The
War on Christmas
Brandon
Brown*, J. Gordon Faylor*
December
2018
Self-published,
limited edition pamphlet [Oakland/El Cerrito, California],
“...distributed by 'word of mouth'...either given out in person or
mailed to friends/family/etc. Something of a nod to Jack Spicer who
would never distribute his books outside of the Bay Area...I have a
bunch of copies of The
War on Christmas
and can always make more as needed.” [Communication via
email to Clara B. Jones from J. Gordon Faylor, 2/8/2019]
Unpaginated
[32 pp]
A
book review in innovative sonnet form by Clara B. Jones. Lines of
poetry appearing in italics are from The
War on Christmas.
“What
is the relationship of such an 'enigma text' to the poetry of High
Modernism?” Marjorie Perloff
1
The
War on Christmas,
The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terror, The War on
Pleasure, The War on Childhood, The War on Western Civilization, The
War on White Males, The War on War, The War on Modernism, The War on
Truth: “The
utter tranquility of an abandoned / Wasteland, where even the hawks /
Picking apart the rotten carcass of a / Guinea pig bite in quietude.”
2
Brown
and Faylor “defamiliarize” Christmas from religious observance,
to commodified holiday, to symbolism, to metaphor. Their description
of elves is not how we imagine them, though Viktor Shklovsky would
enjoy reading this pamphlet.
3
Hard/soft
rhyming: “Come
here, little winter robin, belly so bright; / sit on Santa's stool
and tell me of your world / where kites fly high in the wind / across
the fields, gossiping daisies alight....”
4
“I
wrote about what I didn't see. The experience that eluded me somehow
intrigued me more than the one I was having....” John Ashbery
5
“Dear
J. Gordon Faylor, Dear Brandon / Brown, Dear Comrades: Thanks for /
Extinguishing the need for a Christmas. / Now every day is a goddam
candy cane. / Cheers to you all. Love, Children.”
And no one will find coal and ashes on Christmas morn ever again!
6
“I
can feel these positive fats / And complex antioxidants fortifying /
My body against illness and the sad / Passions of life.”
All well and good; but, do we still get to eat plum pudding?
7
“The
words 'expressionism' and 'expressionist' first cropped up in the art
literature around 1911, initially as blanket terms for avant-garde
art in Europe around the turn of the century.” Norbert Wolf
8
“Whenever
life unearths you / ruthless, sparks injury or ill / red devils
burgeoning under skin / to try and kill you and your soul, deliver /
thyself to the Christmas Hospital.”
[Clara vividly recalls the strange feeling in her gut when her father
drove her to the Richmond (Va) Children's Hospital on Brook Road on
Christmas Eve in 1949 to stare at the building where kids with polio
were housed.]
9
Combinations
of words and phrases seem to make sense at first; but Brown &
Faylor are playing “language games.”
10
La'Toya:
What does this stanza make you think about, Jamal?—“The
permanent fixture of the sun
/ permits
no life the absence of light
/ in
our world, as you know we scrounge,
/ and
must, like mice for the germ
/ of
a voracious reality.”**—Jamal:
'Honkies' control the banks and the media.
11
Symbolism,
a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that originated
with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to
painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American
literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. [Retrieved from
internet, 10/7/19]
12
“And
what, you asked me, of Christmas angels? / We were sitting in the
Plaza de Janeiro / Eating a rol de guyaba, one of the world's crucial
/ Pastries. Annoying little hairless dogs / Bit at the stone feet of
the huge replica of the David / Which rises up from soil in the
middle of the park / And bares its head for the shit of birds.”
[Poetics is as useful to angels as Ornithology is to birds.]
13
“Act
so that there is no use in a centre.” Gertrude Stein
14
“To
maintain the hush of another / Christmas, barreling through the /
Long silent night to be born.”
And, who doesn't like W.B. Yeats?
“And
a very Merry Christmas / to all and to all a good night!”
*Brandon
Brown and J. Gordon Faylor are poets and editors living in El
Cerrito, and Oakland, California, respectively.
**Italics
in original
