Dick of the Dead

Rachel Loden

 

Read an interview with Rachel Loden by T.J. DiFrancesco, Jr., here.

 

“Nixon’s emptiness [in ‘Milhous as King of the Ghosts’]—the wind is literally moving through him—is reminiscent of the Romantic/Modern idea that the summit of lyric poetry is a sublime destruction of the self. Stevens’s description of the sublime (which is rather funny in the original) has been humorously transformed into an image of empire and oil. One might see Loden’s rewriting as a send-up of the lyric tradition. By creating a sublime image that's morally repugnant, Loden calls into question the validity of the lyric moment. Still, to me, the poem is more interesting than mere parody. The poem’s content, commentary and humor never diminish its aesthetic beauty. It may very well be a parody of the sublime, but it is also oddly sublime in itself. This tension is typical of the collection and what makes it so intoxicating.

“Despite the title and the truncated picture on the cover, there is much in the collection that has little or nothing to do with Nixon. As in her first collection, Hotel Imperium (another book with Nixon on the cover), Loden’s poems wittily explore constructions of femininity, the absurdity of runaway capitalism and the role of art in commodity culture. She does all this with restraint, trenchant wit and rich sonic play. If Nixon were still alive, he might not understand the subtlety of Loden’s humor, but I am sure Checkers would love it.” —from the review by Joanna Fuhrman in The Poetry Project Newsletter

 

“Pink angel wings buzz in Rachel Loden’s formidable verses. Real villains like Tricky Dick and Dick Cheney are re-cast as Shakespearian spooks in technically innovative send-ups. Politics and star culture merge as the poet purges our collective soul while never losing her own. . . .

“Loden sometimes layers a current scenario over an old text. Poems by Li Po, Blake, Rilke and others become armatures, as do the Nixon tapes and an ‘Affidavit.’ Thus, the narration retains a core authenticity while the updating is expansive and whimsical.

“With a nod to Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet XXXVII, Loden’s ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ becomes a moving eulogy to both aspiration and disappointment. The poet speaks to us as a lover and as a nation with a wise and witty voice.

“When Loden turns to the personal in the wisp of a poem, ‘My Cupboards,’ she lets us peer into her sources of sorcery. ‘No tincture of seahorse. / No cloudberry poultice.’ ‘Pixels’ in the next line add a jolt of technology, plus a good dose of pixie dust. It’s magic.” —from the review by Jeffrey Cypher Wright in Brooklyn Rail

 

“In Loden, I’ve found a kindred spirit. Her Nixon is a fallen monument, an apparition who stalks the grounds of the Whitehouse; who sits with his head ‘like a Rushmore in space’ awaiting his ultimate pardon. Later, he is a bauble, a plastic man inside a snowglobe ‘while hoodoo snow is falling.’ Loden’s Nixon is the crooked leader for whom I grew nostalgic, as the eight torturous years of the Bush regime raged on like an unchecked virus. Deeply human, deeply flawed, he is the most tragic figure ever to appear on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

“Nixon is but one in a long line of arrogant, if flaccid, politicos who have mongered the wars of our empire. Rachel Loden is not afraid to follow the money; to show us where the bodies are buried: ‘And if a hospital ship sails out of Baltimore/it must be filled, it cannot come home empty.’ If this be a tragedy we live in, it is practically Wagnerian, and Loden’s Dick is the Loki at its darkest heart. Cue the Ride of the Valkyrie. With all of the mordant wit she can muster, Loden celebrates the smell of napalm in the morning, the war on terror and its most ironic emblem, a ship called the USNS Comfort.

“We live, Loden reminds us, in the midst of an ‘epic struggle against stupidity.’ Leonid Brezhnev, Martha Mitchell, Deep Throat—like ourselves, they are but the bit players in the story of reckless ambition and our foolish, foolish ways.” —from the review by D.A. Powell in Rumpus

 

“More than politics, more than death, although there’s plenty of both to go around, Dick of the Dead is about sexuality. They’re bound up together—politics and sex and death—but they’re not bound inextricably; it only seems that way. Nixon and his dick cheat death; Rachel separates herself from it―Miss October leaves empty rooms behind her, but she goes on forever, naked with staples in her navel, like Keats’s bold lover, but unlike Keats’s lover she can kiss, she can fuck, she can explore or imagine a panoply of sexual personae, with Nixon as her spirit guide, ‘As diaphanous as Bush’s / brain, as feverishly sensitive as Cheney’s heart // I lived in those times, yet I was free.’” —from the review by Tad Richards in Jacket

 

“In wrestling with the cycle of history, Loden summons not only Dick Nixon, but the full complement of myth: fairy tales, Bible stories, cowboys, movie stars, and ancient empires (not Rome but rather the empire of Sargon, whose Khorsabad, located a few miles from what is now Mosul, Iraq, was capital of ancient Assyria). As Dick himself says, in Loden’s poem ‘The Nixon Tapes,’ ‘God/damn, twelve princesses dance their shoes/to tatters all night in a castle underground/and nobody is running their income tax/returns?’ Dick Nixon has one foot in myth and one foot in reality, and we’re the ones stuck in the middle, who must beware of thinking a myth is always past and never prologue:

Blessed is he
who leaketh the depositions

of the wicked; he hath convened

a new grand jury for Thy name’s

sake. Plus the goat must die. Selah.
The dead witness eats dust

for your sins. And the Capitol is wet
with such a sweet and steady rain.

“The fascination with repetition occurs not only in the substance of the poems themselves, but also in their form. Many of Loden’s lines are cribbed from well-known twentieth-century poems, and she often rewrites those poems completely, providing twenty-first century updates. She channels not just Dick Nixon, but Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Ted Berrigan, and Robert Creeley. In the shortest, and certainly one of the most thoroughly creepy, of all the poems in Dick of the Dead, Loden transforms Pound’s famous couplet, the summation of imagism:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of the faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

into

THE USNS COMFORT SAILS TO THE GULF

Huge red crosses on the whitewashed hull:
http://www.comfort.navy.mil/welcome.html

“In Loden’s world, not only is the spirit of Tricky Dick capable of rising again, possessing the occupants of the White House, and driving the world awry, but poetry has the capacity to renew itself and respond to these events. Her updates transform poems that had become museum pieces—beloved objects shut up behind the glass case of poetic memory and reverence—into living, vital work again, ready to kick up a fuss.” —from the review by Maureen Thorson in Open Letters Monthly