August 2015
I was born in Denver, Colorado, on the westernmost edge of the Great Plains, and I’ve always responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call “clarity.” Not that I’m interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity; after all, light is not always benign: it blinds as often as it reveals, as anyone who’s grown up in my part of the world would know. That duality fascinates me and continues to shape my work. I’ve published 15 collections of poems over the years, most recently Marked Men, Thread of the Real, and The Earth-Boat, and in September 2014 Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper appointed me to a four-year term as Colorado Poet Laureate. I teach for the University of Denver’s University College, where I also direct two graduate degree programs, and live with my wife Melody in the foothills southwest of Denver.
American Anthem
Wandering the Web, I
stumble on
dreamy Kodachromes
of Connie Francis, one
fading into another
while she aches out
her famed
rendition of Who’s
Sorry Now? I lean
close to listen—and through
the dark back-
ward and abysm of
time, I can see that red
and cream ’55 Chevy
where her voice first
pierced me.
A buddy’s older
brother had taken
pity on us, two bored
ten-year-olds,
and brought us with him
to The Scotchman drive-in
(our neighborhood’s infamous
eatery, all
hotrod
machismo and moist
young love). He even
bought burgers to keep us
occupied
while he gravely “cruised
for chicks.” I can almost touch
the rolled down back seat window,
a carhop’s tray
gripping
the door. The sultry
summer night breeze flows
in, dyed by The Scotchman’s
red neon.
There we slouch, my pal
and I, sipping through straws
the sweet stinging fizz of Hot
Kookies (Cokes spiked
with pure
cinnamon oil), when
Connie’s voice fountains
from the car’s radio.
Eros! I
feel it still—a rush
in the veins of my
childhood (happily bell-jarred
in distractions,
so damned
American). When
that voice touched me, Ike’s
“advisors” already
had spent years
rolling loaded dice
in Vietnam (a year
for every million dead
in jungles, in
paddies),
a triumphal gleam
in their goatish eyes;
and just a year later,
the fêted
genius of D-Day
would re-cross the ocean
for a photo-op with his
Spanish fascist
friend—one
with a nation’s neck
under his heel. So
much for the pipedream
of our own
guiltlessness! And yet,
America, I do
not call your name without hope,
no thanks to your
elites
greedy for light sweet
crude and endless war,
but thanks to the likes of
Connie: born
Concetta Rosa
Maria Franconero
in wartime Newark,
her clear voice still
sweetens
my sour love for you.
America, shake
off that old hand-me-down
anthem! That
pub song with lyrics
by a sly slaveholding
lawyer. What you need is more
songs like Connie’s:
a tune
born with my mother
in the bleak roiling
wake of the First World War,
a song still
haunting in the long
shadow of the Second,
as it will surely haunt us
in the Third War
with its
Humvees thundering
under angelic
hosts of drones. Right to the
end, she crooned,
just like a friend, I
tried to warn you somehow.
A meaning we’d all missed. Then
the radio
rasped—as
if the president
were clearing his throat
to hawk yet one more war
half a world
away; but what blared
forth was “Flying Purple
People Eater”! With what glee
we seized the beat,
threw back
our boyish heads, and
blithely sang along….
Wandering the Web, I
stumble on
dreamy Kodachromes
of Connie Francis, one
fading into another
while she aches out
her famed
rendition of Who’s
Sorry Now? I lean
close to listen—and through
the dark back-
ward and abysm of
time, I can see that red
and cream ’55 Chevy
where her voice first
pierced me.
A buddy’s older
brother had taken
pity on us, two bored
ten-year-olds,
and brought us with him
to The Scotchman drive-in
(our neighborhood’s infamous
eatery, all
hotrod
machismo and moist
young love). He even
bought burgers to keep us
occupied
while he gravely “cruised
for chicks.” I can almost touch
the rolled down back seat window,
a carhop’s tray
gripping
the door. The sultry
summer night breeze flows
in, dyed by The Scotchman’s
red neon.
There we slouch, my pal
and I, sipping through straws
the sweet stinging fizz of Hot
Kookies (Cokes spiked
with pure
cinnamon oil), when
Connie’s voice fountains
from the car’s radio.
Eros! I
feel it still—a rush
in the veins of my
childhood (happily bell-jarred
in distractions,
so damned
American). When
that voice touched me, Ike’s
“advisors” already
had spent years
rolling loaded dice
in Vietnam (a year
for every million dead
in jungles, in
paddies),
a triumphal gleam
in their goatish eyes;
and just a year later,
the fêted
genius of D-Day
would re-cross the ocean
for a photo-op with his
Spanish fascist
friend—one
with a nation’s neck
under his heel. So
much for the pipedream
of our own
guiltlessness! And yet,
America, I do
not call your name without hope,
no thanks to your
elites
greedy for light sweet
crude and endless war,
but thanks to the likes of
Connie: born
Concetta Rosa
Maria Franconero
in wartime Newark,
her clear voice still
sweetens
my sour love for you.
America, shake
off that old hand-me-down
anthem! That
pub song with lyrics
by a sly slaveholding
lawyer. What you need is more
songs like Connie’s:
a tune
born with my mother
in the bleak roiling
wake of the First World War,
a song still
haunting in the long
shadow of the Second,
as it will surely haunt us
in the Third War
with its
Humvees thundering
under angelic
hosts of drones. Right to the
end, she crooned,
just like a friend, I
tried to warn you somehow.
A meaning we’d all missed. Then
the radio
rasped—as
if the president
were clearing his throat
to hawk yet one more war
half a world
away; but what blared
forth was “Flying Purple
People Eater”! With what glee
we seized the beat,
threw back
our boyish heads, and
blithely sang along….
©2015 Joseph Hutchison