Yoko Ono in Poetry
 

Yes. Yoko Ono has a poem in Poetry. It is very short.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...-5b2298c783091

It is very short. Mercifully.

Jayne

Our own (barely posting anymore) Quincy Lehr posted on this on Twitter. He, and Jayne, are right. This is not a mediocre poem. It is a bad poem.

I'm working my through this Poetry. I just got to the 40-page Matthew Dickman poem...let's just say this hasn't been my favorite issue, though there are pieces here and there I enjoyed (fewer than usual, given the 40-page page).

Quincy's twitter seems to be protected and, thus, closed to the likes of me. What did he say? Was it that this poem really sucks? Is there anything more subtle to be said about its suckitude?

Typical Quincy:

"Just going to let this sit here without comment. Because Satan."

But, yes, mostly that the poem sucks...

Whatever.

The poem is bad, Poetry is often bad.

Fly and Plastic Ono Band are better than anything any of the Beatles did solo.

Actually, she's better than the Beatles.

It hardly honors Mother Earth, and, in fact, rather denigrates her -- who is hallowed, among some of us. Plug in your mother's name, and see what I mean:

"We s**t on you, Mom."

Lacking any context -- lovely.

J

There's a lot of it about...

Clive

The poem is abominable, but Poetry has run wretched poems before. Take this abomination from a prominent architectural critic from the magazine's early days:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...er-two-windows

Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, like Yoko Ono, was mostly known for something else, though her inclusion had less of a starf*cking quality than so much recent editorial practice under the Other Donald (as Kevin Higgins calls him). Does everything in Poetry magazine suck? No. Has the overall trend in recent years been faddish, #woke, and increasingly dumbed-down? Hoo boy!

An amusing side note: Don Share has me blocked on Facebook and Twitter despite my never having directly interacted with him on either platform. I noticed, I think, when I curiously checked to see if there were any Tweets of the Damned about this colossus of contemporary poetry in the almost uniformly wretched Tavi Gevinson issue:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...222/fuck-stuck

It's easing up a bit, but the emails from the Poetry Foundation (I let my subscription lapse years ago) have been pretty good about alerting me to my New Least Favorite Thing on a monthly basis for some time now.

Not that I want to say to say that the poem is good (it's not), but I think you're misreading the line. I take it to be doing two things:

1. On the metaphorical register, "we shit on earth" is functioning as a true (if crude) description of how humans, as a whole, treat the planet that supports them. As they admire and dream of the sky (think Elon Musk), they shit on the earth, even though it's the earth, not the sky, that supports them. The line, on this register, is accusatory.

2. But the line also can be taken literally, and there I suspect Ono wants us to think about how shit is a crucial fertilizer—in this sense it's *because* we (and other creatures) shit on earth that earth "gives birth / to our future." On this register, the poem is again contrasting our admiration of the sky with our relation to the earth, only now to suggest that something we think of as disgusting is in fact honorable and important.

In neither case do I think the poem can be plausibly read as denigrating the earth.

Anyway, there's my detailed analysis of a poem that didn't deserve it.

Interesting extrapolations, Aaron. Thank you.

I read it like Aaron in his point #1. I kind of thought she was on-side with what I understand as the Native American reverence for Earth. I also think we could use more of that, rather a lot more.

Michael, I think the contrasting interpretations -- they are a part of the failure of the poem, a part of what makes it bad.

Just my humble, reverent, Native American opinion :o

J

Of course the poem is bad. But it doesn't bother me very much because I can see the reason it was published: Yoko is a public figure who is of interest to many millions of people, so it's interesting to see a sample of the poetry she writes whatever its failings may be. If they had published the same poem but it was by someone we never heard of, it would bother me much more because I couldn't see any reason for its publication.

For a long, long time now, the prevailing aesthetic there has been that good and bad do not even exist, as far as art is concerned.

Naturally, when you strip away such, you are left with only the materialistic -- as Bob points out (and I agree): fame.

That and money and power.

J

"She's better than The Beatles." Care to elaborate? (I said The Pixies were better than Leonard Cohen, which I'm fairly certain about--outrageous here, it seems. Maybe to you as well. I do disagree with you, firmly, but am very curious about why you feel that way.)

And Yoko's poem is pretty awful. I don't accept the justification that she's a name so let's look at what she scribbled on an old receipt when she was bored. I think rejecting that sort of thing is one of the most important things a journal can do.

When I was living in Japan in the early sixties, Yoko Ono distinguished herself by selling bottles of her own piss in front of Shibuya station. And here we are fifty-five years or so later, and she's still famous and I'm still not. How can I compete with poetry like that?

Asia is a little different... but I don't think Yoko represents Asia, or Japan, in the slightest. Not that she should. But she is opportunistic. Maybe I'm wrong. Ask Paul.

Maybe the original was amazing, but then a modern critic told her to avoid trying to write like a Shakespeare, so she converted it to this.

Quincy may or may not admit that a lot of the music he likes was influenced, even if indirectly, by Ono’s music, which remains challenging and ear-opening, unlike the Beatles who are wrapped in nostalgia. Maybe they are pop perfection, maybe not, but besides the self-titled white album, which I admire conceptually, “A Day in the Life,” which really is brilliant, and the suite at the end of Abbey Road—besides these bits of pleasure I am tired of their music and their songs which sum themselves up too neatly when they end.

None of this excuses the poem.

Two favorites from her first two albums:

“Greenfield Morning”

"Mind Holes"

That's a lot of exceptions. I dunno about nostalgia, maybe you're right. But The Beatles evolved dramatically in, essentially, 6 years. You know, we weren't around then, and I'm certainly not saying they weren't influenced, but I've never seen anything like that. And the fact that I think they averaged something like 2 to 3 albums a year... It's typical I suppose to like The Beatles, but they were pretty fucking good.

Thank you, Walter, for these! Both pieces blend perfectly with waking here in the Australian bush. Atavistic. Theta waves.

C

I bear Yoko Ono no particular ill-will and even see your point, if there is a great deal of similar material from the same era I would gravitate toward as a general rule. Per the Beatles and rock 'n' roll more generally, there's a place, and a crucial one, for three chords and the truth, dick-out mayhem, and, really, imagining a world in which one's face is a Maserati, which might be just what the doctor ordered.

As a child, I would have been severely chastised, simply for tossing a candy wrapper onto the ground. My mother would have added a commandment: "Thou shalt not litter." The summoning forth of such a profane image as this...how it would have saddened her.

We set the bar high.

J

The only reason for publishing this poem is name recognition. She is a curiosity. A distorted mirror into Lennon's artistic soul.

The poem is not short enough.

There is absolutely no chance that this poem would survive Erato criticism. Ono's success was that she loved John Lennon and he loved her. That's it. Her art is little more than a footnote.

Well, I've always felt there was more than a little of the pompous ass in John Lennon. And Jim, there seems more than a little of the blatant sexist in your remark.

And there is certainly nothing denigrating Mother Earth in the poem, unless you think that shit is inherently bad.

Eratosphere seems such a predictable place sometimes.

Nemo

Still, one must appreciate of the brevity.
 

I, for my part, was suspicious on hearing Ono had a poem in Poetry. I fully expected to read something without merit whatsoever; yet with a little effort to set aside my admitted bias, I did not even mind it. I am far from being head over heels; yet, to my surprise, I was not struck over the head by an abomination through and through. I honestly could not have fathomed, before now, that I would ever say such a neutral thing of her's in Poetry. Who knew?

Because John was pompous? You're not? I am. For sure. Let's get real and look at the work. Mostly my opinion about The Beatles is chemistry. Wings and the plastic ono band, was like running away from home. Sorry Walter. I will keep it mind. I think on their own they're all good. But come on... Who had the first number one song after they broke up (not that it's so important, but it makes me smile)?

Nemo -- Sexist? Was I too flippant? I do apologise for not being deferential to others who find her music/art inspiring. I’m usually pretty good about that but not this time. I couldn’t begin to argue the merits of Ono’s recordings because I’ve never been able to warm up to any of it. But not for lack of trying. I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. I have a somewhat adventurous nose for music but my tastes have limits. Two of them are 1) It must be warm, and 2) It must be accessible. I don’t find either in her work. What I have been able to bear listening to is coldly, discordantly atmospheric at best in my opinion.
I don’t doubt that there is an audience for the art that Yoko Ono puts out. My point is that she attained her following almost exclusively as a result of her relationship with Lennon. Is that sexist? If it is, I have a blind spot to correct. Don’t we all?

Yes, I am aware of the many shortcomings Of John Lennon (pomposity was one of his lesser flaws). And Yoko Ono still loved him. In my eyes that reflects well on both of them.

Yes, more or less, from time to time, the eratosphere can be a predictable place. But it can also be the opposite. Like now, for example.

If I have misjudged Yoko Ono and there is good poetry to be shared that I’m not aware of, I’d like to know. The poem that appeared in Poetry was not offensive in anyway. It just turned me off. I have tried to understand her artistry. I gave it a chance. It never clicked -- not even a little bit -- for me.

I will give Yoko Ono credit for her activism and for keeping the activist spirit of John Lennon and the dual vision of peace and love alive all these years. John was galvanized by her. She made him the activist he became.
x

I think Yoko herself has said that she never thought/intended her music to have wide popular appeal, and that her marriage to John caused her music to be listened to a by millions of people she never expected to like it, which in turn led to her being ridiculed. She never blamed the wider audience for not liking her music, but always thought of it as a niche sort of thing that somehow got exposed beyond the niche because of John's fame.

Interesting. I hadn't heard that. She has done good things.

It is the Bob Dylan Effect. Expect to see more of it, on a cultural scale.

J

Well, what a lot of words. On this thread I mean, when there are so few in the poor little poem.

Much of the problem seems to be with the word “shit”, which surprises me. Nowadays I hear the word used to mean all manner of other things not remotely connected to excrement. All sorts of random “stuff” are now, collectively, “shit”, just as the verbal constructions “to go” , “to be” and “to be like” are now understood to mean “to say”.

It amuses me that when I listened to the recording of the poem, I could not for the life of me hear the word “shit”. I played it again and again, and could only hear “sit”. What a difference an “h” makes!

Over the past few days I’ve considered the poem on several levels. For many years I went everywhere with pockets full of plastic bags so as to remove my dog’s shit from places where people might step in it. I was saddened by the fact that I was taking the world’s most biodegradable substance, the thing that would, theoretically, feed the future, wrapping it in a non-biodegradable membrane and sending it to landfill. I saw that thought in Yoko’s poem.

I am also guilty of shitting in remote rural places, answering what is universally recognised as a “call of nature”. I have proved experientially that one thing you can’t do at the same time is look up at the sky. You fall over backwards and find yourself in… Then I was reminded of a video I posted on Facebook of a two-year-old Asian boy squatting in perfect balance while he fed a twittering group of birds from a dish with a chopstick. I mentioned that I was amazed at his poise and David Wayne Landrum said “People in the east…. know how to squat. They keep perfect poise and balance doing so and can remain in that posture (which we find so difficult and awkward) for long periods of time”. I had a vision of myself sitting in an airport lounge with Yoko, explaining this, and the pair of us falling about in silly woman-laughing.

That airport kept coming back into my thinking. Odd, since I have only flown less than a handful of times. I realised that it was because of a picture I’d seen of Yoko opening it, standing in front of a line of Lennon’s that forms an epigraph below the name of it. LPL (not ACK, which is Nantucket – see how my mind wanders?)

And if you don’t like “shit”, will “fuck” do? We’re in the process of fucking-up the earth while we look romantically towards the bit we haven’t yet shat on. I am put in mind of Oscar’s gutter, and his stars.

If we are dropping dollops of real shit, we nourish the earth and create a paradise for our children. If we cover it with the sort of shit that our lifestyle creates, we leave them a different kind of legacy.

I’ve got all this headshit from those few maligned lines. Even an echo in the uppidowniness of it, “we look up the sky” and “I sat belonely down a tree”

So many head-adventures from such an ugly little thing. The Japanese are good at that. They even have a poetic form that aims to perfect that concept of multum in parvo. What do they call it…?

Maybe it's because I'm on a camping holiday right now, but I read the poem this morning and smiled.

And the music Walter linked to is fantastic. Reminded me of Can. Go Yoko!

"It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."

-- Oscar Wilde

Aaaaagh! Is it just me...?

Greenfield Morning is interesting-- it's not my thing, but I can certainly understand why it might appeal to some. And I'd certainly never claim that she wasn't an artist, whatever that means. But I'm sorry, this poem, no. You really have to contort yourself in order to justify it, and why bother? As was probably mentioned, if Joe Nobody had written this, it would have never seen the light of day. And rightfully so.

Compare anything to Can (the best of bands) and I'll listen to it. The songs Walter posted are good indeed.

x
Who would have predicted this poem would spark such response? Answer: everyone : )

Aaron N.'s response is by far the most enlightening. If that is the kind of thought this poem provokes then I'm the one who doesn't get it. It is too minimalist in its expression for me to flesh it out and feel it. I admit I am largely talking in the dark on this one, though I do fully understand that her art is attractive to some. I truly wish I did understand her work. I just can't grasp it.

Here's one reason why, I think:

In 1973 I was naive. I was excited to think I could walk into Apple Studios and get an interview with Lennon for my school newspaper about his Mind Games album. I was told by the receptionist that he was "marooned in the U.S." and she gave me an address to write to him and send him my questions. I did that, but never heard back.
I'm still naive. I've tried, with some success, to rid myself of it but it has a hold on me.
So, my hunch is that Ono's art is not for the naive...
x

------
Coming back to say I'm listening to Greenfield Morning/I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City and reading comments about it and Ono's impact work. Here's one of the comments:

A brilliant sound picture. The title is taken from a poem Yoko had written about her miscarriage the previous year. To me, the loop of Ringo's drumming is like the wheels of the 'baby carriage' going across the cracks in the sidewalk. Yoko's singing brings to mind the ululating of mourning women in many cultures around the world. Genius.

That helps. The piece reminds me of a sparse Revolution #9 that Lennon pieced together (with the help of Ono) on the Beatles' White Album. I listen to that song as much as any the Beatles produced. I know every nuance of it. The White Album was the album that turned me on to the Beatles' work. I've never been a fan of their early work except for it's formative impact on their later work. Their later work (Revolver and later) is stellar IMO.
x

"...Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent."

--W.B. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"