Pamela Gemin's "What's Going On"

Pamela Gemin's poem, "What's Going On" (see link below) is a wild ride through both Detroit and a plethora of influences on contemporary poetry. Like many other poems written these days, the language has decided that Eliot was full of crap when he saw the present as a squalid wasteland cut off from a glorious past. Gemin's poem knows that the wasteland is all we've got for our poetry, whether we learn to live with it or not.

The same might be said for W.C. Williams' poetry, but fresh typewritten imagery was so new to him that he put his poems down like polished gems. Gemin's poem rides through the present of "nineteen seventy-something," blase about history, allusion, form, etc. yet slightly aware of them all. Like Plath and Larkin, the poem is aware that parents "fuck you up," but it's too wrapped up in its own present to dwell on it.

All we know as readers is that we're driving through Detroit with a bunch of teen-age girls in someone's Mustang to see someone's sister's new baby, that someone has a big stuffed dog, and that the car is full of big stuffed hungover heads. The readers also get their heads stuffed with "what's going on" in the car to the point that they participate in the hangover. We get wild specific questions about whose parents are doing what, culminating in a puzzling "Take this and eat" communion blurred into baby spiders hatching out in a vacuum cleaner bag and someone's mother saying why don't you girls get your hair out of your faces and hold your heads up.

It doesn't do this poem justice to try to figure out its significance on a first reading. Only after you let it drag you along for the ride do the poem's occasional rhymes start resonating with Marvin Gaye's music and the joy of being alive in the squalid present of Detroit in the nineteen seventies--in spite of bitter cabbage rolls and someone's father knocking someone's mother down the stairs. The cult of poetry about abuse, victimization and recovery in confessional poetry takes a back seat to a big stuffed bear, a Mustang full of gabby, hung-over girls, and a new baby.