The New World

I
Lost until Columbus found her,
canyons yawning, deserts aching,
she had room to foster children,
bought their past, returning freedom,
watched them spread across her prairies.
Only then, when they were settled
did they wonder where they came from,
made up stories of brave exploits,
- bison roaming, laughing rivers,
whitewashed fences, burning bridges -
painting haloed saints and angels
like the stained glass of their home towns.
Rather than ignore the world some
copied it like prodigies. Too
youthful to express themselves, they
duplicated nudes and landscapes.

When Germanic pride rekindled
dreams of purity and power,
Europe's avant-garde invaded,
brought the world - its bricks and pisspots -
back inside the walls of culture.
Cutting out the middle man they
changed the world - made billboard ads and
heaps of garbage, opened theme bars,
wrapped up buildings in white plastic -

yes this is art, you can walk out of it
whenever you like, emerging from the cinema
into sunlight to wonder why Mondriaan kept
a wooden tulip painted white in his New York studio.

II
Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge
in Kingston-upon-Thames) knew motion needed moments,
not long exposure. He exhibited volcanos, exotic native women,
the ruins of Rome. Artists still mocked him.
So he conceived the shutter,
assembled a wall of white boards across a field,
rolled out a long strip of white canvas,
placing cameras at yard intervals 5 yards from the boards,
tying their shutters to tacks with silk thread - nothing but the best.

Then he waved the jockey to ride his thoroughbred
along the canvas, the threads breasted through like years.
He took the photographic plates to the mobile workshop,
pacing up and down outside like the expectant father he'd never be.

Later in San Francisco Arts School he projected a Gainsborough,
then cranked up his Zoogyroscope to show
the world's first ever movie, demonstrating that when
all the horse's legs were off the muddied canvas
they were not spread like a hobbyhorse's but tucked in.

III
Art or science? Creation or discovery?
They were all explorers, all lovers
knowing more about the natives
than the natives knew themselves.
By creating the future they discovered a version
of their past, had to explore further.

Five ... a nation silenced. Station wagons lining a desert road
Four ... while a jet-lagged sex tourist leaves a Zambian Jumbo at JFK
Three ... a white-cell white-out mutating across the States -
Two ... from GRIDS to the gay disease then AIDS.
One ... Don't open attachments, they could be viruses.
Lift Off ... soon, another satellite in space,
peering over communist shoulders at the headlines.

Stone-faced politicians wired up the jaws of Liberty.
The CIA hired Strayer from Princeton to study intelligence
reports. A mediaevalist, he could fill in gaps, see through
contradictions. He found the knowledge he picked up
about Russia useful in his lectures.

Oxford's Professor Daniels, Black Death expert,
is coaxed from retirement to analyse
the epidemic's progress. There is no cure, no communist plot.
His grandchildren teach him about Virtual Reality
so he needn't visit the Pentagon.

The Web's heartless, no frontiers, no distance.
Pompei's a click away, but the enemy's within -
its amphitheatre the world turned inside out -
savages surrounded by the Roman Empire
that crumbled, rotten to the core,
obese American kids pretending to be Russell Crowe
asking for the nearest McDonalds.
Soon, briefly beautiful, they'll be grandtouring Europe in threes,
bringing back postcards from great museums,
enriching the new with the old
like worms preying on the unprotected.

IV
Custer boasts about his faked past as he leads three wise men
into the Badlands, laughing as their eyes dart nervously
towards the horizon. He smokes while they dig up
fossils, starts singing in the heat of the day
just to sweat'em up some more, offers them his bottle.

A hornblower skips off a Mississippi river boat dressed smart
as any white man, sits on his suitcase while a buddy
thumps the locks closed. Whores parade. He buys two.
Years later, Bix would hire a taxi to tour Amsterdam,
playing his trumpet in the back seat for hours.

You can see her naked on a stool, back arched
towards the tall window, light seeping round her waist
to her belly, golden, face turned away; an old man's painting,
a dark room, bare floorboards. She casts no shadows.
She will not tell, even after Wyeth's death.

An old man in a Homer Simpson T-shirt lies on the sidewalk,
mugged for his sneakers. People walk round him,
not wanting his blood on their sneakers, not wanting
to phone the cops on their mobile in case it's snatched
along with their unbacked-up list of lovers' numbers.

Bursting into her office I see the back of her head, the reflection
of her face, the skyscrapers opposite crying. She drives all day
through wakes of prairie dust, past abandoned filling stations,
a cowboy emerging from shadows once she's passed,
pushing his hat back, wiping his brow with a finger.

V
In waiting rooms when a formal feeling
comes, the greatest minds dive into wrecks like
blackbirds disturbing the Sunday morning,
picking at worms on the road not taken.

A busker arrives, picking up the crumbs,
playing his blue guitar on Golden Gate,
drunk on Dylan, gorging on stolen plums,
anxious about influence and college

fees, his work on American Pie's
lyrics, his lover on a 404
wanting more space. He's feeling small. He tries
to strum lost moments into melody.

A trannie drops a card into his palm
Hamlet. All male cast. Log into will.com

VI
"What happened there is - they all have to rearrange their brains now - is the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practise madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing." - Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hamburg, 16th September, 2001

Notes

I read somewhere about the phases where European artists migrated to the USA (Disney's Snow White benefited from Jewish immigrants with a dark Gothic upbringing) and phases where Americans flocked to Europe ("like leaves in Autumn", wrote Pound). I decided to write about this cultural interplay, emphasising Art and the past. It became my first attempt at a "long" poem. I hope there's enough thematic continuity to prevent it looking too much like a sequence of short poems. Under the main theme there are other threads that help bind the piece together - inside/outside; moments/continuity; computers (worms, attachments, the WWW, etc). Some commentary might help -

I - Native Americans have been ignored or misrepresented by white man's myths - Columbus's discovery of America; Longfellow's Hiawatha. The colonists adopted Europe's past for a while. Longfellow taught French and Spanish at Harvard. He was a europhile and was disliked because of it. The early artistic settlers after initially continuing in the academic European way began to develop their own styles. The World Wars lead to influxes of European avant-gardists which sparked off modern art in the USA, much of it produced by 1st generation immigrants (Warhol, Roethko, Christo, etc). A description of Art's progress is given in this section and continues later.
II - Edward Muggeridge typified the new American's attitude to the past - changing his name to make it sound more Anglo Saxon while challenging Europe's traditions, freely mixing art, science and showmanship.
III - Art invades non-Art. Expansionism continues: with the Wild West conquered, space beckons. Yet history keeps intervening - the future and past interact. With satellite and the Web some borders dissolve. The age of cheap travel brings a wave of young American tourists to Europe's museums.
IV - Now that readers have seen the main themes we rewind to the past again with snapshots of characteristic American scenes, some foreshadowing future events, some alluding back to Europe's heritage or the USA's past.
V - A freewheeling variant of the sonnet (a European form) integrates earlier themes (though now using USA's cultural heritage rather than Europe's). There are allusions to Dickinson, Stevens, Rich, Ginsberg, Crane, Frost and Williams. The final couplet (which only rhymes if an American accent is used) again brings the past and present together - in Will Shakespeare's time the drama groups were all-male too (a "trannie" is a transvestite). Note: You get a 404 error message when a web page has gone missing.
VI - The last part this poem is given over to a well-known European artist, commenting on the WTC tragedy as if it were an art Happening. Perhaps he was misquoted.

I'd better address the issue of difficulty. At the word/phrase level there are few problems - parts I and V in particular include allusions but they're to famous poems or pieces of art. One reader was puzzled by who the characters were at the end of part IV. Perhaps there are many other potential stumbling blocks in the poem where people don't know whether they've "missed" something and hence misdirect their energy looking for things which aren't there. The main problem people have is not determining what things mean but why they're there at all. I admit that it's shockingly impersonal (I haven't even been to the States!) and there's no personal tragedy or revelation to empathize with. There is no overarching narrative, no neat conclusion. Synthesis needs to be deferred. Thematic hints are given, but they're not all bundled at the end. Though there are small scale narratives, these are montaged together, related to material both before and after. I suppose the most obvious structural model is 'The Waste Land', itself the result of a USA/UK old/new alliance. If nothing else at least it's informative, and the mix of Formal/Free verse with factual/lyric passages provides variety.