Ode to American English

 

Ode to American English

I was missing English one day, American, really,

  with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything

from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English

  is not the same, if the paperback dictionary

I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opera

  is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English

know their delphiniums, but what about doowop, donuts,

  Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian

accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,

  hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,

the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening

  of Mr. Beasley at the sidewalk, fetuses floating 

on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking

  the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,

Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,

  the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect,

I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,

  the battle cry of the Bible belt, but no one uses

the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,

  in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,

"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie

  mummy. "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am,

I miss the mongrel plenitude of American English, its fall-guy

  rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,

the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,

  boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya

with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo

  to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering,

shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous

  back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut

flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters

  Sylvester the cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators

of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird

  resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent

of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist

  euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.

On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny

  Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode,

and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,

  finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,

Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,

  sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne

verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping

  in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs

slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

-Barbara Hamby

Barbara Hamby is an American (did you guess that?) poet raised in Hawaii and now in the English department at Florida State University in Tallahassee. On the Street of Divine Love is a new and selected volume that came out in 2014; 'Ode to American English' is from her volume Babel of 2004. I don't know when she was in Paris, thinking about American English. 😉

It goes from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, though C somehow comes later in the alphabet, doesn't it? I'm still looking for that translation of the Bible where the L-man says, "Whoa, I was toasted," but I do want to find it... I was a little surprised to find Johnny Weismuller's name spelled as the young Johann might have, not as Hollywood did to make more it palatable to Americans, but there you go. Pretty fun stuff. This was the poem I first saw of hers that made me want to read more.

That's iced tea next to the book above. It's been hot here!

A book I actually put on my 20 Books of Summer list.