Not a Slave to Fashion

The poetry of Joseph Salemi is a breath of fresh air. By comparison it makes much contemporary magazine verse feel mincing, breathless, precious, and confused. Salemi has chosen to be definitely and unfashionably what he is: distinctly male (in the best and worst senses), historically reactionary, metrically formal, unabashedly offensive, unashamedly scholarly, blue-collar in sensibility, tragic in philosophy, Christian in culture, and explicit in the expression of his ideas.

The fresh air is sometimes a gale, sometimes a scorching desert blast, sometimes a freezing storm. In earlier collections such as Masquerade and Skirmishes Salemi takes on namby-pamby liberals, the new prudishness, politicians, commercial hype, showbiz, and especially pobiz (as poets term the tiny airless world of poetic reputation and success). His poems are often violent, contemptuous, sardonic, irreverent, alcoholic, and sexually explicit in a way that is especially shocking these days, since he finds sex both splendidly dirty and richly comic. He is the most outspoken and refreshingly brutal of our small and vital band of satirical poets (including R. S. Gwynn, Claudia Annis, the late lamented Richard Moore, and a few others). I believe he has made enemies as a result, which is unfair because, like the barbs of a Shakespearean fool, his insights are, properly taken, therapeutic to our vanity, pretension, and self-deception.

In his latest collection, Steel Masks, the tone and subject have altered a little, though the old swashbuckling satirist is still represented, as in "To an Aging Countercultural Twit" and "The Feminist Professor Lectures on The Rape of the Lock." But now the tragic note, implicit in his earlier work, is stronger. Having earned by ironic frankness and brutal honesty the right to express strong sentiment, the poet today gives us heart-piercing moments of unironic feeling. The eponymous opening poem, "Steel Masks," recounts the accidental death in 1559 of Henri ii, the French king, in a joust, and presents the shocked response of Luigi Corbinelli, an Italian nobleman who saw it and as a result became a Jesuit:

"I saw King Henri speared straight through his maskOf iron, by another masked in steel.And at that moment I saw through the shamOf life, and how it hides us from the Real."

Salemi has always seen himself as a warrior, his poetry as a steel mask and a weapon to reveal the truth. But now his thought is for the victim of the lance; have some of his own victims, though armored themselves, accidentally received spear points in their eyes? Is the game sometimes lethal? Could he himself be vulnerable to a deflected, unintended fatal thrust? Accordingly the collection includes poems that take the point of view of the population cowering under an American urban air strike; that contrast the satisfaction of properly handling a good bolt-action rifle with the casual fecklessness of how it might be used; and that warn us when throwing a hand-grenade we should flatten ourselves at once to avoid the blast. His powerful poem in the Sapphic stanza on the Armenian holocaust quotes the prophet Ezekiel in calling for an accounting of military violence. He imagines the experience of a St. Antony, who, like Corbinelli, has renounced the world and accepts without physical resistance the assaults of demons. And in "My Daughter's Garden," though the poet's first bitter and ironic response to seeing his little girl planting seedlings is that they will be eaten by cutworms and moles, the sestet takes on a very different feeling:

She watered them. And I asked, as she poured,How tall will flowers grow? Will they reach far?So high, she said, her finger pointing towardThe woodshed's sloping roof of tin and tar.And all at once a flock of sparrows soaredSkyward like arrows arching to a star.

In a collection of what Salemi would call "your grandmother's verse" (the title of another of his satirical poems) these lines might not be unusual (though grandma would probably leave out the tin and tar...