Waldrep Refuses to Say It Plain

What I think G.C. Waldrep does well is speak to the part of each of us buried so deep within ourselves that it doesn’t have to explain itself to anyone. I know that when I am by myself, maybe taking a walk, sitting on a log by the creek, even just doing my laundry by myself, I don’t have an organized, expressible thought process. That’s not to say I’m not thinking about important matters. It happens even when I’m chewing over a problem. But my brain doesn’t work like my mouth. My mouth is just a tool for summarizing all those inner ramblings with others. And sometimes it is a really ineffective tool because our thoughts simply can’t be made tangible.
I think poetry is great because it better conveys those fuzzy but poignant thoughts that we have. Waldrep’s poetry reads more like the way my mind works, even if I can’t summarize it in a paragraph or two.

In “Ode to the Hottentot Fig,” as in many of the other poems in Disclamor, Waldrep takes up a plaintive tone, as if he has so much to express but struggles to do so. He names hummingbirds, ants, seals, bees, a man playing the French horn. I get a weird sense with every mention that he is talking about himself, or rather, about everyone, like we are all interconnected and related. The ants he calls Calvinists, and there is the sentence about the seals that reads, “Those that are too old or too sick to care vacation on the mainland like tourists.” I honestly don’t know what the seals have to do with me, but I do feel a connection.

I think within this poem is some kind of statement about America. I know it is America because of the reference to Battery Wallace. He considers fear such an integrated part of day-to-day American life that it is “my church key, my gluestick, my Ziploc bag.” I wonder what kind of fear he means. Is it the fear that moved people to build Battery Wallace? Or is it fear of Hell? Of failure? Of losing something that he takes for granted? I think fear motivates so much of what we do. We reach out to others because we never want to be cut off. We work hard because we worry about the repercussions of laziness. Whether we heal the world peace by peace or buy guns, it is because we fear violence.

I wonder why Waldrep feels he might be happier to live in a broken country. I sometimes have the same desire because something seems more genuine about a place where the clocks don’t run as smoothly. Ultimately, especially due to Waldrep’s opening and closing statements: “For sweetness read vertigo, for beauty say pallor… For abundance say luxate, for introduction read fall,” I sense a recognition of life’s inconsistencies and ambiguities. Whether Waldrep laments this or accepts it as an unavoidable truth, it’s a mystery to me.