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  • My Secret Wars of 1984 by Dennis Etzel, Jr. Book Preview

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    Geoffrey Gatza
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    To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process. —Amy King, author of The Missing Museum The sentence inscribes a trauma, bumps over a secret, and accretes toward continuance, which is life. In My Secret Wars of 1984, Dennis Etzel, Jr. constructs little sentence survival packets, brimming with Reaganite Cold War fear and the inescapable “I am” of a teenage boy in a threatening world. Our Superhero of Fragility threads these lines with tenderness, wit, and humor, and comes out the other side more whole than before. —Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood The world of 1984 has a deft tenacity in the hands of Dennis Etzel, Jr. This book blends the personal to the greater political as only the best possible memoir can do. We are all in this world together and the strangest things occur, sometimes when other strange things occur, and I thank Mr. Etzel for his brilliant, sharp reminder. —CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE Some years brand our history: 1861, 1968, 2001; others are best known as fictions, like 1984, made famous by George Orwell in the real year of 1949. The actual 1984 featured Ronald Reagan's race against Walter Mondale, the discovery of the AIDS virus, dead U.S. Marines in Lebanon, and Prince's Purple Rain album. It was an era in which popular culture and foreign policy came together in Star Wars. Dennis Etzel, Jr., then a teen-ager, played a part in that history. His mother came out as a lesbian in the conservative city of Topeka, Kansas. In prose poem boxes, with sentences arranged alphabetically, the confinement of these years is enacted and challenged. Using sources that include Orwell's novel and Lyn Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure" (another artifact of the 1980s), Etzel re-constructs the era and proposes some ways out, foremost among them feminism. Using the language of that era, Etzel pries opens its boxes of secrets. —Susan M. Schultz, author of Dementia Blog, vols. 1 & 2 and Memory Cards: 2011-2012 Series (Singing Horse Press) “My fellow Americans,” Ronald Reagan joked during a microphone sound check in 1984, “I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This was the same year that the infamous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was set to three minutes to midnight, the closest the clock had come to the zero hour of annihilation in 31 years. How did we get out of the 1980s alive? Dennis Etzel, Jr.’s My Secret Wars of 1984 attempts to answer this question, documenting a year in which the young poet was surrounded by the apocalyptic millennialism of the Reagan administration at the same time that his mother was coming out in conservative Topeka, Kansas. Deploying language appropriated from comics, gaming, and political speeches of the era, Etzel frames these texts with urgent appropriations from work in poetics and gender studies that he would read later in life—when he, indeed, had survived the ’80s. Even when the young poet of 1984 revels in pop culture escapist pleasures, he discovers that it is impossible to transcend political reality. Amid the kinetic “flash of red and yellow” of his comic books, he admits, “I still hear my father’s warplanes.” Etzel’s masterful merging of the personal and political is matched by an equally vital attention to the politics of poetic form. Unfolding in wildly appropriative, politically astute prose poems to

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    To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process. —Amy King, author of The Missing Museum The sentence inscribes a trauma, bumps over a secret, and accretes toward continuance, which is life. In My Secret Wars of 1984, Dennis Etzel, Jr. constructs little sentence survival packets, brimming with Reaganite Cold War fear and the inescapable “I am” of a teenage boy in a threatening world. Our Superhero of Fragility threads these lines with tenderness, wit, and humor, and comes out the other side more whole than before. —Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood The world of 1984 has a deft tenacity in the hands of Dennis Etzel, Jr. This book blends the personal to the greater political as only the best possible memoir can do. We are all in this world together and the strangest things occur, sometimes when other strange things occur, and I thank Mr. Etzel for his brilliant, sharp reminder. —CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE Some years brand our history: 1861, 1968, 2001; others are best known as fictions, like 1984, made famous by George Orwell in the real year of 1949. The actual 1984 featured Ronald Reagan's race against Walter Mondale, the discovery of the AIDS virus, dead U.S. Marines in Lebanon, and Prince's Purple Rain album. It was an era in which popular culture and foreign policy came together in Star Wars. Dennis Etzel, Jr., then a teen-ager, played a part in that history. His mother came out as a lesbian in the conservative city of Topeka, Kansas. In prose poem boxes, with sentences arranged alphabetically, the confinement of these years is enacted and challenged. Using sources that include Orwell's novel and Lyn Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure" (another artifact of the 1980s), Etzel re-constructs the era and proposes some ways out, foremost among them feminism. Using the language of that era, Etzel pries opens its boxes of secrets. —Susan M. Schultz, author of Dementia Blog, vols. 1 & 2 and Memory Cards: 2011-2012 Series (Singing Horse Press) “My fellow Americans,” Ronald Reagan joked during a microphone sound check in 1984, “I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This was the same year that the infamous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was set to three minutes to midnight, the closest the clock had come to the zero hour of annihilation in 31 years. How did we get out of the 1980s alive? Dennis Etzel, Jr.’s My Secret Wars of 1984 attempts to answer this question, documenting a year in which the young poet was surrounded by the apocalyptic millennialism of the Reagan administration at the same time that his mother was coming out in conservative Topeka, Kansas. Deploying language appropriated from comics, gaming, and political speeches of the era, Etzel frames these texts with urgent appropriations from work in poetics and gender studies that he would read later in life—when he, indeed, had survived the ’80s. Even when the young poet of 1984 revels in pop culture escapist pleasures, he discovers that it is impossible to transcend political reality. Amid the kinetic “flash of red and yellow” of his comic books, he admits, “I still hear my father’s warplanes.” Etzel’s masterful merging of the personal and political is matched by an equally vital attention to the politics of poetic form. Unfolding in wildly appropriative, politically astute prose poems to

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Scarica in formato PDF, TXT o leggi online su Scribd
    Segnala contenuti inappropriati
    560 visualizzazioni20 pagine

    My Secret Wars of 1984 by Dennis Etzel, Jr. Book Preview

    Caricato da

    Geoffrey Gatza
    To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process. —Amy King, author of The Missing Museum The sentence inscribes a trauma, bumps over a secret, and accretes toward continuance, which is life. In My Secret Wars of 1984, Dennis Etzel, Jr. constructs little sentence survival packets, brimming with Reaganite Cold War fear and the inescapable “I am” of a teenage boy in a threatening world. Our Superhero of Fragility threads these lines with tenderness, wit, and humor, and comes out the other side more whole than before. —Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood The world of 1984 has a deft tenacity in the hands of Dennis Etzel, Jr. This book blends the personal to the greater political as only the best possible memoir can do. We are all in this world together and the strangest things occur, sometimes when other strange things occur, and I thank Mr. Etzel for his brilliant, sharp reminder. —CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE Some years brand our history: 1861, 1968, 2001; others are best known as fictions, like 1984, made famous by George Orwell in the real year of 1949. The actual 1984 featured Ronald Reagan's race against Walter Mondale, the discovery of the AIDS virus, dead U.S. Marines in Lebanon, and Prince's Purple Rain album. It was an era in which popular culture and foreign policy came together in Star Wars. Dennis Etzel, Jr., then a teen-ager, played a part in that history. His mother came out as a lesbian in the conservative city of Topeka, Kansas. In prose poem boxes, with sentences arranged alphabetically, the confinement of these years is enacted and challenged. Using sources that include Orwell's novel and Lyn Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure" (another artifact of the 1980s), Etzel re-constructs the era and proposes some ways out, foremost among them feminism. Using the language of that era, Etzel pries opens its boxes of secrets. —Susan M. Schultz, author of Dementia Blog, vols. 1 & 2 and Memory Cards: 2011-2012 Series (Singing Horse Press) “My fellow Americans,” Ronald Reagan joked during a microphone sound check in 1984, “I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This was the same year that the infamous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was set to three minutes to midnight, the closest the clock had come to the zero hour of annihilation in 31 years. How did we get out of the 1980s alive? Dennis Etzel, Jr.’s My Secret Wars of 1984 attempts to answer this question, documenting a year in which the young poet was surrounded by the apocalyptic millennialism of the Reagan administration at the same time that his mother was coming out in conservative Topeka, Kansas. Deploying language appropriated from comics, gaming, and political speeches of the era, Etzel frames these texts with urgent appropriations from work in poetics and gender studies that he would read later in life—when he, indeed, had survived the ’80s. Even when the young poet of 1984 revels in pop culture escapist pleasures, he discovers that it is impossible to transcend political reality. Amid the kinetic “flash of red and yellow” of his comic books, he admits, “I still hear my father’s warplanes.” Etzel’s masterful merging of the personal and political is matched by an equally vital attention to the politics of poetic form. Unfolding in wildly appropriative, politically astute prose poems to

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Scarica in formato PDF, TXT o leggi online su Scribd
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    di 20

    MY SECRET WARS

    OF 1984

    DENNIS ETZEL, JR.


    ARTWORK BY ELAINE M. RODRIGUEZ

    BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
    Buffalo, New York

    My Secret Wars of 1984


    by Dennis Etzel, Jr.
    Copyright 2015
    Published by BlazeVOX [books]
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
    the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
    Printed in the United States of America
    Interior Design and Typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza
    Cover and Interior Art by Elaine M. Rodriguez
    First Edition
    ISBN: 978-1-60964-223-5
    Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944621
    BlazeVOX [books]
    131 Euclid Ave
    Kenmore, NY 14217
    Editor@blazevox.org

    publisher of weird little books

    BlazeVOX [ books ]
    blazevox.org
    21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

    [envoi]

    366 sentences as 1984a leap-year progression as "the progress


    of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sentences, has spatial
    properties as well as temporal properties." 1984's secret wars
    raged inside comic books, movies, dungeons, and dragons
    "pressing back against the pressure of reality" of our
    neighborhood against my mother coming out.

    17

    [A couple of amazing things]

    A couple of amazing things just happened. A large TV


    transmission tower collapses under the weight of the ice, along
    with many trees and large tree branches. A mark of their life
    without protest, without rage. A nightmare on Elm Street.

    18

    [A phrase of absolutism]

    A phrase like "I advocate" does not imply the kind of absolutism
    that is suggested by "I am". A tool / made out of thought. A
    totalitarian dictatorship over my childhood is over, so now what?
    A transition from middle to high school, from thirteen to
    fourteen. A transition that crosses through the unknown X.

    19

    [A wave of sheer force]

    A wave of sheer force. Accustomed to Topeka's customs. After a


    radioactive spider bites me, I develop superpowers of fragility.
    All molecules obey my every whim. All through the night. All
    week, I've been seeing my bear in my dreams. Almost paradise.

    21

    [Alphabetized to represent]

    Alphabetized to represent the mind's organization of what is


    found. Although dungeon or wilderness adventures are fun,
    consider the characters' reasons for being. America has a way of
    blanketing out things. An aftershock of the aftermath. An
    alphabetized collection of comics, role-playing adventures, and
    music on tapes, as representation. An inker inks over the debris
    adding details.

    22

    [An unspent lunch money]

    An unspent lunch money becomes a sustenance of comic books.


    And a number of pages were excised by that agency head there,
    the man in charge, and he sent it on up here to CIA, where more
    pages were excised before it was printed, says Ronald Reagan.
    And as soon as we have an investigation and find out where any
    blame lies for the few that did not get excised or changed, we
    certainly are going to do something about that, says Ronald
    Reagan. And as the heroes watch, they are watched in turn. And
    each evening the pace back home matches the sun's setting. And
    I start high school at my lowest. And now we are putting up a
    defense of our own, says Ronald Reagan.

    23

    [And suddenly somebody]

    And suddenly somebody says, "Oh, it's got to be up there, and it's
    Star Wars," and so forth, says Ronald Reagan. And the
    experience of using it, which includes the experience of
    understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably
    active. And I fail to protect
    from the night.

    24

    [Anywhere I walk]

    Anywhere I walk I wear my Walkman. Apparently, any


    manipulation of these controls activates this apparatus, which
    senses the intent of its user and accomplishes what is desired.
    Are we ourselves? As a matter of fact, there are some pretty
    scientific and solid figures about how much space there still is in
    the world and how many more people we can have, says Ronald
    Reagan.

    25

    [As a scholar]

    As a scholar of origin stories, I research each superhero I know.


    Assembly is my favorite, moving around the room of others. Beat
    Street. Because we have language we find ourselves in a peculiar
    relationship to the objects, events, and situations which
    constitute what we imagine of the world. Because we're off in a
    strange land, up to our ears in a little secret war that may decide
    the fate of the universe. Better to say nothing and hope he slowly
    discovers the truth for himself or hides from it forever.

    26

    [Between women]

    Between women and men, sexism is most often expressed in the


    form of male domination, which leads to discrimination,
    exploitation, or oppression. Between women, male supremacist
    values are expressed through suspicious, defensive, competitive
    behavior. Bordered labyrinth, with dragons to guard the
    boundary, as my fighter centers. Breakin'.

    27

    [But if guilt]

    But if guilt is established, whoever is guilty we will treat with that


    situation then, and they will be removed, says Ronald Reagan.
    But no one knows whether Armageddon, those prophecies mean
    that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after
    tomorrow, says Ronald Reagan. But these things do not affect the
    adventure or the game. But when you keep star-warring itI
    never suggested where the weapons should be or what kind, says
    Ronald Reagan.

    28

    [By drawing a panel]

    By drawing a panel for my story, a box surrounds me. By level 25,


    the "home base" has become either a strongly fortified castle
    complex or secret stronghold. By using unarmed combat rules,
    characters are free to perform acts of heroic fantasywrestling
    huge opponents to the ground, or escaping from imprisonment
    when no weapons are available. Challenging sexist oppression is
    a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate all forms of oppression.

    29

    [Closes]

    Closes. Cold wars everywhere. Comic books continued my


    dialogue with language as I sought my story within costumes.
    Coming out of a bad marriage, my mother comes out. Crackling
    up / like a wall of prairie fire / in a somersault silver / to climb
    blank air. Cruel summer. Curled over for the walk back home,
    my pages touch the landscape until, hooked by the wind, they
    detach from my staples.

    30

    [Dancing in the dark]

    Dancing in the dark. Daydreams of fighting supervillains


    surround while unsure of those around me. Delay: The victim
    automatically loses initiative for the next round. Destruction is
    widespread throughout the city, with Gage Park in Central
    Topeka especially hard hit. Do they know it's Christmas? Doctor,
    doctor. Dune. Dungeon adventures are common, and a few short
    wilderness journeys usually occur.

    31

    [Each illustration]

    Each illustration holds potential for intensity, for intensities that


    require several word balloons. Each moment stands under an
    enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information,
    potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly
    incomplete. Each superhero has an origin story for
    misunderstanding what makes a power. Each time, the image is
    more distinct. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a
    distinction. Elections with margins.

    32

    [Electric dreams]

    Electric dreams. Electricity is not restored in some areas for over


    a week. Entangle: The victim cannot attack, cast spells, or move
    until a Saving Throw is successful. Even words in storage, in the
    dictionary, seem frenetic with activity, as each individual entry
    attracts to itself other words as definition, example, and
    amplification. Eyes without a face. Fans, especially young fans
    often suggested to me "one big story with all the heroes and all
    the villains in it," so I proposed that.

    33

    [Feminism defined]

    Feminism defined as a movement to end sexist oppression


    enables women and men, girls and boys, to participate equally in
    revolutionary struggle. Fits and starts, half stars. For cover, he
    holds up his indestructible shield. For me, a central activity of
    poetic language is formal. For monster summers / slammed wind
    / on weighted bough.

    34

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