Against the Campaign to Stomp Out “Awesome”
Awesome is so casual in its clothing, its announcements
like tacky Hawaiian shirts depicting my dearest nouns'
dying—yesterday's chile-relleno burrito, or last week's
pinkest sunset, or dad's new surfboard, or the news
the darkness on my forehead is benign. Yep, awesome
"is elegy to what it signifies," meditates Robert Hass,
as the pleased voice is pleasure's psychopomp;
the just-dead world made word, made, as poems, alive
almost successfully. Yet on public radio this poet
calls me, mom and dad, probably you, ridiculous idiots
for saying awesome / awesome. Awesome
is more gesture than word, is a pumping fist,
nodding head, thumbs up; never le mot juste,
none exists. There's nothing precise about awe,
its magnitudes are unknown quantities of some,
a suffix that suits The Big Lebowski to Half Dome
better than those of wonderful, beautiful, purposeful. Yet
it's dreadful, just dreadful, says the Oxbridge pedant,
dreadful, my dear, these youngsters with their fretfully
impoverished vocabularies. Qualifiers are drowsy reflexes:
The astute server says, the Napa pinot is terrific /
terrific choice, the sole with farro and peas / have a terrific
evening. Where's the terror? Where's the terrific
fuck I'm supposed to give? Hackneying is not...no,
not just thoughtlessness; it's sharing a lingo,
an understanding, a social identity, yes, lost
the more it's shared just like the thoughtful
play of synonyms can be a bully's game. Awesome
means you no harm, just rolled out of bed, and
hasn't done yoga in like a week. But awesome
is the monument we'll raise to your splendorous,
venerable, your preeminent diction of novelty. Awesome
will be the natives' education; bedeck our adjectives
in morion, codpiece, and crucifix 'cause who needs readers
when subjects can be got cheaply? Who needs art
when vestments are the rage? Forgive me, dreadful
is my overreaction. This hyperbole keeps rupturing its crypt;
it can't stand beadledom, not least of which my own.
Hordes of undead hyperbole to come, the most ingenerate
mode of speech because we all make like awesome
and die. What's there to repel the dreadful, dreadful
darkening but our persistent awesome / awesome / awesome?
WW Editor's Note: This poem is a parody of Robert Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas". It first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal.
