Lamont Poetry Board

In the hot, stale air of Lamont library's fifth floor, a battle rages.

It's strange place for a war. Bodies slump insensibly in overstuffed chairs. A peach rots silently in a wastebasket--forbidden fruit, barely tasted.

Here lives the "poetry board," a field of blue construction paper pricked by pin-sized holes, fluttering with an army of white paper banners. This is the battleground itself, a place where writers tack up their poems, and critics tear them down-figuratively, never literally--or offer advice. The warriors: anonymous scribblers. The shot: a verse like this one, by a mysterious poet, "Tokio Rose":

Dirty

Holding her,

Like a moaning bowling ball,

Fingers

In her cunt and asshole

It's such a thin wall of flesh between the two,

Like good and evil.

And if he really sticks his index finger up there

Far enough,

He can just barely feel

The shit she's holding back.

Yes, I guess sex can get dirty,

But it's not as bad love."

The poem is vintage Tokio Rose: like a slap in the face--stinging-hot but strangely cool. Its power lies in the bowling ball idea. Not really an "image" because it's more tactile than visual, it is a simile so original, massive, and vivid that it forces you to touch what shocks you. The twin holes of the bowling ball suggest the dichotomy between good and evil, sex and love, shit and "shit." The reader senses bitterness and self-recrimination amidst unrepentant profanity.

Tokio Rose has attracted as many partisans as foes. "Jesus Christ--Wonderful, wonderful--This is great! My god! You say what many think but are uncomfortable saying or even thinking--i.e.=me," reads one scrawled comment below "Dirty." "Fucking brilliant imagery," declares another. Some, like "Oedipus," offer encouragement: "Tokio--Baudelaire said, 'Every idea is endowed with immortal life.' Keep writing." (Tokio's elliptic response: "Get drunk.") Others offer their own verses, like this one addressed "To Tokio":

I want you,.

(to wrap your words around our waists

like a tight screw...)

But it is Tokio's enemies who write most vehemently. "B.H.L." dismisses much of the work on the poetry board as "a bunch of useless, profane, empty words." "Grow up people," B.H.L. advises. It doesn't take brains to use the world 'fuck'." Tokio's response in the margin: "What the FUCK do you mean by that? It does take brains to use it effectively. You're just afraid of the word 'cause mom & dad don't like it.'"

B.H.L. launches another broadside, this time from a different angle: "With all the real problems to be addressed in the world, why not put your energy toward something useful, instead of paying $17,000/year to write on a bathroom wall?"

"You want us to save the world using this poetry board!" writes Tokio incredulously. "Art is not responsible for socio-political problems, etc. and is, in my opinion, not particularly suited to being a forum to discuss such issues."

But for Tokio, obscenity--as beauty--is ultimately an instrument of social good. "All these geniuses who believe in our moral obligation to save the world as Harvard students post only malevolent comments on this board and fail to bless the poor masses with the beauty of their poetry," Rose raves. "Oh poop!"

All around the poetry board, students drowse and old books sigh, unwittingly caught in a silent crossfire of "poop" and "shit." Tokio Rose's poems, and the diatribes they have inspired, are curling in the dry air; occasionally a sheet floats down to the floor, revealing a dark blue rectangle of unfaded construction paper.

One day a new poem appears, signed by a graduate of the college, a co-founder of the poetry board now revisiting his brain-child:

"And here it is, vociferous and blue! Metaphor crammed, bursting

With lumbering exegesis. Witless and acerb by turns, rehearsing

furiously the same old duels, scoring the same wounds we're always nursing."