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  • Baby Boom Poetry and the New Zeitgeist
  • Dorothy Barresi (bio)

So much for Sinatra. So much for pearls and the broken strand of actresses in kitten heel pumps walking backwards underground. The Hall of Mortals will now be closed for extensive renovation.

(The Last Kennedy)

I wrote “The Last Kennedy” in 1999, not long after JFK Jr. died in a plane crash. Borrowing imagery from my parents’ generation, I riffed on celebrity, dynasty, and desire to explore an old idea of American promise still haunting baby boomers: “a tale that is told—frequently, like this one, / with too much falling action / and no conclusion.” But in one respect I have been proven wrong about such conclusions in 2009.

The imagery in “The Last Kennedy” is rueful but not entirely ironic; the sadness the speaker feels is real. Like many poets born between 1946 and 1964, I have written as though iconic nostalgia were my birthright—part of what marked my poems as special. Simultaneously hip and told as unreconstructed yearning, iconic nostalgia rejects the constraints of prior social constructions (Sinatra, Monroe) while remaining half in love with their dashed glamour, and then it inserts Jimi Hendrix or Pol Pot (and always ourselves) at the center of an ever-more-distant galaxy of shared historical experiences and long-drawn-out sighs, even as we reassert our cool. No, no—I’m still relevant! In 2002 Mark Halliday cheerfully acknowledges the complex problem of narcissism and nostalgia in his poem “Strawberry Milkshake”:

I could try to imply some universal pattern, relevance to certain persons you failed to kiss in 1988 but you’re still going to feel this is my own blandished finger-smudged bland dish [End Page 175] of warped middle-class Creedence albums and Red Sox sweatshirt and Oh-God-that-blonde-across-the street . . .

(Jab)

What’s the use in trying to deny that we are the real stars of our own poems, Halliday suggests, not Creedence Clearwater Revival or the Red Sox. Those references are merely passwords, the magic argot that opens doors to a club baby boomers already belong to—and the boorish banality of the speaker’s observation in “Strawberry Milkshake” is part of Halliday’s brilliant schtick: enough about me, let’s talk about me. But what interests me most at this particular poetic moment is my suspicion that the utility of our iconic nostalgia is finally fading. Look at Caroline Kennedy. As I sit down to write this essay on the current state of baby boom poetry in America, it feels oddly resonant that Kennedy’s ad hoc bid for the U.S. Senate has come to a fizzled, damp-fireworks end. In “The Last Kennedy,” Caroline is portrayed as a serio-mythic mourner: “A stricken sister, heiress in bicycle pants and helmet, / rides along the strand, / too smart or too dignified to cry out / as the foaming ocean / shrugs a suitcase / toward shore.” Because Kennedy was born in the same month and year of my birth, November 1957, I have always been aware of her; I can recall perfectly the pained regard I felt when I first saw photographs of Caroline taking riding lessons on her pony (notice how easily this nostalgia comes to me). Looking at blonde Caroline in tiny riding habit was like peering into the loveliest, gated garden of American ascension. Last year, when she announced her interest in Hillary Clinton’s senate seat, my first thought was nostalgia driven: she’s the last living member of the holy family. She should be a senator. When the Los Angeles Times ran an article suggesting that the Kennedy halo effect might not be enough to carry Caroline, I resisted the idea that the potency of iconic nostalgia could have a shelf life, a terminus. But by the time the New Yorker devoted an article to the counting of her various verbal tics, I got it: delayed recognition. Caroline wasn’t special enough by today’s media standards. Outside of New York the end of her brief candidacy was met with a shrug.

When one is no longer at the center of popular culture, shaping it, one becomes, de facto, an analyst...

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