Boogaloo: A Dandy Collection of
Star-Spangled Masques
Remington Murphy
Review by Alyce Wilson
The poems in Boogaloo by Philadelphia poet Remington Murphy aren't so much poems as they are surreal dramatic poems that tackle news events in American history.
Impossible to perform, these dreamlike pieces, these verse sketches, feature shifting characters and ridiculous actions and settings. And yet, like dreams, they make an intuitive sense.
These pieces are poem as political cartoon, highlighting humorous ironies of American history and politics.
The strongest example is "Boogaloo, And/Or, Number One With a Bullet (Kennedy Versus Nixon, A Dramatic Poem for Television)." As in the previous poem, "Horace Greeley for President!" it parodies American election politics, which is extremely relevant right now.
In the poem, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon reenact their famous television debate, with Kennedy saying:
I offer you poetry
and rockets to the moon
and candy kisses in a jar.
Instead of a moonlit smooch
and a bottle of perfume
and a snappy Hallmark card,
Mr. Nixon offers you a snake.
Those words encapsulate and caricature the differences many Americans saw between the young, healthy-seeming, optimistic Kennedy and the dour, serious, haggard-looking Nixon.
As the American presidential race gears up, Murphy's poems make interesting points about the factors — both substantive and superficial — which influence voters' decisions.
The second half of the book examines the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction. For those unfamiliar with the story, the Hills were a middle-aged couple who attracted the attention of the ufology community with their highly detailed account of their abduction by the forboding, scientifically leaning aliens, the grays.
In "Betty, and Barney Hill: The Untoward Story," Murphy lampoons the popular conception of aliens, ranging from grays to greens to Nordic types.
But it's difficult to tell what point he was trying to make, except for "look at these loonies," even though there's an attempt to convey meaning through a final soliloquy, asking whether the abduction was "shared fantasy," "psychic projection" or "shared unconscious wish." For that reason, this section is weaker than the first section, which had a clearer political message.
Overall, these poems are richly textured and multi-layered. A reader would find it easy to read through these poems several times and find new nuances, new ideas to ponder. His stacco-like free verse lines suit his material perfectly, giving these poems the feel of a broadcast news report, albeit it a highly surreal, thought-provoking one.
Mellen Poetry Press; ISBN: 0773434852