Poetryland History Lesson (poem)

“If you get the joke, you get the history.”
~ Shirley Wajda, Kent State University
Wonderful Professor of History and Museum Studies
and former resident of the City of Boston,
(NEVER a professor at Poetryland)




The class is called “History of the United States.”
It is taught by Professor J R P Cueball
who makes less than $40,000 a year,
has three cats named Linus, Marty, and Sprig,
respectively,
and secretly hangs teenybopper posters
of Britney Spears on the wall
behind his office door.
He is single, thus the posters, and cross-eyed.
He has a reputation for being a dick.
Students take him
to develop backbone,
to learn important life lessons
about bitter white men
who are condemned to teach,
who say, “We’re all historians here.”
But no one knows
what a historian is.
He knows his reputation and thrives on its word,
brings pop quizzes on the first day of class
and makes them worth 25% of the final grade.

His social security number is 412-98-5006.

He lives in one room of a small house
that he does not own
on Winding Trail Parkway in Kansas City, Missouri.

He takes the train
to Poetryland everyday.

The class is held in the Lundberg Auditorium
on the North Quad of the South Lawn.
Professor J R P Cueball hates his classroom.
He tells in-coming students it’s the worst
room on campus. Welcome!

Students at Poetryland University
are fairies and figments of imagination.

They are rogues, they are lovers.
They are pretty, petty, and perfect.
They are lofty, lighthearted, and luminous.
They are as smart, if not smarter than their maker.

They glow “like the moon.”
They sing “like the birds.”
They babble “like the brook.”

They are a whole generation
of well-drawn
metaphor/clichés

Professor J R P Cueball hates them. All of them.
Even the pretty ones.

On each first day of class,
he welcomes the new bunch
with the same speech,
even though he tries to make
it sound extemporaneous:

“Ahem.
Greetings.
I am Professor J R P Cueball.
You are druids and imps
with no finger prints.
Welcome.
I guess.
For lack of a better word.
This is the History
of the United States.
I hope none of you
are big Jefferson
fans or Washington buffs
because I don’t teach
them in this class.
The Constitution’s too old -
who gives a rat’s ass
about dead anarchists?
The Civil War’s all bullshit.
(Let me save you the suspense:
the North wins and the South
will not rise again)
The World Wars are nothing
but propaganda.
The stock market crash is dull,
so is foreign policy with Latin America.
The very mention of Korea puts me to sleep
and no one cared about Vietnam when
it was current.
So, fuck it, no really, fuck it all.
Why dwell on the past?
It has nothing to do with today.
This course will begin our nation’s
proud history
with Bill Clinton, our Founding Father.
Light your cigars,
throw away your history
textbooks and subscribe
to Time and People
or The National Inquirer.
If you don’t ask me
to ‘Remember the Alamo’
or discuss the War of 1812
or admit there ever was a Civil Rights Movement,
we’ll get along fine.”

This time, when Professor J R P Cueball
finishes his solemn, thought-provoking introduction,
a fairy-like student with Rapunzel hair
and a Britney Spears body
raises her waif-like hand to ask why
he skips two hundred years of history
and he stares at her, cross-eyed and smirking,
and says: “That shit

is archaic and tired.
Useless, too. Unimportant. Uninspired.
We’ll stick to the cutting edge,
what modern writers say
about history. This class

is all about shits and giggles.
Starting now.

Here’s your pop quiz:

What are contemporary poets
writing about?”

The Archangels and the Devils,
the Melodramatics and the Seducers,
the Fallen and the Rising
all stare at Professor J R P Cueball

and he laughs.

“Don’t say they write
about history, either, drones
because, look, all that shit
is out-dated.
No one reads Thomas Paine
or Ben Franklin anymore.
People watch Hardball,
60 Minutes, The Daily Show
with John Stewart.
I have four words for you all:
Fuck. The. History. Channel.
Our forefathers didn’t make
that many mistakes that were
too catastrophic for us to repeat.
In this class, we pontificate
on ‘farting in the general direction’
of those who came before.
Now, pass your quizzes forward,
my pretty pirates and handsome handmaidens!”

The Britney Spears/Rapunzel-like fairy stands
when he finishes, bows her head respectfully
and says,

“Professor Cueball?
In the immortal words
of Kurt Vonnegut,
‘shove it up
your fundament.’

History is foundation,
isolation, explanation.”

Holding her quiz up in the air, she continues:

“And contemporary poets
try too hard to be free
from the past. It’s
dry and tough, just
like you.”

The Britney Spears/Rapunzel fairy lives
with her boyfriend, a spider monkey named
Zed, in a tree on Mortimer Lane.
She has no social security number
because she’s not human.
She has no finger prints
because Zed licked them off.

She has no history
because Poetryland University
doesn’t teach her about it.

That is the lesson.