Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones

 

In “Bamboozled #5,” Sylvia Jones writes:

 

Everything we have

         and have been 

 

given

is

manufactured

and

bad.

 

“Bamboozled” is a six-part ekphrastic poem written in response to a montage of blackface figurines from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. In an interview, Jones explains that writing in the ekphrastic style—and the “intense, almost conspirational dialogue” with the artwork it affords—enabled her to “unsettle static history” and speak to the legacy of minstrel iconography in the present.

 

However, Television Fathers feels just as absorbed by the future, declaring in the opening poem:

 

sometimes it’s good to be afraid of the future

it’s the year of that feeling

everyone has when they’re dancing

and I’m not lonely cause I’m friends

 

with my neighbors, and my childhood home

is an airbnb is a brothel

of vacationing millennials and hallelujah

money, it’s the bootstrap trick mirror, waiting 

with bated breath; I lost my face or the face I had

 

In this poem—which also happens to be ekphrastic, responding Noah Davis’s “Man with Shotgun and Alien”—Jones describes hallelujah money buying up “childhood homes” to make airbnbs in gentrification, a type of the world’s overall transformation towards increasing artificiality and characterlessness. 

 

This is “static history” insofar as those who exchange their labor for the “good” of society still find that rewards they were promised turn out to be a “trick mirror” after all, all while society “progresses”—towards enlightenment, prosperity, and technological advancement.

 

In other words, progress is static history, just shinier. Yesterday’s trash (“mining lithium out of fossilized / Beanie babies”) is transubstantiated into higher-tech trash, and while everyone can afford a TV, the food is poison. The future arrives, and it brings “Problems with Bluetooth”:

 

With the AirPods

I have to always 

forget the device 

then re-remember

it it’s like we live

in 

the future but

                   under what conditions?

 

Television Fathers’ two sections are called “Paywall Poems” and “Drywall Highway.” These are fitting symbols for the hurriedly constructed, fast-forward, highly artificial stage of the Zeitgeist Jones demonstrates we are in—one in which people are not just priced out of neighborhoods but, via paywalls, of information itself. Making the AirPods “re-remember” the device, a minor inconvenience given everything, shows how even the most mundane and/or inane circumstance speaks to a fundamental malfunctioning at the heart of things. Everything is manufactured and bad.

 

While Jones explores several styles throughout Television Fathers, including a sort of pixelated one with vertiginous line breaks—

 

into a mosh pit

at a house show in Shockoe

Bottom where Harriet Tubman begets

an image of Andrew Jackson

donning a neck tattoo of Lil Wayne

with the locks pulled back

 

—and one that merges an experimental/imagistic urge with narration—

 

Feathers too

can be used to identify birds

a cohort of brown pelicans facing the Gulf of Mexico

or a gaggle of sweet bay magnolias plume

hunting in a rest top camp gear near

Lake Okeechobee, where there was a little bit of 

sidewalk and then there wasn’t. 

 

the style/voice from “Bamboozled” is the one I found most enjoyable and forward-thinking. This style is on display in poems like “Don Draper Acquires Himself an Art Residency”

 

How come 

the richest people

you know

you can never ask for 

money?

 

and “Affirmative Action”

 

during undergrad

if you never donated plasma

or sold your own blood

to go buy drugs

then perhaps you’ve

never really been poor.

 

Plainspoken and aphoristic, semi-confrontational and playful, this voice invites solidarity without flattening experience, ultimately questioning the relationship between humanity (and/or authenticity?) and the apotheosis of artificiality in the present, AI:

 

If the political winds

do or don’t shift into more salient slices of non

sentient activism, where in the sausage of 

repeating decimals does that leave us?

 

This question concludes “Good Propaganda Involves Real People,” a poem that begins with breathier, more open-ended lines:

 

I used to think every poet had

two heads. Mid-thought I think,

google knows me better than

my friends

 

Here, Jones celebrates consciousness’s ability to shift “mid-thought” and poetry’s ability to capture that—a dynamic that perhaps cannot be replicated by repeating decimals—while also bemoaning that consciousness is choosing to feed itself to Google and machine learning. 

The sacrifice of human relationships for intimacy with decimals is convenient, both because of how ubiquitous technology has become and for how relentlessly “progress” makes demands on time. Jones suggests this transformation has been a long time coming, citing the example of how fewer and fewer people can (or have the time to) cook:

 

My grandma’s kids threw

out her cookbooks that were living

in a shed behind her house

 

next to the wooden pallet on cinder blocks

where we used to stack firewood

wearing oven mitts.

 

A chain-gang of nieces and nephews

who will eventually stretch into an amalgam 

of successful and worrisome, backlsliding

 

adults, all of whom don’t even cook. Can’t 

cook. Couldn’t cook

to save their lives.

 

Jones holds on to the possibility that we have a choice in what happens to the drywall-paywall-manufactured-artifical world, for we are the ones who are throwing away cookbooks and feeding Google. However, her ultimate thesis—it’s the year of it being good to be afraid of the future—suggests we may be on the verge of a new breakthrough of artificiality and manufacturedness. When that comes, “what was incomprehensible will become comprehended”:

 

I don’t know what pain is, do you know what pain is?

Can beauty save us? Yesterday

echoes from the handball courts nearby 

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended

forget the world’s smallness. I’m tired

 

Everything becoming comprehended is not cause for celebration, but sign of consciousness being flattened into a sausage of repeating decimals—additional proof that enlightenment ends in violence and numbness, not liberation. For this reason, Jones keeps this poem open as a space to ask about feeling before it’s forgotten (or perfectly manufactured) as well as to report on spaces where artificiality is still being resisted:

 

I buy a groupon for a palm reading downtown,

from a woman halfway leaning off a circa 97

purple mitsubishi halfway facing a valet kiosk

couched between a corner store

and two different forty-dollar hourly

ten-level parking garages adjacent to

the spiritual information center,

sporting windbreaker adidas shorts beneath a

ruined plaid vest, battered loafers, and finished off

with churchgoing socks

 

detailing a demon summoning

gone wrong, dealing blackjack

off a tarot deck simultaneously

playing spades simultaneously

trying to sell me a blue rock for a

hundred dollars

 

Television Fathers is a substantial book that negotiates poetry’s place in a world that's as “manufactured and bad” as ever.

 

Buy it here.