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The Lumpenpoemletariat

 

The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows and the truest of all books was Solomon’s and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe… So I briefly knew woe … once … in Worcester, Massachusetts… I knew it when I knew something about the Great Pyramids … in Egypt… Who built them … and how … that it was not slaves … not aliens … not geniuses outfitted with agile hammers … Not … it was not the moon making strange tides run over the rivers and over the sands … It was … and I knew it from some letters I found … once … in an old book … The letters were in the Kings chapter … The Bible in a secondhand shop … Worcester is … near where I am from … War Chester is how the word looks… Herman Melville was also from … near here … near Worcester … and the letters were written … I think … it has been a long time since I read them … I really think they were by him … It is on record that Melville took a ship to Egypt … to Giza …! to gaze at the pyramids … people think he wrote very little afterwards … about the pyramids … or anything else … but these letters … In them he confessed… he confessed how weak he was … upon understanding that the pyramids were built by a kindergartener … an ancient Egyptian five year old … the boy was not told to … he was simply playing … playing in the sand … while the adults were busy with funerals … he was playing … he was making stones with secret ingredients … … then he was piling them higher and higher … the pyramids were not for the gods … it is always the simplest answer … the most elegant solution … the kindergartner knew true north … by … by the way… when he looked up…  his head was pulled by the sky… he knew π … from the circles of his parents’ eyes … and the circles inside those circles… and the way eyelids slice everything in half … and how to charm ants … armies of ants … to help him with the heaviest stones … he did it with his fingertips …

 

This is just … semi-remembering … the only exact line I recall from the letters was But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. … Why I didn’t steal the letter from that store in Worcester … or even grope the bottom of my backpack … for dollar bills … I am a wuss … I am shallow … I like joy … A kindergartner building the pyramids … it is … to even think about … so lonely-making … The amount of time he must have had to be alone to build them … and … how he must have learned how much all of us have to … And… this is important…  how he got down from the top once he was finished … When his parents said Come down  and he wanted to obey… But … But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. … did he jump … he would have died … unless … Maybe he knew that secret too … or maybe he invited his parents up to the top … the way the deceased will get an angel escort … or maybe he slid down … they are giant slides … but too fast …  or else he did make it down but was then stricken … by life is all … lifestricken … The day I found those letters in the shop in Worcester I was alone … and had been alone for months … and I did not want what was true … or woe … I wanted children …




Darcie Dennigan

levelheaded: Lumpenpoemletariat

 

The title of this poem is a play on Karl Marx’s term “lumpenproletariat,” opening the possibility that either the speaker or the poem belongs to a directionless, hopeless class of people. In a kind of subtle joke, this title belies the eruditeness of both the speaker and poem. Not only does she drop the aforementioned L-bomb, she wanders through used bookstores reciting Bible verses and quoting Herman Melville. Because of this disparity, the title opens us up to the idea that, in this poem, she’ll construct her identity using her own imagination and fragments of ideas she finds around her. It is through this constructed lens we ultimately glimpse her “woe.”

 

We enter into the poem with a line from Moby Dick. The line from Moby Dick refers to Ecclesiastes and the Books of Solomon. Immediately, the speaker is concerned with the memorial qualities of language and literature and the connections that develop between texts over time. She speaks on her own but also vicariously through the works she references. The structure and appearance of the poem—a prosaic, narrative arc punctuated by ellipses—calls to mind Alice Notley’s contemporary classic The Descent of Alette, which uses quotation marks in much the same way this poem uses ellipses to both split phrases into units and indicate the existence of a world outside the poem. But “Lumpenpoemletariat” is more than the sum of its influences.

 

Strikingly, the speaker is willing to let these influences coalesce into a daydream that sends her on an emotional reel.  Based on a set of imaginary letters written by Melville found in “a secondhand shop,” the speaker falls into a surreal, detailed reverie about “an ancient Egyptian five year old” who, with assistance from “armies of ants” built the pyramids underneath himself while playing with sand. There is some humor in the image of this child atop a great pyramid. Then there is an almost political conflation of the helplessness of children with the helplessness of humanity (is “kindergarten,” with its overt German root, a call back to “lumpenproletariat”? Are all children members of this lowest of classes?). But by the end of the poem there is mostly that “woe.” The speaker brings it all back home with the lines, “The day I found those letters in the shop in Worcester I was alone … and had been alone for months … and I did not want what was true … or woe … I wanted children …” In those final moments, it’s as if all the humor, pathos, and love the speaker imagines wrapped into the role of parent comes crashing down under the realization that her constructed self—the one that insulates itself by romanticizing poverty and lionizing other people’s writing—can’t always hold back real emotion, that certain truths can’t be held back.

 

 

-The Editors