Morning In America: A Poetic Assemblage from the Long Decade
by P.J Laska, Igneus Press, 2016
Reviewed by Bob Henry Baber, NOW & THEN: The Appalachian Magazine,
Vol. 32, No. 1, 2016.
Let me state my bias up front: P.J. Laska was my Professor at Antioch/Appalachia and a fellow member of the Soupbean Poets, became a mentor, and has been my friend for over 40 years. That being said, Laska is a literary genius, Zen master, historian, political prognosticator, and Appalachian rebel rolled into one. He is a true red, white, and black and blue American patriot writer; a cultural prophet without recognition in his own land and time. But in a moment in our history when two 1-per-centers are about to vie for the Presidency in a corporate-funded media circus (which, btw, is just as interested in the size of Kim Kardashian’s butt or Christmas card line, as they are in if people have real jobs, healthcare, and educations) can this really come as a great surprise?
Whatever. Laska’s politically imagistic poems distill it all to essence. Witness these two gems:
Foraging at Starbucks
Round the trash barrel/at days end/pigeons, sparrows/and a bag lady/content
***
At the Wall Street Café
Bold and unsharing/the urban sparrow/under the table/covets the too big/crust of bread.
***
It don’t get any clearer than that. Wall Street excess and Citizens United rendered in imagism that will not be erased.
Near the beginning of this eclectic book one of Laska’s many characters, who may emerge from ancient history or the shuffling halls of our currently and chronically underfunded VA hospitals, states, “A poet’s nothing apart from people, apart from place.” The time from which this book begins is the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan’s, “axe of austerity began falling on America’s middle class . . . and on the working, non-working and disabled poor.” Fall it did, but few heard and fewer still recorded it. Laska did. And in what might be called “mourning in America” he connects us with its horrid thud and the damage done that has only accelerated in pace and depth in the ensuing decades. We see the exposed flesh. Smell the blood. Feel the hunger. Shiver. Lose heart. If FDR saved capitalism from itself, who will do so now as the Koch brothers’ think tanks and Super-Pacs rapidly undo the fraying social safety networks set in place almost a century ago, Laska asks, with frighteningly good cause.
”It was a time when churches began/installing loudspeakers in place of bells that daily tolled the noon hour. / It was a time of felony fraudulent schemes in banking and abstract bite marks made with the stroke of a pen. / It was the time of the multi-billion dollar Federal Bailout of the bankrupt de-regulated Savings and Loan used by former hard money lenders as their own personal piggy banks. / It was a time when a little critical common sense could have glimpsed the disasters that lay ahead,” Laska writes, referring to the 2008 meltdown of “Banks Too Big to Fail” which precipitated a 1 Trillion Dollar bailout (paid for by us) that made the pre-cursing schemes of the 80’s seem like the primitive pyramid schemes of three year olds playing with colored wood blocks.
Laska’s book is a tough read. It ain’t for the faint hearted and it’s quite intellectually challenging at times. I think I’m reasonably smart, but Laska stretches my mind till it hurts. Fortunately, he also gives intellectual exercise some much-needed comic relief and gallows humor. I laughed out loud three or four times while reading the book, a rarity for me. Like another great Appalalchian poet, Jim Webb, once wrote, “You can’t make this stuff up!” Neither can Laska whose fascinating footnotes at the end of the book (almost 40 pages of them) are just as interesting as the dialogues and poems themselves. Documentation with a punch, if you will. Prose poetry robbed from the headlines of the newspapers. Political forensic files.
Finally, I wish to end with this guardedly optimistic quote from his preface, “Given the disasters of the Long Decade as it continues into the 21st Century, the title “Morning in America" is bitterly ironic, but I do not foreclose on the possibility of a non-ironic meaning for it in the future.” Hear, hear, Dr. Laska. Hear, hear.
