San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STATE LINES California Poetry
Kyle Dargan’s “Olympic/Drive” is a masterful example of how a poem can be made from elements of rhetoric and song. His poetry usually carries a vital, lyric pulse. I love the rhythmic excitement of lines like “All around, one wide screen — the dark hills / due north pixel-pocked with villa lights.” Dargan’s argument, that gentrification paves over history and culture along this tarred stretch of Los Angeles, is set into motion from the poem’s first gesture. Dargan emphasizes the irony of “the gorgeous dog park” in this neighborhood by focusing on the homeless men who inhabit it. The poem also fittingly implicates the entertainment industry for the way it sells us the “American dream.” Across from the gorgeous dog park, men dream against poodle-pissed trees — their pillows crafted from breath captured in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate climate offers respite. Let us suppose they too have tales, here in this city where filmed stories turn a mint. All around, one wide screen — the dark hills due north pixel-pocked with villa lights. Below, streets hemmed with haggard brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies ever unfolding. Who is pitching this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.” Voiceover: After the Integration Apocalypse, one man must find his way in a land where the sole survivors who look or speak like him are those rendered deranged and indigent. Assume the Motion Picture Association eager to levy a “Rated R,” then remember that those who judge violence never shared your definition of savagery. A culling is all your eyes decipher — your herd thinned. No urban wildlife anywhere to be found, yet hunger for a hunt remains. Tagline: A hero must choose — between starving or bartering one’s own skin. Plot: Amid the solar famine, bioelectric research has revealed melanin’s subtle charge — the brown population gone mad from being sapped like Copper Tops. Imagine The Matrix without the extraterrestrial machines. Imagine that among us have lived scientists churning statistics, devising a human harvest, a controlled carnage to subsist off fellow men. The drained bones left to be gnawed by next century’s hounds. Copyright © 2018 by Kyle Dargan. Published 2018 by TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Kyle Dargan is the author of four collections of poetry, including “Anagnorisis,” in which “Olympic/Drive” appears. He has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.