Karyna McGlynn : Would You Like Me to Walk Your Baby?

(Typo 8)

I said to the couple on the airplane.
Don't worry; I won't drop him. I'm a dancer;
I never drop anything. Besides, I'm good with babies;
                                   I have huge breasts & big eyes.
He's just having a little altitude earache. I'll bounce him
on my huge breasts and sing something under my breath.
We'll just take a little stroll down the aisle;
let you two get some shut-eye.
Sure, it's narrow, but so am I.
                                   I have no hips to speak of.
Give me your baby, I said with my widening smile,
my enormous breasts, and my pointy pointy shoes.

@

Is this flarf? I'm preparing a much longer post on the new Jacket compliation of flarf poetry, but I don't think I remember seeing McGlynn's name. In any case, there are definite elements of "flarf" here, in particular in the way a deeply un-P.C. fantasy of the silly, heavy-breasted, narrow-waisted girl that someone like John Currin might have come up with (see below.) Is John Currin flarf? (The one interruption in this fantasy is the narrow hips, something Currin does not like to paint, although they are, still, deeply out of proportion to the breasts.)



I love this poem, in the same way I love John Currin's work: the way in which the language is both deeply natural and deeply fucked-up, the way in which pure passivity merges into some kind of underwater-bombed threat, rising upwards in the language like a bubble of toxic gas.

The final stanza — "give me your baby" -- really begins to draw on the mythological aspects of this work, turning this doe-eyed girl into something larger, something that takes babies and walks, in

my pointy pointy shoes

down the asile that is not the church asile, but instead its parody, the airplane aisle. Perhaps this is the one line precis of the poem's genius, the way in which it piles multiple levels of parody on top of one another to form a kind of wobbling stack that leaves us, at the end, with a sense of tumbling-over.