Poetry and Pop


Page 9 (of 13)



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As I've argued, it's not enough to simply applaud these poets for responding
(at long last) to a popular art like rock music. It's how they respond that
matters. As readers, we need to live awhile in these poets' texts, perform our
own readings of their readings of music-related experience. In that spirit, I
want conclude by looking at some length at a single poem from Sweet
Nothings. "The Supremes" by Mark Jarman demonstrates how rich this
genre can be, how a poem can capture not only some of the contradictory public
meanings of rock, but its private meanings as well. 



Set in the mid-sixties, the poem opens with a conventional California scene:
a group of boys, on break from surfing, are eating sweet rolls in a local store
-- 


In Ball's Market after surfing till noon,

we stand in wet trunks, shivering

as icing dissolves off our sweet rolls

inside the heat-blued counter oven,

when they appear on his portable TV,

riding a float of chiffon as frothy

as the peeling curl of a wave.

The parade m.c. talks up their hits

and their new houses outside of Detroit

and old Ball clicks his tongue.

Gloved up to their elbows, their hands raised

toward us palm out, they sing,

"Stop! in the Name of Love" and don't stop

but slip into the lower foreground. 




In this first image of the group ("riding a float of chiffon as
frothy/as the peeling curve of a wave"), Jarman sketches one of the issues
explored later in the poem: race. The Supremes, after all,
were not only a "girl group," but a black group as well -- seen by
white audiences as both exotic and natural. Like other girl groups in the
sixties, The Supremes inherited conventions that governed the appearance and
behavior of women performers. But as black performers, they were subject to
additional constraints. As Andrew Ross and others have noted, it was these latter
conventions -- rooted in the minstrel show, and manifest in Vegas-style outfits
and heavily choreographed movements -- that were the same ones young white groups
were beginning to dismiss as "phony" and, ironically,
"soul-less." 






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