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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >George Wallace's Poppin’ Johnny: New American Poems

Poppin’ Johnny: New American Poems
George Wallace
Three Rooms Press
ISBN Number: 978-0-9840700-2-2

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


          If “life is a gesture,” as one of George Wallace’s characters says, then opening Poppin’ Johnny is vital. Suffolk County's first Poet Laureate and author of eighteen chapbooks of poetry, George Wallace explodes the humdrum work-a-day lifestyle even as he meticulously attends to the mundane. Sips of coke, the act of folding sheets, the Rice-A-Roni’s dance in a cast iron skillet, and even a morning pee are all accounted for. Places will look different after Poppin’ Johnny—pubs, the Manhattan skyline, the way “daylight creeps and conquers night.”

          Unexpected and penetrating, Wallace’s outspoken lines won’t be interrupted. And the world might be better for it: “make a meadow somewhere/ in the world that cannot be undone by law or by profit,” the poet implores:
a meadow that cannot be sold off. a meadow
nobody can own completely, including
yourself. make a meadow, protect it from
politicians and real estate agents,
and then ignore it for awhile.
          Such is the activism of George Wallace, which seeks to undermine an oppressive capitalist system. To Wallace’s eye, the act of sitting in “a working man’s bar/ at four thirty in the afternoon when there’s no one/ supposed to be there but there you are anyway” is an assertion of agency that chills a man’s heart. Even his grammar is subversive: “anyhow like the good book says poverty sucks but working for the devil is much much worser.”

          George Wallace is known for his alignment with the Beat poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As Wallace’s bio indicates, he was named a “Next Generation Beat” by the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival committee. George Wallace’s subtitle is appropriate—he is firmly associated with the “third generation” poets of Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry. Specifically, his work is often compared with Bukowski, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Wallace markedly shares Kerouac’s sensibility, for better and for worse: he is anti-establishment but also sexist, and arguably misogynistic.

          In this newest release, Wallace explicitly notes two of his other predecessors: “The Next Big Train Going West” follows Carl Sandburg. “The Redhead of My Sudden Acquaintance” is after Neal Cassady. Elsewhere in the book, he writes:
i mean to hell with eliot
and ezra poud
let my voice be heard
let it rise up like jeremiah
like aznavour or francis villon!
          Even as he belongs in a genealogy of Beat writing, Wallace’s style is inimitably his own. Wallace is a poet of the mellifluous tune and an unexpected music. One sentence flows without break into the next. He uses few coordinating conjunctions and is sparing with punctuation. Coupled with his ample use of anaphora and alliteration, as such, the book belongs in the mouth. It’s sonically savory, even as it depicts the seedy.

          Wallace’s style is also marked by his persistent use of metaphor and simile. He claims anything as an identity with the words “I am” or “you may be” or, in the case of the poem “That’s You, Man,” the words “you are.” The piece “I Am a Nation at War with Itself” makes the most of this technique. The result is a series of arresting lines:
and i am a cut
flower in a blue vase on a tabletop in a country kitchen.
and i admire your hands.

the way you move your hands on the table top. the way
you handle a butcher’s knife. with your tongue
like a roasted red pepper, with your eyes like garlic cloves.
with your voice in the deepest candlelight making love to
the night. like a power plant makes love to the dead
ukraine.
          With things as ordinary as a kitchen table, Wallace rhythmically sketches an America that can’t be fully deciphered. He traces the untraceable—incomplete shoulders, sex like a corkscrew. The American lives realized in this book are not romanticized. Rather, they are marked with obsessions—booze, sex, and violence. Consistently scored with this triumvirate, Wallace offers short portraits that feel panoramic and incisive. These microbiographical snapshots reinvigorate a time and place. Walt Whitman is reincarnated bare-chested and making love to a wheelbarrow. A boy and a man are witnessed yelling “yeeee haw” in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Often located in “the whole/ shit and caboodle of new york city,” these poems are crowded with a gaze-worthy populace:
high school teachers
moonlighting in new car sales, grandma olive at her
window talking to the ashes of her dead husband gone
these fifteen years, teenage boys loud and leggy in the
pizza parlor. business men business women standing at
the smart commuter station wearing black leather gloves
and city overcoats collars tucked up to their ears. old
man van alt with leaves and lanolin in his hair explaining
that what you’re looking at here is the very last sheep
anywhere between cold spring and setauket.
          Wallace is conscious of imminent demises. All the while, however, he makes clear that nature’s processes could go on without us. Even at the loss of a lover, the maples leaves go on turning colors, northern mists continue to descend. “[E]verything is going to be okay,” the poet declares. The book’s clear-eyed approach makes us trust its optimism. When Wallace reaffirms the statement, “the rough and tumble spirit of the American people will carry us through,” we might just believe it and hear it differently than we have before. Wallace is at once buoyant, even ecstatic, and apocalyptic.

          With its second poem, the book offers a kind of invocation of the muse titled “A Buskers Prayer O Lord of Buskers.” “[L]et your voice rise up/ in me,” the poet pleads, “and roll on easy/ over the high seas/ to hong kong/ to splitsville/ to valparaiso.” Although it’s incontestably an American work, Wallace deserves such an international readership. Poppin’ Johnny pops with far-reaching reverberations.

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