Rob Delaney
Hi, I am Rob Delaney.
I am not Rob Delaney
and he would never begin a five-minute set like that,
but before California dangled blackberries
above my granite mouth,
Rob showed us the way and the truth and the life
(John fourteen-six by the score of silent thumbs)
god, twitter fame was the only thing
that could bring us nearer gods we don’t believe in
this big bang of a perpetually expanding following
we cannot fully understand
by choice I never listened to robins
conducting high-frequency symphonies
(but I did read Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon
by Daniel A. Hoyt that summer
and could form the parentheses of a whistle
enough to calculate the slow kettle of tea)
my father would sit on a pig stump
(an oak whose life he ended himself)
and watch birds fly the superhighway,
clouds like rush hour in L.A.
like some hippie saint claiming
all that is God
is not man-made
I always thought of bird-watching as a way
for the elderly to augment their loneliness
now all the young men I know
fetishize loneliness in themselves
| James Croal Jackson |
|
Levelheaded: Rob Delaney
This poem starts with a joke. As stated, the speaker is not Rob Delaney – a comedian notable for his successful use of Twitter – but there’s a point to the momentary conflation of Rob Delaney and the speaker. That is, the line between poem and joke sometimes seems very thin. Poems and jokes both use well-timed, compressed language to elicit an autonomic emotional response. The point can be taken further. Is a joke just a marketing tool? Is Twitter just a marketing tool? Is a poem? Where do we draw the line between marketing and art, between self-promotion and communication?
Big subjects all. There’s sarcasm in the “John fourteen-six” description of Delaney’s Twitter success, but there also seems to be a certain admiration for the scope of it all, for “this big bang of perpetually expanding following / we cannot fully understand.” It’s not that Delaney’s success really is “the way and the truth and the life,” but that this idea of “following” implies someone is leading, that with great power comes great responsibility.
Ultimately, this poem leads us out of the Twittersphere, which the speaker sees mostly as an entertainment. He compares the Twitter to “robins / conducting high-frequency symphonies” and uses “bird-watching” as a metaphor for passive participation in social media. It’s a nice bit of nuance because it resists an urge to dismiss the whole easy enterprise. The speaker throws in the equivalent of a literary deep cut by referencing Daniel A. Hoyt’s “Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon” – a story from Hoyt’s 2009 collection Then We Saw the Flame. It’s an obscure reference that returns us to some of those early unanswerable questions.
There’s a Frank O’Hara-esqueness to this poem. It’s colloquial. It’s got some name drops. But mostly, it’s an attempt to wrench profundity out of the quotidian, art out of pop culture, and commonality out of highly specific personal experience. In the shadow of Twitter’s enormity, the poem ends with a realization that loneliness is the exclusive domain of exactly no one – that is, it’s the domain of exactly everyone – 1.7 million Twitter followers or 794.
– The Editors
