levelheaded: too ra loo ra

The goofy title and first line of Ron Green’s “too ra loo ra” make us comfortable as college kids at a kegger. The effect—by line two we’re willing to be transported into a world where nouns can be verbs and moons can be wicker. Just looking at the poem on the page, we know we’re in a place that speaks to spontaneity, a place where pop music can share a stanza with an allusion to Paul Blackburn.

Lyrics to the Dexys Midnight Runners’ 80s classic drive the poem forward. They jumpstart the second stanza, quickly recede, and just as quickly resurface. The speaker’s self-revelation (“I am a fox”) exists jammed within the silly parameters of pop music. Equally important, the lyrics become elevated by their new place within the parameters of poetry.

Though the poem is undoubtedly funny, its dramatic turns in language usher in shifts to a more serious, sincere tone. While the third stanza uses common, flat language to explain the speaker-animal remiss of instincts, the description of “you” in stanza three brings us back to the place of exciting possibilities— “you       hawk / more brindle than I.” As the speaker turns inward with a parenthetical aside, the poem goes back to more predictable language.

Green lays out the poem’s Marvellian theme with the first line of the final stanza: “I’m waiting for you.” What makes the poem fresh is the world in which the speaker is waiting. It is a world where collisions constantly occur—a pop song bashes into a revered poet, a fox stammers into suburbia, a glen is encapsulated by noise, a billboard shares the sky with desire.

– The Editors