Two Prose-Poems About TV Programs

SEINFELD

There is very little on film or television that moves me to laughter. I am often amused, tickled, impressed by the cleverness of some comedian but, if I watch a whole program I am out of spirits half way through and distinctly disjointed by the last phase of the sequence. As the piece progresses, my laughter becomes mechanical and each chuckle intensifies my ill-at-easeness. At the end of the program I feel flat and empty. I also feel I have wasted my time. -Ron Price with thanks to G.B. Shaw on Oscar Wilde in Bernard Shaw: A Critical View, Nicholas Grene, MacMillan Press, London, 1984, p.4.

Laughter is idiosyncratic, canned,
a commercial product. I feel it inside,
welling-up, fast, a spontaneous explosion,
frequently in Seinfeld, a program of skits
about nothing, trivia, the spaces in relationships,
self-centered human beings. I dig the absurd, my
laughs and millions of others in this most popular
of programs, where the energies of comedy are
harnessed, dynamically: do we understand ourselves
in the end? Society? I create nothing. I invent nothing.
I imagine nothing. I see the drama and laugh at everyday
nothingness. Can I call these laughs spiritual relaxation?
Filling my pocket full with the most delightful emptiness
and the weight of the day lifts, exploded into thin air.

Ron Price
16 August 1998

POETRY: ITS OWN REWARD


The written word holds oh so much
Of wonderful import-
Here in these little books of mine
Shines gold of every sort.
-Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, editor, M.F. Mootry and G. Smith, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1987, p.126.

There is a dominant popular history
of America in our time beginning with
I Luv Lucy and Milton Berle
and ending with Seinfeld and Roseanne,
a text of our time
where viewers mingle imaginatively
with a special kind of intimacy
among the totality of peoples, places and things,
in a consciousness industry,
the primary socializing agency
of these our epochs,
bombarding with trivial material
the increasingly fractured attention span
and the unceasing dream of perfect entertainment
as we surf, now, in a national sport
thanks to remote-control devices
and an abundance of cable-delivered channels
that tell a story of our times, our days.

My poetry calls attention to the boundaries
of this omnipresent rival, this sea of time
and space in which contemporary people
voyage hour by hour, year by year,
altering the texture of human relationships,
the way they know about themselves
and colonize their imagination.

I must intensify my retrospective gaze,
with all humankind as my skin and nervous system,
refashioning myself in my poetry, a godlike prerogative,
and carrying profound truths of the soul, hour after hour
putting marks on paper, an activity that that is against nature:
sitting alone, hunched up, scribbling,
some might say a form of torture
that best attends to grief, joy and the future
and seems only fleetingly intelligible
to what Auden called ‘the odious public’.
Unlike the movies, poetry is
its own exceeding great reward1,
one way of finding the meaning
behind the shadows and within my own realities.

1 Coleridge in The Art of the Critic: Vol.6, Literary Theory and Criticism from the Greeks to the Present, editor, Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Pub., NY, 1988, p. 98.