Blue’s Clews
we wander this mazing labyrinth
Jigsaw scraped Daedalus
and wonder who crafted this no-escape room
SPOILER ALERT: it was us, all along
choke down minnow tar food
picking Soylent Green from between Dr. Teeth's chompers
and choke out the Minotaur
another Dagobah swamp gas Sasquatch sighting
spin around to face the shadow
def process_analysis(self): print(" The Shadow Knows" )
then spin aground
drop on the deck and flop like a Pacific Garbage Patch Kid
it's more stairing, step after step after step after
Escher's full moon cursing
it's more staring, mirror upon | noqu ɿoɿɿim
ergot ogre, never odd or even
as we trace wires along unfinished fenceposts
Rookie of the Year programmer mistake
and trace “Why Are … ?”s back to …
TL;DR: There ain't nobody here but us Robot Chickens
Nicholas De Marino
Nicholas De Marino is an analog head swapper, furniture saboteur, and escaped content farm workhorse. He has several writing credits in bathroom stalls and a hopelessly indulgent column in foofaraw. ¡Viva SFPA y Codex! More at nicholasdemarino.blogspot.com.
Why This Knocked Martheaus Out:
Would it be a bridge too far to call this dystopian verse? We get the tip off in the first lines about entering a labyrinth (a horror labyrinth with maybe a sprinkle of the David Bowie one), then a flurry of collections from several different media spaces (almost like someone in a wasteland collecting trinkets and resources from the pre-apocalypse): a blues song, Star Wars, a 1970s dystopian film, myth, a Dutch painting, a radio drama, internet language. Whether or not we approach a reading or readings of meaning in the poem, I found joy moving through.
Thinking through the title, to "clew" is to roll something in a ball or haul up a sail--there's the homophone with Blues Clues. I'm approaching the poem with that same sense of searching and sailing, every reading leaving me in a different place. On my first reading, I saw ecological devastation or--at least--a societal collapse through the mention of Soylent Green (an older dystopian film where people are secretly being fed people) and how we're being outlasted by robot chickens (nobody but the chickens being an old Blues song). My second reading, I saw the poem mapping of our larger psychosis, how we seem lost, in perpetual search through the poem's consistent motion through the maze, along with that mention of The Shadow (an old radio play character with a slogan of "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men"). Then, there are readings where I trust being lost, embrace it--that "too long, didn't read (TLDR)" ending being an invitation to acknowledge how there are just gaps in knowledge that we have to live with.
Interview
Mar: How did you think through weaving together these different sources: the movies, the myth, the different language styles?
Nicholas: The sweet version: My third through fifth grade teachers, Miss Hall, Mrs. Mudd, and Mrs. Pallo. They're why, today, I'm eyeing notes on a word web that include “TV Guide,” “Great Illustrated Classics,” “Game Genie,” “Seinfeld,” “Napster,” “Boing Boing,” and “Rotten.com.” The dickish version: My father's peripheral, hands-off parenting and the fact I only encountered The Classics as references in “MAD Magazine” and “The Simpsons.” Anyway, all this stuff lives in my head and I try to be an egalitarian host. Ohh, and Dave Barry. He's the first writer I enjoyed who regularly broke the fourth wall.
Mar: I didn't mention this in my commentary, but your sense of sound and music was so strong. How do you add music and prosody to your work? Or what effect does "the way it sounds" have on your craft?
Nicholas: Thank you; that's very kind of you to say. I love music. Right now I'm listening to Momma's Welcome to My Blue Sky because PJ Harvey's “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” reminded me of one of the songs, but I can't remember which. I swear, I never really paid attention to lyrics as words until my late 30s. I'm shocked by the volume of eggcorns and homophones I've been mouthing all these years. It's like the opposite of that Burnt Tongue thing preached by Chuck Palahniuk (via Paul Spanbauer and Gordon Lish). By the way, I write and unironically love trite rhyming poetry.
Mar: I understand if you don't want to completely give the magic trick away, but is there an element of this poem, its meanings or non-meanings, that has changed for you since you wrote it? In other words, have you learned more about the poem or your intentions with it as more time has been spent away from the piece?
Nicholas: The trick, I think, is to palm meaning like a magician and not check until the prestige. Sometimes the reveal is shocking. You think you're producing a shiny coin, but it turns out to be a sedated pigeon. For this poem, I started with the old meaning and spelling of “clew” in the context of the old Greek story about the labyrinth — Wait, why would you need string to solve a labyrinth? It's not a maze … — and then I just riffed on stories, lyrics, and idioms. I have personal associations with the references, but they've accumulated patinas that would only confuse the poem. For example, “Rookie of the Year” is, as far as I'm concerned, a '90s movie Marc or Jeremy played at a birthday sleepover I wasn't allowed to go to or wasn't invited to in the first place.