CONTINUOUS TOPLESS STRIPPERS
CONTINUOUS TOPLESS STRIPPERS
An eight-speaker sound system,
two continuous topless strippers,
Elvis Presley singing Early Morning Rain.
Everyone loves television.
And because the management doesn't want
to offend anyone's tastes by omitting
So important an element
in the desired sensory mix--
"The lowest common denominator
"Creates an art form," my friend Bob
mutters into his beer--
the five foot by seven foot color TV
Is seen on stage backing up the strippers,
the TV little more than a concentration
of bright flashing lights which,
On closer examination, turn out
to be the Six o'clock Evening News.
"Some damned half-deranged diplomat,
"Portfolio this, portfolio that,
is dithering about something or other somewhere
or other for no reason that neither you nor I
"Nor anyone else has any idea." My friend
orders another, and I order another.
The announcer, meanwhile, is selling hangover
Or headache pills and the difficulty we all have
on occasion of falling asleep or eliminating
properly or what happens when we drink too much
coffee
And that and everything else at last dissolves
the dancers achieving what appears, in fact, to be
a new breakthrough
In negotiations, winning
in the ovation that follows
their performance
Not only our freedom
but the release and freedom
of all hostages.
These are such, sad, generous poems--peopled with characters it's impossible not to love, especially Robert's podiatrist-Jewish-Rosicrucian father with his wisdom that bridges dualities expounding on the feet and the soul, sex and death, the broken and the whole. In one poem, Robert asserts, In a world of 'No, dogs are a Yes.' And in the world of poetry, this book is a resounding Yes. Read it when you're happy, but especially read it when you're depressed. You'll find yourself joining in with the many dogs in these poems, saying, 'Woof, woof f----in' woof!”
—Poet Ellen Bass
About Robert
Guggenheim Fellow, chosen by Lucille Clifton for a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award, author of more than 20 books, including Four Incarnations (Coffee House Press), Heavenly Sex, God is in the Cracks and The Collected Poems (now in its 2nd printing),...
Connections
Causes Robert Sward Supports
Audubon Society, National Geographic, "Green," the Environment, SPCA...
Robert’s Favorite Books
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March, Ezra Pound's Make It New, T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems, The Autobiography of Benjamin...
Robert is a fan of
Continuous Topless Strippers
Poem written in the early 1980s while living in Toronto. Hostage crisis... the "sensory mix" (TV, strippers, Elvis Presley...) all mingled together. That's as much the subject of the poem as "the hostage crisis" itself. Whirlwind... trying to keep up with American politics while living North of the border.