levelheaded: If You Brush Your Teeth, Your Halo Slips Down Over Your Teeth and Stays There

Rather emphatically the speaker of this poem has distinguished many things in nosing through a decades-old LIFE Magazine. He lists his discoveries, recoveries, what he meets and locates (all these are intimated by the sharp verb choice of “found”). Doubtlessly huge ongoing items such as Vietnam, space exploration, the phenomenon of Jim Morrison breaking on through (to the other side) and his death that year, etc. would have been represented in a 1971 issue of America’s leading photojournalism publication. But there’s a notable absence of those topics here. Instead, the speaker’s concerns circle around advertisements.

“If You Brush Your Teeth, Your Halo Slips Down Over Your Teeth and Stays There”—quite the scenario, yes? As we realize how Ricky Garni integrates the magazine material, this conditional assertion recedes from its initial outlandishness. The speaker moves through images that strike him and reports back his impressions, no matter how opaque or surreal. Throughout the poem, he weaves language that could have been directly lifted from ads with his own ideas of what’s being represented, what he’s trying to be persuaded to do or think or consume. Especially effective in his poem is the use of “you,” just as ads are meant to feel aimed at you, yes YOU. Finally, the discoveries reach us, doubly filtered—through the intervening years, and then through the speaker’s eyes and mind.

That some of the images conveyed seem like the speaker misunderstood what was trying to be communicated acknowledges the alternate bizarre logic that is often present in ads. As momentum gathers, the weirdness of the universe the speaker has discovered allows for anything to seem normal. Even the pressurized language we’re able to point to, such as a “purple soft sack”—which we would intuitively describe as a soft purple sack—attests to the freshness of this new place. He sees what he sees and draws conclusions thereupon. The most important details, those deemed worthy of sharing, are the ones we become privy to.

A “battle axe [. . . ] that makes you go ooo”; “a sailboat [ . . . ] that makes you go hmmm”; a T.V. that makes you live longer. Such causal relationships add to the poem’s tone. They form a rich combination of innocent certainty (he finds a Christmas “prayer,” a “plea”), playfulness, and awe (“love’s fresh lemons are the sunniest gifts you can give.”). The poem reads as a new country, “under a blanket of snow,” about which the speaker makes his assumptions as he teaches us the neologisms (“Accu-color”) that necessarily crop up.

Toward the end, findings are more tenuous. Along with a shift in spacing—early, the poem moves in longer stanzas, later, one-line stanzas take over—attention shifts to expansive concepts of memory, home, love. The poem gets wilder, more absolute, superlative and bold in philosophical putting-forth: “true is better than 99% of everything else,” “no gift is better than four roses,” and “Cool ’n Creamy is the best thing since anything.” The poem’s pulse quickens as the speaker naturally relates his findings in LIFE to his own life—verbs change now from “found” to “confess,” “use,” “am,” “know,” “stay.”

While fast, recognizable clarity is imperative to successful advertisement, our speaker tells us of the images indelible to him. This deliberate process of internalizing the world around him commemorates his present. His present is enticing. Consider us aboard the bandwagon.

– The Editors