Michael Meyerhofer is a Lollapalooza festival all tidied up into a single act. If you put his lineup of poems next to the music festival’s lineup of performers, you will notice an equal degree of diversity, and Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, comes with such a lineup. It has just as much capacity to win over a new generation of poetry readers as it does teaching students or even seasoned professionals a lesson or two in modern poetics. What I am saying is this: Damnatio Memoriae is a book that will entertain newbies and enrich, or even challenge, those who are well-versed in, well, verse.
Since the book is a collection of 74 poems broken into 4 sections, and with respect to our modern Twitter attention spans, I’ll highlight just a couple of my favorites from the book.
As tempted as I am to explore Meyerhofer’s comic, “The World’s Oldest ______,” I think I’ll let readers take that one in and figure out the fourth word of the title on their own. Instead, I’ll first pick on “Wisdom of the Ancients,” which appears in section one, Flowstones, a section of true wit and humor.
This poem reminds me of a challenge that a peer threw at me one time: To write a poem that can be memorized and spoken to a stranger at a bar as if telling a story off the top of your head. “Wisdom of the Ancients” reads like a story coming from a strange dude with a couple of cocktails in him. Midway in the poem, Meyerhofer writes:
They say that ancient Romans
used to rip out the flooring
of their coliseum and flood it…
With this, I’d stop the strange dude and, depending on my mood, tell him that’s ridiculous or just buy him another Jager and ask him to continue. For now, I’ll ask him to continue.
Imagine sitting with your kids,
munching a snack, watching
condemned men splash and drown.
Can you hear it? The strange dude telling this story? Personally, I feel like such a recipient when I read this poem, like I’m nodding my head, saying “yeah?”, “then what?”, “really?” as the strange dude keeps on harping. After hearing this poem in its entirety, and if you’re seeing eye to eye with me on this whole “strange dude” scenario, you’d gather the bar crowd around and ask the dude to tell the story again.
The fourth and final section of the book, Divine Prepositions, is like a cellar, but there is no wine, just roots. The poems bring you downstairs to join them in their climate-controlled melancholy. One poem, “Affirmative Action,” comes with a crushing uppercut of honesty, the kind that stand up comedians get away with, but a poet?
The poem opens with, “When the black woman walks in…” Red flag––for me at least.
“Uh, Meyerhofer, you’re sort of a white man who is about to tell us about a black woman. Are you sure about this?”
Meyerhofer shoves me aside and continues the poem.
When the black woman walks in
with her child, I think about giving up
the best seat in the coffee shop…
I’m not going to put this poem under a microscope and analyze the life out of it, but the immediacy of “I think” catches my eye. It is almost the indicator of the narrator’s Caucasian nature, unless one of the same color would start thinking right away when this woman walks in. What do white people do when their white environment is shaken in the slightest? They think, and whether they are pleasant (Nice to see a black woman in our white neighborhood.) or negative (How do I get out of here?), these thoughts are often triggered out of fear. An anxiety sparks and Meyerhofer taps into the complicated energy of the moment.
The poem moves on to present history textbooks as the single frame of reference many whites have with regard to slavery, how those textbooks have done nothing but birth, and pardon the oxymoron, an indifferent group of white sympathizers. Further in the poem, guilt is presented like a protocol, insincere and cordial, which leads to justification:
shouldn’t we show her
how different we are, you and me
with our tornado bait ancestors
and our manicured haircuts?
The poem concludes with the black woman discerning something going on among her surroundings and the narrator driving home the point of the poem: the continuum of irrational anxiety and paranoia that seems to have been lingering for too long of a time.
My bottom line with Damnatio Memoriae––
It’s a solid read and nothing about it disappoints. I’d recommend this book to those who enjoy contemporary standards like Howe and Dobyns, along with those who keep up with today’s best like Addonizio and Hicok. Whether you’re a goof or a scholar, this is a great book to add to your collection.
