Nobel Savaged: The Jimmy Carter Travesty
by Ray Sharp
My first thought was, “Surely, you jest!” I still can’t believe they gave the Nobel Prize – you heard me, the flippin’ Nobel Prize – to that maudlin hack of a poet Jimmy Carter, better known as “the Bard of Plains, Georgia.”
I know, the award has been politicized in recent years, especially with the selection of novelist V.S. Naipul last year, but at least the man is a respected and noteworthy writer. His early stories, set on the streets of Trinidad, were a real hoot, full of memorable characters, great colloquialisms and lots of pathos.
Mr. Carter, on the other hand, couldn’t write his way out of a bag of salted peanuts with a sharpened quill. I mean, the man wouldn’t be able to hit the broad side of a Georgia barn at twenty paces with one of his cornpone metaphors.
Listen to this poem, from Carter’s 1995 clunker titled Always a Reckoning and Other Poems:
On Using Words
I first heard jumbled sounds
before they framed my infant thoughts
and didn’t know beliefs and dreams
would ride on random consonants
and vowels in the air.
Now when I seek efficient words
to say what I believe is true
or have a dream I want to share
the vagueness is still there.
I’ll say the vagueness is still there. That poem gives me a vague feeling of nausea, right in the pit of my aesthetic sensibilities. It seems that Mr. Carter is “always a reckoning” he’s a poet.
Must I persist? In “Rosalynn,” Carter drones “She’d smile, and birds would feel they no longer/ had to sing, or it may be I failed/ to hear their song.” Puhleeze. Karen Carpenter said it better thirty years ago: “Why do birds suddenly appear/ Every time you are near/ Just like me/ They long to be/ Close to you.” Of course, it should have read “just as I.”
It’s not like there aren’t any deserving writers out there. Heck, no less an authority than Oprah Winfrey picked one book a month for several years. And Ms. Winfrey and the Swedish Academy both liked Toni Morrison. Maybe they could have picked someone else from her list.
Or, in the spirit of democracy, they could have chosen a poet with high sales figures. I mean, I know they’re a bunch of socialists over there in Europe, but they must practice some kind of democracy, except for the kings and queens part.
So I looked up the sales figures for poetry collections and stumbled across this new young poet by the name of Jewel Kilcher. It seems she sold bazillions of copies of a book called A Night Without Armor. Get it?
Anyway, when I failed to find Ms. Kilcher’s book at my neighborhood library, I went on the Internet to search for some excerpts. Right away I found a photo of the young authoress presenting what appeared to be some kind of literary award or other, and the funny thing is, she was wearing a diaphanous dress. I’m here to tell you Ms. Kilcher is no Emily Dickinson look-alike. The woman has a very impressive body of work, if you know what I mean. (By contrast, the boys down at the Americus, Georgia racquet club say Mr. Carter’s getting a little saggy in the old pectorals.)
Needless to say, I was more than intrigued. At another web site, I found one of Ms. Kilcher’s poems, titled “Wild Horse.” In the second stanza, Kilcher writes:
I’d like to paint my poems
with desert tongued clay
across
your back
and ride you savagely
as the sweet and southern wind
through a green and wild Kentucky.
Ay caramba! How do you like them similes? But wait, there’s more. The poem concludes: “I’d be your hungry valley/ and sow your golden fields of wheat/ in my womb.”
Anyone who’s read Whitman, Lorca or Neruda knows what Ms. Kilcher is talking about here. Heck, I think she’s probably poet enough to take on the three of them at one time.
Clearly, in an age when authors like Jewel Kilcher are alive and breathing the heady vapors of Pure Art into their amply poetic lungs, it is an unspeakable outrage to bestow literature’s highest honor on a sour-faced, doddering fool. Why, it’s enough to make a man swear off Swedish meatballs.
