levelheaded: Mount Rushmore

This poem’s subject, as its title lets on, is Mount Rushmore. We begin with a prediction that Mount Rushmore “will lose a nose.” Then there’s a quick shift to a description of a landscape with “In the South Dakota night / a thunder, birds arisen” before moving onto “banking,” which takes on multiple meanings. It might refer to government funding for the monument, perhaps to the “super pac” we see later in the poem, but it also leads us into a reference to Roger Thornhill who famously dodged a “banking” airplane in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (which also sets its final scene on Mount Rushmore). Our memory of that film brings us to “O airplane dive / for my coiffed one, O field / of corn,” etc.

This kind of line-by-line analysis is a good first approach to “Mount Rushmore” because the poem is characterized and mobilized by its rapid shifts in subject and tone. It moves from reverently descriptive (“birds arisen and banking”) to culturally referential (“Roger Thornhill”) to sexually exultant (‘O climb on me, climb / the broad ridge of me”) to overtly political (“Fund your face with my super pac”). The speaker never abandons Mount Rushmore, at least as a cursory subject, so we witness the movement of her restless mind as she considers the monument.

But there is more than just a consideration of Mount Rushmore. A little more than halfway down the poem, the speaker introduces an “I” and a “you.” We get a sense in those middle lines that the speaker is grasping desperately for the right words. Her list of “cancer or amnesia / or Micronesia or July or narrowly” isn’t exactly random – the repetition of  “-esia” and “-ly” offers the possibility of pattern – but it gives us a distilled version of how the speaker approaches language. She knows what she wants to say, but lets chance have some say as well.

Despite its reliance on chance, the poem is especially concerned with permanence. After all, Mount Rushmore is a monument. So is North by Northwest. These represent the permanent. The speaker goes further, saying “Your hair never moves, ear never pierces” only moments before reversing her initial position and saying “you, always soon to crumble.” Her indecision brings to the strange vote “for Teddy” at the end. Is this a return to the beginning of the poem? Is the speaker voting for Teddy to crumble? Or is this a vote in support of Teddy, who had an important role in the creation of the National Park system and thus Mount Rushmore? Who nose?

– The Editors