Tags
American Child by normal (2001), American poet normal, Blood on the Floor by normal (1999), Mass shootings
Four-year-old American child – in the age of the National Rifle Association – learns to use a machine gun
Photo Credit: ABC News Video (January 2014)
My Poetry Corner June 2018 features an excerpt from the poem “american child” by normal. Raised in Passaic, New Jersey, normal is a poet and registered nurse now retired and living in Saugerties, New York.
As a young poet in the early 1960s, he began reading his work at the Rafio Café in Greenwich Village, frequented by Beat poets and writers. Among the poets who influenced normal’s sensibilities is the American poet, e.e. cummings (1894-1962), whose use of low-case letters and minimal punctuation he emulates.
The following excerpts come from normal’s chapbooks, Blood on the Floor (1999) and American Child (2001).
His poem “blood on the floor” brings to mind America’s powerlessness to end mass shootings, stealing the future of our children.
don’t slip
there is blood on the floor.
blood of apathy
blood of the dispassionate
the ignoring
blood of those numbed by dumb
life
blood of those who pretend it
never happens / the cheerfully
humbled who go about it all
smiling.
Meanwhile, the raindrops are loaded / with the eyes of children.
The featured poem, “american child,” portrays Americans in all our glory and shame. Penned on Labor Day 2000, the poem begins with the plight of the American worker.
i am the child of america
the sierra madres are bleeding
i am america
the mad & the magnate marry
the factory wolf howls
i am america
the mantra rumbles with the kinds & the cripples.
Trappings of American life ring through the verses: dinty moore stew, soup kitchens, porno talkshows, paparazzi, honkytonk queen, sams club, home depot, tickertape parade, flophouse, and more.
Four stanzas speak of “death to” individuals, special groups, historical events, and man-made systems. Among the targets are lewis & clark, manifest destiny, trail of tears & of schemes, and the american dream. The poet also boots the capitalist, communist, anarchist, antichrist, and atheist. (I would like to add racist and misogynist.)
Apart from lewis & clark, normal mentions several other personalities that make up the American character: joe dimaggio, thomas jefferson, geronimo, benedict arnold, einstein, and chief joseph. (No shout out to Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King?)
In the following stanza, the poet captures the schizoid character of the American child and his impact on the world:
i am beauty
i am invention
i am wonder
i am the united fruit company
i am promontory point pikes peak & mai lie
i am the glory
i am the savior
i am the black tide of the acid sky
(mai lie instead of My Lai reframes the massacre in Vietnam.)
[…]
fool / genius // the kind of heaven & hell // the arithmetic eyes of the bureaucrat robot
Yet, for all his flaws, the American child is a fighter and survivor in a crazy world, as normal concludes in his final verses.
i am the feral infant dancing on the freakstage / of the final sunset // i am the child of america.
Much has changed over the past seventeen plus years since normal’s portrayal of the American child. How could he have foreseen Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump? I live in hope that an American child – rising from a bloody school floor; less feral and more inclusive – has now embarked on the path to the presidency.
To read the excerpt from the featured poem and learn more about the work of normal, go to my Poetry Corner June 2018.
Three Worlds One Vision 
Reblogged this on Guyanese Online.
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Thanks for the re-blog, Cyril. Have a great week 🙂
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Pingback: “american child” – Poem by normal
Thanks for sharing, GuyFrog 🙂
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Terrifying
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It is, indeed, Derrick.
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I think if I were American, I would think seriously about moving to Canada. Why does nobody important actually do anything about these guns? And while I’m in the mood, why do the police keep killing black people and nobody important seems to think that it’s unacceptable?
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Many of us have thought seriously about moving to Canada or elsewhere. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy (for many different reasons). Not too long ago, my inquiry to a Canadian friend was met with ridicule. “Good luck,” she replied sarcastically.
The problem of police targeting black people is very complex, but I’ll try to convey the essence of what’s going on. America today is a broken society suffering from intense cultural polarization and internal strife. Our education system is in shambles, our political system corrupted by big money, and our people struggling to survive in a stressful environment where competitiveness has turned combative. Such circumstances brings out the worst in people including law enforcement personnel who are frequently caught in between these opposing forces. Police officers are predominantly white and many of them have had military experience in overseas wars. Latent racism in these individuals can be brought to the surface during the normal course of their duties which increasingly involves inherent dangers to themselves.
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Robert, thanks for adding your perspective on police targeting black people.
When it comes to Canada, our government is currently working in overdrive to fracture decades of US-Canadian partnership with our latest disagreements over NAFTA.
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Trump’s stupidity is beyond comprehension. When was the last time America and Canada were adversarial – the War of 1812?
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I agree. He’s very confident that his bully tactics will make his loyal base of supporters tired of all the winning.
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Lest we forget, that tactic worked marvellously for Hitler. There is little difference between Trump and Hitler and their supporters.
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When it comes to our guns, John, even our president is powerless (but won’t admit it) against the National Rifle Association (NRA).
As to the police killing of black people, systemic institutionalized racism continues to serve the elite minority who control our nation. We-Americans seem unable to grasp the ways racism corrupts and corrodes the body politic.
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This picture says it all. We in America are on a downhill slide of our own doing.
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And what’s even worse, Mary, is that we the people are powerless to pull the brakes for all the reasons that normal mentions in his poem “blood on the floor.”
“don’t slip,” normal writes. There’s no mention of cleaning up the “blood on the floor.”
He expands further with the following third stanza: “blood of the holy filthy / blood on the godhead / blood of the rich in their / diamond fishbowls / the paparazzi in their glory / the machines in their monopoly / the innocent in their strangulation / the earth in her silence.”
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If people would only listen…not hear, but listen to the cries of Americas people.
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During the last century and exponentially in this one, America has been exporting extremes of violence accompanied by environmental degradation, unchecked consumerism, moral and social decadence as American virtues to the world at large. These have resulted in massive increases in death by war and genocide, destitution and rampant diseases. Is it any wonder these extremes would come full circle and eat the very fabric of what supported and encouraged the extremes? You reap what you sow is a timeless truism. America’s history makes it unavoidable that it should be plunging into its own horrors in turn and few are those Americans who can translate the writing on the wall: *”Mene, mene, tekel uparsin!” To hope for a return to the “Pleasantville” of the Fabulous Fake Fifties when you needed half a city block to turn your Cadillac around is quite pointless. Where is the admission of guilt? Where the repentance? Where the turning from evil and wicked lifestyles to something more akin to compassion? The problem with evil is, it is cancerous. Once begun and allowed it must grow and consume the body it has infected. This is goodbye America. It won’t disappear overnight, the throes of death will linger and swallow more and more of the nation until the name, “America” will no longer have any meaning. This is a “prophecy” as much as the current times rejects the concept.
*“This is what these words mean: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” (from the book of Daniel, Chap. 5)
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If only, Jim! Tragically, the needs of the people have no place in a society where the profits of those in power take precedence over all of life, human and non-human.
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Quite a picture of America’s poster child; quite an indictment of an entire nation that, but for the few, is smiling along with the proud parents in the picture. Am I shocked? Surprised even? Not at all. To quote a movie character… “You’re dead, you just don’t know it yet.” I’m reblogging this article.
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Thanks for the re-blog, Sha’Tara. When searching for a photo of an American child with guns, I was shocked to discover how far some parents have gone in following the narrative of the National Rifle Association.
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There’s no doubt the NRA has a focused, definite, political agenda of political take over and national mind control. Historically they can be compared to the Nazi party’s brown-shirts (the SA) who were instrumental in getting Hitler to power, after which they were replaced by the SS. We’ll see what happens when the NRA becomes more openly militarized and legitimizes itself as a regular “grassroots” security organization.
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Reblogged this on ~Burning Woman~ and commented:
Have a good, hard look at America’s poster child! If you feel shock, you haven’t been in tune with the trends. This isn’t reality TV, this is American reality.
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from this terrifying
mud a beautiful
flower garden
can emerge!
with skillful
gardeners 🙂
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David, my hope is that those “skillful gardeners” are already in the field and preparing to take over from those of us who have been negligent in our duties as head gardeners.
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What a horrifying photo
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It is, indeed, Bernadette. I thought it a perfect link between the two featured poems by normal. The photo speaks volumes of the “freakstage” we have become.
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I share your hope, Rosaliene.
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Thanks for bringing this to us, Rosalienne! The poem really does evoke the 1960s. It’s particularly effective because the link to the past is comprised of more than content, as is commonly the case in claiming historical context – here, the poet’s own life is literaly the link. And simply by locating himself in history, he reminds his gigantic generation that its lives are as equally linked.
Allen Ginsberg’s famous jeremied, “Howl”, immediately comes to mind here:
“I have seen the best minds of my generation go mad” he warned America. normal doesn’t need to evoke Ginsberg more directly. His structure and cadence come right out of a Greenwich Village Cafe circa 1960.
So do normal’s visual images, which invite Andy Warhol’s presence in just a few phrases.
I usually don’t like the repetition of the first line throughout a poem. It works here though, because it stays true to the aesthetic of the 1960s, while delivering an agonizingly contemporary message.
Thanks again. You always have such a good eye!
Hugs and kisses, comrade
XXXOOO
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Claire, thanks for sharing the historical context of normal’s work. I’m not familiar with the work of the Beat poets. As you say, normal does indeed deliver “an agonizingly contemporary message.” ❤
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Very prophetic poetry.
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The paradox of being an American child…this poem shows almost all of them.
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Powerful!
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Sad and scary times. I’m hoping with you. Maybe the student survivors will continue to rise and lead us to sanity.
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I live in hope, JoAnna.
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I have hope in my heart, but what I see going on around us sometimes makes that hope seem like foolishness. Sometimes.
Thanks for a great post.
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Thanks for dropping by, Shift. When we lose hope, we lose our strength to keep up the struggle for equality, justice, and more.
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