac Bonneville/
or similar.
Drives itself with a computer/
I was crocked when I pulled in here/
but never mind it, you dumb stick.
Now get me a goodbye drink/
Goodbye to my second wife Jan/
Hey, get that little number/
with the full moon tan/
to drop me off at the marina/
and I’ll swim.
I’ve got a classy yacht with towel warmers on it/
You think I’m in pain?
You think I’m ruining seven monogrammed/
imported dress shirts by getting tears on them?
No way/
Man.
Dan Kennedy's Poetry for Monkeybicycle: A Look Back
Dan Kennedy's poem, "How to Get Over Your Second Wife Jan With Class," marks the end of our little series of poetry and criticism here at MonkeyBicycle, and so it seems appropriate to cast a short look back, over our shoulder, to see what it was we just passed, the way a motorist might look back in his rearview mirror at roadkill.
How did we get here? However they came to Kennedy (and do we really want to
know?), his poems all came to me in the same way, which is to say unsolicited,
and by e-mail, while I was busy with something else. Sometimes it was a note
from a friend, sometimes it was on-line bill pay, but in every case I was
interrupted by a flash of light and that annoying sound key from the "jungle"
menu on my control panel — that low echo that is either a tropical woodpecker
going to town on standing deadwood or a frog expiring in the heat — and suddenly
I would find myself blessed, but also burdened, by another of Kennedy's poems.
There was always, in the forwarding e-mail from Monkeybicycle web editor Matthew
Simmons, a faint suggestion of flattery hidden in a polite request — the
shading of pixels into words that said: "Hey, would you like to review
a poem?"
I said yes, this ride began, and what a ride it has been. I've been Robin
to Dan Kennedy's Batman, the great man's lesser-known protagonist riding shotgun,
the guy in the sidecar who stumbles out of the ditch after the accident, sooty
and smoking but O.K. If this were a movie I would lift my goggles and the
audience would laugh because my face would look like a raccoon's.
More to the point, there has been an energy in these installments, a sense
of literary purpose. I think I speak for all five of us reading this when
I say that Kennedy's poetry speaks to us. I speak for us in saying that Kennedy
speaks to us. It's been a dynamic of Kennedy speaking to us, and me speaking
for us about him speaking to us. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, but
one voice rose above the chatter to proclaim: "Hey, these poems are actually
pretty good. They are funny, but also sort of sad. This guy wrote a book?
Maybe I'll check it out."
That, anyway, was the voice I heard. Maybe you heard something else. But like
the work of Billy Collins, you can't quite write off Kennedy's poetry, because
what would you be saying then? Poetry can't be funny? You don't like being
faintly amused? I once read a Tolstoy story about a Jesus who rode the waves.
A motorized, self-propelled, ocean-going Jesus, with the beard, the flowing
robes, and the little splash of foam around his feet. A hilarious cartoon
image from the Mr. War and Peace himself. That's what I'm talking about.
My view, in other words, is that there's a good chance we'll see these poems
again. Maybe on Slate.com, or in a small collection published by an independent
press, someplace in Brooklyn named "Tarantula" that operates out
of the attic of a corner head shop. These poems are that good.
I should also say that Kennedy's latest poem, to which I will now turn my
laser-like attention, came with only the subject line of the forwarding e-mail
as its introduction, and that subject line said only, "Probably the last
poem ever." The words brought a stark feeling home.
The last poem. Ever. Probably.
It was like a secret note, but in code instead of lemon-juice, decipherable
with intuition instead of a toaster. A mystery clue in terse script, hinting
at something as dark and unfathomable as the success of the Da Vinci Code.
In making my way through the poem I saw what Kennedy meant. For Kennedy has
written, for this last installment in our series, an epic. It was an inspired
choice, a fitting poetic form for this last exit on the wide slab of turnpike
that is Kennedy's art.
Every epic, of course, must take on a subject of mythic proportion, something
bigger than the poet himself, something, indeed, emblematic of the poet's
age. The launch of a thousand ships to retrieve a stolen beauty, say, or,
in Kennedy's case, the lament of a Caribbean vacationer unable to escort a
local prostitute to his yacht because he's been pounding the sauce all afternoon
over the loss of his second wife.
Kennedy might have gone for something larger. I think Danica Patrick's thrilling
near-victory at Indy this year would have been a nice choice, but at least
Kennedy picked a universal story, something common to the experience of every
American male over the age of 40. If Kennedy's deft combination of third-world
vacation travel and frustrated sex tourism didn't speak to all of us, it probably
spoke to P.J. O'Rourke, Henry Kissinger, and Christopher Hitchens.
Layered in the setting we find the loss the poem describes. It's the loss
of love, the loss of a soul-mate who might have made one's journey to the
stars less lonely. The poem is shot-through with the feeling that all is not
just vanity, but vanity piled on top of futility and further soaked in pain.
It's a kind of marinated vanity, you might say. Kennedy's protagonist is doomed
by his failings, and the poem awakens us to the realization that the world
only takes its time before bringing us low, and that after waiting so long
only to become swift victims of its cruelty we dare not beg for mercy. Because
Big Daddy World doesn't like that. That's how cruel he is. Cruel and mean
and you better not even ask why.
Every epic ends with the hero's death — it's sort of a requirement of the
form — and Kennedy does not disappoint. We leave his Fallen Man begging for
a lift to the marina, where he'll attempt to reach his yacht in a drunken
midnight swim. Of course he won't make it, and thankfully that last stanza
— that might, had Kennedy bothered to write it, have attempted to describe
the murky water lit only by the crescent moon, and the desperate splashing
of a drowning man - that last stanza is absent from the page. That absent
stanza speaks more eloquently than Kennedy could have, more eloquently than
any poet could have, any poet but Yeats. Yeats, actually, was pretty good
at this sort of thing. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre,"
the loosing of the blood-dimmed tide, etc. That guy could write.
But Kennedy, too, knows something about death. That it isn't glorious, but
pitiful; that it doesn't bring dignity, but something unbearable and fragile,
that we never want to name. There is a reason we say, when someone goes, that
it was a shame.
In closing, I'd like to go out on a limb and say that, despite the ruthless
grilling I gave him on these pages, for which I half-expect he'll try to have
me killed, I liked Kennedy's poems. They were amusing, but also spiked with
pain, an entertainment that stuck with me. You can't really feel sorry for
Kennedy — guy lives the rock star life in New York. A million women come
and go. Take you for all you're worth. You know it. — but you can feel sorry
for his poetry. And that, I think, is how Dan Kennedy would want it. As he
says himself, in his last poem's closing lines:
You think I'm in pain?
You think I'm ruining seven monogrammed/
imported dress shirts by getting tears on them?
No way/
Man.
Dan Kennedy is the author of the memoir Loser Goes First (Crown Books). He also runs the website reallysmalltalk.com, and if
he isn't working on a novel, he should be.
Sean Carman is one of many big-name contributors to the forthcoming
anthology Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction,
edited by Stephen Elliott (MacAdam/Cage).