Poetry
from Full House 2
In the greatest scenes
It is fairly common
—which is to say
We are usually unaware
Of an exact moment
Like this one—when
The actor repeats himself
In error—tho this is felt exactly
As particularized embodiment
And it is at this and for this
The crowd starts laughing its loudest
Its loudest thing is history
I lie beneath
So much writhing
In the air
The performativity of insects
I admire in lines
The yellow-green
Spoils of the newest trees
I have yet to name the
Characters or give them bells’
The golden tolling
Of apples
“Heaped up”
In their necks
Which means—containment
It means masculine
If I could particularize
Or “You make me happy,”
Or “No, you make me unhappy, actually,”
Something is happening
What seems plausible on the page
Until one of the actors speaks it
Then unfolds falsely—and this was not the feeling
This set of words had
Meant to mean—even suggesting
The area around non-numbers
Or the adding up of voices—this one
To this one—in a long chain
A false song—
The trouble is—
Instead of acting
The actor stands in front of a mirror
Instead of standing the actor admires
What is so beautiful
Is so perfect
Establishing shot
There is a wind gathering in front of the building
Where the emergency takes place
All day
Inside me. Just the night before
I was in Del Ray
Fighting with Jesse.
Presumably it was about nothing
Though I stood outside the motel
As he cut across the courtyard
And pool—and could I focus all my attention
Now on this empty pool
And lights built into the concrete sides
Illuminating the water from within
Or perhaps the shadows travel upward
The terrazzo walls to the parking lot behind the motel
And those streetlights I remember
How empty those spaces seemed
Though filled with water
Score
I associate
I associate the death of Mom
With the only landscape
My observation changed
When the camera pulls away
To reveal
The king is Elvis and everything is passionate
And still alive. And my dream is dumb
That I am speaking to you
Though you have my arm
Twisted behind my back
I can’t say Uncle.
But. Mom
Uncle Jesse
Joey.
Danny.
My parents.
Are missing.
Labor
There is the feeling that nothing can mitigate this feeling
Of a pulling away
Into space—a string
Which we could inhabit
Like a pin-head
I think this means
Inadequately—dance
Music—in theory
What happens to us—
Happens in slow motion—
The head feels itself coming undone
So limpidly, in chunks and ribbons
For as long as we have
This idea, we come into being
Fresh, out of the shower, when you look
At the cleaned kitchen. The expensive living room
Rug. And what became of the other people
Who suffered us
Relative to the annual drop or rise in temperature?
What became
Of us? It is true
Nothing? Or it is not true? And everything.
That’s really what this is about.
At least, I think
That’s what this says.
Origins 3
And does this surface
Signal like a flag
Ripple in an airless breeze
Does it mean a symbol
Of our invention of the symbolic
Does it mean
The meaningless
Fluttering across the true and permanent dark
Of space—what binds our boundless
Plural—at midnight—as we’re walking
From the applause in our head
In love with the orange of streetlights
And Tic Tacs
And bird eggs
And these new birds
in our vocab
Which have hitherto been nonexistent
A thin river threaded a throne
Of soil, crumbles, light, like earths
Like Mothers, is a kind of dark
We will never meet with again
Or that we worship badly
As our grammars allow
A person posing
Near a window, just short of breaking
Off the view, or as good
Any new idea to become
Something we saw far off
Once, so will come to mean one thing
Later, when it’s closer
A family in total adherence to
Scale, a demented image of images
Changing size relative to theme music
The Milkman, The Paperboy, The Evening TV
My Full House
There are TV shows which absolutely conform to the collective’s idea of a TV show—
which willingly accept their place within the tradition—and so refuse to differentiate themselves whatsoever
Full House is the most exemplary of these shows
it is clearly one of the least innovative of the family sitcoms on the Big 3 & throughout its run its sole purpose was seemingly to confirm basically everything we, as the audience, had come to believe as denoting “our culture”
which amounted to an understanding of genre, and our complete subservience to, and dominance of—genre
As the audience of Full House we wanted Full House to be nothing short of a cultural artifact we would one day hold up as “exemplary” of this need
as we watched we were comforted in our collective understanding of ourselves as the audience of Full House
as being in collective possession of an artifact as conforming as Full House
Full House is brutally effective in its ability to comfort without ever elaborating on or identifying this process of collective conformity—in comfort
Perhaps we want to believe ourselves part of a culture as interesting as anything Germany has produced—
after all, do we not have culture? after all, are we not culture?—
perhaps here it is Jeff Franklin the show’s producer and creator where we must look—for irony and questioning of sitcom custom
Franklin in the 80s was a wealthy producer for Warner Bros, and something of a bad boy, he eagerly courted tabloids, controversy, and enjoyed exercising his power in the industry ruthlessly. His drug use was notorious. He had at least two documented breakdowns. He was said to enjoy Roman themed parties
ranklin is on the record as stating his father was abusive –their relationship fraught, frayed—ultimately frayed
what does this say about the triad of widowed males who comprise Full House’s patriarchal structure?
Mark Warner, a critic, writes—“we don’t stay glued to the normative family—but to the supreme attempt to patch one together. We who are not queer or perverts or rebels or artists ourselves have no reason to pledge allegiance to the alterior. The demographic pledges allegiance to their culture—it says yes, we are The Milk Man, The Paper Boy, The Evening TV”
Franklin’s life; his gender, his money, his status, his high powered education—all these bear out over the show; condition the plots which occur almost always without drama
If we are to be honest with ourselves
our only mortality is being off screen
and this is why Full House more than Family Matters –this is why the family of blonde daughters raised by 3 men—has such a hold
we chose to shut ourselves inside this immortal familial constellation—to raise one another like blinds—to fill our interiors and to be made immortal by
the sacrifice of the obviously absent mother
as the show went on, attention turned to the youngest of the daughters—who, by merely being before the camera—from the earliest stage of consciousness to adult consciousness—became a cipher, through which we explored the implications of life in the surveillance state
the constant gaze
and the limits of Self
the Self which is and is not itself at any given time, on camera, before the camera
we as an audience experienced the youngest daughter as an actual and prescient event of doubling, and haunting—the one always being the twin she is not
One of the daughters became a religious zealot, shaved her head
Another bloated up, became addicted to drugs, saw ghosts
The twins refused to eat, became artists, and withered away
One of the dads elaborated on the very dirty nature of being a dad, became depressed, and literally stopped bathing
Another of the dads went into pornography, reached inside, to release the coils of his ancient Attic lust
Another of the dads tried to tell jokes that no one would laugh at. Or could laugh at. This humorless void would eventually defeat irony and usher in the age of sincerity once and for all
An ecstasy of beginnings
these violently
culled coils these bright flowers these in a collision of
or collapse
of lines—these flaming
relics of poems these the difference this time extends
through the other richer difference
of contracting
around or with or into or on
these a capitalized term for blondes
these flowers
in their mouths like a glass
rain their mouths are always breaking
like a wind
through my head
a bough breaks and I am clean
minus the times when I am not always
A modern invention
Joey beams as though Uncle Jesse were his invention
The Greek man
The Greek worker
The Greek debt
“I am finished,” Joey says, with the flourish of a magician
The new art
Many attempts were made to cast Michelle
Into a large steel beam
In gallery space. They suspended
Her from wire—there, she was described as floating
“Like an exchange rate”
In that margin
Between viewer and object
A face
Assumes itself like a definition
Through repeated error—it looks back at itself
It is terrifying?
Error of the gaze—
It is cool?
Where were you when you first heard the word stagflation?
Happy blonde curls
Whimpering, I’m so
Not straight—or I’m not so happy
Cast as a large steel beam
In her mouth
A cow’s tongue
Let us recognize then this moment
Of dairy—beaming
In her mouth
Her words—“Having a cow”
In gallery space, the word white space
Passes for the first time as a sort of plural
For darkness through which
A mind cries. This is not unlike wind
The anal phase
Through which a consciousness
Embedded in our feelings—passes
As a thought—and these thoughts are gas
Attendants to our shared sense of being here
Together, like walls—and have in them
Artifacts of faces—tho the vanished kind
Which belong to fabulations
Errors of translation in the ancient texts
Contributor
Randy Lee MaitlandRandy Lee Maitland is a teacher in Brooklyn, where he also lives and gets along.
