Dollar Bill
Small-town AM station,morning show,
still doing a gospel number every hour.
Who's listening?
Bacon tenders, baby sitters.
He yucks it up for the insurance office crew,
the stop-in, mini-mart gas shacks.
He's on the counter at The Hub,
talking coffee cups up and down.
A clown, a daily goofball,
regular as sunup and death,
he reads the obits from the local paper
and sometimes adds a personal note.
Even the disembodied here have an anecdote.
Dashboard and countertop,
new tunes and same old same old,
beer on sale, car tires, paint,
link sausage, the grind and groove
of tune. We're coming up on noon.
Outside, in the parking lot, sparrows bathe
in the dust. Empires rise and fall. He'll notice
and say nothing of it on the air.
The "regular as sunup and death" bit kind of annoy me. While they are distinctively Southern colloquialisms, I think Chitwood probably could have avoided the pitfalls of cliche and still maintained his Southern voice. Still though, I sort of like where the poem ends up, the d.j. noticing the wrongs of the world but saying nothing about them on the air. It's his job to entertain, not inform. So he'll do his job and do it well. I could stand with a little more culpability on the speaker's part, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
This guy, however, is not. A scathing critique, but interesting nonetheless. I'm intrigued by what the critique says about the next to last line: "Empires rise and fall." He's right; it's a politically charged statement. Somehow, though, I think the critic misses the point. He implicates Chitwood for aggrandizing imperialism in a global world, a writer who's perched in his ivory tower in a country that rapes all the others. I don't think that's what Chitwood does. I see the poem functioning as commentary on small town life, on the ways in which people are blissfully ignorant and intend to stay that way. That's really the way it is, y'all. Don't believe me? Come to Thanksgiving dinner with my extended family. While I'll agree with the critic that Chitwood's d.j. is anesthetized--that the poet should make the d.j.'s voice more immediate and inviting for the reader--I'm not willing to go so far to say Chitwood is pushing an imperialistic agenda. In fact, I'm inclined to think that's a pretty ridiculous over-reading of the poem, but hey, what do I know?
In any event, you should all read Chitwood's "Talking to Patsy Cline." Here's an excerpt (all I could find online, disappointingly) from Google Book Search.
